Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, I was just doing the atonal screaming for you, Robert.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now now you fucked up the introduction. So he doesn't
feel good now, does it. It's bad. It's harder than
it sounds.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
You know, I'm honestly kind of fun.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm just hoping that the listeners here will appreciate how
much work goes into my atonal screeches, because, to be polite,
they sound a lot better than your atonal screeches. That's
all I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I absolutely agree, So give the listeners one.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
No, no, no, I think they've gotten enough atonal screeches. Okay, Instead,
let's talk about I don't know. I'm not We're not
on video this week, folks. I'm not feeling well. I
just had a vasectomy, which I debated on because I
don't like talking about my private life on the show
too much. But I also think it's a good thing
to encourage. So guys out there, if you're thinking about

(01:01):
getting the visectomy, if you're like, should I get a vasectomy?
Go do it or do it yourself. You know, it
doesn't look that hard. The doctor wasn't down there very long.
You could figure it out, you know. Pruners sure, you
know whatever, it takes a rubber band. That's how we
do it on the sheep anyway, Margaret, Okay, how are

(01:22):
you doing.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
I'm good. I didn't have surgery this week.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's also good. That's better than having surgery, is a.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
General I love that for you, Magpie.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
I certainly prefer the weeks when I don't have surgery,
even if it's minor surgery. It's never very fun. Margaret.
How often do you think about the fact that, at
any given moment we're at the most thirty minutes away
from the entire planet being wiped out?

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Well more recently was depressed?

Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah, it's I watched a movie about this recently.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
It is a lot of them will have a lot,
which is kind of why I haven't actually seen that
movie yet. But this is always on my mind. It's
a special The whole nuclear doomsday planetary nuclear doomsday device
that we largely co created with Russia is on my
mind a lot. I'm just interested in the facts of
how it came together and who made it. And I'm
interested in because our subjects this week are broadly speaking,

(02:25):
all of the people in the US at least who
built that. Because we don't have quite as much granular
detail on their counterparts in the Soviet Union, you can
generally assume a version of everything we're talking about. This
we happened over there too, right, Like, they didn't not
create a planetary killing doomstate device. We both just kind
of built one that was heavily based on our game

(02:46):
theory understanding of how the other side would respond in
like an escalating nuclear scenario, And the end result of
that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still
today ready at all times to wipe out more or
less all of human civilization. But in roughly fifteen to
thirty minutes, that's about how long it would take.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Do you ever think about quantum immortality? Sorry, I'm just
going to go straight into wig that shit.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
That's a nice thing to think about. It's comforting at
least the idea that like will never experience the worst
case scenario because our consciousness doesn't persist in those moments.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
Except kind that's okay, that is, And I think about
that specifically around nuclear destruction because I think about how
often the people of the generation ahead of mine are like,
they almost seem silly, how worried they were about nuclear
apocalypse because it didn't happen during the Cold War, So
we're like, oh, obviously humanity would never do that, But

(03:45):
it would be impossible for me to be alive now
if the world had been destroyed. So even if nine
times out of ten we destroyed the world, we're stuck
being alive.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
In the one out of ten.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
So it actually makes me more fearful because I'm like, well,
it might just be pure raw luck that we didn't
annihilate ourselves.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yes, and unfortunately, I think that is if you're trying
to look at this from an educated and accurate perspective,
that is the only reason we're all alive, because it
we nearly wiped out. Like the number of times that
the whole world nearly got wiped out in atomic hell
fire is like you have too many to count on

(04:25):
all of our fingers and toes in this podcast combined, right, God,
it happened so many times, and the amount of resistance
whenever someone pointed out, oh, hey, the way this was
built could kill us all at any moment. Accidentally, that
happened so many times. We'll be talking about the fucking
minute Men missiles and how they were initially set up

(04:46):
But what's interesting about this week is that our subjects
are kind of like Schrodinger's bastards, where some of these
guys do have big body counts, especially the folks who were,
you know, responsible for getting the new like Leslie Groves right,
who was the general whoever saw Manhattan Project right, You
can put a lot of deaths under his his name,
But most of the people who built this system never
killed anybody, even indirectly, really, but they could at any moment. Guys,

(05:12):
in fact, guys whose last bit of work was in
the sixties, could fifteen minutes from now, if the right
things had started happening fifteen minutes ago, or a couple
of seconds ago, fifteen minutes from now, all of these
guys could become the biggest murderers in world history right collectively.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
But they won't be remembered.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
But they won't. No one will be nothing will be right.
That's the beauty of atomic hell fire.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
History is written by the victors. That there's no victor.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
There's going to be no victors of a nuclear war,
simply no history written. But they are interesting in that
because a lot of them are not like bad, and
some of them are even deeply sympathetic. There's a guy
we're going to talk about who may have saved all
of human life but also helped still did help build
the machine that could at any moment end at all. Right,
because it's and I need to correct this from the start,

(05:57):
all of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has
been done to make the system safer since the end
of the Cold War, and in fact, it's significantly more
dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War,
in part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be
in a launch on warn situation, which is where both
both Russia and the United States are today is launch
on warn, which means that the policy of both governments

(06:19):
is to start shooting everything they have when they have
a credible warning that they're being nuked. Right, and our
best case scenario would be like one crazy country like
North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the
United States, but that would still trigger a massive nuclear response.
And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch
with the Russian government, And as a heads up, there

(06:41):
have been times where we've been out of touch with
them for as much as forty eight hours when there's
been like critical things to like like that happens, the
gaps and comms like that, especially since Ukraine happened. And
if we started launching missiles the way that most of
our missiles would work, a lot of them would go
through or at least appear to be going towards Russi
aspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of

(07:03):
these radar systems are perfect, So there's a very good
chance even if we weren't didn't have it set up
to Crossrustner Chinese airspace, they would think that for a
period of time that is longer than the amount of
time they know they have to choose to launch their
arsenals in response. As per the way to Terrence theory works,
this could happen at any moment. This could have started
happening seconds ago. Right. So that's what we're talking about

(07:26):
this week, is how we got to this point that
we have not ever stepped back from. We are just
as close as we were during the Cold War. That's
very important for people to understand. So these next couple
of weeks we're going to talk about how this all
came to be. Right, because all of the men were
talking about this week most of whom again have no
body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives. All of

(07:49):
these guys put the work in to make this machine
knowing that they were building a system that, if used,
would lead to planetary genocide, and they built it anyway.
They built it because they knew it would work that way. Right,
So we're gonna talk about why we're gonna talk about
because they thought they were doing the morally right thing,

(08:09):
and up until now you could make a case, up
until the missiles fly, you could continue making a case
that it was the right thing to do, which is
part of one of the fucked up things about it, right, Right,
So this is this is a complicated topic, but I
do think these people are worth discussing in part because
these are all people who sat down and had conversations
about like, Okay, we do this and that'll kill about
six hundred million people. Yeah, build it, you know, like

(08:31):
the these are the talks that they were having. There's
a joke that gets made online today a lot, a
meme about a tech company building the Torment Nexus, an
imitation of classic sci fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.
It's kind of a joke about the way a lot
of tech broke, a lot of tech projects. Feel now
where it's like, this is exactly what the sci fi
that inspired you was warning against, right, But that really

(08:53):
is the reality of the atom bomb. And this is
not something I knew until I read the book Command
and Control by Eric Schlasser, which is one of the sources,
one of several books that I used to sources for
these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlosser
points out that the first person to conceive directly of
an atomic bomb was HG. Wells, who wrote a nineteen
fourteen novel titled The World Set Free. I was not aware,

(09:15):
and now there's some other candidates, but this is like
the first. I'll tell you why this is I think
the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine
an accurate, semi accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it,
Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the
backstory of the Federation. In Star Trek, scientists create the
ultimate explosive, a radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry

(09:36):
in a purse or suitcase quote an amount of latent
energy sufficient to wreck half a city. As Schlosser writes,
these atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind as every
nation seeks to obtain them and use them before being attacked.
Millions die, the world's great capitals are destroyed, and civilization
nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note,
as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment

(09:57):
of world government. And this is Wells. The catastrophe of
the atomic bombs, which shook men out of cities, shook
them also out of their old established habits of thought.
Wells wrote full of hope, and yeah, I think that's fascinating.
I didn't know any of that.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah, well, he also he is really into wargaming.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
He also he would have he would have been so
into Warhammer if he was.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
He genuinely was into wargaming. I know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah him as Warhammer man.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
I like that idea.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
He would have been. Also another war big wargaming nerd
who would have been into Warhammer was the guy who
played Grand Moth tarkan early Napoleonic wargamer. Anyway, Yeah, Wells's
nukes didn't work quite like the real things. They went
off slowly and they lot of huge amounts of radiation
over years of time. But Wells came pretty close to
foreseeing that the real thing, close enough to foreseeing the

(10:47):
real thing that in nineteen twenty nine, a Hungarian physicist
named Leo Sillard sz I l r d. Met with
Wells to try and purchase the literary rights to publish
his novel in Central Europe. This is relevant ter of
like who was the closest to a nuke? Because Leo
Zillard is one of the fathers of the Adam Baum.
A decade or so after trying to buy the rights

(11:08):
to this this is true, he comes to the US
and he's he becomes one of the architects of the
Manhattan Project, and he's a guy. You can't really blame Sillard,
right again, if we're talking about where does the moral
blame lay. He has the most understandable reason for wanting
to help the US build a nuke of anybody. And
it's kind of good to talk about him because it

(11:28):
does make the point that it's a little unfair to
judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the
world that formed them. Sillard was a Jewish refugee. He
fled Nazi Germany, and he wound up in the United States.
Because he was a physicist, and because he was a
refugee of the Holocaust, he knew not only the threat
that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a
bomb program going. In nineteen thirty nine, he sends a

(11:50):
letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears, and Einstein
is the guy who've sent the letter to Einstein. And
then yeah, Einstein helps him write a letter to FDR.
Yeah please, Yeah, like the Einstein helps him craft this
letter and he sends it to FDR. And this letter
warns about bombs of a new type, and FDR takes
the warning seriously that he keeps exploring the idea, which

(12:10):
helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in
nineteen forty two. Like, that's Leo Zillard and he ties
directly back to the Wells idea.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
That's awful.

Speaker 4 (12:19):
Let's so the fact that we could like literally say,
not only don't build the tournament nexus, but maybe don't
write the tournament maybe.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Don't read about the tournament nexus. I mean it's I
think Sillard probably was. I think he probably was into
Wells because he, like people had theorized before Wells that
something like an Adam bomb might be feasible on like
like the physicists had and I think Sillard was impressed
that Wells had gotten something so close. And also he
clearly wanted to warn the world about this thing, which

(12:49):
I think is why he was interested in purchasing the
rights to this. And we'll talk a little bit more
about him later, but is it is so tragic because
you can't blame him, like he's like his attitude is like,
we need, we need to have this because Hitler might
have it, right, yeah, which like, yeah, maybe I don't know,
but that's the same logic that like, and you know,
the USSR is not Nazi Germany, obviously we can the

(13:12):
proof of that is as simple as what happened in
the Cold War. Right, And to be fair, neither is
the United States. Neither country use the damn things on
the scale that would have ended civilization.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
You know, we'll talk about Heroshima and Nagasaki too, but
it's you understand, like Sillard's motivations are deeply sympathetic, right,
And a number of scientists behind the Manhattan Projects, some
of them are refugees, right, But the ones that aren't
still get into it because they're reading the news they see,
they're aware of how dangerous the US, like the US's
enemies are during World War Two, and it's a legitimate

(13:45):
threat that Germany in particular might get the bomb before
we do, right, And those stories are like half the
reason this happened, because a lot of people of goodwill
got involved with the Manhattan Project because they were like, well,
this is probably the lesser It's probably better that the
US has this than that a fascist country is the
only one with a nuke, right, right, Like that's their

(14:06):
logic here, and they they had to operate on. We
know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke, right,
just based on the choice because they didn't, right, they
went in different directions. They did not make the choices
ultimately that would have given you have.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
You heard this thing?

Speaker 4 (14:19):
Maybe it's in the script or maybe I'm like wrong
about this, that there was a work slow down of
the Nazi the Nazi bomb program where they were like
and they went and they tried to tell their US
counterparts like, hey, we're slowing down this bomb. You all
need to slow it down too. But the person that
they told didn't believe them and was like, oh shit,

(14:40):
they're trying to lie to us. They must be like
right about to build this bomb. Have you heard this story?

Speaker 2 (14:44):
No, ipant, actually no, no, no, it's not.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (14:48):
I can never remember the name of the book because
I found it in a trash can twenty years ago.
It was about the social history of building of the
bomb and I read this and and it like changed
the way that I was perceiving this stuff.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
But I've since read.

Speaker 4 (15:02):
More about this and research more about this, and I
think it's like messier than that. But I think again
just from memory, that there was like a work slowdown
in the Nazi program because it was all of these
physicists who used to work with Jews because before all
the Jews got kicked out of the physicist programs.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
I don't know. I don't know if that's sure or not.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Uh maybe do I so check on that, But I
want to believe. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple, there's
some good. There's some stories, I mean, and the espionage
is heavily baked into the whole story of how this
all happened, right, Yeah, And it's the spies in the
US who bring bomb information to the USSR. Are people

(15:41):
working on a similar logic to Zillard, where they're like, well,
the US is obviously not a good actor, and if
they're the only ones with the nuke, they're going to
kill everyone in the Soviet Union, right? Oh?

Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Like and maybe you know we talked about it any
you guys talked about it. We had a plan to
do it, you know, so you're not and maybe by
by the way, it's if it's arguable that building this
doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds
of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do,

(16:12):
and a lot of people argue that to this day,
then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak
information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the US would
have killed six hundred or so million people, right, right,
We know that because we talked about doing it a lot.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
You're really right with the like Schrodinger's bastards.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
People are heroes or bastards and we will never know.
And then half the timelines.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
They're one, and then half for the other.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
I guess part of why I'm doing this is that
if this happens like fifteen minutes after you finished listening
to this podcast, you'll know who to be angry at
and your last couple seconds of consciousness, assuming you're not
near ground zero for one of these things, yeah, you know,
and you probably want to be at ground zero. It's
the least painful option available. The road is optimistic in

(17:03):
terms of like the aftermath of thermonuclear war and a
planetary scale anyway, So those guy, but guys with that
logic basically that like, well, this is a messy thing.
I don't really want to be building a giant bomb,
but it might save a lot of lives in the
long run. That's like a sizeable chunk of the Manhattan Project. Right.

(17:24):
That's like a big amount of the logic behind the
reason individual people got involved. Right. The other half, though,
is and this is largely on the military side of things.
It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is how the
military thinks of these weapons, both when we're starting to
plan one and then immediately after we start using them. Right.
And the military logic for why this is, why building

(17:47):
this system, why getting as many of these things as
possible is a good idea is based on a military
theory that starts to take hold after the end of
the First World War, and this is ultimately the theory
that leads us to the system of internet national usually
assured destruction that we live in today. Right, And there's
an element of historical rhyming here that we build this

(18:07):
global real literal global doomsdaate device as a result of
a theory that takes off in the end of World
War One, based on what happened in World War One,
because World War One is itself the result of a
doomsday device going off, a device that was never supposed
to go off, and a device that a lot of
people a lot if you right up until the start
of World War One, if you talked about this, this

(18:29):
system of alliances and military build up, right and like
an arms build up that like you've got all these munitions,
refit schedules and whatnot and interlocking alliances was meant to
ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war,
Right That was the people who would defend it would
say that, like, well, if everyone's really well armed, and
if everybody's always and if we have all these alliances

(18:52):
between different powers that make it an unwinnable situation, we
won't have this war. Right, people would make that argument.
You know now obviously the technology at the time, they
didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines, so they
had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one
country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf. And
these do work like a machine, right, and that's that

(19:13):
is what happens. You know, you have Austria declares war
on Serbia that brings France and Germany into it. The
German plan that they had built meant that like, well,
the only way we can possibly win this war is
we have to do this specific kind of invasion that
takes us through Belgium that brings Great Britain into the
you know, and so on and so forth, right, and
a maxim gun and they've got that. Everyone's got a

(19:35):
version of the maxim gun, and everyone's got your Everyone's
also thinking, well, I just re like we just refurbished
and upgraded our artillery, and France is France has just
upgraded this thing, but they haven't upgraded this thing. And
if we go now, they won't have the new version
of this thing, and ours will still be Like that's
a big part of the thinking too, right, And this
is like always the case and it had been for

(19:58):
decades prior to World War and prior to World War One,
the fact that it would be so costly and it
was so like everyone's plan for victory rested on so
many like assumptions and was sketchy enough, no one really
wanted to do this, right. I mean, with the exception
of the military thinkers who had spent their entire lives

(20:19):
building and planning out the system of like, this is
how we're going to activate our troops, this is the
order at which we'll get the marching, and this is
where they'll move in. They really So you have this
mix of nobody on the civilian side of governance wants
to think about this seriously because it would be a
calamity and they know it, and everyone in the military

(20:39):
is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start
having leaders need to make a decision as to whether
or not they're going to go to war, the loudest
voice in the ear is this general who's thought of
nothing else's entire professional life. And by the way, in
the six minutes a US president would have to decide
whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice
in his ear is going to be a guy who
thinks about using the nukes NonStop.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
Yeah, it's like his job, it's his job.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
This is like the you know, the whole like an
armed society is a polite society, logical fallacy. Yeah, you know,
Like it's it's just so interesting that's this written large
where we have Yeah, we have data that shows that
an armed society is not a polite society.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
It sure isn't.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Not.

Speaker 4 (21:22):
I pro Second Amendment for complicated reasons, but very complicated,
but like it's just not It's like you could watch
all the videos of people being like you parked in
my space and now they're shooting at each other. Yeah,
and they would have been punching each other in a
different world.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yes, And it's one of those things I have had.
I've literally had the exact situation of, like, I had
a situation that would have been violent, but we all
had guns and knew it and so nobody started shit, right.
And I'm also more than aware of the fact that
like the United States is more violent than a lot
of unarmed societies, right.

Speaker 4 (21:56):
And yeah, because if you carry a gun, you have
to have an entirely mindset where you kind.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Of changes everything.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, you actually can't stand up to you for yourself.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
You kind of have to take possibly even the first punch, right,
You have to do everything, possibly literally everything to avoiding
taken a couple hits. Yeah, because you know that you're
capable of an overwhelming capacity of violence. Yeah, and it
people don't do that. Instead they're like, isn't this sick?

(22:26):
I've got overwhelming capacity of violence?

Speaker 2 (22:28):
And that's one of the worries with like the nukes,
is when they go from because prior, one thing I
will say, and this is something I'll even give Nixon.
Basically all of our leaders and all of the Soviet leaders, right,
it's it's a mistake to leave them out too. This
is the thing that would only have worked if both
sides were similar. For all of the flaws of all
of the men running both countries the duration of the
Cold War, all of them had one thing in common,

(22:50):
which is they were guys who were like, no, that
would be fucked up. Yeah, that that'd be fucked up.
We're just not gonna do that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
There's some great I mean fucking Reagan has some really
good quotes of like, oh, like where he's like having
this conscience of like, I can't believe we as human
beings created this nightmare system. This is so much worse
than I ever knew it was. What's wrong with people?
Raygan had those moments.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
Right, because he wants to punch people. Yeah, you know
he wants that. Yeah, he's want the lower level of violence, like, and.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
There's some good there's a good JFK quote when this
all got explained to him for the first because JFK
one of the things he did is he took away
the military's control of the nukes right and made it
because the military used to be have a basically theoretically
could have made the call to launch the missiles, went
without presidential authority. It wasn't mechanically necessary the way it
is now, right, like the way the code system works now,

(23:41):
you mechanically have to have the president looped in. Right,
although there will talk about that it's not a perfect
system either, but that that became the way we do
it during JFK's administration. And when he when all of
this got explained to him how this works, I think
his exact quote was like, can we call ourselves the
human race?

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Like?

Speaker 2 (24:01):
What the fuck? Yeah, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah,
and they all like, there's a lot. You get a
lot of reactions like that from presidents, and that's the
only reason we're all alive to this day. And that's
the thing, not just with the US and Russia, but
with any country that gets a nuclear power, is maybe
you get someone at the head of that country who
can think about that, and who can think about for

(24:22):
whom it's not an unthinkable, right, And that changes everybody's
calculus to a startling degree. Right, This is why a
lot of people there's a good book called Nuclear War
by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in
a pretty unsparing term, and she provides like a theoretical
and her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles
for unclear reasons, right. And what I don't like about

(24:45):
it is I don't really agree with the whole the
Kim family are like crazy thing. I think they're pretty
rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the
same things that other countries aren't. Entirely.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, they're back to the wall, Like I'm not trying
to apologize for him, but.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
I see a logic in what they're doing. I don't
think they're crazy, right, and which is there's a what
I think is I don't think his book is as good.
But there was another book that came out a year
or two previously, by another like a scholar interested in
the nuclear mutually shared destruction system that was also a
North Korea US exchange hypothetical, but that didn't rely on

(25:24):
North Korea being crazy. In fact, everyone was performing logically right.
It like, basically the premise was North Korea does something
that kills some South Korean civilians, right. I think that's
they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits,
which has happened before. Right, North Korea has in fact
killed South Korean civilians, not all that long ago. Right.

(25:46):
And as a result, the North Korean present, without seeking
US approval, fires missiles at military targets non nuclear missiles
at military targets in North Korea. But the leader of
North Korea doesn't know that the US didn't approve of
the firing of missiles, and their system can't entirely tell

(26:07):
what's incoming and what's not, and they see one. Once
North or South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the
US starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes
aware and anyway, it's this whole it's this whole cycle
of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just
requires And by the way, one of the things we
found at very recently is that the currently imprisoned former

(26:28):
president of South Korea, who is being charged with I
believe insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into
North Korea illegally without getting US approval or anything while
he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically
get to declare martial law. Right, So, like this stuff,
like shit like that happens all the time. It just
hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple

(26:50):
stages of a few different apocalypses occur. This is not
a crazy This is not crazy, and it doesn't require
any power Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes
to be like mustache twirling mad man. It just requires
them to all be have incomplete, imperfect information and focused
on their own survival. Right, Yeah, it's it's good.

Speaker 4 (27:11):
I'm like, while you're talking, I'm thinking about all the
other countries that also have nukes and like their own
things going on, Like yeah, you know, like like I mean,
Israel and North Korea are like comparable entities in my
mind in terms of being like small powers with that
are like pariah states. Yeah that probably aren't going to
do something to get themselves. Like I actually could see personally,

(27:34):
I could see a big state feeling more confident to
do it, you know.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
But yeah, uh, anyway, we'll keep talking about this, Margaret.
But uh, first, here's some ads. We're back. Yeah, so
we got off on a little bit of a tangent.
But I wanted to get back to a point I
was making, which is the history rhyming between the system.

(28:03):
Like the mutually assured destruction is a product of a
military theory that gets born at the This this theory
of strategic bombing that gets born at the end of
World War One, Right, And that theory only exists because
World War One happens, and World War One is the
result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go
off going off. Right, You have all these treaties and

(28:23):
stuff that basically guarantee that if one of a couple
of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them,
it will start a chain reaction that leads to a
general European war, right, and because of the way that
armies work in this period, right and all basically all
military wisdom at this point is based on the last war,

(28:46):
as it always is, and the last war for Europe
is the Franco Prussian War of eighteen seventy to eighteen
seventy one. That's not literally the last conflict in Europe
during this period, but it's the last big one that
people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions, like.

Speaker 4 (28:59):
This versus France, is the only way to have a
European war, right, It's like.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Ah, man, I mean, we have not had a good
European war since those two got their shit together, and
that's why I think we should start tweaking them both.
You know, just just start see who we can make
angrier at the other. You know, Germany, I hear France
has been talking hell of shit. You know, just set
the radiant a little bit, yeah, shit, set the right
on Firefuck it, let's see what happens. Only France has nukes,
so we should be fine. Anyway. The great land powers

(29:27):
of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent,
Austro Hungary knew that the instant war was declared. There
was this clock ticking, right, because most of your army
is reserves, right, The largest amount of manpower you have
isn't your active duty. It's this this mass of like
reserve troops, these guys who when they're eighteen or whatever,
they're basically drafted. They sometimes serve like a year and

(29:47):
then for a period of time they have to do.
It's basically they're all in the national guard, right, that's
the norm. In most of these states. You have some
version of that, and so it takes a period of
time to call these guys up from civilian life, to
issue them their gear, to get them moved into their units,
and then to get them moved to the front. So
everyone is working not just not only do have this
interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side

(30:12):
knows I have to be able to get my reserves
ready for active duty before the enemy can. Otherwise they're
going to invade before I have my army, which means
I have a ticket like I. Once the Archdeoke of
Austria Hungary is assassinated, and then people start to realize
that generally European war is in play. It's not just
a matter of diplomatically, can we smooth this, It's that

(30:34):
all of my generals are shouting that, like, if we
don't mobilize now, we don't know that France isn't mobilizing, right,
we can't tell they might be mobilizing, and if they're mobilizing,
we only have this period of time to start mobilizing
in turn. Right, that's a big part of everybody's thinking here.
And that's the same with nuclear war, right, where you
don't know entirely what the other side is doing. We
the US have pretty good data on when people are

(30:56):
because we have this nuts insane like level of life spice,
satellites and shit like that, although all of it has errors,
all of it has things that can go wrong. Right,
none of it's perfect Today, I will run it.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
It'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, So everyone's acting off of imperfect information, and everybody
has a very limited timeframe, and they're being shouted at
by their generals that if we don't move in time,
were fucked, right, the whole country could be fucked. And
you have x amount of time now they have it's
days and weeks, you know, in the case of these
European monarchs, right, but that's still a ticking clock. Right. Anyway,

(31:32):
we all know how World War One goes not great
at least for everyone. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide
and basically all of the one of the things that's
fascinated to me, and this is the case in a
lot of wars. Everyone's planning at the start of World
War One is based on how the last war had gone,
and everyone's planning is wrong. Germany. Germany's plan to knock

(31:55):
France out of the war in the first couple of
months doesn't work. France and Russia have this plan where
we'll both hit Germany on either side, right, if Germany
starts some shit, we'll come in on both flanks and
we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute
the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain
has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, well,
we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up,

(32:18):
and it'll probably be fine, right, And they realize, oh no,
actually we're kind of you have to have actually millions
of guys with guns, you know, how fast can we
draft all the coal miners, all of these and Germany
or Great Britain's plans are based in part on like, well,
we've got this great navy, that's probably all we'll need, right,
And they have a Tolkien and they got Jero Tolkien

(32:38):
somewhere in there. You know, surely will be okay. Anyway,
everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war,
and it leads to disaster. And so after the carnage
a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying
what had happened to try to make predictions about what
would happen in the next war, which is the same
thing that did happened after eighteen seventy one. And they'd
made the wrong predictions. But they're sure this time we'll

(33:00):
get it. Wal we're smarter than that. Last generation of
military thinkers will make conclusions from the last war that
are right, you know. And one of these guys, among
the most influential of these fuckers, is an Italian general
named Guilio Duhey. Now. He had been born in Caserta,
Italy in eighteen sixty nine, but his family were refugees
from Savoy, which was a former Italian possession that had

(33:22):
been ceded to the perfidious French. As a young man,
he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer
in the Italian Army. He continued his formal education by
studying engineering at a university in Turin. Du Haey rose
steadily through the ranks, and by the early nineteen hundreds
he was a member of the Italian General Staff, basically
their joint chiefs. Right, that's kind of the idea. He

(33:43):
had been an early advocate for dirigibles, initially used as
spots for artillery and the like, and once the first
aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for
aircraft as a weapons system. Right now, this on its
own is a noteworthy He was right, obviously aircraft are
pretty important in modern war. Yeah, but very a lot
of people, I'm not. It wasn't universal. There were certainly

(34:04):
some guys being like, no, the infantryman with a rifless
will be the always be the core of any war
fighting effort. We don't need planes. There were some nuts,
but most intelligent people were like, obviously planes are going
to be useful, you know, being able to have the
sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict and
do Hay. But one thing that did make him noteworthy

(34:26):
where he was kind of seeing far ahead, was that
he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of
ground commanders, right, it would effectively need to be its
own kind of service, you know. And this is something
even during World War Two. There's not an air force
in the US. We have the Army Air Corps, right,
it's a part of the Army, do Hay ahead of
times it's like, no, the air power should be its

(34:47):
own independent branch. It's different enough, right, it's like the navy.
In nineteen eleven, he got a chance to act on
some of his theories when Italy went to war again
in Libya against the Ottomans, because an awful lot of
Italians had never really gotten over Roman Empire. That's the
gist of why we keep fucking with Ethiopia. Du Hay's
conclusion from this was and this was like the first

(35:08):
real world use of air combat power for Italy. And
his conclusion is that in the future planes will get
better and high altitude bombing will become the number one
battlefield role of planes. Right, this is not true for
World War Two entirely. I mean it's debatable, right, but
there's a lot of argument that that that that's not
entirely that high altitude bombing was not the number one

(35:30):
battlefield use of air power.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
It wasn't high altitude bombing more like bombing civilians civilians.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
But close air support is less high altitude because you
can't do it as accurately, right, Like you need to
be closer to not hit your own guys as much.
This is one of those things technologies made this kind
of true because like even a lot of what we'd
call close air support today is still pretty high altitude
because you can fire a missile from pretty high altitude, right,

(35:57):
like if like modern like modern weapon systems, you can
shoot from higher up. But he's wrong in spirit, right,
which is that like this is not the way most
effective combat use of airpower in World War two is
not high altitude bombing, right, And even if you look
in the Pacific theater, right, like, it's a lot of
naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but

(36:19):
it's not really high altitude bombing. You know, Pearl Harbor
isn't high altitude bombing, right, Like it's a different kind
of use of aircraft. But dou Haey is certain that
high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the
not just like critical, but basically the only thing that
airpower will be used for. Right, And he's he's so

(36:42):
certain of this that he becomes kind of an asshole
about it, right, Like he illegally orders the construction of
bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money,
and it burns out his career. He gets forced into
the infantry, and he spends the early stages of World
War One basically screaming that Italy can win. We can
break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make
the enemy harmless if we could just gain command of

(37:03):
the air. And he calls for the construction of five
hundred bombers to drop one hundred and twenty five tons
of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the
stalemate of trench warfare. Now, yeah, so this is the
kind of thing It seems ahead of its time, right,
because this is sort of where military thinking went, right, Like,
it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking World

(37:24):
War two because of dou Hay. But it's not correct
ahead of its time in part like Italy simply couldn't
have built five hundred high altitude bombers to drop that
kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have
the capacity, like the Italian industry, the Italian military in
the middle of World War One was not going to
be able to do that. Right, It's just not a

(37:44):
realistic ask of the country.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Yeah, it is not getting slaughtered in the war already.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
Yeah, they don't have at the spare resources. And also
bombers aren't that good yet right, like they will be
by World War two. But do Hay is not saying
this is what I mean. He will eventually say this
is how the future should work, But he is also
arguing we should be trying to do this right now,
and Italy just doesn't have the resources or technical know
how to create the bomber fleet he wants in nineteen fifteen,

(38:11):
when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen,
and he is such an asshole about this that he
is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about
how because he's calling his superiors incompetent for not following
through with this impossible plan.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Like Yeah, you don't get away with that during a war.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
No, they lock him up for a while, but he
keeps writing about his ideas while he's in jail, and
the war gets worse and worse for Italy, and he's
eventually brought back and given command of the Aviation Bureau,
which shows you how desperate Italy is. After the end
of hostilities, he starts work on his magnum opus, a
manifesto on the future of strategic air power. In nineteen
twenty one, it was published under the title The Command

(38:49):
of the Air. Now, some of his arguments are pretty strong, right.
One of the things he's saying is that, like, look
at what happened in this fucking First World War. It
was a shit show. Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right,
You can get right over them. You can hit targets
behind the trenches like their artillery, right, and you could
maybe knock infantry out of trenches. Now, this is actually

(39:09):
something One of the things will be proved wrong on
that is that infantry and trenches are a lot less
vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be. Right.
Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people, especially
with the kind of technology they're going to have by
World War two, it's better than just shelling them endlessly.
But it is not the get out of trench free card.

(39:30):
Do Hey pretends it is right now? Du Hay is
also he's one of a number of growing military theorists
who had learned from the last war that these huge
conscript armies that everybody has moved towards. Like, if that's
how war works, if the whole male civilian population is
potentially part of the military, and the whole country is

(39:50):
being mobilized to support the military, then you can't limit
yourself to just striking troops in the field. In future
wars civilian populations. Do hey attitude is, civilian populations make
continued resistance possible, and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure
of war must be attacked, right yeap. Oops.

Speaker 4 (40:13):
You know it's funny whenever there's these things that are
technologically developed that I just would have assumed or older,
like I would have just assumed somehow that like bombing
civilian populations is somehow older than this as a like,
I mean tactic.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
You know, it is like this duet is not the
first military leader to be like civilians are a valid This,
in fact, is the norm in a lot of ancient warfare, right, Like,
fucking a lot of times in ancient Greece, one city
state goes to war against another. The one that loses
does not get to keep being a city state. You
inihilate them, right, you kill the men, you rape the women, right, Like,

(40:49):
That's not every war, but a lot of wars in
classical history go that way.

Speaker 4 (40:53):
So I've been reading that for my show recently, and
I suddenly like had to realize. I was like, oh,
the concept of surren under yeah, is sort of new.
It's a new technology, is to actually like let people
go home after you beat That's.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
It's more that it had stopped being the norm to
consider the whole country to be enemies. But even during
World War One, right, Great Britain starves a million Germans
to death by by blocking ports Germany. We know they
can't grow, they don't have the ability to produce sufficient
food stuffs on their own. That's part of the military effort. Right.
It's not as direct as bombing civilians, but it would be.

(41:31):
It would be very inaccurate to pretend Duhey is the
first guy who is like civilians are on the table, right.

Speaker 4 (41:36):
No, totally, but specifically the idea of this standard ice, Yeah,
exactly exactly, it's meaningful.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah, yeah, Like I think that that is important that
he is the guy writing in a book this is
the this is a logical strategy for how modern war
ought to be pursued, is the systematic destruction of civilian
populations through strategic bombing, Right, it is does matter that
he's the first guy to write that, you know, like
that's that's upon his soul. Yeah, yeah, Which is not

(42:06):
to say that nobody would have thought to do stuff
like this if he hadn't been around, right.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
No, But I mean just because someone else will invent
the torment nexus is not a reason to invent the
torment nexis.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
And no, nor does it erase your culpability and making
it now. One of my sources for this episode is
an article by Colonel Everest Rascioni of the One of
the more who's one of the more influential pilots in
US combat aviation history, is an interesting guy. He was
a key member of what became known as the Fighter Mafia,
which is a group of guys in the Air Force
who argue and this is in like the latter half

(42:35):
of the twentieth century, they argue that like the branch's
bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about the This is like
right before the birth of I think the F sixteen.
They're they're they're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt
and it's lying about how well certain weapons systems work
for corrupt reasons. And as a result, they have all
these complaints about like hybrid role fighters as opposed to

(42:56):
dedicated anti aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debatus to
whether or not the fighter mafia was right bringing this up,
because this is a guy who has a history of
being on controversial sides of arguments right, and he wrote
an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for
the Air Force right where he is kind of laying
out his thinking as to why do Hay was wrong,
and he summarizes do Hay's arguments this way. He also

(43:18):
believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land
and at sea, and that an enemy's ability to sustain
a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of
enemy airpower in the air and on the ground. The
need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but
also to destroy their eggs and their nests. Hay wrote
enemy aircraft production plants were defined as prime strategic targets.
He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses

(43:40):
against them were useless. He believed that attacking populations with
relatively small amounts of explosives, incendiary and gas weapons would
make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He
believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential
enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the
way very influential people in military plannings still think to
this day. Do Hayes thinking is incredibly common, or at

(44:03):
least a descendants of do Hayes thinking is incredibly common
within military planners to this day. And this is the
root of mutually assured destruction. It starts with these ideas, right,
particularly the idea, yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:16):
That people won't put up with it from their leaders.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
That people won't put up with it that well, and
that a powerful strategic bombing force can deter an attack,
right right, Okay, because your ability because they can't be stopped.
You can't stop a bombing run right, it's impossible. Part
of his attitudes that the sky is too big, right,
you can't actually stop bombers from getting to where they're
going to go. So if you have a powerful enough

(44:41):
bombing fleet, like no one will attack you because they
know they're doomed in that instance, right, And this is
basically how we think about near peer nuclear warfare to
this day, right, and that knowledge deters those soda of wars.
So this is part of why people will argue to
Hey round up being right even though he did not.
We're seeing nuclear weapons right in any way, shape or form.

(45:02):
And to be clear, he's not right right.

Speaker 4 (45:05):
He was wrong about bombers, but he was right for
now about nukes.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Well. This is kind of the theme of our episodes
is that a lot of people buy into do Hayes's
theories and base their careers in the Air Force on
believing that this is more or less right. And once
nukes come around, that's the thing that makes that they're
the things they had already believed true and as part
of why they become such advocates for nuclear warfare. Right now,
I want to really emphasize how wrong Duhey is here,

(45:31):
because he is not making grand predictions about the distant future.
Nor is he theorizing about twenty first century nuclear warfare
or even late twentieth century warfare. He is discussing the
war he expected to break out in the next twenty
years or so, and on basically every technical point, du
Haey was desperately wrong. Again. He argues, the sky is
so big that airpower should only be offensive because airpower

(45:53):
cannot defend territory, and the only way to protect the
homeland is to build an air force that can bomb
the enemy into the ground before you're opponent can do
the same. He makes really specific predictions, arguing in nineteen
twenty eight that dropping a payload of just three hundred
tons of bombs over a capital city and under a
month would be enough to end a war. This would
all be proven catastrophically wrong, but for the later period

(46:15):
of his life do Hay as effectively the first air
power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but
it becomes the bible of how to make an air
force for basically all of the men who were in
charge of the air forces in World War Two. Like
on every side, he's super influential, and that's not entirely accurate.
He has his detractors, obviously, but he's massively influential, and

(46:38):
I'm sure to Hay would have been thrilled to have
had such an influence because everyone in World War Two
tries out his ideas, but he never gets a chance
to see that. Shortly after Benito Mussolini makes him the
Italian chief of Aviation, he dies of a heart attack
in nineteen thirty. So, by the way, ends's life is
a fascist two.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
Yeah, couldn't happen to a worse guy.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Really tragic. You know who else died of a heart
attack in nineteen thirty after being made the Fascist Minister
of Aviation by Benita Mussolini.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
His twin brother.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, sure, or these sponsors, I don't know. Great, and
we're back. I was an awkward ad pivot. I'm not
gonna lie, Margaret. I'm not gonna lie. But I think
the audience will forgive us.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
I think they will. I think they'll be able to
find it in their heart attack to do it.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (47:32):
Yeah, that's actually what I'm trying to do is make
you feel better by making a terrible joke. So those
people have already forgotten about your bad ad pivot.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Thank you, Thank you, Margaret. Let's continue talking about this
guy's stupid ideas about how planes work. Right.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
Three hundred bombs, Yeah, three hundred tons of bombs all
you need that'll wipe out any cities, will to fight.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
So, German war planners, influenced by dou Haye, built a
bomber fleet that was tailored for the attack, not operations
on enemy cities, but providing close support to their advancing
infantry and armour. And this is you could call this
an adaptation of some of de Haetes, certainly influenced by it,
this idea that like air power should just be for
the offense, right, like that that's its primary purpose. And

(48:19):
so it's kind of an adaptation, right. England also dou
Hayes attitudes have a lot of influence on how the
Royal Air Force is constructed in the inter war period,
and England spins a lot of resources creating a bomber
command that was meant to deter German action on the
continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids.
You know, that does not exactly work out. Here's how

(48:41):
Colonel Risioni describes what happened next. Germany then turned to
the invasion of England and its first test of dou
Hayes's theories. The Battle of Britain was engaged to gain
air superiority for operations Sea Lion. Britain's bomber command had
failed to deter the war and the attacks on England,
but Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to
its knees. The Luftwaffa tried to gain superiority over England.

(49:01):
The initially frail fighter force of the Royal Air Force,
under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Doubting
and using the nascent technology of radar, was able to
inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts.
After the Battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler
turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population
to its knees. Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened

(49:22):
the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to
a higher pitch. So from the start do hay has
proven wrong, just immediately on boccounts about yes, yeah, the
having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also,
you can defend from a bombing attack, and aircraft are
great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works

(49:45):
really fucking well.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
It's funny because like this is the Europe gave medieval
warfare was a big part of medieval Europe, right, and
like the development of armor until.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
You get to guns.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
Yeah, it's like really it's the development of armor that
is the new technology that's changing.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
Shit.

Speaker 4 (50:04):
You put a fucking armored knight against anybody and they're
just like, yeah, you kind of can't do anything unless
you get a dagger to my throat, you know.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, yeah, no, that's it. Like it is. It is
the same. It takes place over a shorter period of
time with airpower because shit moves faster now, right, But
it is the I mean this it's the it's the
the red Queen hypothesis, right, like everyone is constantly moving
as fast as they can just to stay in place,
you know, like you were you you build up this
great bomber fleet just in time to get attacked by

(50:33):
a bomber fleet of your own and realize, actually, we
probably should have had more fighters that might have been handier.
It's to jump right, yeah, But also the Germans are
learning all you need is a bunch of bombers. We've
got a bunch of bombers. Oh shit, fighter aircraft really
fuck up bombers. Oh no, all our pilots are gone.

Speaker 4 (50:50):
Who'd have thought Mussolidi would have named a guy who
wasn't actually as good at things as he said he was.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Would have thought the Italian fascist Minister of Aviation was
wrong about some important points right now. One of the
things that is important for what will come next is
it is true air power is great on the defensive,
and it's actually very possible to interdict and damage bombers

(51:15):
before they can hit their targets. But not a single
group of bombers on any side during the war is
turned back right entirely without being able to drop any bombs.
That doesn't happen, which for nuclear planning. This again, one
of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes do Hey correct
on is that like, well, once you've got nukes, if

(51:37):
you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs,
then yeah, fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers
and do enough damage that it renders like, you know,
the Germans will drop some bombs in response, but you
can make it be more costly for the Germans than
it is for Great Britain. Right, if a thousand bombers
each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from

(51:57):
hitting and all they need is one, right, Right, That
is an important point about this is another lesson that's
being learned right at the same time as we're learning
how wrong dou Hay is. Once nukes come into the picture,
people are going to be looking at this data and
seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a
nuclear attack of sufficient size even before ICBMs.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:19):
Yeah, the scale of destructiveness of a nuke is just
so different. Yeah yeah, it's huh yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Now, I do want to really emphasize the wrongness that
do Hay was because again he said that about three
hundred tons of explosives in a month dropped over an
enemy capital would be enough to break any people's will
to fight. During a single night, during the Battle of
Britain May tenth to May eleventh, nineteen forty one, Germany
dropped more than seven hundred tons of high explosives on
London as well as eighty six thousand incendiary devices. England

(52:49):
kept fighting.

Speaker 4 (52:51):
Yeah, no, they came up with the whole crazy slogan
about it. Yeah, everyone pulled together of like orwell like
organizing in the home.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Yeah, a lot of people felt better. Yeah yeah, which
is a fun story.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Gives us punk rock that people grew up out of.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
That gives us punk rock. Sure. Yeah, but yeah, that
is an important point again just to how wrong dow
Hay is, Like, yeah, we took more than twice as
much as he said would break any city in a
month and a night. London did, and people don't break
under bombing, you know, which is also going to influence
nuclear thinkers because then the attitude becomes, well you just

(53:29):
have to kill all of them then.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah. So despite the fact that do Hay is right
out the gate proven wrong, war planners on the Allied
side continue to give a great deal of credence to
his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris,
also known as Bomber Harris, who became head of the
RAF's Bomber Command. He was a huge advocate of area

(53:51):
bombing precision bombing, which is another thing people are. The
strategic bombing side also breaks down to a couple of
broad schools, and as is always the case, most people
are you know, have are a little take some from
column as from Colum b. But there's you've got area
bombing and precision bombing, right, And the idea behind precision
bombing is that you can hit just the target you want.

(54:12):
That is, like the factory making bombs or the factory
making planes, right, or a barracks, and not hit the
high rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is
a lie, right, it's especially it's it's not all that
true today, but it's especially a lie in World War Two. Right,
it's a lot. Now you can kind of do it,
although it never works as well as planners like to

(54:34):
claim it does. But in World War Two it's just
a fantasy, right, And so there's a lot of that
that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris,
who are like, well, fuck precision bombing, just bomb desaturate
an area with bombing, right, you accept greater civilian casualties
so that you can cripple their industrial capabilities. Right, that's

(54:54):
the public argument. In private, they're saying something different, But
the public argument is that this is just the way
it has to work. The first area bombings by the
RAF on German cities was in nineteen forty one, in
nineteen forty two, and they did not work very well. Right.
They's spun as wins, but on an actual strategic level,
they're not huge hits. They caused some shock to the
German citizenry, but they don't accomplish the stated goal, which

(55:17):
is to damage war production. Right, and the RAF suffers
high casualties because German air defenses are excellent. You know,
do Hay continues to be very wrong about air defense.
It is popular possible. I mean in Vietnam, North Vietnam.
Part of why the war goes the way it does
is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air defenses. Right,
something gets lost in the whole. It was just some
farmers in the jungle that beat the US. No, they

(55:40):
had an army, they had radar guided missiles and everything.
You know. When Arthur Harris took over bomber command for
Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign,
Operation Millennium. On May thirtieth of nineteen forty two, nearly
eleven hundred Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some six hundred

(56:02):
acres of the city and rendering one hundred thousand people homeless.
Harris declared the raid a success. The British press did too,
but they focused on the destruction of war industry, not
the civilian cost, and this frustrated Harris, in part because
it was inaccurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged
or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent of a
month's war production. The real cost to Germany, as bomber

(56:25):
Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later described
the purpose of bomber Command. In his eyes, the aim
is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers,
and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It
should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities,
transport and lives, the creation of a refugee prob an
unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home

(56:47):
and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and
intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy.
They are not by products of attempts to hit factories.

Speaker 4 (56:58):
Yeah, that makes sense. So does the same stealing the reserve.
Like I've I've met someone whose family I think it
was Colne or Cologne. I just did the ass whole
thing where I've been to a city, so I'm like, let.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Me use the whatever.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
Yeah. But you know, it's like I've met someone who
was like, oh, yeah, my whole family was like staunch
anti Nazis, and then eighty percent of the family was
wiped out in one night by an by a bombing,
and then they all join the army And I'm like, yeah,
they still joined the Nazi army, so fuck them. But
like also like, yeah, I couldn't tell you that anyone
I've ever met would do anything.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
That's just how people work when their family gets killed
in a bombing. Yeah, if they get pissed, they don't
always they're not their best selves, you know exactly. That's
that's just how people be. Homie, I don't know what
to tell you. They don't like having their families killed
by bombs. Yeah, And there's as we'll talk about a
lot of debate as to the influence of strategic bombing

(57:50):
on the German civilian population, but what we can say
is that it's not why they lose. However, however, whatever
it does to morale doesn't in the war. You know,
So Bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude right
as to like what would work to actually in the war,
and he doesn't. He never gets called on that because
we win the war anyway, and everyone kind of thinks,

(58:13):
fuck those guys, low key a high key but and
you know, fuck them, but it doesn't work. That is important. Now.
There's not agreement and in fact a huge a lot
of conflict between the US and Great Britain over the strategy. Initially,
the guys in the US Army Air Command do not
all agree with Harris, and in fact we keep conducting

(58:34):
the Brits are doing night time raids, which allows you
to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians
or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for
a long time, which are way more dangerous because the
idea is it gives these civilians more of a chance
to get away, right, that's part of why you're doing it.
It's more honorable basically, right, which it is, but it

(58:54):
also means you lose a lot more guys right, like,
it's way more dangerous. Yeah, it's very dnerable thing I
think that we're doing for a while. We're not always
going to be that way. So yeah, this debate really
starts to erupt after this point. And on one end
you've got these area bombing strategic bombing advocates saying like,

(59:15):
you know, I know it hasn't quite worked yet, right, Like,
we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not
giving up yet, but if we just get more bombers, bro,
it'll work.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
And on the other side, and again a lot of
people do kind of wind up in the middle here,
but the other side broadly are like, well, close air
support is what's most important, right. Airpower's primary use is
its ability to augment conventional forces in taking and holding territory, right,
And it works really well. It had proved to be
tantalizingly potent in North Africa, and guys in the US

(59:47):
like General Pete Cassada were bullish about its potential in
a future invasion of France. An early test for the
strategic bombing advocates, on the other hand, came prior to
the invasion of Sicily. There's this island called Antillaria, which
is garrisoned with about eleven thousand Italian troops that we
need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy.

(01:00:07):
And I'm going to quote for an article in National
Interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pantelleria became
an experiment when anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt
that bombing would ratify what up to then had been
a matter of faith, but would soon offer proof through
bombing alone, surrender was a certainty. All these forces were
assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what
a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing

(01:00:29):
more in, then in due course of time it becomes
impossible for him to defend himself. Major General Jimmy Doolittle said,
if bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies
planned to invade the island by June eleventh. In an
attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, the Allies
generated five two hundred and eighty four sorties, dropping a
total of twelve point four million pounds of bombs on Pantelleria.
Jesus did it work kay After a month of unopposed

(01:00:56):
round the clock bombing. The Italians surrendered after Allied ground
troops had approached the island. Right, They did surrender on
their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops
came in. Now you can still say, but that still worked. Right. However,
there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses
were remarkably intact still given the force deployed against them,

(01:01:17):
because nearly every bomb missed. The B seventeens were most accurate,
with a twenty two percent hit rate. That's defined as
landing a bomb within one hundred yards of its target.
So the B seventeens hit twenty two percent of the time,
and that's our best bomber.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
And that's within a football field, because that's still within
a football field.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Yeah, and our medium bombers hit rate is about six percent. Now,
this is a problem because we had been claiming very
different things about the accuracy of our bombs. Back at
the start of nineteen forty three, we'd had something called
the Casablanca Conference, in which Winston Churchill sat down with
the eighth Air Force Commander Ira Eaker, who promised the
British Prime Minister that the B seventeen flying fortress. That's

(01:01:57):
fancy knew. We had these things called the Norden bomb Site,
which was like, this is the shit. This makes precision
bombing possible. It's like almost it's like a little computerized
bombing system that like, we can do things with bombs
we never could do before. You can drop a bomb
for twenty five thousand feet and hit a target the
size of a pickle barrel. Right, that's the promise Iri
Echer makes Winston Churchill when he's like they're sitting there,

(01:02:19):
He's like, we can hit a pickle barrel at twenty
five thousand feet. Now in combat. A few months later,
these things would hit within a football field only twenty
two percent of the time. Yeah, so you're getting this.
This is going to be also a theme with all
of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They
will make all these claims about yes, you know, it'll
it's it's this accurate, and it's this safe, and it

(01:02:39):
can only be activated if this and this and this happens,
so it like could never be accidentally fired. And they're like,
oh wait, but what if this thing happens that happens
every day, Oh yeah, that could accidentally launch all of
our missiles. Yeah, are you guys gonna fix it? We
actually don't wanna. That's the story of the minute Man
in a nutshell, but we'll talk more about that later. Anyway,
with a fleet of these eager price we can disembowel

(01:03:01):
the German Reich and destroy its industrial capacity with no
need for ground forces. Right, we can just get the
Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct
experience with aerial warfare, and he does not believe Eger, right,
he doesn't believe about the accuracy. And the other thing
that iri Eker is saying is we don't need fighter
escorts for our B seventeens because they have all these

(01:03:22):
guns on them that will that'll be enough to deter attack.
We can send the fortress. Yeah, that's basically the idea
behind that title. But like, yeah, because these B seventeens
are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to
if they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate.
And that that's necessary because the bombers can fly a
lot further than the fighters. So what Eker is saying

(01:03:44):
is we can send these bombers into the heart of
enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range
of the fighters, and they'll be fine. And he's going
to be wrong about that too. So one result of
this the Casablanca Conference, is that the Allies put together
a list of military assets they want prioritize destroying or
disabling a task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power.

(01:04:05):
These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities,
and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first
of these targets was a ball bearing production facility in Regensburg.
Ball bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and number of
other important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by
Major General Ekers eighth Army Air Force on August seventeenth,

(01:04:27):
nineteen forty three. Three hundred and seventy six bombers plowed
deep into German territory, beyond the range of any fighters
to escort them. Per the website code names operations of
World War II, The mission inflicted heavy damage on the
Regensburg target, but only at catastrophic loss to the force
inasmuch as sixty bombers were lost and many more damaged
beyond economical repair. As a result, the Eighth Air force

(01:04:49):
was incapable of immediately following double strike with a second
attack that might have seriously crippled German industry when Schweinfert,
that's the industrial facility was attacked again two months later.
The lack of long range fighter escorts still had not
been addressed, and losses were even higher. As a consequence,
the US deep penetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for
five months.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
Could you imagine going on a thing where you're like, well,
last time we did this about uh, you know, one
in six of us died anyway, so we didn't change anything.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Are we so different? Yeah? Are we doing anything new? Yeah? No,
same plan huh okay, yeah. I mean you talk to
anyone who saw heavy combat and they have stories like
that where it's like, well this was this went really badly.
We're just doing the same thing. Huh yeah, okay, yeah,
that is that is how armies work. Now, this was

(01:05:41):
a double failure, not just for Eager but for douheyes theories.
Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a
defending military for women inflicting severe casualties on a farmer fleet,
and that despite the damaged under the Regensburg Plant. German
industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. As Reich Minister of
Supply Albert Spear stated at after the war, no plane
or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings.

(01:06:04):
Colonel Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Rassioni noted in
his article the Allies failed in their choice of a
target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad. Germany
was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point,
and it also stop. They had foreseen this and stockpiled
pre war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft

(01:06:25):
and shit to not see as many ball bearings.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
This was for like a home alone style plan they
had that was actually the stockpile was unrelated.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
It was they were dropping it down the stairs.

Speaker 3 (01:06:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:33):
Did a horrible damage to the Third Army. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah. Rassioni writes this was a failure both in
target definition and target priority. Worse, because it was vulnerable,
the Eighth Air Force had become the target. Now over
in England, Arthur Harris never accepted the primary contentions of
the advocates of precision strategic bombing. In October of nineteen

(01:06:55):
forty three. Not long after Regensburg, he stated the aimous
destruction of germanies, the killing of German workers, and the
disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be
emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives,
the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale,
and the breakdown of morale both at home and at
the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are

(01:07:17):
acceptable in intended aims of our bombing policy. They are
not byproducts if attempts to hit factories. Yeah, Bobara Harris,
one thing you have to give him. He's very clear. No, no, no,
this is about killing women and children and riten'ing them homeless.
That's what we're doing. That's the business the RAF is in.
You guys need to stop pretending that you're fucking with
ball bearings.

Speaker 4 (01:07:39):
I mean, there's an honesty to that that I respect.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
Yes, the man knows what he's about. It's killing civilians,
but he's about it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:48):
Yeah, he has made his peace with whatever he believes,
and he thinks that this is the lesser evil is
by doing a lot of evil, and like you know,
it's not evil quickly, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
A little before the Regensburg attack, bomber Harris had launched
a nighttime raid on Hamburg. It was the opposite of
a precise attempt to destroy a specific target. Incendiaries created
a firestorm that swept through the downtown area, incinerating roughly
forty thousand civilians. This is like, and this is one
of the this becomes a theory, Right, there's a theory

(01:08:19):
put into practice. But there had been this theory that
by dropping incendiaries in the right place, in a certain
parts of a city, you can create these firestorms that
massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign. Right, And
this is like when it when it really works for
the first time. This is going to be a massive
part of our strategy. And when we're bombing the Japanese
home islands, right, is creating these these hideous firestorms. And

(01:08:40):
this also this becomes I think the term is literally
like bonus damage. Basically, this is like a concept of
nuclear war too. Is a big part of the appeal
of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them
is that you create these firestorms the size of states,
and like, that's really handy It really amplifies the amount
of a country you can destroy when you create firestorms

(01:09:02):
that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain.

Speaker 4 (01:09:05):
So it has never occurred to me until this moment
that the phrase firestorm. I'm aware that firestorms happen in wildfires,
it has never really actually occurred to me until this
moment that people artificially create them. And that's where a
firestorm like, you know, a firestorm to purify if you're
in a shitty hardcore music yeah, yep, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
Yep, yep. I mean, I think most people have learned
the term firestorm from Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun firestorm
obviously the Tiberian Sun expansion pack. That was pretty good. Yeah,
But some people learned it from history. I'm sure I
learned it from a shitty hardcore band. So I learned
it from a hardcore band. I learned it from Command
and Conquer. Yeah. In November of nineteen forty three. In

(01:09:48):
March of nineteen forty four, there were vast raids on
Berlin which left much of the capital in ruins, and
yet German morale continued to hold this is the thing,
Bomber Harris, He's more honest, But what he's saying will
happen still doesn't happen. Yeah, he's No amount of bombing
causes Germany to give up. By the time the war
in Europe enters its endgame, there were very mixed conclusions

(01:10:11):
to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and
precision bombing. Both ideologies had suffered failures, and both had
claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success.
Months earlier, bomber Harris had considered strategic bombing the same
as opening a new front, summarizing a write up for
the Juno Beach Center quote until D Day, he was
convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force

(01:10:33):
Germany into submission without the Allied casualties that were bound
to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe.
In Part two, we're going to talk about what happens next.
We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll start talking about
the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the
foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device

(01:10:55):
that we all live under right now. Like this second,
an incident could have started, maybe just because a radar
station was wrong, that will in fifteen to thirty minutes
result in the annihilation of all organized life human life
on the planet. That could have happened, as I say
this sentence, and we mostly won't know until the bombs fall,
and there's really nothing. Like One thing that maybe will

(01:11:18):
comfort you is that that like, none of the facilities
we have to protect our government will work, like none
of them are sufficient for the amount, the tonnage, the
mega tonnage of explosives coming at them. That little like
this is a good This is a good thing about
Jacobson's book Nuclear War. One thing she points out is like, yeah,
there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone

(01:11:41):
will bake to death slowly as if they're in an oven.
Like we know what kind of forces will be deployed
against DC. There's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a
much worse death than the people top side will have.
Well that's good, that's good anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up.
We roll out of part one.

Speaker 4 (01:12:01):
I appreciate this idea of like I hadn't put together
this idea that World War One, the powder keg was intentional.
You know that it was this mutually assured destruction concept
and like seeing the through line is yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
It wasn't as direct because it did kind of a
lot of this started to like this evolved accidentally out
of stuff that it existed before. It was not constructed
as consciously as nuclear mad, right, but it was something
people were conscious of, people talked about. That's a reason
why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances
and like military armament schedules and like the different like

(01:12:40):
arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device, right, because
it worked that way, and it is really relevant to
discuss that in the context of the doom state device
that we all live under, right now, Yeah, yep, cool, cool?
All right, all right, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
Magpie, do you want marketing blood?

Speaker 4 (01:13:01):
Oh well, if you respond to the possible eminent destruction
of all things by retreating a little bit into escapism,
you could listen to me and Robert and some of
our friends play Pathfinder, where we're just pretending to be
people in a fantasy world.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
You don't know what Pathfinder is. It's a tabletop game thing,
much in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons or a
number of other games just legally distinct, legally distinct.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
Yeah, and if you like weird history, I have a
podcast called Cool People Didical Stuff with a totally original
the format, Robert, you got to try this format. What
I do is that I research a topic every week, okay,
and then I get a guest who doesn't know as
much about that topic but sometimes knows like kind of
related things around that topic, and then I tell them

(01:13:49):
what I've learned.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
Is that that seems like the newest idea in podcasting.

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
Yeah, there are.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
A producer named Sophie there that doesn't say very much
but sometimes talks a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:14:00):
Yeah, you should, actually, Robert, you should. You should use
that part too. Get a producer named Sophie.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
I'll see, I'll think about it, Markka, I'll think about it.
I'll think about it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:09):
But uh, but don't take my name. You are you
have a decent name from behind the bastards. Mine's cool
people who did cool stuff?

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
Okay, cool people who did cool stuff. Check out us
playing Pathfinder on it could happen. Here's book club. And remember,
if there is a nuclear war, all of the people
who got us into it will also die unthinkable deaths.

Speaker 4 (01:14:30):
So yay.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
I don't know. Try to live near the center of
a city and just you know, say the things to
your loved ones that you need to say. Yeah, tell
your friends you love you, Tell your friends you love them.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
Yeah, bye bye.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):
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, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday.

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All