On today's episode of the Glenn Beck Program, Glenn Beck delivers an important message to the young men in the audience. Glenn explains the difference between a revival and an awakening, and why an awakening is more important than a revival.
00:14:04.960that have virtue seek the things that have beauty in music in in art in life in architecture in clothing whatever it is look for real lasting beauty and value find the things that are true truly true universally true find the things that uplift
00:14:36.960and you will change your life and your world
00:14:41.420let me tell you about relief factor pain doesn't have to be dramatic to be disruptive sometimes you know it's just that constant low hum in the background the shoulder that just doesn't turn the same the back that doesn't bend the knee that makes you think twice before standing up and you start to wonder is this normal now I mean this you know when did normal start to hurt all the time relief factor was created to change that it's a daily supplement developed by doctors to help your body fight the inflammation that causes pain naturally without depending on masking it with temporary fixes.
00:16:10.420So congratulations on that first question are there going to be sequels?
00:16:15.420Well first of all thank you very much I really appreciate it means a lot coming from you there is no plan for a sequel we know we wanted the movie to be a provocation in the best sense of the word you know a provocation to a larger conversation about this nuclear issue which I'm so glad to be having with you right now.
00:16:38.080Yeah was your primary source the Annie Jacobson book or was that just one of many I mean did you go to government sources where how did you get all this information?
00:16:49.360We spoke to a wide variety of people who had worked in places like the White House the CIA Strategic Command we you know I had worked as a journalist previously and so new folks who had held these kinds of jobs Catherine Bigelow who's the director of the movie had made Hurt Locker Zero Dark Thirty.
00:17:12.720So she has extraordinary relationships in the national security world and obviously there's an incredible body of work that has been done over the past several decades you know think tank folks authors journalists etc.
00:17:26.720Um and you know it's it's surprising how much a lot of this information is in the public domain in terms of what procedures the government would follow in in case of a of an attack like this and then a lot of it you know you can build by talking to sources uh you know much like you would do if you were trying to report out a story or get to the bottom of something.
00:17:47.720You know it's it's amazing to me that most presidents don't ever ask for training on this they don't they don't they don't do dry runs this is you're the one person that could change the whole world uh in 15 minutes and you're coming into it most of them are just coming into it absolutely dead cold if something would happen they don't they don't know how the work and this is not so I don't know how you would make the decision
00:18:17.580in that amount of time yeah it's I mean two of the most terrifying things that we that we zeroed in on early was this question of sole authority and decision time right so the idea that in the united states we live in a nuclear monarchy the president united states has the sole authority to determine whether these weapons are used it's not like he has to build any kind of consensus with the joint chiefs of staff or take a vote of the cabinet he has to decide uh and he has to decide
00:18:46.520under extraordinary time pressure so you know if a missile is launched from the pacific theater that part of the world it's you know under 30 minutes to impact on the continental united states if a missile is launched off our coast by a russian sub for instance it would take 10 to 12 minutes so you do have a scenario in which one person has arguably the fate of all mankind in in their hands and they've got a clock ticking and you know depending on where they are and what the target is they're probably running for their life or
00:19:16.440being evacuated worrying about their own family um and it's all put to them what do you want to do um and if you that's not scary enough the cherry on top is we spoke to people who had worked directly with presidents directly with secretaries of defense and we said how often uh is the president rehearsing this practicing for it preparing and they said never
00:19:39.440basically never never they get one briefing when they take office where they're introduced to the military aid who we're all familiar with the guy who follows them around with the the suitcase the nuclear football if you will
00:19:50.920their the process is explained how that would work um and then after that uh they never think about it again and you know ronald reagan we were told was the last
00:20:02.380president who participated who participated in any kind of live nuclear decision making exercise uh and it's and and so the the guy who
00:20:11.240has the most responsibility all the authority is also arguably the least practiced and prepared of anyone in this whole
00:20:19.000it's really it's it's terrifying you know i've i've talked to president trump about nuclear capability and i will tell you
00:20:27.680you'd say whatever you want about donald trump but the one thing i know he's afraid of is nuclear war he that has
00:20:35.940kept him awake night after night he he knows like reagan did and gorbachev did you start that you push that
00:20:46.680button it's over it's all over uh there's i mean you you hinted at it you know when you know you were like i got
00:20:53.860you know if we fly these missiles over this country what are they going to are they going to perceive this
00:20:59.460as a threat you know missiles you know russia i think in in the movie you've got russia saying how do we
00:21:04.900know you're not going to bomb it we should just trust you i mean it's it's over yeah and all of which
00:21:12.200begs the question i think um for president trump and for all of our leaders what do we do about it you
00:21:18.780know how do we solve this problem we we've lived with this threat in the background of all our lives
00:21:23.460since the dawn of the nuclear age i i am despite my last name not related to oppenheimer um but you
00:21:30.480know we've lived with this we've we've lived with this uh dynamite in the walls uh for so many decades
00:21:38.640now and really since the end of the cold war we haven't really talked or thought about it very much
00:21:43.080it is obviously on president trump's mind he does talk about it he's talked about trying to build the
00:21:48.700golden dome and a better missile defense system and i think that you know this this question of
00:21:54.880how do we make the world safer and it may be part of that is building a better missile defense system
00:22:00.000it it may be that part of it is re-engaging with an arms control and arms reduction process right i mean
00:22:07.120new start our last remaining treaty with the russians that that governs the the development and you know
00:22:13.560proliferation of these weapons is set to expire at the end of the year um maybe we should engage in a
00:22:19.640process with russia with china to try to dramatically reduce the nuclear stockpile um there are a lot of
00:22:26.140levers that before the president and can pull to try to make us all safer so you know part of the
00:22:33.120controversy with your um your movie which is uh house of dynamite and it's on netflix um part of the
00:22:41.480controversy i guess with the with the pentagon is that um the ground-based missile uh are interceptors
00:22:50.520and the interceptors you say it's 60 success i think i think uh annie jacobson says it's like close to
00:23:01.880zero and um the pentagon says it's 100 every time what do you think it really is is it 60
00:23:09.940so there's a there's a few factors involved here um the record of uh the testing record for
00:23:18.280this system which is the ground-based mid-course interceptors uh is is is public and it is 61 percent
00:23:26.040they have done a series of tests over the last 25 years and if you add up uh the you know the number
00:23:33.120of successes uh over the number of failures it comes to 61 percent the the pentagon in their memo
00:23:39.520is trying to say that the last several tests have been successful the previous ones were not
00:23:46.460so they say if you only count the most recent ones it's 100 which is of course that's like saying
00:23:52.260i made my last i made my last two free throws and so i'm a hundred percent free throw shooter even
00:23:59.160though i missed the previous exactly right four yeah so now that being said they're not wrong in
00:24:04.580that the system is getting better the software is getting better all of it is improving but it is
00:24:09.260nowhere close to being able to say it's 100 effective and part of that also comes down to
00:24:15.280the conditions under which these tests are undertaken right if i tell you you know glenn i'm
00:24:20.540going to throw a baseball at your head it's a lot easier for you to brace yourself and be ready and
00:24:25.400catch that baseball it's you know if an attack were to happen in the real world it's far less likely
00:24:30.620uh you know it's far more complicated to defend against so you know this though is not a debate
00:24:36.580between you know us as filmmakers and the pentagon it's really a debate between the pentagon and
00:24:40.980a much wider community of experts um about the efficacy of this system and you know like i said
00:24:47.680you know it's it's a good conversation to have do we want to improve the system do we want to try
00:24:53.120yes building something like golden doles yes yes we do yes we do um the um uh the one thing that
00:25:01.780you didn't uh hit on that was in annie's book that i thought was fascinating was that the president
00:25:07.180when the president has to finally make the decision he still doesn't know if it's nuclear tipped
00:25:13.260there could be a conventional weapon on a ballistic missile that is being sent by north korea
00:25:22.940let's say i mean it would be an incredible waste but you know if we launch before the missile hits
00:25:30.200we don't even know if that's nuclear and we would have then started a nuclear war because we're
00:25:36.120launching nuclear weapons and they didn't i think that one of the things that we're trying to capture
00:25:44.680in the story that we tell which is of course a fictional story um is the difficulty of making
00:25:52.300decisions in the fog of war and that particularly when you have such a tight decision window when that
00:25:58.880clock is winding down so rapidly it's it you're gonna find yourself being forced to make calls with
00:26:06.960imperfect and incomplete information and the other thing that is scary is is that the system that we
00:26:13.900built to that governs the use of nuclear weapons was designed during the cold war for a specific
00:26:19.100purpose it was to make sure that the soviets believed they could never get away with a first
00:26:25.940strike that if they launched missiles at us the president would be able to fire back so quickly
00:26:31.240that our decision making our command and control apparatus would be able to retaliate and so
00:26:38.280maintaining that deterrent threat we needed to make sure that the president could respond and
00:26:44.940retaliate as quickly and as easily as possible so that's the world we still live in now and so you
00:26:51.040know again if one domino falls there aren't breaks a lot of breaks built into this the idea is to make
00:26:56.580it easy for the president to fire back um and so yeah i mean you're right i mean mistakes can be made
00:27:02.860it's i i think it's miraculous frankly that you know we're all still here it hasn't it is it really
00:27:09.260is you're streaming the best of glenn beck to hear more of this interview and others download the full
00:27:14.480show podcasts wherever you get podcasts hello stew welcome thank you glenn appreciate that yeah yeah yeah
00:27:22.460yeah well i meant it with everything in i could tell uh yeah i know listen uh so 10 percent of the
00:27:29.540flights in 40 major cities is where we're starting we could go as high as 40 percent of our flights
00:27:37.900in fact uh we had um uh we have our secretary of uh transportation sean duffy actually coming out and
00:27:46.700saying you know what uh the problem is we're not going to have skies that you know are unsafe sorry
00:27:56.100can't do it we'll just shut down the airspace before we have unsafe skies which i appreciate
00:28:01.940uh however you know there comes a time when you're like okay maybe we should stop this
00:28:06.700maybe democrats you should open the government back up
00:28:12.120at what points do do people start to lay the blame you know at the feet of the democrats do they