December 10, 2025 • 48 mins
ICBMs made it possible to end the world in 15 minutes or less. Robert tells Margaret about the nightmarishly incompetent first draft of the Minuteman, a nuclear weapons system almost perfectly designed to end the world on accident.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about how everyone might die in nuclear hell fire. This
is part four of our series on the bastards who
built the doomsday device that we all currently live under,
the looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads,
the several thousand nuclear weapons ready at a moment's notice
(00:22):
to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or
cared about. Back with me to really get into some shit,
because I did not expect it to take this long
to get to the mid fifties. But there's a lot
to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I'm good. I've come up with a strategy and the
strategies I've decided. I believe you are telling me Warhammer
forty k lore that.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Would make this a lot more comforting.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Huh. Yeah, this is just something that some space orcs
have decided to do.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
There are orcs in space and Warhammer that's a very
important part of the setting. So I'm going to start
this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last
couple of years that we've talked about in part three,
right as you know, the kind of fallout from the
(01:12):
Korean War is going on, and the US and the
Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands.
Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the
idea of being able to land a first strike that
would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back.
In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss
a US nuclear response in defensive terms, but in nineteen
(01:35):
fifty four, the Eisenhower Dulles Declaration announced that the US
would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons
quote at places and with means of our own choosing.
The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's
promise to the Soviet Union. Right, basically, if you provoke us,
if you fuck with us, we'll kill everybody. Right, that's
(01:58):
kind of the idea. You know, that's not exact, but
it's we will retaliate massively. And that that that isn't
that means nuclear, right.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Trying to have a fist fight with someone who has
like a suicide vest on and you're.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Just in a room, which, by the way, is the
best way to get into a fist fight, which is
why if you want to buy one of our patented
suicide vests today, you know, never get beat up again. Yeah,
or get beat up exactly one more time. It's probably
a more accurate way to look at the way the
suicide vest works.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Well, we've actually we've workshopped it. They're called lifefests, now.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Called life vest. Now we're currently suing the boat people
over their life vest. But I think this is going
to work out well for us.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing
our product.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, we wore our product and we can't. We brought
a life rate.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
To by stopping.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh man. So this whole idea of the Eisenower Dolus declaration,
it's not a promise that we actually keep, right Eisenhower,
I think there's a degree to which I mean elements
of this are things that the US will do at
other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally
a guy who he has some respect for human life. Right.
(03:04):
So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's
Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency
to exploding into nuclear hostilities. Like we're seriously considering using
nukes to like basically like clear Taiwan's flanks, right, because
they're in a rough strategic situation for US to respond
to with anything else. But Eisenower proves less willing to
(03:26):
massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation,
and the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons,
thank fucking God. Right, Yeah, So it is this situation
where Eisenhower is he wants to, he wants that threat
to be out there, but he really does not, and
none of our presidents really do. After Truman, they don't
want a nuke. People, they're really anti nuke because they're
(03:50):
not insane as a general rule, like Nixon kind of is,
but even he's not that crazy for the most part, Right,
for the most part. The evolving nature of nuclear warfare
it meant that units across the globe are now by
the mid to late fifties armed with nukes meant for
defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as
a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons could be
(04:10):
launched to air burst and destroy entire fleets of Soviet
bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now by the
mid nineteen fifties, every American was well aware of the
horrors of nuclear war, and one of the few comforting
thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only
the president could order a nuclear attack. That was a lie.
Turns out that was not true. In the book Fifteen Minutes, L.
Douglas Keeney reveals, and I think this is the thing
(04:32):
that was came to light while he was writing his
book as a result of like information requests and stuff
that he was filing. But in nineteen fifty seven, this
was not known until very recently. In nineteen fifty seven,
President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for
field commanders to use nuclear weapons in specific defensive situations
without any outside approval. A small number of authorizing commanders
(04:56):
in chief even had the ability to launch and command
a retalian nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a
direct attack on the United States. Right, it was never
really true during this period of time, like, at least
not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only
the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing,
there's no governor on these so theoretically anybody who had
(05:17):
one could have made the decision, but also Eisenhower gives
field commanders the ability and this is mainly meant for
with the exception of those guys who had that small
number of guys who could do a retaliatory strike. Most
of these are guys who if they see a fleet
of bombers incoming, they can fire anti aircraft nuclear artillery, right, Like,
it's that sort of thing. So it's not as crazy
(05:37):
as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right this.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Like this does have Would that have brought on like
if we had been like, oh, fuck these bombers and
nuked them in the sky, would that have like brought
on USSR's retaliation.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I mean, at that point, they were already sending a
bomber fleet over right, So I mean they probably would
have continued to fight.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs,
we still might have had a nuclear war that didn't
kill everybody, right, because you could have theoretically had one
that was devastating enough that the major powers are not
able to keep fighting. But everything doesn't get expended because
we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, Right,
That's not really an option right now. What makes this dangerous, though,
(06:20):
is that by the late nineteen fifties, there are nuclear
weapons US nuclear weapons fucking everywhere all over the world
at all times. Curtis LeMay had insisted from the beginning
because he's really obsessed with the SAC's readiness, right, and
so he from the jump is like, our bomber crews
have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional
(06:40):
nuclear weapons on board. It's not a real test if
they don't have an actual nuke on the plane, right.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Okay, I don't understand why, but.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Sure, well, because he's the craziest man who ever lived.
Our second text to MacArthur, maybe.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, you can only dry fire with bullets in.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
The right, right, it's fucking insane. And what this means
practically is that from this point on, thousands of nuclear
weapons are flying across the US and the world. Every year.
There are always nukes flying around at all times, tons
of them. It's so scary, it's fucking insane.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
That's okay, soviy, this is warhammer, yeah, warhammer lore.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
In the early nineteen fifties, LeMay had developed the beginning
of a strategy to keep what he called an air
fleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in
the air, with nukes ready to divert their course to
attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice.
The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men doing it.
If the Soviets knew that they could get away with
a first strike on the US, they might try. The
(07:38):
best way to make sure they never did was by
always having bombers in the air and ready to fight
at all times, which meant at all times dozens to
hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in
the world, and this meant there would always be nukes
going missing. Right, h If you are flying thousands of
flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage
(07:59):
of those bombers are going to crash or are going
to need to drop their nukes in order to deal
with some sort of like engine trouble that is going
to happen. And it does, in fact happen, right, I'm
gonna guess people are aware that this has happened once
or twice, generally like a couple there was one off
like the coast of Spain. The reality is it happened constantly.
(08:20):
This happens so much more often than you would have
gett It's fucking shocking how many nukes we just straight
up lose. LeMay and his successor at the SAC General
Power considered it a necessity that the US always have
armed nuclear bombers in the air, and a consequence of
that is, of course, all these things getting lost. I'm
gonna provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an
(08:41):
ESSAC training mission to switch crews on ground alert every
twenty one days. This is kind of the start of
what allowed. Like, we always have a fleet of bombers
that are like six to fifteen minutes away from being
in the air. They have a nuke on them, they're
loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac. They have
a crew and a bunker nearby that can run onto
the plane and take off at a moment's notice. Right,
And we also have I think it's like ten or
(09:03):
eleven percent of those planes are flying with a bomb
in them at any given time. Right, That's what operates.
It starts as a testing plan to see if this
is feasible, and in July of nineteen fifty seven, we
make this like the SAC standard Plan each B forty
seven bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home
carried a six thousand pound four megaton Mk thirty nine
(09:24):
hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear depth machines. That same month,
a B forty seven in Texas crashed, killing the four
man crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of
the emergency war plan load, but as Kini notes in
the book fifteen minutes, as of this writing, No nineteen
fifty seven bomber crash in Texas is included in any
official document disclosing accents evolving nuclear weapons. And there are
(09:48):
several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed,
and based on how it was coded, we know it
should have had a nuke on it, but they never
reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So
this new presumably just blew up in Texas and they
kind of they covered it up.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
You know, how often are they just being like, oh, whoops,
it fell off the back of the truck. All off
the back of the truck.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
No, not off a truck. They're falling out a plane.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Oh so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like
are they ever like.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Not that we know not that we know that there's
not evidence of that. What's actually happening is much dumber
than if they like someone stealing a nuke, and scarier,
to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know,
where a bomber that we know should have been loaded
with a nuke crashed and no report was ever made
of a nuke getting lost. But cover ups weren't always possible.
(10:37):
The same month that General Power takes over sac command
from LeMay, who goes on himself become the vice chief
of Staff and then Chief of Staff or the Air Force,
a C four cargo plane bound for an air base
in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between
Rehoboth Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected
two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to
(11:00):
lighten the load. These fall in the ocean, and the
Navy searches for the bombs and doesn't find any of
them ever, even though the ocean is just one hundred
and fifty feet deep at some parts of the potential
drop zone. So at like New Treasure questus, yes this
is dropped. There are folks listeners. If you live in
the Jersey area. You could be the owner of an
(11:21):
Mk five atom bomb if you just spend some time
swimming around in the ocean.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And once you've got a nuke for one thing, you're
not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother.
Can you got a lot of You got a lot
of leverage if you get your if you become a
nuclear armed state in and of yourself, it always goes well. Yeah,
so again, both three thousand pound Mk five bombs are missing.
(11:46):
To this day, these are never found. The number of
times this happens is fucking shocking. Nineteen fifty seven is
a key year for our story because it is the
year that we start being fifteen to thirty minutes away
from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August twenty six,
the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile,
the SS six Sapwood, could travel six thousand miles carrying
(12:10):
a warhead. Soviet premiere Nikita Krushchev bragged could make Europe
or the United States quote a veritable cemetery. A couple
of months later, in October, Spudnik entered orbit. If you're
wondering why that freaked out Americans so much. This is
one of those things I actually I have a little
more under empathy for, like why so many people because Oh,
because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah,
(12:30):
that's a little scary, Okay, So they invented the ICBM,
they get they have a functional ICBM before we do.
They have a successful test before we do, not long before,
because between those two events. In September of nineteen fifty seven,
the u SO, after the Soviets launched their ICBM before Spudnik,
the US Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully.
(12:53):
Now it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the
idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on
this thing, probably, So it doesn't really if you're off
by a couple by a mile or two even, Yeah,
but you'll do some damage. Probably. In November of that year,
General Power revealed to the public for the first time
that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground
alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. Eleven percent
(13:15):
of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway,
loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in
less than fifteen minutes, and a certain number of bombers
were kept up in the air at all times when
they admitted they are bombed up and they don't carry
bows and arrows.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Bombed up, bombed up.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Maybe, Yeah, it sounds like he's because like he's kind
of horny for these things. Yeah, in this period after
the ice So the ICBMs exist now, but they're not
a viable weapons system yet. Right, We've had we have
our proof of concept, but we don't We don't immediately
go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right.
It takes a little bit of time. You know, that's
just science. Right, So during this kind of awkward inner
(13:54):
still period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war
are extremely low. For one reason. The only way to
deliver an atom bomb is by air, right, I mean,
you could drive it somewhere, set it off on the ground,
but really, like realistically you're going to be using like
a bomber or a tailler's you can't launch it across
continents yet, right, unless you're flying it. That means that
you could theoretically, if you send out a bomber fleet
(14:17):
to start a nuclear war, you could because you're in
contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber
fleet right up to the last moment. You can't do
that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you
can do it with like the sub mounted nukes, we cannot.
It is not possible once they're launched there heading for
their targets, right, that's how these things work. But you
can recall bombers if you can reach them up until
(14:39):
the last minute, right now, if you can reach them
is a key part of this, because that presents a
conundrum to the SAC. This is the fucking late fifties.
Coms aren't as good as they're going to be. That
we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us
to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts
of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us
to gamble the survival of the human race on right.
(15:02):
And the SAC has another problem, which is that nobody
outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet
with the idea of nukes being sent off without a
way to recall them. And while radio code, you know,
it's just not there's not a great, perfect way to
guarantee you can reach these bombers. And that's really important.
And this brings us to one of the most interesting
(15:23):
innovations in nuclear war and it's honestly the simplest. This
doesn't require any technology whatsoever, and it's maybe it may
have saved the world. Right, we may all exist because
of this. It's called Project fail Safe now rather than
relying on technology which could fail. The way failsafe worked
is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to
(15:46):
return without dropping their payloads, no matter what they were
ordered to do, unless they were transmitted to GO code. Right.
The innovation of fail safe isn't that a got This
is important. The go code does not trigger the bombing, right. Instead,
the default is in all instances, return home without bombing
(16:07):
unless you're given the code. And that's a meaningful distinction, right.
That means there's no room for a bomber public. Well,
they didn't give us the go code, but right over
the target, should we do it? No, you fly home
unless you get the code, right, yeah, And that's tech proof.
It doesn't matter if your coms are out right, and
that means the default assumption is we should err on
the side of not dropping the bombs.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Right. No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it
makes sense that that was like literally a technological development.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah, it was an It was a development by a
single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolstetter. He
visualized failsafe, and again you could argue this guy might
have saved all of humanity.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Was doing so.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Good idea. Thank you, Albert.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
The opposite of a dead man's switch, you know, yeah, yeah,
it's a it's a I guess, a live man switch.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I don't know. Speaking of a dead man switched, I
have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you
spend money on the products and services advertise on the show.
Oh boy, we're back. So we've just hit the point
(17:17):
where failsafe has been implemented and.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Which were fit on your knuckles. I'm just going to
point out.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Right, Oh actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah yeah,
I've been meaning to get a knuckle tattoo. So yeah,
we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World
War three because the radio goes out right, which is
a good thing to do. Now, in February of nineteen
fifty eight, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error,
a bomber and a fighter wing in Florida. We're doing
a training mission which for some reason required a trio
(17:45):
of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B
forty seven bombers armed with actual one point six megaton
Mk fifteen nuclear bombs. One of these fighters fucked up
and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines.
The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing,
but the nearest airfield was under construction, and to make
a long story short, the pilot was worried that when
landing they would crash into something that would send the
(18:06):
nuke in their bombay launching forward like a bullet into
the crew cabin. In order to protect the crew, the
pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasauce Sound,
east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs.
It's a little unclear to me. These are never found.
This bomb is never found. It is theoretically still some
east east of Savannah to this day.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Oh my god, I'm gonna write terrible fiction about a
crew of people who go and find these things.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Go new Cutting, Let's go find up. Let's get us
a nuke yeah, yeah, we could be the we could
be at finally a nuclear armed podcast. This is this
is what podcasting has been missing. So it's obviously big
news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own Georgia,
not even the one overseas, and the good people of
that state expected the Air Force to recover the nuke.
(18:53):
A study of the Air Force press releases around this
matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of
a portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no
one knew quote whether the nuclear device landed in the
sea or on land. Great, there's a chance some hillbilly
has just been passing this nuke down to his kids
for the last like, that's.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
What I want. Now they'll be like, you take some
pride in our family. We are incular power. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Now, don't don't touch it too much. I don't really
know how it works.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Now, when they dropped these this bomb or bombs, both
pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were
when they dropped it. But they both write down different
sets of coordinates, which is a real watermark for the
competency of our brave boys in the sac. After several
days of searching with no luck. The Air Force issued
another press release elaborating that the bomb had been carried
(19:46):
in transportable condition. This means nothing. The Air Force defined
that when asked what transportable condition means as a form
carried for safety reasons, which again means nothing. If you're
wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying,
here's another excerpt from fifteen minutes. Those in Savannah made
little sense of this warding, but they took it to
(20:07):
mean that the weapon was perhaps disassembled or in crates,
or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all.
The second press release, however, vague, nonetheless seems to have
had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the
Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers, had arrived.
The Bowers brought with it fourteen more divers and men
from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Cedar Keys, Florida.
The Air Force explained the stepped up activity by saying
(20:29):
that the ejective component was a very expensive piece of equipment.
So the Air Force is like, ah, it's not even
a real bomb. We are sending the bomb squad in
though there the bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for
this thing. Trust, this not a functional bomb. Definitely, we
do fly exclusively with functional bombs permissions like this, but
this one isn't. Right, You're good, Yeah, no, right, yeah,
I mean and they did sometimes they would have like
(20:50):
the physile material outside of the bomb so that when
they dropped it, they're just but that didn't happen in
a lot of cases, and we don't know that it
happened in this case.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
What is their argument for, Like, clearly a dummy that
is exactly the same size, no weight, is the only
thing that makes sense. I can't understand the argument.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Lemayan powers want them to be training with real nukes,
and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly
to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice.
That is very important to them.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
I'm going to invite him to a paintball game with
AR fifteen, right, what.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy, But this is like,
there's this is super important to both LeMay and Power. Right,
we're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at
the SAC So by this point it should be clear
to you we don't know and never will know how
many nuclear bombs are government lost on US soil. But
(21:46):
there's a couple at least just start of lying around.
So again, folks, get your metal detectors out. Yeah, yeah,
have some fun with it. What could go wrong?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's what we call our scavenger.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
What could go wrong? No, you asked earlier about stealing
nuclear weapons, and I don't. I've seen no evidence that
that happened. But it could have very easily. It was
for a long time startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon.
The only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it
was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever
(22:20):
crazy enough to try. In her book Nuclear War, Annie
Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos
scientist named Harold Agnew paid to NATO base in Europe
in December of nineteen fifty nine. This was one of
the bases where US nukes were in NATO hands, as
they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, during the
trip to the NATO Bass, Agnew noticed something that made
(22:41):
him wary. I observed four f eighty four f aircraft
sitting on the end of a runway. Each was carrying
two Mark seven nuclear gravity bombs. He wrote in a
document declassified in twenty twenty three. What this meant was
that custody of the Mark sevens was under the watchful
eye of one very young US Army private armed with
an M one rifle with eight rounds of ammunition. Agnew
told his colleagues the only safeguard against unauthorized use of
(23:04):
a nuclear bomb was this single gi surrounded by a
large number of foreign troops on foreign territory, with thousands
of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea,
Like I feel like I've got a decent chance of
stealing a nuke from that guy, right, I one eighteen
year old with a rifle like like those odds, And
this is all part of the whole. All that matters
(23:26):
is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right Because
one of the things that guys like LeMay and Power
are doing that the ESAC is doing is like, we
don't need to be putting money in the infantry. We
don't need to have like dudes on the ground doing
stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste
of resources. More nukes, more planes, less guards.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
This is like how they're treating AI like. It's just like, yes,
we don't need anything else, Yes we just need this.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
No guardrails, no governors, make it illegal to put any
safety measures in Fuck it now. After returning home, this
is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes
a while, but this is what starts that process because
once he gets home, having this startling moment, Agnew pairs
up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories and they try
to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into
nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a
(24:12):
bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a
lock and coded switch, which required a three digit code
to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take
several years until the Kennedy administration for the President to
actually order these locks placed on bombs. Right, But that's
where this leads, right, that's why we get the nuclear
football in the system we have now where you have
to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
That starts with Agnew realizing like, oh, fuck, someone can
just take these There's like a kid standing in a
field with a rifle and there's four nukes. Shit, eight
fucking bullets. At least give him another couple of clips.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Jesus Christ, totally send a unit of people you hate first,
and then.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Jesus, yes, send more guys. Fuck it, there had to
be more eighteen year olds. My god, I'm getting ahead
of myself here. Because we don't immediately put the it
takes some time to figure out how to build these locks. Right,
There are two key inventions from the late nineteen fifties
that help set the doomsday device into motion. The first
is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes,
(25:18):
and it's the distributed system of radar stations in the
middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first
provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously,
the Soviets are building their own versions of this too, right,
but the early warning systems right, These aren't a major
topic of these episodes, because just wanting to know if
someone's about to murder you isn't really fucked up in
the same way as, for example, building twelve thousand nuclear weapons.
(25:42):
But all of these early warning systems are flawed and
capable of generating false positives, and in fact, we have
both us and the USSR have several near nuclear catastrophes
because we get false positives, like one of these radar
installations thinks it sees missiles coming in or thinks it
sees bombers coming in, and its problems.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Right, and it's like geese or some shit, right right, right.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
All these early warning systems are flawed, you know that,
And that's still the case to this day, right, And
so it's both understandable that you'd want to have these,
but also the fact that these are flawed, and the
fact that our strategy increasingly becomes launch on warn moves
us a lot closer to midnight right. So, by far,
the most influential move from an approaching the apocalypse point
(26:26):
of view was the deployment of ICBMs. These made it
possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could
not be recalled. There was and is no fail safe
for ICBMs. The idea that we can cancel them is
just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM,
they are almost impossible to stop. You can only really
(26:47):
stop them by shooting them down, and we're terrible at it.
Right there, we have this thing, the bullet basically that
we use to shoot them down and it works about
half the time in tests, and we have like forty
four of them.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, i'd want more magazines than like, i'd probably want
to bullets is enough if it's that's not a lot
you have to stop the end of the world. Here's
a magazine and a half of bullets.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
The enemy it has three thousand missiles or something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, so good luck private.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Now our first ICBM is kind of a piece of shit.
The only good thing about the Atlas C, which is
declared operational in September of nineteen fifty nine, is that
it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time.
It has to be fueled right before launch, something to
do with the kind of fuel that they're using right,
which means that you can't have these things ready to
go in a matter of minutes, you know, like you
need more lead time to do that. Atlases are stored
(27:43):
above ground. Also, we're starting to build hardened silos, that
is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. US
war planners were worried that the USSR would be able
to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just
parked out like on bases and stuff, and they are
the Soviets are a They have you know, survey lens
and stuff. They are able to see them. But this
also causes another near calamity because the Soviets don't assume
(28:06):
that we just have these things parked in the open
because we're not finished building silos. They assume we had
them in the open because we plan to use them
as a first strike weapon, right right, So this is
another thing that like ramps up the paranoia between everybody
because the Atlas was such a shit weapon system and
it is a bad ICBM. By the nineteen fifty nine,
the US was already hard at work at its replacement,
(28:28):
the Minuteman. This was a missile with a stable fuel
mixture that could be stored for long periods of time
and launch ready conditions, so you can have a minute
man ready to fire. And in fact, it's called a
minute man because you can literally from the moment you
get the order, you can have it in the air
in a minute or less. Right again, they're just starting
to explore this technology. This is very new and they
(28:49):
don't have the kinks out right, which is a problem
because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these
things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect
of they have to figure out. None of this is
immediately obvious, right, how this is going to work, how
nuclear silos are going to work, how our warning system
will work, how these things will be triggered to fire
under what conditions? Right, It is important to remember there's
(29:10):
no locks on these missiles yet, right, So every minute
man is stored launch ready and every minute on silo
no locks at all. Right, Well, there's a lock in
that in order to fire it. So you have you
have like these two man teams and like a command bunker,
and each of these two man teams can launch ten missiles, right,
(29:32):
that are each held in separate silos that are like
a decent distance from each other. So you can't stop
them all if you nuke them, right, if you nuke
the silos, that's one of the reasons. So each two
man team, if they if both men turn a key
at the same time, it will fire the missile. Right,
And then as we'll talk about the it will start
a process of firing all of the other missiles. So
(29:53):
that means two guys have the ability if they both
decide to turn a key to fire ten nuclear missiles
across the world into Russia.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Right, yeah, or one guy who like, are they in
the same place? Or the keys next week show the
like in movies because in which guys it's like that's
or one guy beats up his front.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
That's a great that's a great point you brought up,
because the Air Force did consider this, right that this
is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this.
What if a crazy person winds up in a silo,
would he just be able to start World War three
on his own? And the answer is no, because the
Air Force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that
kind of behavior.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Margaret.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Both guys in the silo have guns and they're separated
from bulletproof glass, so they're just ready to go and say, yeah,
this way, one guy can't threaten to shoot the other
guy if he doesn't launch a missng right, Like, that's
literally the plan is like we'll give both guns and
put them behind bulletprook glass. It's fine.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Also, it's like people can hot wire cars, right, this
is an electrical system on some level.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Oh, it's so much worse than that, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Okay, I feel like you could probably figure out a
way to give the positives signal over this electrical wire.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
It's good that you bring that up. That's what we're
going to be talking about a lot of the rest
of this episode, because this is so much worse than
you're guessing. So another issue with the Minuteman program is
that because of some errors and how they construct this thing,
they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsdate device.
This is not known by Air Force planners when they
(31:24):
start putting this stuff out and constructing these silos and
putting out the plans of how they're going to use it,
because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing.
We only know about the immediate, the initial problems with
the Minuteman system because of a confessional that was written
in two thousand and eight by one of the architects
of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel, and Rubel
is he's both a hero and a victim in this story.
(31:46):
He's one of these guys who may have saved all
of our lives because of the story about to tell,
but he also is an integral part of building this system.
Born in nineteen twenty to a wealthy Jewish German family
in Chicago. Rubelle moved to Los Angeles as a kid
after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech.
In nineteen forty two, his older brother died in action
fighting the Nazis, and Rebel was inspired to do his
(32:08):
bit for the war by moving to Schenectady with his
wife and becoming a junior engineer at GOE. After the war,
he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin.
By nineteen fifty six, Rubel was a successful executives at
Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company right.
He was featured in an ad by his employer which
described him as America's new kind of man. This meant
(32:31):
he was an expert and a successful professional in a
field that had not existed just a couple years earlier,
defense electronics. And from that ad at Hughes, we have
twenty seven hundred of these men in our research and
development laboratories, men like John H. Rubell, brought together from
all over the country to solve urgent new problems of
national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that
rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time,
(32:53):
and the work they have done is so basic, it
is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics.
And Soviey's going to show you the ad just because
I want everyone watching the video to see what a
thirty six year old man looked like in the mid
nineteen fifties. Look at those crows feet. That's what you
get when you're just consuming led every day, just puffing
(33:14):
it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff. Wow. Yeah.
So anyway, three years after this photo was taken, in
early nineteen fifty nine, Rubel left Hughes Aircraft to become
the Assistant Director of Research and Engineering for Strategic Weapons
over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over
the next four years, becoming the sole Deputy and Assistant
(33:34):
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in nineteen sixty one.
He is a very highly placed civilian within our military
research and defense infrastructure. Right This rapid advance was because
he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was
at all concerned about whether or not we might be
about to kill the whole planet accidentally. In nineteen fifty nine,
he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force,
(33:57):
because the Air Force, as they're getting ready to deploy
the Minute Man, they have this missile designed, and they
have these silos under construction, but they're not operational yet.
And so the Air Force is sitting down with high
ranking civilian DoD employees and explaining all their different nuclear
retaliation systems, including Minuteman. According to Rubel, he has conversations
with a number of military officers and he comes to
(34:20):
realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack,
right and if an adversary again. The logic the military
has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive
launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it.
So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is
to have quote first strike capability and the way to
use it aka launch on warning quote from Rubel's piece. Consider, however,
(34:46):
launch on warning almost necessitates an automated response. The electronic
warning signal itself in the scenario would trigger our first
strike missiles, many of them ready to go in a
minute or so. The will to use the strategy would
require no high level decision making or intervaent. Now, fuck,
this is extremely dangerous. And this is the thing that
leads to the minute Man. Right, And when Rubel talks
(35:08):
about the minute Man, he's referring to both a single
missile and quote to the aggregate of more than a
thousand of them, comprising a system of missiles and control
centers spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in
states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Right, that's what
the Minuteman system is. It's about a thousand of these
missiles split up into groups of like ten and fifty
and spread out all over these kind of plane states.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, minute Man was not yet an effect. Right, that
doesn't happen until sixty one. But two aspects of the program,
the wide dispersal of missile silos and the fact that
each silo is hardened to withstand anything but a direct
nuclear hit, came from suggestions made by RAND thinkers. Rubel
makes the important point that all these defense nerds and
all the high ranking Air Force officers behind these plans
are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we
(35:57):
would be able to fire our nukes if the government
was to he writes, quote equally important considerations such as
flexibility of command and control of these weapons, provisions to
prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the
malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result
in a missile launch or some comparably dreadful catastrophe were
treated little or not at all.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Right, I was expecting this sense to end very differently.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay this
system and make it safer, because anything that you do
to like make the Minuteman system less dangerous is reducing
its automation, right, which is increasing the odds that we
don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable, right,
(36:44):
partly because the game theory thing is that they need
to know that even if they kill a president and
whoever comes after that, yeah, they still lose too. As
a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people
are like, well, but like, are you not worried about
maybe something going wrong and the missiles all launching accidentally,
And they're like, well, that's not nearly as scary as
the missile's not launching, you know, that really is how
(37:07):
all these guys are thinking and you know who else
thinks that way?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Margaret, Well, is it the life Fest?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yes? Yes, the makers of the new Life Fest get
one today, you know, get two, get three, get one
for the whole family. You know, everyone should have one
of these vests. A society where everyone's wearing a suicide
vest at all times is a polite society.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Probably, That's what everyone says.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
We'll see what happens, you know, We'll see what happens
and we're back. Yeah, Margaret, how you take in this revelation?
Speaker 2 (37:46):
I you know, okay, so I can't remember we talked
about on mic or not, but we talked about the
dark forest theory and the yeah, the books I can't
remember the name of.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, by the that Chinese sci fi
author about yeah yeah yeah. The dark forest theory. Folks,
if you're not aware, is this basically this idea that
if there's life out there, the chance that it's hostile
is so high that everyone would be basically be trying
to either hide or fuck up other life first, right,
Like it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest.
(38:19):
Is kind of where the name comes from, but it's
it's more game theory stuff, right, but trying to imagine
how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
But whatever, No, I don't either, And it's not shocking
that it's a right wing author, but like, yeah, it
doesn't make the opinion in it wrong necessarily, But I'm
just like not surprised.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
No, No, people speak very highly of the books. I
thought the show was good, Like, I don't have to
agree with someone's politics to be interested in there.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah, And I find it so interesting because it is
so much of it is around this idea of like,
whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button, we need
to make sure that they're reliable, and by reliable we
mean not think, not thinking about the consequences of their actions.
And it's like, because to me, I clearly shouldn't be
in charge of mutually a shared destruction because I'm like,
(39:08):
I would rather I die and everyone I know die
than all humanity die. Like it just yeah, it just
seems so obvious to me, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Yeah, like I don't. I don't, And this, I guess
is just the difference between different kind of value systems.
I don't think American lives are worth more than any
other kind of life.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Nope, right, yep.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives or
Chinese lives or Latvian lives and nope, I guess I
don't want to get nuked. But my preference would be
if someone's going to get nuked, that not everyone gets nuked. Right,
That's better to me than anyway. That is not how
these people think.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Right. Even if the leaders of another country are my enemy,
that doesn't make every single person who whatever anyway.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, yeah, the leaders of every country are my enemy.
They're all assholes. But I still don't want nukes firing.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Off, I know, get them in a room anyway, yep, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
So one of the things that I think is valuable
here to get into is Rubelle talks about when he
starts realizing how this system works. He has this realization,
which is that our whole nuclear deterrence system is what
he describes as dangerously unstable. Right, And this is valuable
just in terms of understanding how like military planners think
and kind of the logic that this guy's going through
(40:26):
as he's trying to deal with this problem.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Quote from Rebel Instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary
world when fast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up
ready to go in minutes. If one side does go
for any reason, or even for none, the other is
set to respond and must respond. Strategic weapons, I soon realized,
could often determine policy by their very design. Military instability
(40:49):
arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered
in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage.
It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner
shrinks to almost nothing, as it does in the missile age. Right,
he's describing this doomsday device that's being built. Right, it's
an unstable system, right, because of how fast everything works
(41:10):
and how destructive these weapons are. Rubell, in no uncertain
terms described the ideology behind launch on warning as quote
flawed and terrifying, and quoted Herman Khan.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Shit guy, yeah, my guy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
He quoted Herman khn and calling this arrangement a doomsday machine.
And he discussed he wrote about something that happened in
World War One as an example for like why he
considered all this so frightening. And I'm going to quote
an extended piece here. On a visit to France in
nineteen sixty three, I came across the remains of a
World War One catastrophe and you're a small village along
the Canal de Nord northeast of Paris. There one discovers
(41:45):
a crater about fifty feet deep and a couple of
hundred feet in diameter. Postcards on sale in the village
identify it as Le tournaire, a melancholy reminder of what
happened in a pre war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants.
Before World War One, a small hill stood were only
the crater room. The little hill was a formidable obstacle
in the path of the French on one side and
the Germans on the other, each hold up in extensive trenches,
(42:06):
unable to see the enemy on the other side of
the hill, and likely to get blown away if they
dared peer over the top. An obvious solution occurred to
each side mine the other side and blow it up.
Each side began mining the hill. The process went on
for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form
tunnels extending under the German side, dug by the French,
and under the French side dug by the Germans. Eventually
the tunnels were filled with t and t by each
(42:27):
side under the part of the hill occupied by the other.
Then one day somebody on one side or the other.
Nobody will ever know which side or who it was,
detonated a charge that ignited all the French in all
the German explosives. Who knows. Maybe it was an accident
either way, accident or on purpose. This little mountain with
hundreds of luckless humans and trenches on it or still
tunneling beneath it, was blown to Kingdom come, leaving only
(42:48):
an impressive crater to remind an occasional visitor forever what
military instability can mean. It was not too early in
nineteen fifty nine to envision a ghastly replay of this
little known drama on a global scale.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame. Yeah,
it's like a It took a lot of people dying
to give us that metaphor.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I mean he's right here now.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Rubel first sits down with the Minuteman project manager, who's
a former Hughes Aircraft guy named Bob Bennett. In the
spring of nineteen fifty nine, he noticed it. Despite their
friendly relationship, Bob was squirrely and didn't like to give
out information when asked basic questions like how do these
missiles actually fire? And how many missiles fire at once? Right?
At this point, the Minuteman system was being built as
(43:33):
a second strike system, but there was no reason you'd
need a weapon like the Minuteman for a second strike.
It was clearly meant for a first strike in a
launch on warn scenario. The Air Force was just lying
to everybody, right. In order to make this seem less dangerous,
each Minuteman was to be aimed at all times at
a different city in the USSR or China. We don't
have good computers back then, right, So the way these
(43:54):
things are targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside
each of these missiles, rotating on frictionless ball bearings at
all times, which will guide the missiles win launched towards
a specific set of coordinates. Missiles cannot be retargeted on
the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're
launching them at, no matter who starts the war. If
the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are
(44:16):
you seeing a problem potentially?
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Yeah. Also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring out
how to aim things.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
So it's incredibly impressive.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Like, these people are very smart and very stupid at
the same time.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Yep, yep, twentieth century engineering.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Yeah. Like, there's a very high chance with this that
we wind up nuking a country that has not fired
at us, because we're just launching all of our shit
and some of it's targeted towards them. Right, we'll talk
more about that in the last episode. Now, this is
a problem because each squadron of fifty missiles is divided
into five groups of ten, and each squadron of ten
(44:50):
would be fired by just two guys. If two men
chose to insert their keys at the same time, the
launch control center they were in would be considered to
have voted to launch, and all ten missile would fire.
If two or more centers voted yes within a short
period of time, all fifty missiles in the squadron would fire.
Each missile was targeted to a city, we have no
way of knowing who might provocus, which means, by default,
(45:11):
our automated response was to nuke both the USSR and China,
even if one of those nations did nothing to piss
us off or threaten us.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Oh my god, when did China get nukes?
Speaker 1 (45:22):
China detonates their first nuke in October of nineteen sixty four,
so they don't have it yet. But you know, military
planners at this period of time before China has nukes
are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as one
unified communist block. They are not. As Nixon will make
very clear, those countries don't like each other, really like
(45:43):
they have a fraught history. But our assumption is we
got to start by nuke in them both. Right, So
it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk
about in the last episode. But I think this is
a good point to end here, just with the dread
of how fucking danger risk this system is.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
My god, God, I'm so glad that this is just
in this weird nerd game that you play and called Warhammer.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Certainly not real, this was Yeah, this was real. This
would be like big Dude verifying what a nightmare?
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yeah? How does anyone sleep?
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah? If this was all real and people actually tried
to build it, built a system like this, we would
have to throw them all in prison, right, I assume
so we wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars.
That would be crazy. No, all right, well, Margaret Pluggables.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, I have a substack. I write about the things
that I talk about on my show, and my substack
Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on all of the
various Internet things that I'm on and not the ones
that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any
other Margaret Kiljoy except apparently a Disney character where she
from the second Plantasia movie or something, or she's a
(46:57):
nag like a massogynist character that oh boom, I actually
could have these characters. It might be I might have
the movie wrong. I don't know. Someone just pointed out
to me recently, but I'm not a missogyny stereotype from Disney.
I am instead everyone's nightmare of if you're transphobed, I'm
your nightmare and you can find me by googly me.
(47:18):
That's what I got.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, I actually am a missogyous nightmare from a Disney movie.
I was the inspiration for guests on a lot of
people don't know that.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Comment. I don't have a counter argument. I've met you
in real life.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Podcasts is over all right. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube,
(47:55):
new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel
dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about how everyone might die in nuclear hell fire. This
is part four of our series on the bastards who
built the doomsday device that we all currently live under,
the looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads,
the several thousand nuclear weapons ready at a moment's notice
(00:22):
to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or
cared about. Back with me to really get into some shit,
because I did not expect it to take this long
to get to the mid fifties. But there's a lot
to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I'm good. I've come up with a strategy and the
strategies I've decided. I believe you are telling me Warhammer
forty k lore that.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Would make this a lot more comforting.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Huh. Yeah, this is just something that some space orcs
have decided to do.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
There are orcs in space and Warhammer that's a very
important part of the setting. So I'm going to start
this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last
couple of years that we've talked about in part three,
right as you know, the kind of fallout from the
(01:12):
Korean War is going on, and the US and the
Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands.
Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the
idea of being able to land a first strike that
would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back.
In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss
a US nuclear response in defensive terms, but in nineteen
(01:35):
fifty four, the Eisenhower Dulles Declaration announced that the US
would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons
quote at places and with means of our own choosing.
The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's
promise to the Soviet Union. Right, basically, if you provoke us,
if you fuck with us, we'll kill everybody. Right, that's
(01:58):
kind of the idea. You know, that's not exact, but
it's we will retaliate massively. And that that that isn't
that means nuclear, right.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Trying to have a fist fight with someone who has
like a suicide vest on and you're.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Just in a room, which, by the way, is the
best way to get into a fist fight, which is
why if you want to buy one of our patented
suicide vests today, you know, never get beat up again. Yeah,
or get beat up exactly one more time. It's probably
a more accurate way to look at the way the
suicide vest works.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Well, we've actually we've workshopped it. They're called lifefests, now.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Called life vest. Now we're currently suing the boat people
over their life vest. But I think this is going
to work out well for us.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing
our product.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, we wore our product and we can't. We brought
a life rate.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
To by stopping.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh man. So this whole idea of the Eisenower Dolus declaration,
it's not a promise that we actually keep, right Eisenhower,
I think there's a degree to which I mean elements
of this are things that the US will do at
other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally
a guy who he has some respect for human life. Right.
(03:04):
So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's
Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency
to exploding into nuclear hostilities. Like we're seriously considering using
nukes to like basically like clear Taiwan's flanks, right, because
they're in a rough strategic situation for US to respond
to with anything else. But Eisenower proves less willing to
(03:26):
massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation,
and the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons,
thank fucking God. Right, Yeah, So it is this situation
where Eisenhower is he wants to, he wants that threat
to be out there, but he really does not, and
none of our presidents really do. After Truman, they don't
want a nuke. People, they're really anti nuke because they're
(03:50):
not insane as a general rule, like Nixon kind of is,
but even he's not that crazy for the most part, Right,
for the most part. The evolving nature of nuclear warfare
it meant that units across the globe are now by
the mid to late fifties armed with nukes meant for
defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as
a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons could be
(04:10):
launched to air burst and destroy entire fleets of Soviet
bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now by the
mid nineteen fifties, every American was well aware of the
horrors of nuclear war, and one of the few comforting
thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only
the president could order a nuclear attack. That was a lie.
Turns out that was not true. In the book Fifteen Minutes, L.
Douglas Keeney reveals, and I think this is the thing
(04:32):
that was came to light while he was writing his
book as a result of like information requests and stuff
that he was filing. But in nineteen fifty seven, this
was not known until very recently. In nineteen fifty seven,
President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for
field commanders to use nuclear weapons in specific defensive situations
without any outside approval. A small number of authorizing commanders
(04:56):
in chief even had the ability to launch and command
a retalian nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a
direct attack on the United States. Right, it was never
really true during this period of time, like, at least
not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only
the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing,
there's no governor on these so theoretically anybody who had
(05:17):
one could have made the decision, but also Eisenhower gives
field commanders the ability and this is mainly meant for
with the exception of those guys who had that small
number of guys who could do a retaliatory strike. Most
of these are guys who if they see a fleet
of bombers incoming, they can fire anti aircraft nuclear artillery, right, Like,
it's that sort of thing. So it's not as crazy
(05:37):
as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right this.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Like this does have Would that have brought on like
if we had been like, oh, fuck these bombers and
nuked them in the sky, would that have like brought
on USSR's retaliation.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I mean, at that point, they were already sending a
bomber fleet over right, So I mean they probably would
have continued to fight.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs,
we still might have had a nuclear war that didn't
kill everybody, right, because you could have theoretically had one
that was devastating enough that the major powers are not
able to keep fighting. But everything doesn't get expended because
we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, Right,
That's not really an option right now. What makes this dangerous, though,
(06:20):
is that by the late nineteen fifties, there are nuclear
weapons US nuclear weapons fucking everywhere all over the world
at all times. Curtis LeMay had insisted from the beginning
because he's really obsessed with the SAC's readiness, right, and
so he from the jump is like, our bomber crews
have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional
(06:40):
nuclear weapons on board. It's not a real test if
they don't have an actual nuke on the plane, right.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Okay, I don't understand why, but.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Sure, well, because he's the craziest man who ever lived.
Our second text to MacArthur, maybe.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, you can only dry fire with bullets in.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
The right, right, it's fucking insane. And what this means
practically is that from this point on, thousands of nuclear
weapons are flying across the US and the world. Every year.
There are always nukes flying around at all times, tons
of them. It's so scary, it's fucking insane.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
That's okay, soviy, this is warhammer, yeah, warhammer lore.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
In the early nineteen fifties, LeMay had developed the beginning
of a strategy to keep what he called an air
fleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in
the air, with nukes ready to divert their course to
attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice.
The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men doing it.
If the Soviets knew that they could get away with
a first strike on the US, they might try. The
(07:38):
best way to make sure they never did was by
always having bombers in the air and ready to fight
at all times, which meant at all times dozens to
hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in
the world, and this meant there would always be nukes
going missing. Right, h If you are flying thousands of
flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage
(07:59):
of those bombers are going to crash or are going
to need to drop their nukes in order to deal
with some sort of like engine trouble that is going
to happen. And it does, in fact happen, right, I'm
gonna guess people are aware that this has happened once
or twice, generally like a couple there was one off
like the coast of Spain. The reality is it happened constantly.
(08:20):
This happens so much more often than you would have
gett It's fucking shocking how many nukes we just straight
up lose. LeMay and his successor at the SAC General
Power considered it a necessity that the US always have
armed nuclear bombers in the air, and a consequence of
that is, of course, all these things getting lost. I'm
gonna provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an
(08:41):
ESSAC training mission to switch crews on ground alert every
twenty one days. This is kind of the start of
what allowed. Like, we always have a fleet of bombers
that are like six to fifteen minutes away from being
in the air. They have a nuke on them, they're
loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac. They have
a crew and a bunker nearby that can run onto
the plane and take off at a moment's notice. Right,
And we also have I think it's like ten or
(09:03):
eleven percent of those planes are flying with a bomb
in them at any given time. Right, That's what operates.
It starts as a testing plan to see if this
is feasible, and in July of nineteen fifty seven, we
make this like the SAC standard Plan each B forty
seven bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home
carried a six thousand pound four megaton Mk thirty nine
(09:24):
hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear depth machines. That same month,
a B forty seven in Texas crashed, killing the four
man crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of
the emergency war plan load, but as Kini notes in
the book fifteen minutes, as of this writing, No nineteen
fifty seven bomber crash in Texas is included in any
official document disclosing accents evolving nuclear weapons. And there are
(09:48):
several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed,
and based on how it was coded, we know it
should have had a nuke on it, but they never
reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So
this new presumably just blew up in Texas and they
kind of they covered it up.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
You know, how often are they just being like, oh, whoops,
it fell off the back of the truck. All off
the back of the truck.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
No, not off a truck. They're falling out a plane.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Oh so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like
are they ever like.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Not that we know not that we know that there's
not evidence of that. What's actually happening is much dumber
than if they like someone stealing a nuke, and scarier,
to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know,
where a bomber that we know should have been loaded
with a nuke crashed and no report was ever made
of a nuke getting lost. But cover ups weren't always possible.
(10:37):
The same month that General Power takes over sac command
from LeMay, who goes on himself become the vice chief
of Staff and then Chief of Staff or the Air Force,
a C four cargo plane bound for an air base
in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between
Rehoboth Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected
two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to
(11:00):
lighten the load. These fall in the ocean, and the
Navy searches for the bombs and doesn't find any of
them ever, even though the ocean is just one hundred
and fifty feet deep at some parts of the potential
drop zone. So at like New Treasure questus, yes this
is dropped. There are folks listeners. If you live in
the Jersey area. You could be the owner of an
(11:21):
Mk five atom bomb if you just spend some time
swimming around in the ocean.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And once you've got a nuke for one thing, you're
not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother.
Can you got a lot of You got a lot
of leverage if you get your if you become a
nuclear armed state in and of yourself, it always goes well. Yeah,
so again, both three thousand pound Mk five bombs are missing.
(11:46):
To this day, these are never found. The number of
times this happens is fucking shocking. Nineteen fifty seven is
a key year for our story because it is the
year that we start being fifteen to thirty minutes away
from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August twenty six,
the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile,
the SS six Sapwood, could travel six thousand miles carrying
(12:10):
a warhead. Soviet premiere Nikita Krushchev bragged could make Europe
or the United States quote a veritable cemetery. A couple
of months later, in October, Spudnik entered orbit. If you're
wondering why that freaked out Americans so much. This is
one of those things I actually I have a little
more under empathy for, like why so many people because Oh,
because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah,
(12:30):
that's a little scary, Okay, So they invented the ICBM,
they get they have a functional ICBM before we do.
They have a successful test before we do, not long before,
because between those two events. In September of nineteen fifty seven,
the u SO, after the Soviets launched their ICBM before Spudnik,
the US Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully.
(12:53):
Now it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the
idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on
this thing, probably, So it doesn't really if you're off
by a couple by a mile or two even, Yeah,
but you'll do some damage. Probably. In November of that year,
General Power revealed to the public for the first time
that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground
alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. Eleven percent
(13:15):
of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway,
loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in
less than fifteen minutes, and a certain number of bombers
were kept up in the air at all times when
they admitted they are bombed up and they don't carry
bows and arrows.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Bombed up, bombed up.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Maybe, Yeah, it sounds like he's because like he's kind
of horny for these things. Yeah, in this period after
the ice So the ICBMs exist now, but they're not
a viable weapons system yet. Right, We've had we have
our proof of concept, but we don't We don't immediately
go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right.
It takes a little bit of time. You know, that's
just science. Right, So during this kind of awkward inner
(13:54):
still period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war
are extremely low. For one reason. The only way to
deliver an atom bomb is by air, right, I mean,
you could drive it somewhere, set it off on the ground,
but really, like realistically you're going to be using like
a bomber or a tailler's you can't launch it across
continents yet, right, unless you're flying it. That means that
you could theoretically, if you send out a bomber fleet
(14:17):
to start a nuclear war, you could because you're in
contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber
fleet right up to the last moment. You can't do
that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you
can do it with like the sub mounted nukes, we cannot.
It is not possible once they're launched there heading for
their targets, right, that's how these things work. But you
can recall bombers if you can reach them up until
(14:39):
the last minute, right now, if you can reach them
is a key part of this, because that presents a
conundrum to the SAC. This is the fucking late fifties.
Coms aren't as good as they're going to be. That
we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us
to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts
of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us
to gamble the survival of the human race on right.
(15:02):
And the SAC has another problem, which is that nobody
outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet
with the idea of nukes being sent off without a
way to recall them. And while radio code, you know,
it's just not there's not a great, perfect way to
guarantee you can reach these bombers. And that's really important.
And this brings us to one of the most interesting
(15:23):
innovations in nuclear war and it's honestly the simplest. This
doesn't require any technology whatsoever, and it's maybe it may
have saved the world. Right, we may all exist because
of this. It's called Project fail Safe now rather than
relying on technology which could fail. The way failsafe worked
is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to
(15:46):
return without dropping their payloads, no matter what they were
ordered to do, unless they were transmitted to GO code. Right.
The innovation of fail safe isn't that a got This
is important. The go code does not trigger the bombing, right. Instead,
the default is in all instances, return home without bombing
(16:07):
unless you're given the code. And that's a meaningful distinction, right.
That means there's no room for a bomber public. Well,
they didn't give us the go code, but right over
the target, should we do it? No, you fly home
unless you get the code, right, yeah, And that's tech proof.
It doesn't matter if your coms are out right, and
that means the default assumption is we should err on
the side of not dropping the bombs.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Right. No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it
makes sense that that was like literally a technological development.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah, it was an It was a development by a
single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolstetter. He
visualized failsafe, and again you could argue this guy might
have saved all of humanity.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Was doing so.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Good idea. Thank you, Albert.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
The opposite of a dead man's switch, you know, yeah, yeah,
it's a it's a I guess, a live man switch.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I don't know. Speaking of a dead man switched, I
have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you
spend money on the products and services advertise on the show.
Oh boy, we're back. So we've just hit the point
(17:17):
where failsafe has been implemented and.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Which were fit on your knuckles. I'm just going to
point out.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Right, Oh actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah yeah,
I've been meaning to get a knuckle tattoo. So yeah,
we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World
War three because the radio goes out right, which is
a good thing to do. Now, in February of nineteen
fifty eight, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error,
a bomber and a fighter wing in Florida. We're doing
a training mission which for some reason required a trio
(17:45):
of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B
forty seven bombers armed with actual one point six megaton
Mk fifteen nuclear bombs. One of these fighters fucked up
and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines.
The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing,
but the nearest airfield was under construction, and to make
a long story short, the pilot was worried that when
landing they would crash into something that would send the
(18:06):
nuke in their bombay launching forward like a bullet into
the crew cabin. In order to protect the crew, the
pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasauce Sound,
east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs.
It's a little unclear to me. These are never found.
This bomb is never found. It is theoretically still some
east east of Savannah to this day.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Oh my god, I'm gonna write terrible fiction about a
crew of people who go and find these things.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Go new Cutting, Let's go find up. Let's get us
a nuke yeah, yeah, we could be the we could
be at finally a nuclear armed podcast. This is this
is what podcasting has been missing. So it's obviously big
news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own Georgia,
not even the one overseas, and the good people of
that state expected the Air Force to recover the nuke.
(18:53):
A study of the Air Force press releases around this
matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of
a portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no
one knew quote whether the nuclear device landed in the
sea or on land. Great, there's a chance some hillbilly
has just been passing this nuke down to his kids
for the last like, that's.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
What I want. Now they'll be like, you take some
pride in our family. We are incular power. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Now, don't don't touch it too much. I don't really
know how it works.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Now, when they dropped these this bomb or bombs, both
pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were
when they dropped it. But they both write down different
sets of coordinates, which is a real watermark for the
competency of our brave boys in the sac. After several
days of searching with no luck. The Air Force issued
another press release elaborating that the bomb had been carried
(19:46):
in transportable condition. This means nothing. The Air Force defined
that when asked what transportable condition means as a form
carried for safety reasons, which again means nothing. If you're
wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying,
here's another excerpt from fifteen minutes. Those in Savannah made
little sense of this warding, but they took it to
(20:07):
mean that the weapon was perhaps disassembled or in crates,
or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all.
The second press release, however, vague, nonetheless seems to have
had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the
Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers, had arrived.
The Bowers brought with it fourteen more divers and men
from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Cedar Keys, Florida.
The Air Force explained the stepped up activity by saying
(20:29):
that the ejective component was a very expensive piece of equipment.
So the Air Force is like, ah, it's not even
a real bomb. We are sending the bomb squad in
though there the bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for
this thing. Trust, this not a functional bomb. Definitely, we
do fly exclusively with functional bombs permissions like this, but
this one isn't. Right, You're good, Yeah, no, right, yeah,
I mean and they did sometimes they would have like
(20:50):
the physile material outside of the bomb so that when
they dropped it, they're just but that didn't happen in
a lot of cases, and we don't know that it
happened in this case.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
What is their argument for, Like, clearly a dummy that
is exactly the same size, no weight, is the only
thing that makes sense. I can't understand the argument.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Lemayan powers want them to be training with real nukes,
and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly
to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice.
That is very important to them.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
I'm going to invite him to a paintball game with
AR fifteen, right, what.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy, But this is like,
there's this is super important to both LeMay and Power. Right,
we're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at
the SAC So by this point it should be clear
to you we don't know and never will know how
many nuclear bombs are government lost on US soil. But
(21:46):
there's a couple at least just start of lying around.
So again, folks, get your metal detectors out. Yeah, yeah,
have some fun with it. What could go wrong?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's what we call our scavenger.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
What could go wrong? No, you asked earlier about stealing
nuclear weapons, and I don't. I've seen no evidence that
that happened. But it could have very easily. It was
for a long time startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon.
The only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it
was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever
(22:20):
crazy enough to try. In her book Nuclear War, Annie
Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos
scientist named Harold Agnew paid to NATO base in Europe
in December of nineteen fifty nine. This was one of
the bases where US nukes were in NATO hands, as
they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, during the
trip to the NATO Bass, Agnew noticed something that made
(22:41):
him wary. I observed four f eighty four f aircraft
sitting on the end of a runway. Each was carrying
two Mark seven nuclear gravity bombs. He wrote in a
document declassified in twenty twenty three. What this meant was
that custody of the Mark sevens was under the watchful
eye of one very young US Army private armed with
an M one rifle with eight rounds of ammunition. Agnew
told his colleagues the only safeguard against unauthorized use of
(23:04):
a nuclear bomb was this single gi surrounded by a
large number of foreign troops on foreign territory, with thousands
of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea,
Like I feel like I've got a decent chance of
stealing a nuke from that guy, right, I one eighteen
year old with a rifle like like those odds, And
this is all part of the whole. All that matters
(23:26):
is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right Because
one of the things that guys like LeMay and Power
are doing that the ESAC is doing is like, we
don't need to be putting money in the infantry. We
don't need to have like dudes on the ground doing
stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste
of resources. More nukes, more planes, less guards.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
This is like how they're treating AI like. It's just like, yes,
we don't need anything else, Yes we just need this.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
No guardrails, no governors, make it illegal to put any
safety measures in Fuck it now. After returning home, this
is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes
a while, but this is what starts that process because
once he gets home, having this startling moment, Agnew pairs
up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories and they try
to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into
nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a
(24:12):
bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a
lock and coded switch, which required a three digit code
to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take
several years until the Kennedy administration for the President to
actually order these locks placed on bombs. Right, But that's
where this leads, right, that's why we get the nuclear
football in the system we have now where you have
to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
That starts with Agnew realizing like, oh, fuck, someone can
just take these There's like a kid standing in a
field with a rifle and there's four nukes. Shit, eight
fucking bullets. At least give him another couple of clips.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Jesus Christ, totally send a unit of people you hate first,
and then.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Jesus, yes, send more guys. Fuck it, there had to
be more eighteen year olds. My god, I'm getting ahead
of myself here. Because we don't immediately put the it
takes some time to figure out how to build these locks. Right,
There are two key inventions from the late nineteen fifties
that help set the doomsday device into motion. The first
is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes,
(25:18):
and it's the distributed system of radar stations in the
middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first
provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously,
the Soviets are building their own versions of this too, right,
but the early warning systems right, These aren't a major
topic of these episodes, because just wanting to know if
someone's about to murder you isn't really fucked up in
the same way as, for example, building twelve thousand nuclear weapons.
(25:42):
But all of these early warning systems are flawed and
capable of generating false positives, and in fact, we have
both us and the USSR have several near nuclear catastrophes
because we get false positives, like one of these radar
installations thinks it sees missiles coming in or thinks it
sees bombers coming in, and its problems.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Right, and it's like geese or some shit, right right, right.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
All these early warning systems are flawed, you know that,
And that's still the case to this day, right, And
so it's both understandable that you'd want to have these,
but also the fact that these are flawed, and the
fact that our strategy increasingly becomes launch on warn moves
us a lot closer to midnight right. So, by far,
the most influential move from an approaching the apocalypse point
(26:26):
of view was the deployment of ICBMs. These made it
possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could
not be recalled. There was and is no fail safe
for ICBMs. The idea that we can cancel them is
just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM,
they are almost impossible to stop. You can only really
(26:47):
stop them by shooting them down, and we're terrible at it.
Right there, we have this thing, the bullet basically that
we use to shoot them down and it works about
half the time in tests, and we have like forty
four of them.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, i'd want more magazines than like, i'd probably want
to bullets is enough if it's that's not a lot
you have to stop the end of the world. Here's
a magazine and a half of bullets.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
The enemy it has three thousand missiles or something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, so good luck private.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Now our first ICBM is kind of a piece of shit.
The only good thing about the Atlas C, which is
declared operational in September of nineteen fifty nine, is that
it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time.
It has to be fueled right before launch, something to
do with the kind of fuel that they're using right,
which means that you can't have these things ready to
go in a matter of minutes, you know, like you
need more lead time to do that. Atlases are stored
(27:43):
above ground. Also, we're starting to build hardened silos, that
is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. US
war planners were worried that the USSR would be able
to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just
parked out like on bases and stuff, and they are
the Soviets are a They have you know, survey lens
and stuff. They are able to see them. But this
also causes another near calamity because the Soviets don't assume
(28:06):
that we just have these things parked in the open
because we're not finished building silos. They assume we had
them in the open because we plan to use them
as a first strike weapon, right right, So this is
another thing that like ramps up the paranoia between everybody
because the Atlas was such a shit weapon system and
it is a bad ICBM. By the nineteen fifty nine,
the US was already hard at work at its replacement,
(28:28):
the Minuteman. This was a missile with a stable fuel
mixture that could be stored for long periods of time
and launch ready conditions, so you can have a minute
man ready to fire. And in fact, it's called a
minute man because you can literally from the moment you
get the order, you can have it in the air
in a minute or less. Right again, they're just starting
to explore this technology. This is very new and they
(28:49):
don't have the kinks out right, which is a problem
because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these
things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect
of they have to figure out. None of this is
immediately obvious, right, how this is going to work, how
nuclear silos are going to work, how our warning system
will work, how these things will be triggered to fire
under what conditions? Right, It is important to remember there's
(29:10):
no locks on these missiles yet, right, So every minute
man is stored launch ready and every minute on silo
no locks at all. Right, Well, there's a lock in
that in order to fire it. So you have you
have like these two man teams and like a command bunker,
and each of these two man teams can launch ten missiles, right,
(29:32):
that are each held in separate silos that are like
a decent distance from each other. So you can't stop
them all if you nuke them, right, if you nuke
the silos, that's one of the reasons. So each two
man team, if they if both men turn a key
at the same time, it will fire the missile. Right,
And then as we'll talk about the it will start
a process of firing all of the other missiles. So
(29:53):
that means two guys have the ability if they both
decide to turn a key to fire ten nuclear missiles
across the world into Russia.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Right, yeah, or one guy who like, are they in
the same place? Or the keys next week show the
like in movies because in which guys it's like that's
or one guy beats up his front.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
That's a great that's a great point you brought up,
because the Air Force did consider this, right that this
is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this.
What if a crazy person winds up in a silo,
would he just be able to start World War three
on his own? And the answer is no, because the
Air Force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that
kind of behavior.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Margaret.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Both guys in the silo have guns and they're separated
from bulletproof glass, so they're just ready to go and say, yeah,
this way, one guy can't threaten to shoot the other
guy if he doesn't launch a missng right, Like, that's
literally the plan is like we'll give both guns and
put them behind bulletprook glass. It's fine.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Also, it's like people can hot wire cars, right, this
is an electrical system on some level.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Oh, it's so much worse than that, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Okay, I feel like you could probably figure out a
way to give the positives signal over this electrical wire.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
It's good that you bring that up. That's what we're
going to be talking about a lot of the rest
of this episode, because this is so much worse than
you're guessing. So another issue with the Minuteman program is
that because of some errors and how they construct this thing,
they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsdate device.
This is not known by Air Force planners when they
(31:24):
start putting this stuff out and constructing these silos and
putting out the plans of how they're going to use it,
because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing.
We only know about the immediate, the initial problems with
the Minuteman system because of a confessional that was written
in two thousand and eight by one of the architects
of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel, and Rubel
is he's both a hero and a victim in this story.
(31:46):
He's one of these guys who may have saved all
of our lives because of the story about to tell,
but he also is an integral part of building this system.
Born in nineteen twenty to a wealthy Jewish German family
in Chicago. Rubelle moved to Los Angeles as a kid
after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech.
In nineteen forty two, his older brother died in action
fighting the Nazis, and Rebel was inspired to do his
(32:08):
bit for the war by moving to Schenectady with his
wife and becoming a junior engineer at GOE. After the war,
he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin.
By nineteen fifty six, Rubel was a successful executives at
Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company right.
He was featured in an ad by his employer which
described him as America's new kind of man. This meant
(32:31):
he was an expert and a successful professional in a
field that had not existed just a couple years earlier,
defense electronics. And from that ad at Hughes, we have
twenty seven hundred of these men in our research and
development laboratories, men like John H. Rubell, brought together from
all over the country to solve urgent new problems of
national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that
rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time,
(32:53):
and the work they have done is so basic, it
is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics.
And Soviey's going to show you the ad just because
I want everyone watching the video to see what a
thirty six year old man looked like in the mid
nineteen fifties. Look at those crows feet. That's what you
get when you're just consuming led every day, just puffing
(33:14):
it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff. Wow. Yeah.
So anyway, three years after this photo was taken, in
early nineteen fifty nine, Rubel left Hughes Aircraft to become
the Assistant Director of Research and Engineering for Strategic Weapons
over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over
the next four years, becoming the sole Deputy and Assistant
(33:34):
Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in nineteen sixty one.
He is a very highly placed civilian within our military
research and defense infrastructure. Right This rapid advance was because
he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was
at all concerned about whether or not we might be
about to kill the whole planet accidentally. In nineteen fifty nine,
he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force,
(33:57):
because the Air Force, as they're getting ready to deploy
the Minute Man, they have this missile designed, and they
have these silos under construction, but they're not operational yet.
And so the Air Force is sitting down with high
ranking civilian DoD employees and explaining all their different nuclear
retaliation systems, including Minuteman. According to Rubel, he has conversations
with a number of military officers and he comes to
(34:20):
realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack,
right and if an adversary again. The logic the military
has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive
launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it.
So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is
to have quote first strike capability and the way to
use it aka launch on warning quote from Rubel's piece. Consider, however,
(34:46):
launch on warning almost necessitates an automated response. The electronic
warning signal itself in the scenario would trigger our first
strike missiles, many of them ready to go in a
minute or so. The will to use the strategy would
require no high level decision making or intervaent. Now, fuck,
this is extremely dangerous. And this is the thing that
leads to the minute Man. Right, And when Rubel talks
(35:08):
about the minute Man, he's referring to both a single
missile and quote to the aggregate of more than a
thousand of them, comprising a system of missiles and control
centers spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in
states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Right, that's what
the Minuteman system is. It's about a thousand of these
missiles split up into groups of like ten and fifty
and spread out all over these kind of plane states.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, minute Man was not yet an effect. Right, that
doesn't happen until sixty one. But two aspects of the program,
the wide dispersal of missile silos and the fact that
each silo is hardened to withstand anything but a direct
nuclear hit, came from suggestions made by RAND thinkers. Rubel
makes the important point that all these defense nerds and
all the high ranking Air Force officers behind these plans
are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we
(35:57):
would be able to fire our nukes if the government
was to he writes, quote equally important considerations such as
flexibility of command and control of these weapons, provisions to
prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the
malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result
in a missile launch or some comparably dreadful catastrophe were
treated little or not at all.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Right, I was expecting this sense to end very differently.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay this
system and make it safer, because anything that you do
to like make the Minuteman system less dangerous is reducing
its automation, right, which is increasing the odds that we
don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable, right,
(36:44):
partly because the game theory thing is that they need
to know that even if they kill a president and
whoever comes after that, yeah, they still lose too. As
a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people
are like, well, but like, are you not worried about
maybe something going wrong and the missiles all launching accidentally,
And they're like, well, that's not nearly as scary as
the missile's not launching, you know, that really is how
(37:07):
all these guys are thinking and you know who else
thinks that way?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Margaret, Well, is it the life Fest?
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yes? Yes, the makers of the new Life Fest get
one today, you know, get two, get three, get one
for the whole family. You know, everyone should have one
of these vests. A society where everyone's wearing a suicide
vest at all times is a polite society.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Probably, That's what everyone says.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
We'll see what happens, you know, We'll see what happens
and we're back. Yeah, Margaret, how you take in this revelation?
Speaker 2 (37:46):
I you know, okay, so I can't remember we talked
about on mic or not, but we talked about the
dark forest theory and the yeah, the books I can't
remember the name of.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, by the that Chinese sci fi
author about yeah yeah yeah. The dark forest theory. Folks,
if you're not aware, is this basically this idea that
if there's life out there, the chance that it's hostile
is so high that everyone would be basically be trying
to either hide or fuck up other life first, right,
Like it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest.
(38:19):
Is kind of where the name comes from, but it's
it's more game theory stuff, right, but trying to imagine
how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
But whatever, No, I don't either, And it's not shocking
that it's a right wing author, but like, yeah, it
doesn't make the opinion in it wrong necessarily, But I'm
just like not surprised.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
No, No, people speak very highly of the books. I
thought the show was good, Like, I don't have to
agree with someone's politics to be interested in there.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah, And I find it so interesting because it is
so much of it is around this idea of like,
whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button, we need
to make sure that they're reliable, and by reliable we
mean not think, not thinking about the consequences of their actions.
And it's like, because to me, I clearly shouldn't be
in charge of mutually a shared destruction because I'm like,
(39:08):
I would rather I die and everyone I know die
than all humanity die. Like it just yeah, it just
seems so obvious to me, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Yeah, like I don't. I don't, And this, I guess
is just the difference between different kind of value systems.
I don't think American lives are worth more than any
other kind of life.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Nope, right, yep.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives or
Chinese lives or Latvian lives and nope, I guess I
don't want to get nuked. But my preference would be
if someone's going to get nuked, that not everyone gets nuked. Right,
That's better to me than anyway. That is not how
these people think.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Right. Even if the leaders of another country are my enemy,
that doesn't make every single person who whatever anyway.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, yeah, the leaders of every country are my enemy.
They're all assholes. But I still don't want nukes firing.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Off, I know, get them in a room anyway, yep, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
So one of the things that I think is valuable
here to get into is Rubelle talks about when he
starts realizing how this system works. He has this realization,
which is that our whole nuclear deterrence system is what
he describes as dangerously unstable. Right, And this is valuable
just in terms of understanding how like military planners think
and kind of the logic that this guy's going through
(40:26):
as he's trying to deal with this problem.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Quote from Rebel Instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary
world when fast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up
ready to go in minutes. If one side does go
for any reason, or even for none, the other is
set to respond and must respond. Strategic weapons, I soon realized,
could often determine policy by their very design. Military instability
(40:49):
arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered
in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage.
It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner
shrinks to almost nothing, as it does in the missile age. Right,
he's describing this doomsday device that's being built. Right, it's
an unstable system, right, because of how fast everything works
(41:10):
and how destructive these weapons are. Rubell, in no uncertain
terms described the ideology behind launch on warning as quote
flawed and terrifying, and quoted Herman Khan.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Shit guy, yeah, my guy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
He quoted Herman khn and calling this arrangement a doomsday machine.
And he discussed he wrote about something that happened in
World War One as an example for like why he
considered all this so frightening. And I'm going to quote
an extended piece here. On a visit to France in
nineteen sixty three, I came across the remains of a
World War One catastrophe and you're a small village along
the Canal de Nord northeast of Paris. There one discovers
(41:45):
a crater about fifty feet deep and a couple of
hundred feet in diameter. Postcards on sale in the village
identify it as Le tournaire, a melancholy reminder of what
happened in a pre war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants.
Before World War One, a small hill stood were only
the crater room. The little hill was a formidable obstacle
in the path of the French on one side and
the Germans on the other, each hold up in extensive trenches,
(42:06):
unable to see the enemy on the other side of
the hill, and likely to get blown away if they
dared peer over the top. An obvious solution occurred to
each side mine the other side and blow it up.
Each side began mining the hill. The process went on
for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form
tunnels extending under the German side, dug by the French,
and under the French side dug by the Germans. Eventually
the tunnels were filled with t and t by each
(42:27):
side under the part of the hill occupied by the other.
Then one day somebody on one side or the other.
Nobody will ever know which side or who it was,
detonated a charge that ignited all the French in all
the German explosives. Who knows. Maybe it was an accident
either way, accident or on purpose. This little mountain with
hundreds of luckless humans and trenches on it or still
tunneling beneath it, was blown to Kingdom come, leaving only
(42:48):
an impressive crater to remind an occasional visitor forever what
military instability can mean. It was not too early in
nineteen fifty nine to envision a ghastly replay of this
little known drama on a global scale.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame. Yeah,
it's like a It took a lot of people dying
to give us that metaphor.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I mean he's right here now.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Rubel first sits down with the Minuteman project manager, who's
a former Hughes Aircraft guy named Bob Bennett. In the
spring of nineteen fifty nine, he noticed it. Despite their
friendly relationship, Bob was squirrely and didn't like to give
out information when asked basic questions like how do these
missiles actually fire? And how many missiles fire at once? Right?
At this point, the Minuteman system was being built as
(43:33):
a second strike system, but there was no reason you'd
need a weapon like the Minuteman for a second strike.
It was clearly meant for a first strike in a
launch on warn scenario. The Air Force was just lying
to everybody, right. In order to make this seem less dangerous,
each Minuteman was to be aimed at all times at
a different city in the USSR or China. We don't
have good computers back then, right, So the way these
(43:54):
things are targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside
each of these missiles, rotating on frictionless ball bearings at
all times, which will guide the missiles win launched towards
a specific set of coordinates. Missiles cannot be retargeted on
the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're
launching them at, no matter who starts the war. If
the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are
(44:16):
you seeing a problem potentially?
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Yeah. Also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring out
how to aim things.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
So it's incredibly impressive.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Like, these people are very smart and very stupid at
the same time.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Yep, yep, twentieth century engineering.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Yeah. Like, there's a very high chance with this that
we wind up nuking a country that has not fired
at us, because we're just launching all of our shit
and some of it's targeted towards them. Right, we'll talk
more about that in the last episode. Now, this is
a problem because each squadron of fifty missiles is divided
into five groups of ten, and each squadron of ten
(44:50):
would be fired by just two guys. If two men
chose to insert their keys at the same time, the
launch control center they were in would be considered to
have voted to launch, and all ten missile would fire.
If two or more centers voted yes within a short
period of time, all fifty missiles in the squadron would fire.
Each missile was targeted to a city, we have no
way of knowing who might provocus, which means, by default,
(45:11):
our automated response was to nuke both the USSR and China,
even if one of those nations did nothing to piss
us off or threaten us.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Oh my god, when did China get nukes?
Speaker 1 (45:22):
China detonates their first nuke in October of nineteen sixty four,
so they don't have it yet. But you know, military
planners at this period of time before China has nukes
are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as one
unified communist block. They are not. As Nixon will make
very clear, those countries don't like each other, really like
(45:43):
they have a fraught history. But our assumption is we
got to start by nuke in them both. Right, So
it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk
about in the last episode. But I think this is
a good point to end here, just with the dread
of how fucking danger risk this system is.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
My god, God, I'm so glad that this is just
in this weird nerd game that you play and called Warhammer.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Certainly not real, this was Yeah, this was real. This
would be like big Dude verifying what a nightmare?
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yeah? How does anyone sleep?
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah? If this was all real and people actually tried
to build it, built a system like this, we would
have to throw them all in prison, right, I assume
so we wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars.
That would be crazy. No, all right, well, Margaret Pluggables.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Yeah, I have a substack. I write about the things
that I talk about on my show, and my substack
Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on all of the
various Internet things that I'm on and not the ones
that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any
other Margaret Kiljoy except apparently a Disney character where she
from the second Plantasia movie or something, or she's a
(46:57):
nag like a massogynist character that oh boom, I actually
could have these characters. It might be I might have
the movie wrong. I don't know. Someone just pointed out
to me recently, but I'm not a missogyny stereotype from Disney.
I am instead everyone's nightmare of if you're transphobed, I'm
your nightmare and you can find me by googly me.
(47:18):
That's what I got.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, I actually am a missogyous nightmare from a Disney movie.
I was the inspiration for guests on a lot of
people don't know that.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Comment. I don't have a counter argument. I've met you
in real life.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Podcasts is over all right. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube,
(47:55):
new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel
dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards News
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