Annie Jacobsen > Quotes

“Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes.
And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out.
Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“We still don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the human brain. We have theories; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that mimics the biological system. We can’t emulate the behavior. One day in the future, we think we can.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“By contrast, Dresher and Flood found that the minority of game players who refused to testify against their criminal partner were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in order to get the best possible outcome for both themselves and a colleague—just a single year’s jail time.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560) did not pass. So the Defense Department could be cloning now.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Health Alteration Committee”
― Annie Jacobsen, Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins

“A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“As part of the animal sentinel program, going back to 1999, scientists had been making great progress training honeybees to locate bombs. Bees have sensing capabilities that outperform the dog’s nose by a trillion parts per second. Using Pavlovian techniques, scientists cooled down groups of bees in a refrigerator, then strapped them into tiny boxes using masking tape, leaving their heads, and most of their antennae, poking out the top. Using a sugar water reward system, the scientists trained the bees to use their tongues to “sniff out” explosives, resulting in a reaction the scientists call a “purr.” After training, when the scientists exposed the bees to a six-second burst of explosives, some had learned to “purr.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy commanders each insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the Army, the moon was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Dayton had no civilized culture.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all. —Ovid”
― Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

“The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Clandestine Service, tells us a story about the building at the center of the Pentagon courtyard, which is now a food court but used to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during the height of the Cold War, when satellite technology first came into being, Soviet analysts monitoring the Pentagon became convinced that the building was the entrance to an underground facility, like a nuclear missile silo. The analysts could find no other explanation as to why thousands of people entered and exited this tiny building, all day, every day. Apparently the Soviets never figured it out, and the hot dog stand remained a target throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of the Pentagon. It’s a great anecdote and makes one wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon, which is rumored to have multiple stories belowground.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Ten years earlier, participants from the same movement had fought to kick the French out, and had succeeded. Now they were fighting for the same cause. The insurgency was not an insurgency to the locals, Zasloff and Donnell said. It was a nationalist struggle on behalf of the people of Vietnam.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike [would be] that democracy would be completely gone and military rule would take place.” Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“DARPA’s original autonomous robot designs were developed as part of DARPA’s Smart Weapons Program decades ago, in 1983. The program was called “Killer Robots” and its motto offered prescient words: “The battlefield is no place for human beings.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“If it’s a Bolt out of the Blue attack,” says Fugate, “population protection planning is a different animal. With a Bolt out of the Blue attack, population protection planning won’t happen because everyone will be dead.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Castle Bravo had been built according to the “Teller-Ulam” scheme—named for its co-designers, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam—which meant, unlike with the far less powerful atomic bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount of power, or yield. “What this meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the world.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead. A”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster. The”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Himmler offered Blome a medical block at a concentration camp like Dachau where he could complete this work. Blome said he told Himmler he was aware of “strong objections in certain circles” to using humans in experimental vaccine trials. Himmler told Blome that experimenting on humans was necessary in the war effort. To refuse was “the equivalent of treason.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

“Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Then he made a bold declaration. “World War I was a chemists’ war,” Scales said. “World War II was a physicists’ war,” and the war on terror was “the social scientists’ war.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“Christofilos’s theoretical Astrodome-like shield was the hoped-for result of exploding a large number of nuclear weapons in space as a means of defending against incoming Soviet ICBMs. By Christofilos’s count, this likely meant “thousands per year, in the lower reaches of the atmosphere.” These explosions, he said, would produce “huge quantities of radioactive atoms, and these in turn would emit high-energy electrons (beta particles) and inject them into a region of space where the earth’s magnetic fields would trap and hold on them for a long time.” Christofilos figured that this electromagnetic field could last months, or perhaps longer, and that “the trapped electrons would cause severe radiation—and even heat damage—to anything, man or nuclear weapon, that tried to fly through the region.” In short, the idea was that the arming and firing mechanisms on the incoming Soviet ICBMs would be fried.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“The cause of an effect is just as important as the results produced in order to formulate doctrine,”
― Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis