ANNIE JACOBSEN: Thank you so much.

Can everyone hear me all right?

And thank you so much to Google for having me

and the tech guys for trying to make this work.

We'll do a little test here.

I'll [INAUDIBLE] work.

OK.

So I am Annie Jacobsen.

Thank you for the intro.

And this book is about the Pentagon's Brain,

which is sometimes how DARPA is referred to at the Pentagon.

One of the most frequent questions that I am asked

is how do I get these guys to talk to me?

So I just wanted to begin for a moment

with that, because I do write about these seemingly

impenetrable areas, whether it's Area

51 or the old Nazi scientists program,

which was still very classified up until recently, to DARPA.

And what I would like to mention is that one of my Area 51

sources, a physicist who invented

stealth technology for the government going back to when

Eisenhower was president told me, he said, Annie,

there's two things to always remember.

One, "fortune favors the prepared mind,"

and he was quoting Pasteur, but the idea is that we should just

be as knowledgeable as we can and be prepared

for amazing things to happen.

And the other thing that he told me was look up, not down,

and he said that because physicists, as I have learned,

are always looking up to understand

the mysteries of whatever it is they have in front of them.

And the physicists that I work with

are dealing with weapons related issues, but looking up,

whether it's at bees, birds, bats, the moon, or the cosmos,

that is where so many of the answers

lie to this kind of a scientist's mind.

But he also meant look up, meaning go up.

If you get a no, [? Lavik ?] told me,

then go to that guy's boss, and if that guy gives you a no,

then go to his boss.

Because, he told me-- and I have found this to be true--

that the most knowledgeable people among us

often want to share their information.

They do not want to hoard the information.

Particularly as they get older, they

find that it's important for this country that they love.

All of the national security scientists I work with

are real patriots, and they talk about how

even if they worked on classified programs,

they stay abreast of what is unclassified

as they get older so that they can then

share that information.

And so that is how I approach these things, and three

of the scientists that I was most happy to work

with on this book-- Charles Townes invented the laser,

and he recently passed at the age of 99.

And the way that I got to Townes was

I was at the Pentagon trying to learn about laser beam weapons.

They're called directed energy weapons, DEW weapons.

They're among the most classified systems

in the government and no one would tell me anything.

They wouldn't even tell me basic technology about how it worked.

I followed [? Lavik's ?] lead.

I looked up and not down, and ultimately I

found my way to Charles Townes, still giving interviews at age

98 when we spoke at the University of California,

Berkeley.

And he told me some amazing stories about the laser

and about early laser development, which

I write about in the book, which give you

a real clear idea of why these weapons are so important, why

they're so secret, and it has to do with accuracy and precision.

In the middle there is Murph Goldberger,

and he worked in the Manhattan Project.

He too passed this last year.

He was the co-founder of the Jason scientists.

So if anyone has heard of the Jason scientists,

they are perhaps the most elite, most secretive defense

scientists in the nation, and have

been since they created their organization in 1960,

specifically to work for DARPA, which was then called ARPA.

It did not yet have the D.

And Joseph Zasloff also died recently,

but I was able to interview him.

And he was a social scientist, and he ran the program

during the Vietnam War, specifically

for ARPA, which was called the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale

Program.

You could do a whole linguistic study on that title.

But it was interesting to see how social science played

a role in the Vietnam War, and then again played

a role in the Iraq war, and even more

interesting for a reporter like me

to realize that DARPA, who is an organization that

is so involved in the highest technology

weapons of the present and of the future,

is also in the business of social science.

I also say that-- I like to say that the truth has

many points of view, and the reason

why is this document, which is this is one of my sources,

and it says at the top Francis Murray.

It says he's at headquarters, US Air Force.

That's at the Pentagon.

And it gives the dates and everything,

and it gives them grade marks and whatnot.

But Frank Murray was also one of my Area 51 sources,

and he was in fact out at Area 51 during this entire time

that he was allegedly at the Pentagon,

even though this documentation says he was there.

So I like to say that as a point that the truth has

many parts to it.

It has many points of view, and whenever

you're dealing with government secrecy

there's always the sense that more will be revealed.

This here, which is the DARPA Cheetah robot runs.

It starts at zero miles an hour, and it begins to gain momentum

through like 10, 11, 12, and suddenly it's going so fast you

can barely see its legs moving, and then you cannot see its

legs moving anymore.

It's going 28 miles an hour, and then

suddenly it crashes by sort of falling back on itself,

and it's tethered to a rope, so it doesn't really crash.

The reason why this is so astonishing

is this is, you know, this incredible thing to look at

to watch, and you realize this is

where our weapons are heading.

Our weapons are heading toward autonomous robotics.

And I write about this at the end of the book,

but I wanted to give you an idea of what they look like now.

So we'll jump way back in time, when--

Because computers and computing are so much of a part of where

we are today and where the Pentagon is with its weapons

systems, it's important to realize--

or at least it was for me-- to realize that back in this day--

this is around 1946.

That's John von Neumann and Robert Oppenheimer,

and they're at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study,

and they're down in the basement,

and that's the MANIAC computer.

And at the time, a little before this, during the war,

John von Neumann was what I call the first Pentagon's brain.

He was the smartest man in Washington, DC,

and the Pentagon looked to him to solve solutions.

For example, when the decision was

made to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,

scientists wondered whether or not

they should have it explode when it hit the ground.

Well, von Neumann, in his ability

to do math calculations in his head at an extraordinary speed

said no, and with a little bit of pen to paper

he determined that actually the bomb

should be dropped at 1,800 feet above Hiroshima

for the largest kill rate.

So that's how von Neumann's mind worked.

He was what was called a human computer.

That's what computers were then.

He built this computer, a machine computer,

and he was one of the first people in the United States

who had this idea that one day computers could think.

And he actually called what we now call software,

he called it the computer's organs,

just like a human being.

von Neumann died of cancer the year before DARPA was started,

most likely from a speck of plutonium

that he inhaled while he was working on the Manhattan

Project.

But he is the first Pentagon's brain that I write about.

So why did I begin the book here where I did,

which this is the thermonuclear bomb going off

in the Marshall Islands.

It's a 15 megaton bomb, and what I

found astounding was for a while when I first

used to look at this photograph, I

thought that those images there at the bottom

were the waves in the sea, because I interviewed many

of the scientists who worked on this bomb program

and they would talk to me about being on boats

and whatnot watching it, and then

I realized those are actually clouds.

That's how high up that mushroom cloud is,

and it's 70 miles across.

It was a 15 megaton explosion.

It was supposed to be six megatons,

and the science got away with itself, so to speak.

But this is why DARPA was created.

Scientists had created a weapon against which

there is no defense, and there still is no defense today,

by the way.

One of the first jobs that DARPA did

was-- and this was a very classified program.

I don't think it's ever been revealed before.

I certainly couldn't find it in the public domain,

but I did find in an archive.

One of the first things that the DARPA scientists did

was calculate down to the second how many seconds it takes

for a nuclear weapon like this to leave the Soviet Union

and travel to Washington, DC.

Does anyone have a guess?

How many seconds?

I'll tell you.

It's 1,600.

1,600 seconds.

So that's not very much time.

That is still a fact today, by the way, and something

that the nuclear agency of the day

will neither confirm nor deny.

But it is a fact.

So this is why DARPA was created.

How do we defend against these weapons

that there is no defense against?

And then the idea was, well, we'll just

go into the offensive.

So we'll create more and bigger weapons.

This little slide I like to show,

just because it's so astonishing to me.

I was able to interview one of the men who was in this bunker.

There were 10 scientists and engineers

19 miles from ground zero where that thermonuclear weapon

went off.

And the idea was the Defense Department

wanted to see, well, since we can't defend against it,

maybe we can create these bunkers

and we can all live underground for a while.

If we have enough time, 1,600 seconds, if we

can all get in a bunker before then.

So they built this-- I mean, I have all the specs in the book.

It's just a crazy bunker.

The men lived.

They barely lived.

But they had to be airlifted out of it hours

later because the radiation was so intense no one could go in.

So unless you had one of these built

to these wild specifications, there's

no way to survive a nuclear bomb.

Sputnik came along.

This is a replica of that 23 inch diameter sphere

that made the American public go wild in October of 1957,

thinking my god, the Soviets are coming.

"Time" magazine had this on its cover.

And the idea-- You know, Sputnik.

Just a satellite.

How bad could it be?