Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Robert tells Margaret about the giant meeting the military held to tell everyone how they planned to kill the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's behind the Bastards. This is our special episodes on
the guys who built the nuclear doomsday machine that could
kill us all at any moment. Episode five, The end
is finally in sight. That could be literal. Margaret Kiljoy,
Welcome back to the program. How you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm doing great. I've gone full circle. I've accepted that
this is reality, and I am just very happy to
get to live in these times.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
It's great that you got to that point because actually
the next ten pages are all Warhammer. Oh I just
stopped writing about nukes at a certain point, but you
can just assume that that's real.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, because that's what your brain does when presented with
this much disaster, is you're like, yeah, man, I really
like fantasy books.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna relax to the
comfort of a game where every single person is worse
than Hitler, Like we're Hitler would be a moderate bleeding hearts. Well,
let's get back to talking about this insane minute man system,

(01:14):
because we've talked about some of the shit that's crazy
about this, but we still have not gotten to the
craziest thing about this, right, Good, So we left off.
John Ruble has been having in nineteen fifty nine and
start at sixty. He's having conversations with all these Air
Force guys about the minute Man system, and he's come
up with some serious concerns about, well, how do we

(01:35):
decide when these things are fired? When you choose to
shoot one, how do the other nine get launched? Is
it really just four guys who have to turn their
keys in order to launch fifty missiles? Are there ways
they could at fifty random cities? Are there ways they
could accidentally get launched due to, you know, an electrical error?

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
These are all concerns, and the Air Force is like,
with the fuck are you asking questions for? You fucking nerd?
Get the hell out of here. Let us killed. Yeah
you a commie? So here's Rubelt are tell me? Yeah,
you got to tell me if you're a communists. Here's
Rubel discussing his concerns. I was curious about the procedures

(02:17):
for launching. How are the decisions to be made and
what happens when the launch commands are given? What if
you decide you really didn't want to launch the rest
after you've already launched some can you launch missiles one
at a time selectively, what if some operators decide to
launch without authority? Here I cite from a transcript of
my discussion of this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library.
A moment arrived in this briefing in the June of
nineteen fifteen. In June of nineteen fifty nine, when I

(02:38):
could ask the question I wanted to ask, when I
had asked Bennett in private before, but without getting a
satisfactory response. I had the feeling that if I asked
the question surrounded as I was by members of the
President's Science Advisory Committee panel, that I might elicit a
better answer. So I said something like, Bob, can you
describe how the missiles are launched? Now? I began to
think he was made uncomfortable by the question. He seemed

(02:59):
reluctant to grasp it simple meaning. And Bob gives the
explanation I gave you earlier about how well these guys
are all behind bulletproof glass, and they have guns so
they you know, one guy can't threaten the other, and
they turn their keys at the same time or close
to it, and that'll count as a vote to launch
the missile. Right the first miss and so Rebel's immediate
question is when you say the missiles are launched, do

(03:20):
you mean all fifty? And Bob said, well, that depends
on whether or not the missiles are ready, but yeah,
all fifty will launch. Now, this upsets everybody on the
President's Science Advisory Panel. These people are not These are
like normal people, right, These are not maniacs. These are
like science guys who were, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust? Right,

(03:43):
And they're like, what or guys live launch fifty missiles
with no one getting in the way. Really, and there's
no way to stop all fifty from launching once you
start the process of launching one. Are you serious? He was,
So everybody gets upset. So Bob Bob is like, now
in damage control mode, and Bob Bennett goes like, now, look,

(04:03):
you have to understand, this isn't as crazy as it sounds.
There are two modes that we can fire these in. Right.
One of these modes is salvo and the other is
ripple launch. Right, one of them launches all the missiles
as close as simultaneously as possible, and the other staggers them. Right,
does that make it better? There's two modes Margaret, there's

(04:26):
two modes. It's fine.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
The hose has shower and jet. Yeah, not a hose.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
You just know, Bob has not sat down with anyone
who is not constantly spending every second of their life
like touching themselves to the thought of ending humanity, right,
and he's just like, wait, people don't they don't know
there's two modes that'll fix it. I'll tell them about
the modes, right.

Speaker 4 (04:51):
See.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
I think they and its consequences have been a disaster
for the years.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
It's a fucking catastrophe. Yeah, once people start thinking about
game again, that needs to be a bricking. If you
ever encounter somebody who starts talking game theory shit, just
brick them, you know, give them a good heart.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Theory says you have to brick them. That's the you
have to brick them.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
It's the only way to stop these people. Yeah, all right,
Rubel continues quote. It turned out in pursuing the matter
further that if you had preset the system for a
ripple launch, there was no way to interrupt it. After
the launch command was transmitted to the silos. If the
first missile went then six seconds later, let us say
the second and after another six seconds the third, and
if after the twentieth missile you decide that was really

(05:30):
enough missiles, you couldn't stop the system from launching the
remaining thirty. According to what Bennett told us at the time,
Rubelle describes the committee as pretty shook by this revelation.
I don't think anybody had ever realized before that there
would be four men buried in the ground somewhere in
North Dakota who might someday stick their keys into four
little slots, turn them, and irrevocably launch fifty minutemen missiles.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah that's life on Earth.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, that's insane. The next question this inspired was under
what circumstances would these men get the order to turn
their keys? Everyone outside the Air Force assumed they'd have
to be a verified command from the President or a
designated military authority, but that wasn't physically required, and as
Rubel notes, the whole system was designed to remove choices

(06:19):
from civilian leadership. Quote. By design, the president could not
decide to launch one missile or two or a few
against specific targets. This was intentional. The Air Force built
it this way to remove choice from the president. So
the president, if he was asked to make that decision
in ten or fifteen minutes do we start a nuclear war?

(06:40):
So he would not have any option but to do it.
That's why they built it this way. That was conscious,
that was intentional.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
Fuck.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
So now I should note here, and this is something
Rebel points out, fifty of these Minuteman missiles, with the
standard explosive loads they had, would have meant more explosive
power than all of the bombs used in all of
the wars in human history put together up to that point.
Four guys could do this, and again, the whole minute

(07:16):
Man system was meant to eventually have at least a
thousand missiles general power. In fact, advocated for two hundred
squadrons a total of ten thousand missiles, all set up
the same way.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Every state gets four, every state gets four.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah. So Rubel was so frightened by all of this
that he dedicated his career to stopping the system as
it existed from being implemented. He sat down first with
General Curtis LeMay, than the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Rubelle expressed to LeMay that he believed the minute Man
system represented a crucial loss of civilian command and control.
Here's LeMay's response, command and control. Command and control, what's that?

(07:53):
It's telling the fighting man what to do. That's what
it is, and that's a job with a professional soldier.
They talk about the president, exercise and command and control?
What is the president? Rebel notes that le may spit
out the p and president a politician. What does the
politician know about war? Who needs a president? If there's
a war? Nobody. All we need him for is to
tell us that there is a war. We are professional soldiers,

(08:15):
will take care of the rest. Just out of his mind.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Hell yeah, I'm impressed that you got This is like
almost the worst bat. This is Schrodinger's worst bastard in
all right.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah, Like this man's dedication to ending
all life on earth is really unique in history. I mean,
I assume he had a Soviet counterpart, but like, I'm
not as familiar with them.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Do you think that they get like lonely, the American
one and the Russian one, and they have only each
other to talk to when they talk about their doomsday machine,
that they're the only people who really understand.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, man, they won't give me ten thousand missiles, bro,
I know, it's so hard to get enough missiles to
kill the whole world a thousand times over. Like, don't worry,
we got a bunch too, though, homie, Like, it'll be fine.
The no one's gonna live through this.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
We'll do our part too, all right, as long as
you do your part.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Mm hmm. So it's here that Rubell points out every
detail of the minute Man system discussed so far was
designed per the specifications of the Air Force. This was
true right down to the mechanics of how turning the
keys led to firing the missiles, which is the scariest
part of the whole system. To make a complicated story
kind of simpler, the keys send out these electronic pulse

(09:33):
generators which travel to electronic gates, and once the get
the signal pat the pulse passes through the gate, it
advances one notch for each pulse that passes through the gate, right,
and if enough pulses pass through the gates, it starts
launching the missiles automatically.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Right. Oh my god, so I start You can hack
one position and get all four sorry, yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't even have to be that. Because
I explained this to a friend of mine who has
never read a book about nukes, but who has done amateur,
unlicensed electrician work. And she immediately asked, hey, wait, does
that mean that, like, if the power goes out and
then comes back on, it might send a pulse and
advance one notch closer to firing the missiles. Wow, God,

(10:15):
you wouldn't think so, right. Clearly, anyone putting the effort
of putting missiles and hardened bunkers meant to a stand
an atom bomb would have made sure that something as
simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in
the sixties wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust. Only they did not.
They never considered it for a second.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
My god, this.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Thing could have started launching fifty missiles if there was
a power outage or a couple of power outages. Because
once Rubel starts taking this to other engineers, they bring
this up and they start looking into how the system
design realized that's totally possible, Like it absolutely could have
happened if they had built the system the way it
was originally designed. And no one in the Air Force

(10:58):
even fought to look into that, Like that's how reckless
these pieces of shit are. Now the reason why the
Air Force doesn't care about this sort of thing is
that they are more concerned that just two guys can
launch a whole squadron of ICBMs if everyone else in
the country is killed first. So they built an automated
clock system. The other thing they added to this is
they have this automatic clock system that counts down from

(11:19):
between six hours. You can set it to like one
hour or six hours. You can set it to a
variety of times, but depending on how you set it,
if one command center votes to launch the missiles after
a limit, after whatever time you set it to, this
automated system will act as the second vote to fire
the remaining forty missiles, and Jesus right, yeah, Now, when

(11:42):
this is.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Explained, this is worse than I expected.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
It's so bad, so fucked.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
Yeah, it's so bad, like it's the Taurus firearms of
nuclear missiles. It's nuts, like to not.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Even no, not even Celtech. Yeah, they built a nuclear
cig P three twenty to go off in a cops box.
Oh man. So when all this was explained to Rubel,
the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that, like, well,
the minimum setting is fifty eight minutes, right, and we
want to have at least that much time to allow

(12:21):
the military to disable the system. If two men vote
to launch without warning and we decide we don't want
to launch the rest of the squadron, right, that seems
like maybe it's a safety feature. Right now, many of
these silos are hours away from anything else. That's kind
of the point. Even to this day. You can't reach
a lot of these in fifty eight minutes, you know.
But the other problem is that the Air Force colonel

(12:42):
who described the way this clock system worked to Rubel
lied to him. The minimum count you could set it
to wasn't fifty eight minutes. It was zero minutes.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
So you really genuinely could just automate all the minute men.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah we damn near? Did we damn near? Did? Here's
rebel again. Zero could mean that only two men or
perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing
of fifty minute man missiles by accident or effectively by
designing the system this way in the event of a
series of power interruptions. So Rubel is like, oh God,

(13:22):
I have to do something this system. These missiles are
not active yet, these silos aren't active yet, and I
have to stop them from being made active at least
until this is fixed. Right, So he sets to work
trying to get someone at the Air Force to give
a shit about these problems. Right. He sits down with
the head of missile Development, General Shreiverer, who he described
as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject. Eventually, in late

(13:47):
nineteen sixty he manages to have lunch with the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, and while they're arguing about this system,
he's like, look, man, tell me, would you feel safe
knowing the Soviets had a system that worked the way
the minute man does? And yeah, he thought I had
a point there, but my concerns again dropped into another
organizational black hole. Everyone's just trying to push this guy on.

(14:10):
I don't want to deal with it. I don't want
to think about it. Why are you trying? Why are
you causing problems? Just let us build this thing and
forget about it. Man, No one else has a problem
with this. That's literally how he's being treated.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
It's like, so it's not even the torment Nexus. It's
like one guy's trying to stop the torment Nexus from
being built by a bunch of people who also don't
think that the Torment Nexus needs to be. They're just
doing their part.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Torment said, come on, man, don't fuck with us. A
lot of people's jobs are on the line building the
Torment Nexus. Yeah, come on. So, as I noted Rubel,
because he's good at his job, he gets promoted regularly, right,
and in sixty one I think sixty sixty one, he
passes his job at the Strategic Warfare Office I think
it's sixty onto a guy named Martin Stern. He tells

(14:53):
Stern that his top priority is to change the Minuteman
launch control system and warns him, you will not get
this done unless you get a presidential directive ordering the
Air Force to do something. And Marvin has a good
relationship with some of these generals, and so he starts
at being like, that's not how you get things done
in the Air Force, right, you just gotta let me
talk to these guys. But then he starts talking to
these guys and all of these generals lie to him,

(15:14):
and he realizes like, oh fuck, no, they really are
refusing to fix these problems, these apocalyptic problems, and they're
trying to fast track these missiles to being activated. To
make a long story short, Rubel and several of his
friends spend the next two years of their lives shouting
at everyone who will listen about this. This culminates and
another guy at the DoD named Jim Fletcher heading a

(15:35):
committee that issues a report on the minute Man system.
Their research found that a very real chance that simple
power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal
to fire. The ultimate bill and this is it's because
of this commission report that we retrofit the whole minute
Man system. Right, And the ultimate bill for retrofitting the

(15:55):
system is hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. It's very
expensive to fix these problems, which is why the Air
Force hadn't wanted to fix them. But Rubel does win.
The most dangerous features for the economy, Yeah yeah, yeah,
real bad fucking. The stock market does not do well
when everyone's dead. Nope, Nope, doesn't do much at all.

(16:17):
Now Rubel does win. The most dangerous features are removed
by the time the first minute Man silo goes active
at the end of nineteen sixty one. But a big
part of why I noted all of this stuff. None
of this comes out until two thousand and eight, when Rubel,
at the end of his life, publishes a confession talking
about all this right as a way to try to
warn people. Essentially, he's warning people, nothing's really all that
much better today, right, Like, that's why he writes this,

(16:40):
to try to get people to understand how much danger
we're all in. And a big part of the point
of that confession is he's talking about all of the
gaps in the system of civilian control of the military
that allowed all of this to happen in the first place,
because those gaps weren't entirely eradicated by fixing this one system.
He documented a conversation one of his allies had with

(17:01):
another Air Force general around the same time. Quote General
Cutter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS
Ballistic Missile Early Warning System as soon as possible, and
he urged that we expanded in order to create a
highly redundant capability at each site. We must have an
absolutely reliable early warning of a missile attack. Basically, I agreed,

(17:21):
all would have been well if he had stopped there,
but he didn't. In words I can't precisely recall, he
went on to say that we had to have this
redundancy in the resulting high level of right reliability, so
that when we finally connected the warning system directly to
the launch button of our own ICBMs, there would be
no false alarms. I was astonished. I told him flatly,
we would not automate our response at We would not

(17:44):
connect the warning system directly to the launch button. We
would not, in some go to a launch on warning strategy.
We would especially not go to one that did not
have the president in the decision making. Loop Cutter coldly replied,
in that case, we might as well surrender now.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
I love it. It's like no one who's ever done plumbing
or hacking. No, yeah, air gap, you need a fucking
air gap, needs for so many gaps.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Never trust a computer, don't trust people, and don't trust computers.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Every hacker is like, this is my computer that matters,
So it doesn't have the Internet right like it.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
It's just it's fucking insane, like the whole Well, we
might as well surrender now. If we're not just going
to have an automatic doomsday device that goes off, if
a radar has an hallucination, why don't we just quit?
Fuck it? What's the communists like? It's fucking crazy? And
I should note that this happens later, but the Soviet
Union does devise a similar automated system called the dead Hand,

(18:46):
and some aspect it's kind of unclear exactly how put
together this is, but they do a version of the
same thing, right this right it is a really cool name,
but it's basically a way to guarantee that if the
US wiped out out their command and control first, that
there would be an automatic launch system in order to retaliate. Right,

(19:07):
It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but
they this is these same conversions of all of these
same conversations happened in the USSR.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
Right two, because they, if nothing else, they need the
Americans to believe they do that right right exactly, and
like everyone is worried about what the other guy is
doing and everybody's out.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Of their fucking minds.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Now the good news is, Margaret, it's time for ads.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Oh good, it is a nice thing that makes the
ads seem like a nice refreshment.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah. Yeah, probably not going to get ads for nukes.

Speaker 4 (19:39):
Huzzah.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
And we're back. So the good news is this, This
is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern
military advisors and officers today. But general Cutters type of
thinking is not extinct at the Pentagon, and it is
still very common. I don't know if i'd say it's
completely dominant, but there are a lot of guys who

(20:07):
think this way who are still part of our nuclear
defense architecture, right.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
This.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
In fact, getting that job kind of requires that you're
at least a little bit like these people.

Speaker 4 (20:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
It fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with
some of this to wind up in those positions. Rubell
points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized
for examining the technical status of launch controls for any
of our nuclear weapons systems, and there is none today, right,
And that's a real problem. There's no one checking other

(20:39):
than guys like Rubel to make sure we don't build
another really flawed, suicidally flawed missile system, which the Minuteman
initially was. Now, while Rubel was fighting to reform the
minute Man system, he was part of the problem in
a different way. Right. We've just talked about him. Maybe
he saved everybody's lives. Here's him being kind of a
bastard and late night. Yeah, in late nineteen sixty, which

(21:02):
is right in the middle of when he's having this fight.
President Eisenhower issued an order for all three military departments
to formulate a single operational plan or PSYOP for nuclear
war like SIOP, not like a psyop, but it is
pronounced the same way, right, and this will this will
get finalized in sixty two. But they start working on it,
and they presented initially in nineteen sixty. So in late

(21:22):
nineteen sixty the DoD the Department of Defense, shares a
cohesive plan for nuclear war to a mix of military
personnel and selected civilian defense officials for the first time.
The Single Integrated Operational Plan or PSYOP sixty two was,
in Rubel's words, deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions
of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on in innocent civilians

(21:43):
in the USSR in China. This plan was presented at
an underground meeting at the SAC headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska.
General Power Stage managed a deliberately theatrical display in which,
at his command, AIDS would simultaneously set up easels and
start flipping maps over that like each new map would
show different detonations from different waves of planned strikes, you know,

(22:05):
five minutes, in ten minutes, twenty minutes. Right, this is
like it's an analog PowerPoint, right, he has like guys
being his PowerPoint presentation basically, Yeah, and I'm going to
quote from Rubel, because Reubella is at this meeting, right,
I'm going to quote from his description of what he
sees here. At the point in the briefing where some
bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their

(22:26):
way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying
just a minute, just a minute. He turned in his
front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms
and dusk stretching behind me, and said, I just hope
none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they
have a radar station there that is right on our
flight path, and we take it out with that, to
which the response was utter silence. Power turned to the
speaker and with another wave of his hand told him

(22:48):
to go ahead. Just Cashry was like, by the way,
we're killing everyone in Albania immediately.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Yeah, famously our enemy Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Hope you don't got family there, because again we knew
pok them right away. Because of a radar station. We're
just going to kill everyone in the country. Because of
a radar station, everyone in the country. We're wiping the
whole country out.

Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
So, Rubel, I think we've established is a thinking man
and a man who cares about ethics. He's not a monster.
He's a part of this terrible system, but he has
a soul and he's upset. He's upset at this general
casual being, like, so we start by killing albaniact just
for shit, right, He's upset, but he doesn't say shit right.

(23:29):
He writes about this decades later. He writes about his
discomfort in this meeting, and that specifically, he writes about
his discomfort at the fact that SIAP sixty two quote
deliberately removed effective operational control from the president or any
other civilian or even military commander in the event of
a nuclear conflict. Now, none of this is public knowledge
for decades, right, it takes a long time. We only

(23:52):
know what we know because in two thousand and eight,
Rubell published his experiences as a warning to the rest
of the country, and he noted that during this meeting,
General Power and the other authors of si UP sixty
two gave an anticipated death count of five hundred to
six hundred million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR
in China.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
That gets into that, like, that's like a combined death
count of every war that's ever happened. Levels ye problem, yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, like right, it's got to be up there, right. Quote.
No accounting was presented of reciprocal effects in the United
States or collateral deaths and damage in many other parts
of the globe where global clouds of radioactive dust would
eventually descend. They just don't bother with that. We're not
interested in what the fallout might do. We're not interested
in the knock on effects. We're just interested in killing

(24:41):
half of all of the people or more in the
USSR in China, right yeah. And the way in which
Power and the other briefers talk about civilian death on
an unimaginable scale struck Rubel as ghoulish. Quote. There are
about six hundred million Chinese in China. He said, his
chart went up to half that number, three hundred million.
On the vertical axis. It showed that debts from fallout

(25:03):
as time passed after the attack leveled out at that
number three hundred million. Half the population of China.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah, yeah, they don't care.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
They don't give a shit. Yeah, now I say they
don't give a shit. Someone in this meeting does give
a shit, right, And I'm gonna continue with Rubel's reminiscence.
A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying,
may I ask a question. General Power turned again in
his front row seat, stared into the darkness, and said, yeah,

(25:34):
what is it? In a tone not likely to encourage
the timid What if this isn't China's war? The voice asked,
what if this is just a war with the Soviets?
Can you change the plan? Well? Yeah, General Power said resignedly,
we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it because
it would really screw up the plan. Hey, what if

(25:55):
we don't need to kill three hundred million people in China?
Can we like nix that part?

Speaker 4 (25:59):
Well?

Speaker 2 (25:59):
I hope not. That fucks up my plan. We're not
killing three hundred million people in China. That really fucks
things up for me.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
We already had the banner printed, you know.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, we've got the banner printed in everything. We had
a mission accomplished board here. Come on, Yeah, you don't
want to kill three hundred million people in China. What's
wrong with you?

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Yeah? But what was that? Bonus effects?

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, yeah, bonus effects. Now it says something about Rubel
that it was not until this moment that he found
himself thinking about the Vonse Conference in January of nineteen
forty two, in which a group of top Nazis planned
the Holocaust. For some reason, this is one of the
most frightening moments of the Cold War to me, A
man who truly cared about protecting his country and stopping

(26:38):
a dangerous system from going live finds himself stuck in
a room where something many times worse than the Holocaust
is being casually planned, and he realizes, oh fuck, oh shit,
I'm like some junior SS guys sitting in the back
of the Vonse conference too scared to speak up and
ruin micro fuck fuck, I'm a not fuck like. That's
literally how he describes his recollection is like, this is

(27:00):
the fuck. This is so much worse than the they're
talking about skilling six hundred million people. He doesn't say shit,
he does not. He is not that kind of brave, right,
He is a work within them that's.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Like a telling human conditioned thing right, because we all
imagine ourselves saying something right now.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
You want to hope you would. And I get the
feeling from his writing that Rubelle never quite forgave himself
for not right.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Good.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
He shouldn't have, Yeah, he shouldn't have. This should haunt
you to the end of your days.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
But he's still the most deeply human person in that room.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
I'll say the second most, because we're about to talk
about someone who does speak up. There is one guy
who has who actually has some courage here. Okay, So
the day after this first meeting at the SAC headquarters,
Rubel takes part in a smaller meeting about the meeting
they just had. Right, even the military, you can't escape
meetings about meetings, you know, like that's that's that's just bureaucracy, baby.

(28:03):
So this smaller meeting includes the Secretary of Defense, all
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of
each major branch of the military, plus the Commandant of
the Marine Corps, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Speaking
on the harrowing meeting they just had, quote told everyone
that they'd done a very fine job, a very difficult job, right, So,
and that sentiment is echoed by everyone. Everyone just goes

(28:25):
around congratulating each other at the start of this meeting
being it was a great meeting. It was really tough,
but you guys really pulled together and came up with
a plant two six hundred million people, and I'm proud
of you. You know, it's not easy to figure out
how to kill half a billion people or more, but
you guys really got a job. Yeah. Yeah, So everyone
in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment except for one guy,

(28:46):
General David M. Shoop, commandant of the Marine Corps. And
you know, the Marines. The Marines are an interesting branch
because both the chuttiest maniacs and the military and the
absolute like coolest, like best soldiers in American history, like
Smedley Butler were Marines, right, Yeah, they have a history
of producing occasionally these like really weirdly like woke generals

(29:10):
and stuff like Smedley Butler is a committed anti capitalist
and anti imperialist who gets very angry about being used
as a gangster for capitalism. And David and Shupe, who's
the commandant of the Core at this point, is cut
from the same cloth. He's the same kind of guy, and.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
He probably seem like more like honor, like more like yes,
whatever you believe in, you're still like you're like, no,
I'm willing to risk my life to go do this thing.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
That's why I joined the Marines.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, right, Like my dad was a marine. It doesn't
have entirely positive things to say about the people in
it with that, Like.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
That's what I'm saying is there's they run the gamut,
you know. Yeah, but Shop is a really interesting guy
in the long history of Marine Corps commandants. He is
one of the men who earned that job title the most.
He'd been born in Indiana in nineteen oh four to
a poor family, and he was raised politically progressive and
grew into a staunch anti imperialist with a very strong

(30:03):
anti business outlook. He is not super sold on capitalism
and he hates imperialism. As a starving young man, he
joins the military to survive. He proves very good at
the job and is deployed twice to China during their
Civil war. He serves as a staff officer in the
Pacific during World War II until he was given a
combat command to lead the invasion of an island called Tarawa.

(30:26):
His forces encountered immediate and fierce resistance. His transport was
disabled before landing, and he had to wade ashore, where
he was struck by shrapnel and shot in the neck.
Despite this, he continued to organize and lead his men
from the front with a gunshot wound to the neck.
On the afternoon of the second day of the attack,
he sent a message to his divisional headquarters Combat Efficiency colon,

(30:47):
we are winning. Just just a badass, Like, what are these?
What of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war.
Shep receives a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts,
right if you want to know, like, how what kind
of a badass this dude was? Like he is a
general leading from the front in such a way that

(31:08):
he gets a medal of Honor for his service in combat.
And he is the only man in this entire story
who gives us anything we can be truly proud of
as Americans. And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's
book Nuclear War here, and this is after they're going
over the plan again to kill six hundred million people.
No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing

(31:29):
of six hundred million people in a US government led
preemptive first strike nuclear attack. Rubel wrote, not any of
the joint chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense, not John Ruble.
Then finally, one man did, General David M. Shupe, the
commandant of the US Marine Corps, a marine awarded the
Medal of Honor for his actions in World War Two.
Shupe was a short man with rimless glasses who could

(31:50):
have passed for a school teacher from a rural Mid
American community. Recalled Rubel, he remembered how Shop spoke in
a calm, level voice when he offered the sole a
poising view on the plan for nuclear war. That Shop said,
all I can say is any plan that murders three
hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their
war is not a good plan. That is not the
American way. The room fell silent. Rubel wrote, Nobody moved

(32:13):
a muscle, nobody seconded Shoop's descent. No one else said anything.
According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way.

Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah fuck yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
At least there was one I know, at least there
was one guy being like, are you do you guys
realize how fucking evil this is? Ht you out of
your minds. You know what you're talking about killing three
million people who might not have fun, fuck all to us.
They don't even have nukes yet.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah, we we killed Japan for trying to kill all
the Chanese people.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, did you not see a problem here? Yeah? Yeah,
that's not the American way. Unfortunately it is. But I
can't blame for trying to make it not be Yeah, exactly.
Shoop goes on to be a cool guy the rest
of his life. He spoke vocally against nuclear escalation during
the Cuban missile crisis, like he was a major voice

(33:08):
trying to be like, no, no, no, we need to
take a step back. And he was also he advised
against entering South Vietnam during the opening stages of the
Vietnam War. He was one of the few generals who
was like, this is a terrible idea and we should
not get involved at all. This is a really bad plan.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Right Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
In general, he was the one sane man not afraid
to speak his mind in the entire defense establishment during
some of the maddest years of the Cold War. Right,
So yeah, thank you, general, i'd I know what this
is involved. We shouldn't do this.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah. Yeah, and he.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
Clearly like not afraid of confrontation, is willing to say, like,
you people are fucking maniacs.

Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
But unfortunately he uh, he's the only one. So Ruebel,
who is not a fighter, not great at confrontation, one
gets the idea, does continue to push bureaucratically for a
saner nuclear posture, but he does so from within the
bureaucracy in which he was comfortable. In his two thousand
and eight report, he accused defense planners of building both
Syops sixty two and the minute Man system deliberately to

(34:09):
deny quote any but a go no go option to
civilian leadership. As Henry Kissinger put it in nineteen sixty one.
And this is the only time I'll quote Kissinger approvingly,
these plans offered the president just one choice quote suicide
or surrender, holocaust or humiliation. In other words, the military
has set it up that the only choice the president

(34:30):
gets to make is let the country get nuked or
kill everybody.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
The good news is that in the early nineteen sixties,
at the very start of the Kennedy administration, is probably
the high water mark for at least the danger of
an atomic Holocaust during the Cold War. Part of why
we stepped to tell you, yeah, during the war so far. Yeah.
Part of what got us to step back from the

(34:57):
brink a little bit is that after the Berlin Crisis,
which is, you know, the Soviet Union tries to cut
off supplies into the chunk of Berlin that NATO is
occupying and we have to drop a bunch of shit
in by plane. Right after that, and then the Cuban
Missile crisis, Kennedy comes to realize what Rubel had known
for a while, which is that the men running the

(35:18):
Strategic Air Command in particular and the Air Force in
general are out of their goddamn minds. Right like that,
he starts to become Kennedy starts become very aware that, like,
these people are crazy and they're going to get us
all killed. I have to do something about the way
this system works, right, And this is arguably the best
thing he did in his presidency. One of the first
moments where this was made clear to him was on

(35:39):
September fifth, during Kennedy's first year in office, in which
several Air forcemen submitted a first strike study that suggested
killing fifty four percent of the USSR's population. An alternate
plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy
named Casin, the study author, estimated would kill only around
a million civilians. However, US casual he's from a Soviet

(36:00):
response ranged from basically none to seventy five percent of
the US population.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Uh huh right.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Rubell includes a note about the reactions of people in
the Kennedy administration to this horror show. Ted Sorensen, the
chief White House counsel and speechwriter who had been with
Kennedy since his earliest Senate days, was outraged when Cayson
told him about the study, shouting, you're crazy. We shouldn't
let guys like you around here. Even Moripauld was a
friend of Caseon's on the NSC staff named Marcus Raskin.

(36:29):
Raskin had served as foreign policy advisor to a few
Liberal Democratic senators and had been hired as a token leftist.
Raskin was horrified by the very existence of such a study.
How does this make us any better than those who
measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the
tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany, he hollered.
At one point Raskin never spoke to Cason again. Good question, yeah,

(36:50):
really good question. Yeah. Kennedy himself was briefed on the
likely death toll of a nuclear war, basically on the
result like he's briefed on this case and study, and
his response is characteristically eloquent. He says, and we call
ourselves the human race.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
Yeah, oh fuck yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
The Cuban missile crisis unfolded across thirteen days in nineteen
sixty two, and it seems to have inspired Kennedy to
take action to reduce the ability of his insane generals
to destroy the world. When he imposed a blockade of
Cuba to force the USSR to remove their nukes. General
LeMay insisted on direct military intervention as the only path forward,
claiming that any attempt to solve the problem without violence

(37:34):
would lead to war. Look, we might have a war
if we don't get violent with these guys. You don't
want a war, do you? Quote LeMay indirectly threatened to
make his dissent public. I think that a blockade and
the political talk would be considered by a lot of
our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response
to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own
citizens would feel that way too. In other words, you're

(37:55):
in a pretty bad fix at the present time. LeMay's
words angered Kennedy, who asked, what did you say? LeMay responded,
You're in a pretty bad fix. Kenneth O'Donnell recalled in
his memoirs that after the meeting, Kennedy asked him, can
you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass
hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we
listen to them and do what they want us to do,
none of us will be alive later to tell them

(38:15):
they were wrong.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
I better understand the like second half of the twentieth
century is a big push for pacifism on the left. Yeah, yeah, Like,
and it's one of those things you like look back
at and you're like, oh, that seems kins silly, and
you're like.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Some parts worked, some didn't, But oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
I get why people lean towards that.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Yeah yeah. And this is arguably the best thing Kennedy
does is it's during the Kennedy administration that we take
trigger control mostly and eventually entirely away from the military.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
The scenario now, and this is I don't I think
it's better, but it's also differently bad. Now, some general
or some colonel or some kid in a silo couldn't
launch our arsenal.

Speaker 4 (39:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
You can't have four kids launching fifty missiles on their
own because you have to have like codes transmitted and stuff, right,
But one guy can decide to launch everything, and it's
the president. Now, that does mean we have civilian control,
and I think that's a positive step away from a
bunch of insane generals potentially having that command, or four
kids in a cornfield having that ability.

Speaker 4 (39:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
But and that is a major thing that happens under Kennedy, right,
is that command and control of our nuclear arsenal gets
shifted much further to the president, and that process continues
over the years. This is what leads to the nuclear football, right,
which I think people are generally aware of, right because
it's under Kennedy. I talked about how that Los Alamos
scientists came up with the idea to we need a

(39:50):
lock on these fucking things, and they figure out how
to do that during the Kennedy administration, and Kennedy gives
the order to start putting locks on our weapons, right,
which starts moving this this all, I'm YadA yading. This
takes longer to get to where we are now, but
this starts the process, right that leads to the situation
we have now where these weapons all do at least

(40:12):
have a lock, and where we have the football, right,
the nuclear football, which is ultimately a product of both
that scientist Agnu realizing a single private with eight bullets
was all that stood between a nuke and whoever, as
well as Rubel and his allies repeatedly insisting to their
bosses that these Air Force fuckers are out of their
goddamn minds, right, like that is you know, a really
good thing that happens here. And characteristically, when the switch

(40:36):
the lock is first demoed, it was presented to President
Kennedy who immediately is like, yeah, put these on everything
we can right immediately, right now, do it today. You
have no other priorities, and the military loses their fucking mind.
The faust are bombs. They put a lock, our bombs up.
The fears of one General Alfred Starbird, which is a

(40:57):
wild name, were summarized as follows. How is a pilot
us are four and somewhere around the world going to
get a code from the president of the United States
to ourma nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively
superior number of Soviet troops. Okay, maybe it's this. I'm
fine with that.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Actually, yeah, a couple instead of all of us. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, Look, I'm not casual about the lives of soldiers.
They're people too, But it's a soldier's job to potentially
die for their country, and I prefer that to the
whole world dying, including that soldier. Including that soldier, they're
not living through it all. None of these bomber guys,
all of these sac bombers know that their missions are
suicide missions. If they get the order to fly to

(41:40):
the USSR, they are not coming back. There won't be
anywhere to come back to, right, Yeah, although the.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Only people still alive, they'll flying from other ten minutes before. Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
Mean that would That's how it is now, because we
have these doomsday planes that we literally call like doomsday planes,
which are these huge shielded planes that are able to
president basically can hand over control of continuing to launch
our nukes to the official in the plane because the
President's going to be dead pretty soon. Everyone is. None
of these bunkers working as well as people want to

(42:11):
believe they do, especially not when you're talking about multiple
thermonuclear impacts. It doesn't matter how deep. If people are
dropping multiple hydrogen bombs as they would be, or missiles
as they would be in this very few things could
could protect you. All of these fancy bunker complexes are
great if you don't get directly hit by multiple thermonuclear bombs,

(42:32):
but they're not going to protect you from it, which
is you're going to boil alive, right, yeah, yeah, no,
And that's anti Jacobson's Nuclear War book, which posits a
pretty chilling theory about how this could all go down.
Does have everyone dies, like everyone in command and control
is fucking dead, except for the guy in the doomsday
plane who make sure that everyone dies on the other
side of the world. That's nuclear war. Anyway. Let's have

(42:57):
some ads and we'll come back and finish this story. Whew,
all right, we're back. So this is what gets us.
The stuff with Kennedy evolves into like, you know, the
system we have today which gives the president's sole authority
to end civilization. We'll talk about that a little more

(43:18):
in a second, but I want to finish with Curtis
LeMay's story first in nineteen sixty four, now is Chief
of Staff of the Air Force. Curtis Lamay is still
in nineteen forty five, Curtis LeMay is in charge of
all of the US air power in Southeast Asia. Basically
during the Korean War, same deal. During the start of Vietnam,

(43:40):
same deal. So when in nineteen sixty four, when we
really start upping our commitment in Vietnam, he is running
things and he pushes a plan to bomb northern Vietnam
into submission. The plan is described, and I believe this
was his name for it, as the genteel du Pey Plan. Right.
I mentioned that like the polite version of the dou

(44:01):
Hay plan, Right, do Hay being the guy who's like,
you just kill all the civilians until they're not willing
to fight anymore. Now, there's a big battle between Kennedy's
civilian advisors who wanted the US to threaten North Vietnam's
industry but not actually blow it up immediately, So that
we blow up some of it and we make it
clear we can really cripple their industry so that we

(44:21):
have a negotiating hand to push for peace, right, And
I don't think we should have gotten involved in fucking
Vietnam whatsoever. I'm not saying that, like these guys were
good and ethical, but that is a much saner response
than Leamy's, because Limay just wants to send North Vietnam
back to the Stone Age, right right. Like these liberals
are like, well, we can bomb them, you know, kind
of strategically in order to exert a cost and make
them willing to come to the negotiation table. And the

(44:42):
May is like, what if we just fucking kill everybody.
I'm going to quote from the book Bombing to Win
by Robert Pape quote. Destroying the North's industrial economy appears
to have been valued more for its effect on civilian
morale than for reducing the flow of military goods into
the South. For instance, the rationale for closing the port
of Haiphong was not to interdict battlefield hardware, but to
weaken civilian morale, right, which keeps not working it. Yes,

(45:07):
you may recall none of this did. This led to
Operation Rolling Thunder, And Rolling Thunder is LeMay's baby. This
is like Operation Rolling Thunder is the genteel dou Hay
plan put into effect it is a three year bombing
campaign that resulted in what, Margaret, you want to.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Guess, no, effective destruction of the morale of the enemy.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
I mean stuff was just yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't work.
We don't win Vietnam. In case you were unaware of that. Interesting,
This does not stop their ability to equip and support
their troops. It does not break civilian morale. It does not.
It doesn't do the trick and thiss me.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
One of the main things I've learned over this epic
journey we've been on. If you had asked me, I
would have been like, well, it's probably a moral to
bomb all these enemy cities, but it probably is effective
at destroying morale. And what I have learned is that
it's not.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
No, no, Well, you gotta think if like, if somebody,
for example, goes and stabs the person you love most
in the world in the gut, are you gonna like
walk away because you're demoralized, or are you gonna fuck
that person up?

Speaker 4 (46:21):
Like?

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Are you gonna do everything in your power to destroy
that person? Right?

Speaker 4 (46:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (46:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
I think people think similarly when their family is incinerated
from the sky.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
But this the fact that this fails and the fact
that LeMay's plans kind of fail a lot brings me
to a key point about LeMay and all the dou
Hay acolytes who came to run our air power during
this time. These guys.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
Surrealist Manray is also one of these people.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah, these guys loved nukes because nukes were the only
weapon system that worked the way they thought all weapons
should work. So they always insisted on using nukes at
every corner, and when they were denied, they didn't know
how to fight a modern war well, because they only
have the one strategy and it only works if you

(47:09):
use nukes. So when the president says no, you can't
nuke them, then they're left leg Well, I guess we
try to use conventional bombs and it just doesn't do it.
But they don't. None of these people are actually capable
of adapting and looking their failure in the face because
they've based everything on this being how war works. And
because unless you're killing everyone, right, yes, yeah, because they're

(47:31):
twelve year old boys. Yeah, now, fuck, I'm ending this
story in the mid sixties, right, which there's a lot
more to talk about in terms of nukes and shit. Obviously,
after this point. But I'm ending here because kind of
by the point we're at in the story, right, Vietnam,
the tale of how our nuclear arsenal functions changes, but

(47:52):
not like in earth shattering ways. Right, everything gets kind
of better. Our early warning systems get better, are missile
get more destructive and reliable. Nuclear submarines are by this
point a part of the determent. We're not talking about
that all that much, but that's a major part of
the deterrent package, right, because a nuclear submarine absolutely cannot
be found, right, It's basically impossible. Like, if you have

(48:14):
nuclear submarines, you always have nukes out there that you
can throw back at whoever fucks with you, So it's
a guarantee that you'll be able to get some sort
of second strike. Nuclear submarines are fucking terrifying. They're the
scariest weapons human beings have ever made and probably ever
will make. Right, Like it is just death tubes. They're
fucking nightmares. I had a friend, Yeah, I have a

(48:34):
friend who went to Annapolis that's the Naval Academy, and
was a nuclear submarine pilot during the eighties. There's a
book called blind Man's Bluff that's about like all the
stuff that he used to do, and all of his
like stories are because what US and Soviet subs were
doing in this period of time was like d basically

(48:55):
one would try to like plain chicken, trying to force
the other to surface, right, so, you know, because it
was like that was kind of part of the game
that we were playing in the high seas, and so
he has all these stories of just like he and
a couple of his friends are standing and I guess
the bridge or whatever, doing a bunch of complicated math
in their heads, and if they fuck up the math,

(49:15):
everyone dies because they crash into something.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Like, It's like those kind of stories like sub nuclear
subs are fucking taro. But you know, once we get
nuclear subs, that's we have all three kind of arms
of our nuclear like posture. We have our ICBMs, we
have nuclear subs, we have our bombers. Right obviously we
also have like field artillery and you know, nukes and
stuff that the army can use. But nothing that happens

(49:40):
after this point seriously alters the fundamental calculus up until
something that's kind of more recent, and that fundamental calculus
is we and the Russians and other people China now
as well. Right, obviously, more people have nukes, but all
of the nuclear powers have a bunch of nukes ready
to fire at a moment's notice, and in both the
US and Russia, only the president gets to decide when

(50:02):
we use them, right, Right, That's the way it is
starting in the sixties, and that's the way it is today,
right Obviously, Like I'm not gonna talk a lot about
hypersonic missiles. That's kind of the biggest recent change that
might seriously alter a lot of calculus because it allows
a strike that potentially might not get spotted at all,
and so maybe there's no warning, which is why I

(50:24):
read a really fucked up war on the Rocks article.
There's basically arguing for like an automated AI like second
strike system because of the fact that, well maybe they
are able to if they blow up the president, no
one can launch the nukes back.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Right, So, no one's watched the movie war Games, That's
what I'm meaning.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
No one has ever watched the movie war Actually, the
actually wargames. Literally one of the generals they quote references
Wargames in order to say that we don't have a
machine that does that right now, like this is so
they were arguing that we need to do it.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
And this is part of one of the one of
the things that that that I have worry about, because
I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're
going to like give AI the ability to launch nukes
or do that. That's not my immediate worry. But they're
already integrating different machine learning tools into like the radar
systems in our early warning systems. That's the worry is

(51:18):
that people are being advised by these by machines that
like them, that like the minute Man, will have unanticipated
flaws that the arrogant pieces of shit who designed these
weapons refuse to consider because they cannot accept the fact
that maybe they didn't think of everything, and they will
fuck up and miss stuff and it could cause it

(51:40):
could cause the end of the world. Right, That's what
scares me more than like a death computer, right.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Which any hacker or wanna be hackers you would immediately
be like, oh, you can't build systems that don't have flaws.
That doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
No, No, That's why up until very recently this was
all being done onlike the big nineteen eighties floppy discs
and everything's fucking air gapped. Is like, you want this
shit simple and reliable as possible. Yeah. Anyway, well now
it's all bluetooth. So now's yeah exactly. Well, that's the
most reliable thing in electronics is bluetooth. Everyone who has

(52:17):
a headset knows that. So it's important everyone know that
our launch policy from nineteen sixty four to today remains
launch on warn. Now, the USSR, to be fair to them,
officially rejected a launch on warn policy. There are grave
doubts as to whether or not that was the real
policy or propaganda. Right, A lot of people say they
were definitely launch on warn too. I think that's probably right.

(52:39):
I think both the US and Russia more or less
would have fired if they felt like they had a
credible warning that the other was firing. Right, Well, I
don't think either of US.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Russia needs us to believe they're launch on warn, even
if they're saying something else. They have to say it
in a way where they're like, oh, don't worry, we
would totally not launch on warn, but scare people to
thinking they would.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Well, and now since Putin's taken and this is really interest.
In the last few years, Putin has made it very
clear that the Russian Federation is now launch on warn
as well, right, So they are just straight up saying
like everyone is now launch on warn, the US and Russia,
and that's all that really matters. China's got some nukes.
I don't know as much about their system, but they
don't have near like both. The all it takes is
the US and Russia, right, Yeah, Like, you know, it's

(53:23):
worth being concerned about North Korea obviously, because one missile
opens the possibility that all of the missiles start flying, right,
because of the kind of cascading decision trees people will make.
But the US and Russia are by far the most
heavily armed right now. I know there's a tendency among
folks on our side of the political aisle to say,
oh my god, isn't it terrifying that Donald Trump has

(53:46):
the fucking nuclear football?

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Right?

Speaker 2 (53:49):
And I'm gonna say something controversial here, which is, I
don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that
call than any other present, not because he would do
a good job at that, but because no one can.
Everyone is bad at this. Nobody is competent to make
that call, and it's a dangerous mistake to believe that, well, well,
Obama's would have been a good guy to have in

(54:11):
the seat or Biden wou No, they're all bad at this,
They would all have been terrible. No one will do
a good job if they are put in that situation.
In her chilling book Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson makes one
very important point. Several times. She quotes John Wolfstal, the
former national security advisor to President Obama, who said, no one,
not even the president, has complete knowledge of what is

(54:32):
going on in a crisis or in a conflict, let
alone a nuclear war. Former Secretary of Defense for Reagan,
William Perry added, many presidents come into the office uninformed
about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not
to want to know. This is a point made several
times that presidents generally don't know much about this, even

(54:52):
though this football is with them at all times. They
don't like to think about it, they don't like to
ask too many questions about it. They don't like to
dwell on it. A bunch of people who were in
a position to know have said similar things that like
President's not super well informed, generally on how all this
works because it's scary. They don't like to think about it.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
I don't like to think about it like this knells
firmly into the lake. Dude, things that you can't control,
you don't worry. Absolutely. If I was the president, I would.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Think about this a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd be
sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
That's why we're that's why you're running in what twenty
thirty two?

Speaker 2 (55:34):
That's right, that's right on a takeout Lake Superior.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Yeah, more like inferior.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
That's right, that's right. We're going to get revenge for
those brave men on the Edmund Fitzgerald know. Anyway, Jacobson
continues talking about how unready presidents are to make these
kind of calls. Once, at a press conference in nineteen
eighty two, President Reagan went so far as to incorrectly
tell the public that submarine ballistic missiles are recalling. That's

(56:00):
why that myth exists. After the Berlin Wall came down
and the Soviet Union was dissolved, William Perry found in
his experience as Secretary of Defense that many people clung
to the idea that nuclear war was no longer a threat,
when in fact he now says nothing could be further
from the truth. In a nuclear war, confusion over protocol
and speed of action will have unintended consequences beyond anyone's grasp.

(56:22):
It will send the United States of America into the
heart of darkness that defense official John Rubel warned about
in nineteen sixty, into what he called a twilight underworld
governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless group think aimed
at wiping out half the people living on nearly one
third of the Earth's surface.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
The fundamental issue here in terms of his Trump any
worse than anyone else on this specific issue. Theoretically, the
president is only going to be asked to make a
call on whether or not to launch our missiles if
one or more are known to have been launched towards
the US or an ally. Because of the way all
of these weapons systems work, this means that the hypothetical
president in this scenario is going about his day doing

(57:05):
something else and is grabbed and taken bodily like the
Secret Service. Like response teams job is to literally physically
haul him like carry him into the bunker and then
into like a chopper to get to a more secure locations.
The White House bunker isn't really all that safe, but
he will be grabbed in the middle of his day,
taken into a situation room, and told that the entirety

(57:28):
of Washington, DC is about to die in flames, including
nearly every member of his administration in the most likely scenarios.
He will then be told that he has between three
and six minutes to decide to launch a world killing
salvo of in most situations, hundreds to one thousand nuclear warheads.
The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisors,

(57:48):
who his entire job is to think about how important
it is that we strike back before being decapitated, will
shout for him to launch everything that we've got. No
one is qualified for that job. Yeah, the only president
we've ever had who could be argued to have stood
up to this kind of pressure was JFK. Right, and

(58:08):
JFK was a combat veteran, had been in some scary
situations before, and thank fucking god he was the guy
on the ground at that point in time, because it
could have been a lot worse than it was. The
Cuban missile crisis of a bunch of others. Shit, I
don't have any real faith that Obama or Biden would
have performed much better than Trump in this nightmare scenario.
As John Ruble wrote in two thousand and eight, we

(58:30):
know that this mentality, given half a chance, will surface
in military and government councils. We know from recent history
that a compliant bureaucracy, military and civilian will murder six
million people in cold blood, or plan by design, build
and deploy the means to murder half of the people
on earth, probably including themselves. How come is all this
built into the human genome? A melancholy procession from stones

(58:52):
to atoms, a predestined progress toward the end times, the
inevitable rise of maligned leaders over compliant masses. Anyway, thanks
for listening to my podcasts.

Speaker 4 (59:02):
Yeah, wow what a wait end?

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Yeah? Like, what did you do today?

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (59:08):
I get My job is that I have to make
jokes during the as I get described the mechanism by
which the world will end.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Yeah, cool stuff, legit, I don't know. Probably should be
something people are like asking presidents to change. We could
change this. It doesn't have to be this way. It
doesn't have to be this dangerous, Like, there are other
ways this could all be designed to where we're not
permanently fifteen minutes or less away from annihilation, you know,

(59:38):
and if we step back, probably the Russians do at
least a little bit. You know. I don't have a
lot of faith in Buden, but I don't think he
wants to die in nuclear.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
Hell fire either, and most people don't.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
I think most people don't. Uh. Anyway, maybe this should
be like a voting issue that people talk about, right,
Like it's you know, climate change obviously very important, and
people it needs to be much more of an issue.
But this is up there, This is an equivalent problem,
right because this is potentially a much more thorough destruction

(01:00:11):
of the biosphere that climate.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
Change will bring even quicker.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
We should probably care about this a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
Yeah, anyway, what a good system we all have. Yeah,
it's pretty nuts. I actually recommend all the books that
I read for this, Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War A Scenario. Again,
I don't entirely agree with kind of some of her

(01:00:40):
panic about North Korea, but it's a pretty good book
on the whole about the way the system works today.
The book Fifteen Minutes is a really good look at
like basically how we got to the point where we're
fifteen minutes away from annihilation at all times. And then
Command and Control, among other things, talks about a bunch
of the different like fuck ups and errors that have
happened along the way. They're all good books.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
I h the movie house a dynamite that just came
out recently. It's the one that the way specifically the
drama is just around. It's around the nuclear football, it's
around the chain of command. This relates to it and
the current one. And it's what started me, like a
couple weeks before this started thinking about being like, oh,
this isn't as like I sort of thought. I was like, oh,

(01:01:25):
we probably have like decent intercept systems if it's just
like one missile, right, you know, you're like, uh.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
If it's just one maybe, But again, we don't have
decent intercept systems. None of these work nearly as well
as they're supposed to, and there are some similar problems
with at least some of the different early warning systems.
It's been this is really a problem for the Russians
because the Russians like one of the problems with the
Russian system is that it's not smart enough to know
because each of the missiles that we would be firing

(01:01:52):
launches a bunch of chafe, right, So you have the
actual warheads and ICBMs now often have multiple warheads, right
that it's called an mirv I think, and basically what
you can do, and this is particularly a case with
like a lot of the sub mounted missiles too, is
you launch one missile, but then it splits into like
multiple warheads, each of which is targeted at a different area. Right,

(01:02:14):
But also all of these missiles have what's called chaff,
which is basically like like little strips of aluminum that
come out with like the warhead in order to confuse
like its system right right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly,
so that like it can protect the missile basically, but

(01:02:35):
one of the main Russian systems can't tell the difference
between that chaff and a shitload of additional missiles. So,
like say there was a situation where North Korea launched
an ICBM at somebody, and we launch a decapitation strike
at North Korea or a strike at their nuclear facilities.
That's a limited strike. We're just firing a couple of missiles.
It might look because of where North Korea is, Russia

(01:02:56):
and China might both think, oh shit, the Americans are
launching hundreds of missiles and they could be coming for us.
We don't know where they're targeted. And if the President
hasn't gotten through to both of those leaders to inform them,
and if or if they don't trust the president, right,
who knows what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
I hate to say that HG. Wells is right because
I don't actually believe in one world government, kind of
famously with my political position, but this idea that like,
the only way out of this, besides everyone de escalating,
is better diplomacy and everyone talking to each other, and like, yeah,
I'm moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your

(01:03:33):
borders zealously, and moving well, I think the solution of
most problems is to get rid of national borders. But
I'm you know whatever, Yeah, I'm I'm so glad I'm
not in charge of trying to figure out how to
solve this. That's the main takeaway that I have.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
Yeah, there's a couple of things we could do. Jacobsen
talks about this, like one of the things that we
don't do, but ought to because it's so hard to
basically impossible almost to stop an ICBM reliably once it
gets above a certain level, like once it gets and
in terms of like there's no real way to like

(01:04:08):
protect against the mass of ICBMs that Russia could launch,
but North Korea doesn't have all that many. And if
we were to keep like a bunch of predator drones
in the area, we could theoretically have a quick reaction
for US that could intercept an ICBM before it could
get to the point of no return where you have
no ability to shoot it down. But we just decided
not to do that. Like that got theorized and it

(01:04:28):
was like, I think it was too expensive. It's the
same thing with like, well, we could have fad batteries
to protect certain things that might be like that nuclear
plant that might be a target, but we're not. We're
just going to keep them, you know, protecting Israel. We're
not going to have them, you know, in the US
or whatever. For the most part, I mean obvious we
have a lot of those in Ukraine, and there's good
reason for that, but we don't devote It's both a

(01:04:50):
mix of none of it really works all that well.
None of our missile interception stuff is perfect. The fad
is about as good as it gets, but it it's
not good for everything. Like it could be useful against
like some of those sub based missiles, but I don't
think like it can take out ICBMs, certainly not or
certainly not a hypersonic. I don't think anything can take

(01:05:10):
out a hypersonic if it actually works the way they're
supposed to. There's just not really reliable ways to stop
a massive nuclear attack. If you get shot at by
one missile, you might be able to do something right.
That's kind of where we are.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
Well away.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
Yeah, I love talking about it though I love me
some nukes.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
The ideas of all the things that I want to
write fiction about is related to it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Folks, get out there to go
to the Wassaw Sound, you know, look around, hike around,
get your metal detectors out. There's a couple of nukes
just waiting for a new home.

Speaker 3 (01:05:47):
Out you know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Nuclear power.

Speaker 3 (01:05:52):
Uh yeah, take care of each other and tell your
friends you love them, but not in a way where
you don't get completely lost thinking about this stuff all
the time. And also podcasts cool people who did cool stuff,
which is the opposite of this, but.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
You know, yeah, yeah, sweet, all right, everybody go away.

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:06:36):
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