When Penguin Random House prepared the release of Annie Jacobsen’s most recent book: Nuclear War, A Scenario; for early 2024, they did not anticipate that it would appear at a time of heightened risk of a nuclear war.
The risks include casual threats of the use of nuclear weapons over Ukraine or in the Middle East; as well as the actual attacks or threats to the nuclear plants in Ukraine and Russia.
Annie Jacobsen’s book is based on dozens of exclusive interviews with military and civilian experts who built the modern nuclear weapons and launch systems.
Annie Jacobsen and Professor Steven Starr explain how nuclear weapons and the highly automated systems that set them off, have become so much more deadly than in the early 1990s, when we thought we had ended the Cold War.
Professor Steven Starr teaches the class: Environmental, Health and Social Effects of Nuclear Weapons at the University of Missouri. His most recent book is: Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse: A Mortal Threat to the U.S. Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants.
Credit to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco for excerpts of their March 27, 2024 interview with Annie Jacobsen; and credit to Hugo Kruger for excerpts from his interview of Steven Starr on Feb. 24, 2023.
DATE: 2023 and 2024
CREDIT: The Commonwealth Club, San Francisco; and Hugo Kruger, Paris; YouTube channel
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)
