Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm chatting with Annie Jacobson. Annie started off by studying at Princeton. She now has, I think, eight books. Most recently and prominently is a favorite of mine. It's called nuclear war, a scenario, was one of my favorite books of last year. The book is also being turned into a screenplay and will be directed by the Dune director, Dennis Villanueva. Annie also has co written three episodes of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan TV series for Amazon Studios. Annie, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Now your last book, of course, it focuses on nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Would it actually help if we were more afraid of nuclear weapons and thinking about them more often? Or does that just not help at all? I think it certainly helps, and you probably gathered that from reading my book. I mean, what I wanted to do sometimes people say, why did you write such a terrifying book? And the answer is very simple. I wanted to demonstrate in appalling detail just how horrific nuclear war would be as a way, perhaps, for people to have precisely the kind of conversation that you and I are having. But say when I was a kid, people thought about nuclear weapons much more. It seemed more dangerous. It actually seemed more thinkable then. If we're just obsessed with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, can't that raise the risks by making it psychologically more salient? I would say certainly not. And also, you know, what we perceive and what we think about is not necessarily what happens. I doubt many people imagined a pandemic was gonna show up and shut down the whole world as it did. So I do think it's valuable to think about things, not in any kind of hypochondriacal way, if that is an exact word, but more about people asking, why is it that I focus on subject a rather than subject b? And maybe even one more degree of that is, like, what do I want to think about and what is important to me? If I think about the experts in the immediate post World War two period, you know, there's von Neumann, there's Herman Kahn. It seems they got most things wrong. So maybe they thought there'd be another nuclear another world war, a nuclear war quite soon, or they might have favored a first strike on the Soviet Union. We almost did a first strike against China. Isn't that an example of how expertise can just lead us to go badly wrong? And this more common sense approach, maybe we had it with Ronald Reagan. We actually do better with that. Oh, …