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

“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

“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

“Dayton had no civilized culture.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“Just a decade before, in the wake of the Vietnam War and with his agency’s budget slashed, Stephen Lukasik had appealed to Congress to allow DARPA to pursue “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.” Lukasik told Congress that in the modern world, the country with the most powerful weapons would not necessarily have the leading edge. He argued that as the twenty-first century approached, the leading edge would belong to the country with the best information—with which it could quickly plan, coordinate, and attack.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“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

“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

“Von Neumann saw great promise in a redesign of the ENIAC computer’s memory. He believed there was a way to turn the computer into an “electronic brain” capable of storing not just data and instructions, as was the case with ENIAC, but additional information that would allow the computer to perform a myriad of computational functions on its own. This was called a stored-program computer, and it “broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things,” writes von Neumann’s biographer George Dyson, adding, “Our universe would never be the same.” These “instructions” that von Neumann imagined were the prototype of what the world now knows as software.”
― Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

“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

“Poindexter’s background was in submarines, and there was an analogy here, he told Tether. Submarines emit sound signals as they move through the sea. The 9/11 hijackers had emitted electronic signals as they moved through the United States.”
― 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

“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

“It is the astonishing speed with which ballistic missile submarines can launch nuclear weapons, and hit multiple targets nearly simultaneously, that makes them the handmaidens of the apocalypse.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“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

“When a nuclear bomb hits Washington, D.C., chaos will grip the nation. Without a functioning government, there will be no rule of law. Democracy will be replaced by anarchy. Moral constructs will disappear. Murder, mayhem, and madness will prevail. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors will envy the dead.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America