From one piece Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420 10 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Well, not just at Area 51, but in all the different national security and military intelligence and intelligence programs. And I personally have no reason to believe that aliens have ever visited Earth. That’s just me personally.
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But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.
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So you don’t have wise decision makers. Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That’s really important, because you want to have differing opinions. But as things become more viperous, both here in the United States and in nuclear armed nations, all bets are off at whether your advisors are going to give you good advice.
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Because why on earth there would be two candidates, one of whom has cognitive problems and the other of whom has judgment problems? These are the two biggest issues with the nuclear launch, judgment and cognition. And so where’s the young-ish, thoughtful, forward looking, wise, dedicated civil servant running for president? I know that sounds fantastical, but I wish it weren’t.
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But it’s actually more than that. They launch one, we launch 80. That’s called escalate to deescalate. Pound the you know what out of them to get them to stop.
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there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia.
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First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.
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So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
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Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
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I’m coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people.