Episode 54: The Man Who Led NATO is Trying to Frighten You

How could the U.S. lose a war with China? What happens if American political divisions keep getting more extreme? And what in the world will AI mean for national security? These are the questions that keep the former commander of NATO, retired Admiral James Stavridis, and retired Marine Captain Elliot Ackerman up at night. But unlike a lot of people in their shoes, they haven’t been harrying policymakers with op-eds or reports. Instead they teamed up to write a set of novels showing how badly things could go — and what the U.S. can do to avoid a nightmarish future.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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If I asked you to think a decade or two into the future, maybe your first thoughts would be personal. Whether or where your kids go to college, or how your health holds up. But maybe you’re like me and also inclined to worry about the state of the world — where events are headed, whether the crises or near misses you’ve seen in the news might get worse…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Coups and insurrections and domestic extremism…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Fears of civil unrest…

ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: We are closer to a civil war than any of us would like to believe…

ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: There’s no question we’re in a new cold war…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: China is increasing its nuclear arsenal…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: Putin says Moscow ready for nuclear war if threatened.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 5: Could we be heading toward WWIII?

I recently had a conversation with two people who’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the future of world events. And there was one worry in particular that kept coming up:

James Stavridis: Neither the U.S. nor China are going to try to start a war, but there could be a moment of miscalculation.

Peter Bergen: 9/11 kind of obscured this in a lot of people's memories, but during the first few months of the George W. Bush administration, there was an incident that isn't dissimilar from what you're suggesting.

James Stavridis: Sure. It was in the air above the South China Sea.

On the night of March 31st, 2001, President George W. Bush found himself staring down the biggest national security crisis of his young presidency. Bush had only been in the White House for 10 weeks when the United States stumbled into a potentially explosive standoff with China.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 1: A U.S. Navy spy plane and its two dozen crew members remain on an isolated Chinese island after being forced to make an emergency landing.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 2: The U.S. says the sophisticated reconnaissance plane was on a routine surveillance mission in international airspace over the South China Sea when two Chinese F-8s intercepted it.

[SOUND EFFECTS OF JET ENGINES]

The two Chinese fighters intercepted the American aircraft and followed it at close range. The U.S. spy plane looked like a small airliner bristling with antennas and it carried a crew of 24 people. They included cryptographers, linguists, and technicians, all flying over international waters west of Hong Kong on a mission to monitor Chinese communications.

The Chinese fighters giving chase were following a standard — if somewhat belligerent — practice. They meant to remind the American plane that it was being monitored, too. But then one of the Chinese fighters got really aggressive and swooped in really close.

ARCHIVAL Navy Plane Cockpit Crew: He's very, very close. Oh yeah. He's, he's almost, uh, probably 20 feet from our wingtip.

That's actual audio from the American spy plane's cockpit, recorded during the incident. The Chinese pilot buzzed the U.S. Navy plane, flying dangerously close once, then twice.

ARCHIVAL Navy Plane Cockpit Crew: All right. Whoa, we got thumped. Felt that one. We got thumped.

[SOUND EFFECTS OF A COLLISION]

On the third close pass, the two planes collided. The Chinese jet broke apart on impact and crashed into the sea. And the Chinese pilot was never found. The U.S. crew managed to land their badly damaged plane at a military airbase… on China’s Hainan Island.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 1: The Chinese military forced the Americans off the plane at gunpoint. And there's growing evidence the Chinese are stealing the spy plane's top secrets.

With a Chinese pilot presumed dead, and 24 Americans effectively held hostage, tensions got very high, very fast.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 1: President Jiang Zemin speaks out, insisting the Americans bear full responsibility for the incident, and he wants answers.

ARCHIVAL Congressman: That's what China is telling us by holding our people: They are a hostile power.

ARCHIVAL Pundit: Until the men and women are released, we are going to be in a deteriorating situation.

It seemed like a moment that — if handled wrong — could push the countries over the edge, from ultimatums to actual violence:

ARCHIVAL George Bush: It is time for the Chinese government to return our plane.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster 3: China said the full responsibility lies with the U.S. side. The statement warned the incident is not yet over.

[TENSE MUSIC FADES]

Eventually, cooler heads prevailed. Diplomacy wound the crisis down, and the 24 American servicemembers came home. But the dangerous standoff between China and the United States left a lasting impression on a U.S. naval officer named James Stavridis.

James Stavridis: It was an extremely tense moment, and it could have moved very differently and very dangerously.

Stavridis has retired from the U.S. military now. He left the Navy in 2013 as an admiral who’d served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. But you might say that the incident, or the potential of an incident like it, is still very much on his mind.

James Stavridis: There could be a moment of miscalculation. A miscalculation in the South China Sea between an American destroyer, a Chinese military aircraft, a Chinese merchant ship, that could be the spark.

And instead of writing a white paper that might be read by almost nobody or an op-ed to get the warning out, he wrote a novel.

James Stavridis: It is the opening scene of 2034.

The book is titled 2034, for the year when its fictional events take place — where a confrontation between U.S. and Chinese ships in the South China Sea touches off a global war.

James Stavridis: That leads to a vertical ladder of escalation that ends up with, many, many killed in action, a tactical nuclear exchange.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

Fiction is, in many ways, people dreaming out loud. And2034 seems to lay out the worst nightmares of Admiral Stavridis and his co-author, a novelist and former Marine named Elliot Ackerman.

Elliot Ackerman: What happens if political extremism and dysfunction in the United States keeps getting more extreme?

They’ve got a lot of nightmares, as it turns out. Enough to fill a second book, about a very different event even further in the future, in the year 2054.

Elliot Ackerman: We as Americans are in no way not susceptible to the types of dysfunctional environments that lead to civil war.

Join me as they explain their fears, the benefits of cautionary fiction, and what the U.S. can do to make sure these 21st-century nightmares — like a nuclear attack or a civil war on U.S. soil — never come to life.

James Stavridis: The power of the project is to frighten people.

I’m Peter Bergen, and this is an apocalyptic, techno-thriller edition of In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES THEN FADES. PULSING, FUTURISTIC MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: A U.S. Navy Admiral teaming up with a U.S. Marine sounds like the beginnings of a buddy comedy. [PETER LAUGHS] How did you, uh, divide up the work? It's hard enough to write a book by yourself. How do you write it with somebody else? And I'll begin with you, Elliot.

[MUSIC FADES]

Elliot Ackerman: You know, when the idea of doing this project first landed in my lap, Jim and I had a great friendship, but I would be remiss if I didn't say, you know, he retired as a four star admiral and the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. I left the Marine Corps as a lowly captain. So the, the idea of arguing about adverbs with the Supreme Allied Commander [PETER LAUGHS] wasn't one that you know really appealed to me. So we needed to know that we could work together.

James Stavridis: I may have been the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, but Elliot is definitely the senior novelist, a finalist for the National Book Award. Brilliant, brilliant novels. I've learned a lot about the craft of fiction working with Elliot.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Elliot Ackerman spent eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving stints in special operations and also with the CIA's Special Activities Division. Ackerman won a Bronze Star for valor in Afghanistan. He also won a Silver Star — one of America’s highest military honors — after risking his life to save wounded Marines in Iraq. When he left the military, Ackerman launched an award-winning writing career, publishing a couple of memoirs and half a dozen novels. Two of those novels he wrote alongside Admiral Stavridis. They've been friends since first meeting in 2013.

Elliot Ackerman: Our friendship had been talking about books that we liked and, and I think we kind of knew one another's sensibilities.

They're both intensely smart guys, whose experiences have much to teach us about the dangerous turns that world events can take. But why write fiction?

James Stavridis: I'll give you three quick answers. One is audience. You just expand your audience immensely. I could have written a very detailed, very fact-ridden book about a war with China, and, you know, 117 people would have read it.

I feel like the tally of readers would likely have been a little higher than that. After retiring from his own distinguished military career, James Stavridis has developed a pretty serious following as a writer on grand strategy and geopolitics.

ARCHIVAL James Stavridis: And then we go into the Cold War…

After the admiral did a TED talk about global security a few years ago more than 700,000 people watched it.

ARCHIVAL James Stavridis: Instead of building walls to create security, we need to build bridges.

So, if you're writing a scene about high-flying finance bros boning up on strategy — like, say, in the Showtime series Billions — Stavridis is a pretty good name to drop:

ARCHIVAL Billions:

Prince: Dumb adversary lets things like revenge run them. Smart one waits for an opening.

Axe: You been reading your Stavridis?

Stavridis has written books about global conflict, naval history, strategy — and he even revised a couple of the official leadership handbooks that the U.S. Navy issues to its officers. But these days, he says fiction has the most reach.

James Stavridis: I think that by writing a novel — you know, 2034 — this book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I think it's on its way to selling a million. And we'll see how 2054 does. Using the characters to carry the story, humanizes the themes you are trying to get across. And, characters are the heart of any great story.

That's certainly true. And there are great characters in this story. They’re fleshed-out human beings with affecting backstories and convincing motivations for doing what they do.

Elliot Ackerman: You know, it's that old saw that people will never remember what you say, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. And I think that's one of the reasons to embrace taking on these topics through the medium of fiction, is that the stories and the ideas conveyed in the stories stay with people in a way they don't necessarily stay with them if it's a editorial in The New York Times or a policy book. One of the things we wanted to do with these books, is that they have a certain style and that style is that you keep turning the page and there are books that are these sort of very dense, extremely technical, thrillers that kind of weigh in at, you know, 700 to 800 pages. And those books are great and they're immersive. It's just not what we were trying to write. We were trying to write a book that you could almost read in one sitting, that really moves, that is propulsive.

James Stavridis: Frankly, and I defer to Elliot, but writing fiction is just fun. You get to splash a lot of paint around on the canvas in a way that you're kind of in a straitjacket of fact when you're writing nonfiction. And I think Peter, you as an extraordinarily accomplished historian and policy writer, you know you're, you’re confined to fact. And so... Peter, you ought to write a novel.

Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] Well, I'll be looking for tips from both of you if I'm going to do that anytime soon. [THEY LAUGH] So let me ask you, Elliot, what attracted you to this sort of interesting form which is a novelistic look at the future that is trying to say something factual about what the future could look like. You know, H.G. Wells, he predicted, amongst other things, tanks, aircraft used for warfare and the atomic weapon. He did all that, right at the beginning of the 20th century.

Elliot Ackerman: Well, I think first of all, you know these books are, much like H.G. Wells who managed to successfully predict things in the future, we're not necessarily predicting what's going to happen, but we are speculating and sometimes those speculations could turn into a prediction.

James Stavridis: You know, Peter, I'll just add to that, that H. G. Wells also predicted an invasion of the planet Earth by aliens, so he didn't get, hopefully, everything right. [ALL LAUGH]

I really hope that Stavridis and Ackerman didn’t get everything right either — otherwise we’re all going to be in serious trouble a decade from now:

Elliot Ackerman: 2034 imagines a war between the United States and China. And it is a narrative really told through five principal characters, all international. And I will just presage this with saying that in that war between the U.S. and China it isn't necessarily either the United States or China who really wins the war.

Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] That's a good cliffhanger.

James Stavridis: Yeah, it's a great line. And as I always say about 2034, it's not Tom Clancy, as in good guys, bad guys, good guys win in the end, usually in the last 15 minutes. It's not that novel. It's about war — is the villain of that piece, neither China nor the United States.

For this writing team, the animating nightmare of their first joint project is the looming threat of a nuclear conflict between the United States and China. But from the perspective of a U.S. admiral who has actually led NATO for real — is nuclear war with China really something you should be worried about?

James Stavridis: Of course it is. China has a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons. They're moving to increase that. That brings increased risk. Tensions exist. I don't think we're at danger of a sudden exchange of nuclear weapons. But, a tactical miscalculation could inexorably escalate to that level.

Peter Bergen: And you, Admiral, obviously have spent a lot of time not only thinking about this, but living that potential. Obviously, it's a work of fiction, there is a tactical nuclear exchange, still a very devastating one between the United States and China, but how realistic is that?

James Stavridis: What we ought to worry about is miscalculation. Neither the U.S. nor China, I don't believe, between now and 2034, certainly, are going to try to start a war to create global dominance, but there could be a moment of miscalculation. What was in my mind was not World War II, it was World War I. It was the way in which World War I began with an assassination in a dusty corner of the Austro Hungarian Empire. That was 1914. By 1918, four years later, the Austro Hungarian Empire is gone. The German Hohenzollern Empire is gone. And the Ottoman Empire is gone. And the Russian Empire is gone. The lights went out in Europe. One assassination…

James Stavridis: So, bring it to the present. What I worry about particularly is not so much an invasion of Taiwan. I think that's unlikely for a variety of reasons, but a miscalculation in the South China Sea between an American destroyer, a Chinese military aircraft, a Chinese merchant ship, that could be the spark, and it is the opening scene of 2034, that leads to a vertical ladder of escalation that ends up with, many killed in action, a tactical nuclear exchange.

In the audio version of the book, the fatal miscalculation in the South China Sea is seen through the eyes of U.S. Navy Captain Sarah Hunt. Here she is, moments after the Chinese navy fires on her ship:

ARCHIVAL 2034: She could see the years ahead as clearly as the torpedo, which was now less than one hundred yards from the starboard side of the John Paul Jones. Who was to blame for what had transpired on this day wouldn't be decided anytime soon. The war needed to come first. Then the victor would apportion the blame. This is how it was and would always be. This is what she was thinking when the torpedo hit.

James Stavridis: So it's miscalculation that worries me the most in our moment now.

Peter Bergen: You know, even though the crisis may not come over Taiwan, and China's economy is in the middle of a slow motion collapse with a real estate collapse, is a China that is losing altitude more dangerous or less dangerous than a China that continues rising?

James Stavridis: It is more dangerous because, if there is a significant reversal of the Chinese economy in real internal dissatisfaction, history shows us that autocratic regimes will often seek to find dragons to slay abroad in an effort to consolidate nationalism within the borders of their own nation.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: A huge theme in 2034 is how reliant the U.S. military is on network computer technology. And presumably, Elliot, when you started in the Marine Corps, you weren't as reliant on all these technologies that are kind of commonplace now.

Elliot Ackerman: No, we weren't. I remember being in Iraq with my lensatic compass and my map board, [PETER LAUGHS] which was basically just navigating all over western Iraq you know, with like a clipboard with map sheets on it that we would just cycle through. You know, in my, my own time in the service that changed radically and now we are very much reliant on these technologies.

Peter Bergen: Talk us through that reliance and how in the novel you explain this over reliance and in various different ways the book unpacks that, including with the severing of a number of underwater sea cables that are critical to the internet.

James Stavridis: One of the chapters in 2034 is called "Blinding the Elephant." And this is the idea of an opponent who can disrupt your previously quite clear vision of what's happening on the battlefield. You mentioned those subterranean cables that run under the world's oceans. I think most Americans, if you ask them, well, where does the internet come from? They would say, oh, [PETER LAUGHS] it comes to us on satellites. Nope. It comes to us on cables. Only about 350 of them that run under the oceans. And they're highly vulnerable. And in 2034, we see Vladimir Putin — still alive, still in power in 2034 — using the Russian fleet to go after those cables and help blind the elephant.

This threat, too, is all too real. Russia has had its eye on these cables, and ways to destroy them, for years now:

ARCHIVAL 2010s Newscaster: U.S. intelligence officials warn that they have seen, and they are monitoring increasing activity from Russian vessels operating near these cables underwater in the North Sea, and even in waters closer to American shores. U.S. intelligence officials worry that Russians might be planning to cut those underwater cables.

James Stavridis: So it's a very real concern. As to what to do about it, two pretty obvious things. One is you need to harden your sensor systems. You need to build redundant systems, build black cables that nobody knows they're there. You can switch over to them. You have satellites already in space that can be turned on. And then you need to plan for the worst case. You need to plan to operate in a world in which those sensors are in fact denied from you. And sometimes the best response to losing your technology is to know how to fly that old airplane, or get that ship out of mothballs; these older systems might be less technological and therefore less vulnerable. So there's two paths, uh, that the U.S. military should be thinking down.

Peter Bergen: Do you think the U.S. military is thinking about this and doing something about it?

James Stavridis: I do. I do. Particularly the hardening systems, creating redundancies. I don't think we are, spending enough time learning how to fight simply without it. And I know there are efforts underway in the various services to do so, but we need a annual exercise called blinding the elephant where we tell our forces, ‘Hey, go out, practice war, and you can't turn on GPS. How’re you going to do it?’

Elliot Ackerman: I think you know people are waking up to this idea that you know the future is not going to be Iraq and Afghanistan where we have complete and total battlefield superiority, complete and total impunity with which we operate in the airspace and operate our technology. The future is going to be one in which probably we're being forced to not only go low tech, but to toggle very quickly from low tech to high tech to low tech to high tech.

That’s something that Ackerman and the Admiral say has already become a reality since 2034 came out three years ago:

James Stavridis: A way to think about that is Ukraine today is this curious mixture of World War One — trenches and tanks and artillery barrages — and Starship Troopers — uh, 22nd-century warriors who are using these high-tech drones.

That high-tech vision of an apocalyptic future gets turbocharged in Stavridis and Ackerman’s next book. Their second novel is titled 2054, and it came out in March. The story takes place in the aftermath of their first novel and, in the new book, technology occupies even more of the spotlight.

James Stavridis: Overarching theme of 2054 is artificial intelligence, which I think we can all agree by 2054 will be very central to every aspect of our lives and society. And all of it, of course, moves with the classic geopolitical background as different nations jockey to get control of artificial intelligence, and specifically something called the singularity, which is the idea of the merger between biology, engineering, cyber — all of that kind of come together in 2054.

In case you’re new to this idea of a technological singularity, it’s the theory that technological progress will accelerate until artificial intelligence equals — and then surpasses — all human intelligence. At this point, the theory says, we’ll witness a takeoff. When AI’s growth accelerates beyond any hope of human control, and the consequences for human civilization become impossible to predict. The idea first entered wide circulation in the 1990s, thanks to a guy named Vernor Vinge, who was a writer of science fiction.

And science fiction is where the singularity theory has probably received the most exposure. Here’s Lawrence Fishburn in the 1999 movie The Matrix, explaining a version of this idea to a suitably befuddled Keanu Reeves:

ARCHIVAL The Matrix:

Morpheus: At some point in the early 21st Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

Neo: AI. You mean artificial intelligence?

Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.

But whether you think the singularity is really coming or not, Admiral Stavridis says you should still keep a close eye on artificial intelligence. He thinks there’s a race going on between global powers to build the best AI. And he thinks it’s reminiscent of the race to split the atom during World War II.

James Stavridis: It's not dissimilar to the race for the nuclear weapon. Go back and watch Oppenheimer again. It is a race, in my view, we have to win, for our national security. It is occurring now, and most prominently between the U.S. and China. We are still in the lead, but our lead is diminishing. And it's simply because China is throwing many more resources at the problem. What I worry about is if we lose that battle for artificial intelligence, almost simultaneously with the advent of quantum computing, you enter a world in which cyber security… the security part really no longer pertains, then your systems are completely vulnerable. You really have blinded the elephant…

Runaway artificial intelligence isn't the only challenge that the fictional United States of the year 2054 has to face. Ackerman and the Admiral also imagine a country struggling to hold itself together amid the literal fallout from a disastrous war with China.

James Stavridis: The challenges have changed. Here in the United States, we see a civil conflict kind of rumbling, and you see a U.S. military perhaps caught in the middle of this civil conflict.

It's a civil conflict grown out of the kinds of real-life trends you’re seeing in U.S. politics today: there’s a charismatic, populist president who’s managed to sideline the traditional Republican and Democratic powerbrokers:

Elliot Ackerman: America is now led by an independent presidential candidate who's formed a new party around himself, the American Dream Party. And his loyal opposition is the coalescence of the extremes of the Republican and Democratic Party into the Democratic Republicans — which was actually a very early political party in the United States — and as much as someone might scoff at the idea of Republicans and Democrats ever agreeing or working on anything together, I think the one thing they could certainly agree upon was that they should both continue to exist.

These political tensions set the stage for a very dramatic start to the book — and here's a minor spoiler warning.

Elliot Ackerman: We knew how the book was going to open. And that it was going to open with the assassination of an American president.

ARCHIVAL 2054: The president was giving a speech in San Diego, but he was bent over at an odd angle, coughing, and struggling to finish his sentences... Then he toppled forward from the dais, clutching his chest. Now the president wasn't moving. The Secret Service had rushed the stage… hoisting the president out of view of the cameras.

It’s a seemingly inexplicable death — a mystery that the characters race to solve as the U.S. comes apart around them.

Elliot Ackerman: What happens if political extremism and dysfunction in the United States keeps getting more extreme? And it takes us, I think, to some very, very interesting places, and you'll just have to read 2054 to see what happens. [PETER AND STAVRIDIS LAUGH]

This is a brand-new book, so I don’t want to spoil it too much. But I will say it's filled with some well-informed — if upsetting — speculation about how a civil war in the United States might break out, how the U.S. military could find itself caught in the middle, and how huge moments in history could turn on the decisions of ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressure. I was a little relieved to learn that Stavridis doesn't think this is where America is necessarily headed for real.

James Stavridis: You know, we tend to think that we're living in a uniquely difficult period and I, I think it is a very demanding period, but not one that will ultimately turn into a shooting level of civil war. Now, having said all that, I think it's worth recognizing that we're in a particularly polarized election year: stark choices in front of the electorate, the real possibility of disagreement about the outcome, and on top of all of that, artificial intelligence is now beginning to create the possibility of deep video fakes, robocalls that sound exactly like Joe Biden calling you to tell you something that makes no sense, or Donald Trump calling you and espousing some particular idea that he may or may not have signed up to, injecting some new level of controversy in an already controversial election. So it is a dangerous moment.

I suppose it stands to reason that an Admiral who has commanded warships and led the West's military alliance against Russia might sometimes think about the future and have nightmares to spare. You could probably also say the same for a highly decorated Marine who has seen his share of combat.

Elliot Ackerman: I think what war and experiencing war at a tactile level does is it sort of throws open your aperture of how you understand humanity. So on the one side, you are obviously going to see kind of all of the worst things, the most depraved things humans are capable of doing to one another. But then also on the other end of that wider aperture, you see some of the highest virtues that human beings are capable of expressing in combat, courage and love for one another. Having spent a lot of time in societies that are very dysfunctional and have descended into tribal warfare, civil war; it gives you, I think, an understanding and appreciation for how thin a veneer civilization is and how, you know, we as Americans are in no way not susceptible to the types of dysfunctional environments that lead to civil war.

So maybe it's not surprising that our veterans-turned-novelists can imagine enough storm clouds up ahead, three decades over the horizon, to fill another novel. If the human race survives that long.

James Stavridis: I think the human race will be just fine. The book is called 2084, a little homage to George Orwell's 1984. And it's about climate, Peter. It is, uh, if we don't surmount the challenges of climate, what could happen geopolitically? And I think the chances for conflict between a ravaged global south and a global north become quite prominent in that period if we don't surmount the climate challenges. It was always our idea to produce a trilogy. And I think we, from the very beginning of the project, we thought in terms of great power competition, specifically U.S.-China plus cyber for the first, artificial intelligence, civil conflict for the second, and climate and the geopolitical tensions that will produce is the third.

James Stavridis: What links them all is the lethality of the threats and the fact that we still have time to avoid them. Hence, in my view, the power of the project is to frighten people. Much, Peter, in the way that, uh, you and I are old enough to remember Cold War literature, think Nevil Shute's On the Beach, or The Third World War by Sir John Hackett, or, uh, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, these portraits of how terrible a world war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would have been. Fortunately, we avoided that. I think literature helped us avoid that.

Elliot Ackerman: I would just wholeheartedly agree, that during the depths of the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union couldn't agree on anything, the one thing we seemed to agree upon, was that neither of us wanted to fight that war and how horrible it would be. It was because both sides had done the work to imagine what a nuclear war would look like. And I think all three of the topics that we address in this series are issues that have not been quite as richly imagined, but would be every bit as devastating to our society. So we have embarked on a project to do the prophylactic work of imagining those crises, with the spirit of imagining them so that we can avoid them…

[MUSICAL FLOURISH]

Elliot Ackerman: And the books are a lot of fun.

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He’s right: the books are a lot of fun. And if you've got a few hours to spare for cautionary tales about what the future might hold, I highly recommend 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. And its sequel, 2054: A Novel. Both are available on Audible.

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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from Sky News and the Times of London.