Part Three: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Robert continues the harrowing story of the men who decided we should be ready to rain nuclear hellfire on everyone at a moments notice forever.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special
episodes on how We're all possibly going to die in
nuclear hell fire.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing
over the course of two weeks, five episodes. We're in
our second week, so we'll be getting a bonus episode
this week about the sons of bitches who created the
doomsday device that again could kill every single person you've
ever known and loved in every animal and on earth
except for you know, cockroaches and the like fifteen minutes

(00:37):
from now or right now. You know, we'd have no
way of knowing unless you're I don't know, in the
White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, Welcome to
the show. How are you doing. You're thinking about nukes?

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well, I got promise this is about Warhammer forty k
but no, I suppose we're learning about the nuclear of Poculus.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show.
That'll oh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of genocide in
that too.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
I could be the podcast today for that because I
actually don't know anything about Warhammer.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation, poisoning,
which is what we ended our last episode talking about
our friend Lewis Sloton, who was the partial father of
the first atomic bomb, had his inards dissolved due to
a horrible nuclear error.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
And yeah, that's like kind of like leave a record
for science because he was a pretty cool guy. Like
that's that's badass, Like when you know that, like, Okay,
well I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time
to take notes like fucking that's cool. That's cool, Like
and I guess so acting.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
With agency is like a really good way to not stress, right, yes,
you know, and like I have a job. I'm just
doing my job.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrate, like
he did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed,
there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards,
you know.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah, has come up AND's happened.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm taking them off the list of guys I'm pissed at. Yeah,
so before we move on past World War Two, we
should at least linger on what guys like LeMay and
General Power would have argued was the most important question
of the whole war, Right, which is still a question

(02:22):
that people debate today. Did the use of atomic weapons
against the Empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender,
thus sparing both Japan and the allies, primarily the US,
a hideously bloody ground invasion. Right, this is a question
people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here.
I think you'll it'll be pretty clear where I tend

(02:42):
to land once we get through this. Right, But this
isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right.
I'm not going to come in and just give one
side of this. Again, I have my my take on
the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing even if you
argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan
to surrender, that the military Japan never independently agreed to
call it quits, and if the Emperor of Japan had

(03:04):
not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations,
we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued
supporting the war effort, no matter how many fire bombs
or even additional nukes fell. Right, We actually don't know
that there's a that's a valid point. There's also an
argument that the view pushed after the war, which is

(03:25):
that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding
a greater slaughter in Japan. That like, if we had
invaded the main islands, so many more people would have died.
That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as
a single weapons system. In an article for outrider dot
org Jasmine Power Rights, there is general agreement that the
bombing of Nagasaki did little in the way of changing
the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming

(03:47):
their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet
Union having a hand in the post war reconstruction process.
Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to
push a communist regime onto the country. It was also
very convenient for the US that the attributed their surrender
to the atomic bombings, and.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Oh shit, so it was a way to stay capitalist,
was to be like, oh, it was the nukes, the
nukes to us.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
In more than that, it was a way to avoid
whatch happened to Germany? Right, they're watching Germany get split up? Right,
that's obvious at this point, and they don't want that,
you know, and surrendering now before the Soviets are in,
you know, in the mix, so to speak, means that
the country doesn't get split up. Right, You're not gonna
have Tokyo divided or whatever. Right, that's one argument people

(04:31):
will make, you know, And in this view, pretty simply,
Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's
not a non factor, but they were defeated because they
were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor.
It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we
beat the shit of them all across the Pacific, right, yeah, like,

(04:51):
which is probably, i mean, certainly a more accurate view
than just saying it was the nukes, right Like, there
was a whole war. A lot of guys had to
die to finish that thing, right And Yeah, Harry Truman,
the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on
record basically saying that military planners had told him that
when they were looking into like what how many people

(05:11):
would die in an invasion of the Japanese Home islands,
American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of
five hundred thousand to a million, and if you're talking
about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on
these other island hopping campaigns, and that would have meant
both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have
been higher than that. Right Now, that said, this is

(05:32):
not a real estimate, as best as I can tell,
you will encounter it often. It comes up constantly, but
it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers that five
hundred to a million American casualties estimate have any basis
in reality. Lose in Europe we lost in the whole war,
the United States lost about half a million people, Okay,

(05:53):
Like so this this would be basically doing World War
Two all over again for US more or less. Right,
It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I
want to quote from an article by Alfi Khne on
kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein
writes that military planners at the time put the number
of American casualties between twenty thousand and forty six thousand.

(06:14):
But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong
possibility that neither an invasion nor in nuclear attack was
actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is
an interesting point because if you're saying, oh, five hundred
thousand to do a million Americans killed and injured, millions
of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes save lives.
But if you're looking at well twenty to forty six,
forty or fifty thousand American casualties, probably twice that many

(06:36):
Japanese casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuke the islands. Right, Yeah,
you know.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
What, could they have just laid siege the whole because
they were already they weren't.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
In fact doing Yeah, and that's another point, as we'll
get to. That's another point people will make, is that
Japan would have broken on its own right. In a
good essay on the subject for his book You Know
What They Say, The Truth About Popular Belief, Alfie Cone
gives a succinct version of what we might call this
skeptic's case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He notes that the US fire bombs had already incinerated

(07:07):
Japan's six largest cities and are basically the siege that
we put on the Home Islands had blocked all oil
from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was
in part a desire for the Emperor to retain his title,
con sites in nineteen forty six report from the War
Department Strategic Bombing Surveys Study Group, which concluded the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by

(07:30):
the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war,
did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor,
the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister,
and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May
of nineteen forty five that the war should be ended,
even if it meant acceptance of defeat on Allied terms.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, supported
by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, is

(07:52):
the survey's opinion that, certainly prior to his thirty first
of December nineteen forty five, and in all probability prior
to first November nineteen forty five, pan would have surrendered
even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, Even
if Russia had not entered the war, and even if
no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the
US War Department.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
So that's the They were already beat theory.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
They were beat. They were beat. And I would say
that's by far the strongest argument if you're going with
the fact based argument. Not that it's the only one,
but I think it's the strongest. You know, your feelings
may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm
convinced pretty well now. There was at least one other
secret intelligence assessment from the same time, done by the
US Armies planning an operations group, which reached a similar conclusion,

(08:36):
and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Lahey, the
president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision
to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time adopting
quote an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the
dark Ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's
chief of staff to say about. Like Dwight Eisenhower reached

(08:58):
a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to
hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I
go with Ike on this. One. Not a perfect man,
but he pretty much he knew World War two pretty well.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
That's why he had the I'm with Ike button.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, I'm with Ike. It wasn't necessary to hit them
with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that. Yeah,
now I've allowed that. There's still some room for argument
here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's
decision to surrender, because the bombing campaign in general influenced
their decision to surrender, and the nukes were part of that. Right,
But what isn't arguable is this President Truman and men

(09:35):
in high positions within the US Army like Curtis LeMay
never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew
they had a bomb. Right, there was never any possibility
in their minds but that they would use it. Percne's article,
the fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option
of last resort. It would be easier to accept the
argument that he Truman had no choice but to drop

(09:56):
the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power
to Japan the leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender,
had been carefully considered. They were not there was never
a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of
obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist
Kai Eriksson put it, using nuclear weapons was not, by
any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration.

(10:18):
We have it on the authority of virtually all the
principal players that no one in a position to do
anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the
bombs on Japan.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
So that's pretty much we have a new toy. Weird,
We're gonna see what this thing does. Yeah, this sphenometer
goes up to two hundred, I'm going to two hundred.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, we're already planning for the next war. Like they
handed Lameya list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right,
Like they wanted to use this thing in part to
scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that
was part of their logic, right.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Now it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped
in Japan killed between one hundred and fifty thousand and
two hundred and fifty thousand people. The initial death toll
was horrific enough, but it was what came after. It
really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor
and she described the site of thousands of blinded, burnt
people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to
quench their burning bodies, and all of these, like a

(11:12):
huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were
just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had
tossed themselves, burnt and singing and like melting basically into
the water. It was horrible, And in the days and
weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood,
pulling their hair out, and clumps from radiation poisoning. Right, Like,
this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that

(11:36):
not only does the bomb kill a shitload of people
when it goes off, but there are knock on effects
that continue killing people. Right even though we didn't have
a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good
understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people
with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best
to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of
nineteen forty five, General Leslie Groves, who again the military

(11:58):
head of the Manhattan Project, that before the US Senate
Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read
you a selected Q and A from that meeting, Senator Milligan. General,
is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves.
I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway.
I always love it when people say that the radio
act of casualty can be of several classes. He can

(12:18):
have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He
can have a smaller amount which will cause him to
die rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors,
without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a
very pleasant way to die. Oh yeah, that's what people
say about people say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied, pleasant, chill.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
All the parts of you that tell you that you're
in trouble are also destroyed.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
So yeah, exactly, you're fine.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
You're chillin now happens to everyone.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing.
That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more
palatable for Americans when he said that the average citizen,
and indeed the average senator, would not have had to
dig very deep to find at least a little countervailing
evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had
happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not

(13:07):
yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of
horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast sight
were available. More to the point, you've heard about the
radium girls in the like. People had been exposing themselves
to different kinds of radiation for decades and they died horribly.
We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever
dropped an atomic bomb. Right now. Again, the point here

(13:31):
is that Groves was he was not just lying, He
was engaged in a cover up. This is a conspiracy,
and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of
the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, the campaign
to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that
campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors
of atomic weapons for a little while, longer we knew
eventually it would get out. Right. These generals all knew

(13:52):
you can't lie about this forever, right, But the longer
we lie about it, the more money we get into
these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the
more we can centralize the US military and defense apparatus
around nukes, which was their goal right Their goal was
replaced as many humans as possible with atomic weapons, and
they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as

(14:13):
for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems
to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark,
animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after
the war's end, they set to work launching a new
kind of campaign, a media blitz targeted at convincing decision
makers in the US that nukes were the only future
for the military that was worth caring. About three months
after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society

(14:37):
in New York City to give a speech. He warned
slash promise the men a symbol that the next war,
understood to be the next World War, would be fought
with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that
all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster
than sound and involve atomic power. So he's he's got
a pretty clear vision of the future. Our friend Curtis Lamay,

(14:58):
and he is now trying to sell.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
It and like, are there other because Okay, we have
this like thing where apparently people who build bombs are
obsessed with how bombs are the only thing?

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yes?

Speaker 3 (15:08):
Right? Are there other character classes who feel like similar
about like, like are like the fighter jets being like, no,
all that matters is fighter jets?

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, go ahead, yes there are, and what we will
talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree
with le may just want nukes to be used differently.
But there are some people, there's a couple of decent
human beings still in the military establishment in this period
who are like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Are you at our minds?

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Yeah? You know what this thing does? Yeah, I'm able
to figure out this means to destroy the world.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, that seems bad. Why are we building the world
killing machine? Why are we doing this?

Speaker 3 (15:49):
We live here?

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah, this is the one planet that we've got.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Back in nineteen twenty one, do Hay had argued that
the invention of the bomber craft basically rendered all all
other types of weaponry obsolete, and LeMay was making a
similar argument, but with the nuclear weapon at the heart
of this fabled air force that could finally do the
whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote,
the air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained.
There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to

(16:17):
our air power development. That doesn't sound at all like
a crazy man, No, and it's you know, this is
a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say. One
thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis Lemy tried
harder than any single human ever has to end the
human race and he didn't do it. And I don't
quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived. Curtis Lamay,

(16:40):
he would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace
just to like tweak them, Like he was such a
piece of shit, And they always had.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Nukes, right, quantum immortality as a species. That that's all
I got.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
It's nuts, Like no one has ever tried harder to
wipe out the human race than Curtis fucking went with
his fucking dead face. Oh man, it's nuts. I wonder
if like.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
The villains and pulp stuff from like two hundred years
ago didn't even claim that they're going to destroy the world,
whereas like now we have villains who are like, I'm
going to destroy the world, like yeah, yeah, because people
can now.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
People can now, and we have examples of people who
really worked hard to try to do that, you know.
And this is ultimately kind of why we are now
at the point where the whole human race is, you know,
fifteen to thirty minutes away from annihilation at any given
moment in time, which is Curtis LeMay and a bunch
of guys that followed him felt the air force, and
to them this means the nuclear air force must be

(17:41):
allowed to develop, unhindered and unschained. I cannot emphasize enough
how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio Society was
just warmed up do Hay. He insisted no air attack,
once it is launched, can be completely stopped. This was
an echo of du Hay's argument that the sky was
too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right, And
this hadn't proved true in World War Two, But when

(18:02):
you got nukes, it kind of is true. Right. If
you send five hundred bombers and they each have a nuke,
one of them is going to drop that fucker, you know.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, yeah,
this feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure.
Do May and lou Hay, Yeah, do Hay and le May?

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah. Yeah. It is weird how history literally rhyme.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah. I hadn't even got that fuck no, because I
was trying to remember which one was which.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah. Dueyes, the old Italian guy who was like in
nineteen twenty one Bombers of the Future all, we need
no use in having anything else.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah. A couple decades later, the man who rhymes says
the same thing, right, nuke.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah, if you get if anyone gets into the military
whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we
need to redact it immediately. So, as Richard, I'm going
to quote now from a piece in The New Yorker
by Richard Rhodes in which he lays out le May's
thinking in the rest of this speech, and it all
kind of follows from the bay that you can't stop
an aerial nuclear attack. Quote. This meant to le May

(19:04):
that the United States would have to have an air
force in being that could immediately move immediately to retaliate
if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the
thread of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in
the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come.
It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare
to attack us if we are prepared. So in November
of nineteen forty five, l May was already thinking in

(19:26):
terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein
lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped,
then retaliation would not protect the country, It would only
destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right, And what he
means by an air force in being is you always
have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs ready to fly

(19:47):
minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean
you always have planes in the air with nukes. And
that's going to mean for a period of like a
couple decades, there are never not nukes flying around in
the air always. And this is before there's no governor
on these. This is not a thing today. Every nuke

(20:07):
that we have you have to get like codes and
shit from the nuclear football. This is some guys in
a plane have the ability to activate these things.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Right, You're like, oh, my wife left me.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, exactly, Like it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the
Cold War. Yeah yeah, so yeah. What we see in
this period as early as nineteen forty five as men
in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in
minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians.
People were tired after World War Two, soldiers long deployed

(20:38):
wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed
to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military.
Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the
US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments.
Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an
impossible problem. I'm gonna quote from Rhodes again. In the
four years that the United States held a monopoly on
nuclear weapons, it reduced its mild terry forces to bare bones,

(21:01):
shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly
ninety billion dollars to less than fifteen billion dollars, and
counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter
as Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war ravaged
Western Europe right. And this is kind of the first
use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
which is, we can't keep all these soldiers in the field,

(21:22):
but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the
scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes
all over the place. That way, we don't need as
many guys. We can just set off a shitload of
nukes and we can slow these these Russians down while
we get our shit in gear, you know. And this
works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have
a bomb, right, because they don't have anything to counter

(21:43):
this with. Hap Arnold sent a letter in nineteen forty
five laying out he's an air force general laying out
some of the first principles. While the air force doesn't
exist yet, he's an army air thing general laying out
some of the first principles for what would become the
theory of deterrence. Quote. We must thereforece it cure our
nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques

(22:04):
required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to
deter them from launching. A modern devastating war. In order
to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific
projects the Air Force should support over the next twenty
to thirty years. This resulted in nineteen forty six and
the Air Force setting up the RAND Corporation. You've heard
of the RAND Corporation.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Yeah, I did not know that they were Air Force.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yes, that's how they start. And RAND just means R
and D like literally, that's why it's brand. Right.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Oh shit, Okay, I assume to someone's name.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, it's the RAND Corporation that They're set up in
Santa Monica, right on the coast, beautiful area, and a
former defense engineer named James Rubell later wrote of this
is the first RAND project. Rand quickly proposed a death
ray project, which the Air Force approved. So top man, guys,
everyone's super sane. Not a bunch of dudes whose brains

(22:57):
have been melted by lead and war trauma just trying
to come up with apocalypse weapons. I don't know, guys,
death ray feels like a good idea. Let's get one
of those fuckers. I watched War of the World's to
hell with it now, And to be honest, if we've
made a death ray. That would be pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yeah, would it be a second amendment? You know?

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, yeah, I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret. Yeah,
I'm ready for a death ray. I think I think
certain people should know it.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Death ray is a one on one It's not really
a major step up from bullets, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
No, it's probably faster and less painless to get shot with. Yeah,
you know, and I bet it's I don't know, good
at killing martians, which we might need to do if
Elon Musk ever sets up a colony on Mars anyway.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
So I think we're both pro death rays.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I actually I've come around on the Rand Corporation, Margaret,
I'm gonna be honest with you. Yeah, speaking of the
Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast. Not the
Rand Corporation, because we're primarily talking about how they nearly
killed everyone like a million times.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
It's the we're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why
we were coming out so strong on deathrays right now.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
That's right. And actually, our the company, the death ray
company that sponsors us, is called life Ray, you know,
because it'll it's it's a it's a it's a death
Ray for personal defense. You know, yeah, keep say lives,
It saves lives. That's that's the life Ray. And we're

(24:28):
back having a good time. So right around the time
the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war
is over, because the normal normal life is starting to
reassert itself, for at least the new normal, some people
have begun to question the logic with which men like
bomber Harris Curtis LeMay in General Power. I still can't
believe his literal name was General fucking Power approached a

(24:50):
real warfare. Was it really possible to break in? Yeah? Right?

Speaker 3 (24:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing? Right?
This was a question that people. You know, there are
guys like LeMay that like, obviously it is, look at
what we did, And there are more thoughtful men who
are like, actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out.
And I want to read a quote here about members
of the Strategic Bombing Survey from Kinney's book Fifteen Minutes,
How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective

(25:19):
were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants,
the loss of which ravaged the Germans war, making capabilities
and destroyed their economy. This led to post war air
atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike,
key targets that, if destroyed, would have a large and
effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction. These plants
were often located in major urban areas, said one Air

(25:41):
Force general of this conundrum. I think it was sort
of a shock to people when a few began to
talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital, and particularly
when they began to ask, what was a city but
a collection of industry and that's an important Yeah, it's hideous.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Fuck do they live? It must be these are suburbanites.
This is because suburbanites have entered the world.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and are out running the army share.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
But that term bonus effects is used a lot in
nuclear war planning, and a bonus effect is the added
destruction that you get while destroying the targets you're actually
aiming at. In atomic war, so.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
You're trying to take out of collateral damage. But it's
the same concept, but.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
It's collateral damage but good, right, Like, yeah, we needed
to take out this tank factory and we killed a
million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby, right, Yeah,
And there's other bonus effects. Radiation, poisoning causes bonus effects.
Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they
cause fire storms, massive firestorms, some theoretically some like the

(26:38):
size of states, right, And that's a bonus effect, you know.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
I mean, as they've been trying to do that since
the beginning, based on what you've told me last week.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
And they have been you know, a firestorm really fucks
people up. People don't like firestorms.

Speaker 4 (26:50):
No.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
The argument military leaders were making about the future for
the first four years after World War Two can best
be summarized by a memo General Loris Norstad, Assistant Chief
Staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in nineteen
forty five. He laid out the need for a ready
force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere
in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives,
he argued the existence of this ready force would act

(27:12):
as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons.
So first, we need a ready force so that no
one else will get nukes. If we always have planes
ready to nuke people, no one else will even try
to get them, right, this is this is their first argument,
you know.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, not as strong as the argument that I think
this coming based on what you told me last week.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Right, Yeah. Now, this Ready Force is established in March
of nineteen forty six as part of what becomes known
as the Strategic Air Command. The ESSAC is responsible not
just for nukes, but for the Air force's long range
bombing operations. Right when we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam,
the SACS, especially in Korea, going to be heavily involved.
And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars, but

(27:51):
they come to control a lot of our nukes, and
they come to control our long range missile assets. I
say control. Technically all of our nuclear weapons at this
point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right,
and they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that
we're starting to build in the post war period.

Speaker 4 (28:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
But what you're going to see happen during these first
four or five years after the war is we're increasingly
deploying nuclear weapons around the world to have this this
air force in readiness, right, this ready Force, and so Basically,
they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and SAC is
maintaining control of them. Right, but you know, the SAC
gets them from the Atomic Energy Commission and the.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
SC surprise that none of them got stolen.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Oh they oh, Margaret, just wait, none of them got stolen. Maybe,
but we lose a lot of these fucking bombs, okadh huh,
We'll get to that. But the SAC today. One of
the things that scares me about our current nuclear force
is that it is the shittiest job in the Air Force,
maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this,
but I've talked to a couple of nukes and they
did not like it. It is not a prestigious job.

(28:56):
It is not a fun job. It is boring that
people cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in
nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a
shit job. In this period of time, it is not
seen as a shit job. These are seen as this
is the best part of the military to be in.
This is the most elite force in the military. It's
certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind

(29:17):
of pilot, right, and these are the best pilots and
engineers that our entire military can put together, right, and
they're tasked with a singular purpose, so it's different. At
this point, that is probably what you want. Now, that's
the idea. It's debatable are they ever really that good?
We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the
SAC in nineteen forty eight. He's not the first guy

(29:39):
in charge of it, but he takes command and he
really he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year,
nineteen forty nine, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead,
terrifying members of the US defense establishment. There had been
a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and well,
of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program.
They have resources, They've got spies, are gonna get a bomb, right,

(30:02):
they have the ability to get uranium or platonia, all
this whatever shit they need. It's it's there's like a
fifth of the world's land masks. They have the ability
to do this.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, like we invented the wheel. No one else has
the wheel. No one figure out the wheel.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
They figured out machine guns too, goddamn it. No, of
course they were going to do this, but there were,
and it's a mix. There were plenty of people. Obviously,
there were a number of people in our military who
knew that this was going to happen at some point.
But there are a lot of people who are shocked,
right and are terrifying, like, oh my god, I can't
believe the Communists figured out this bomb? Right?

Speaker 3 (30:34):
Is this because that like spy couple or is that.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
They there are several spies who play a role, And honestly,
I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear
weapons from being used again in war than anything else.
I think once the US has them, if the Soviets
didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up
nuking the USSR at some point. Right, Yeah, that seems
very like that's unprovable, but that that's kind of where

(30:58):
I come in, right, Like, well, it's kind of the gun.
It's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were
no semi automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in
the country? That would probably be more pleasant? Am I
not gonna have one? When the crazy ass motherfuckers I
know have them?

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Like, ah, the people who want to kill me have it?
Ye have read enough history to know what happens after
you disarm.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
And here's the problem. That's there's a logic to that,
and also that leads us both to having four hundred
million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
So it's like, I understand the thought process, but it
might fundamentally be what's doomed? What will do us?

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Right?

Speaker 2 (31:39):
So there's a degree to which, like I have to
put myself in the in where these guys are. And
keep in mind, this is not a period of time
in which all of our generals are most or many
of them are dudes who just came up and have
done this as like a desk job. Right. All of
these Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these
guys did, right. So these dudes are fucked up and

(31:59):
crazy at this point. These people live incinerated cities from
the sky. They're not thinking the way normal people think anymore. Yeah,
and the same is true of the Soviets. By the way,
they lost twenty million people in this war. The Soviets
were not getting into it because I have less detail
on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to
the US, right, sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a

(32:21):
little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged
by this hideous war, Right, so I do have a
little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not
have gone bad? Right?

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, So for quite a while after the Soviets detonate
their first Adam Baum, the US will retain a massive
advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right, That will
not last forever. Eventually we reach parity. I think they
do actually beat us at one point in total number
of news. So it's a little hard to know. But
from this point forward there was no denying that nuclear

(32:53):
deterrence would eventually be a thing, right, And so you
wind up in this there's the nineteen like fifty to
like fifty two to fifty three. Is this insanely dangerous,
dangerous period really up until like the early sixties, where
the Soviets have some nukes but not all that many,
and the US has a lot, and we could have
started and won a nuclear war. It would have been

(33:14):
really pretty easy for US. Right. There would have been
casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would
have mostly been over in Europe, right, because the Soviet
Union just didn't have a lot of bombs. And they
didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs
over here. There's no ycbms. You're flying fucking bombers, right,
so we would have lost Alaska maybe, right, Like their

(33:35):
long range bombing capacity, especially in like nineteen forty nine
to fifty is it probably could have accomplished that, but
it wasn't great. Right. In nineteen fifty, a year after
the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly
three hundred nuclear weapons, The USSR had five. The newly
founded Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Department of Defense,
which that'll get started in this post war period, right,

(33:57):
we don't have the Joint Chiefs or like you know
in World War two. Right, this is a post war innovation,
you know, if you want to call it that. But
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DoD had concluded,
after a study that some two hundred nuclear bombs would
be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth, quote, leaving
only the stigial remnants of man's material works, that is,

(34:18):
the Joint Chiefs. They say two hundred nukes will do that,
and so we build three hundred. Yeah, cool, Well we'll
get a lot more. By nineteen fifty one will have
more than four hundred such weapons.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power,
the USSR goes from one to fifty atomic weapons of
varying power. Shortly after taking over the ESSAC, LeMay decided
that the new post war air force had gotten sloppy,
and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio
to prove it a massive bomber. I love that. He's like, well,
let's have them pretend to blow up Dayton. See how

(34:55):
good the Ohio Yeah, fuck it. So he has this
massive raid over the city. That's like, it's a fake.
They're not dropping real bombs obviously, but all of the
fake bombs are horribly off target. Like every they fuck
up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs
to save their goddamn lives. Right, This is probably less
on training. I mean there's some degree of training. It's

(35:17):
more than just like, bombers aren't great at hitting things
precisely at this point. Yeah, yeah, And nukes.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Are not TV guided I remembering that TV.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah, not quite yet. And it's the kind of thing,
you know, one of the benefits of nukes. It's horrible
to say this, but it is a benefit from a
military standpoint is that you don't have to be very
accurate because it's a fucking nuke, right.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, but people say the shotguns but real.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
Right, But but accurate, yes, accurate, Like you really can
be pretty far off with the nuke, can still hit
your target. But these guys do so badly that even
with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their
intended targets. This is not an effective raid, and the
May calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton quote the
darkest night in American military aviation history, because not one

(36:02):
airplane finished. That mission is briefed and like, man, you
were part of raids where guys die, I think that's darker,
like where guides died and the mission wasn't really that successful.
I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs
just don't hit very well. I don't know, babies, like, yeah,
that might be darker, horotia monig oh, it might be darker. Arguably. Yeah,

(36:23):
Now this means that when the Korean War kind of
starts up, it's gonna be not quite the last point.
Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's this
some shit in the JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's
some shit in during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan where
we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary

(36:44):
annihilation or getting nuked into the Stone Age ourselves. Right,
But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict
where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a
tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things
would have like spiraled into globally annihilation at least at
that point. Right, And given that fact, given that we
could have nuked North Korea and even China and guys

(37:08):
wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't.
It's like shocking to me when I get into the
history that like we that it didn't happen, right, Yeah,
And going into the war, some powerful men in the
Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was
the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered
our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it, was

(37:28):
a wasting asset in other words, because we know the
Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and
starting to get long range bombers and the other things
they need to be able to strike us. Every day
we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically,
he's saying, we got to use him or lose him. Right.
If we don't use them now, we'll never be able

(37:49):
to use them, right, right.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
And if you're playing the world like a video game,
this is true. Right. If I'm a video game general,
I would I will.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game
that gives me a nuke, right yeah, yeah, uh yeah,
which is why gamers should not be allowed in the
Department of Defense. No oops, turns out.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, under strict control by non gamers. Right.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
So, at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing
advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic
targets in North Korea, and they succeeded in these bombing
raids on paper, right, the sac destroys the targets assigned
to them. But North Korea, if you know much about
North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot

(38:38):
of exposure. There wasn't a lot that we could really
do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right,
like we do some damage, but that's just kind of
not how their military is wired at this point in time.
And to make matters worse for the United States, we
start this war using very new high tech guided bombs
like the Asma one Tarzan, but those run out immediately,

(39:00):
which is a thing in modern warfare too. If you
look at what's happened in Ukraine, right, like, you have
these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things,
but also it's really hard to make them, and you
instead of them all and it turns out you go
through that shit real fast in a war. So, as
I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the
SAC in nineteen forty eight and he was the architect

(39:21):
of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the
fact that we had run through all of our most
advanced munitions without ending the war as another l for
team precision bombing. Basically, LeMay is like, well, look, clearly,
just striking strategic targets doesn't work, so he orders US
bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rossioni, in that
article that he wrote, describes SAC's plan as to quote

(39:43):
increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing
civilian targets. LeMay and the sac used US air power
to kill around two million North Korean citizens over the
next two years. In change.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
Jesus fuck, I straight up didn't know that. I know
so little about the Korean War.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
It's a between a fifth and a sixth of the
population of North Korea we kill through primarily aerial bombing.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
But it's also still a hideous war crime, like we
murder two million people and it doesn't win. Like again, Yeah,
the thing that keeps happening, that has always happened every
time someone like LeMay is like, well, we just got
to cause them enough pain that their morale breaks. And
what happens is their morale doesn't break, right, and.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
They're always like forever and ever. I've been just in
a bunch of stuff about people defending against the Roman
Empire and Gaul and things like that, right, and you
start saying like, oh, well, these people, like these people,
you know, the horrible druids, they sacrifice children or whatever, right,
and who wasn't, Like, I don't one who wasn't. Yeah,
And even if they were, you know how many you know,
how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere

(40:53):
near the evil of what Rome did in terms of
killing them.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Julius Caesar does a genocide in Gaul.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, and so like communism is whatever.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
It's the same thing as the people who are like, well,
the conquista or stopped the child sacrifice and the American children.
You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve any fucking kids dying?

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Man?

Speaker 3 (41:16):
Yeah, totally, okay, Brotally, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Look, I'm not saying I'm not saying any of these
any society, any organized empire anywhere in the Americans or elsewhere,
has been a nice empire. None of them are. But
if you're just being like, well, look at the bad
things they did, uh huh, what were you guys getting
up to?

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Huh?

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Yeah? Is that justify you killing two million people? Yeah? Yeah,
come on, bro, Was North Korea so bad that they
all just need to die?

Speaker 2 (41:40):
It's it's the same thing as like, we'll look at
all these fucked up things, and plenty of fucked up
things the Soviet ni and the People's Republic of China
did a lot of, but like we murder millions of
people from the sky repeatedly all over like the world yeah,
so you know, I don't know. Don't don't get up
your own ass about your side being particularly nice. Angels, right,

(42:02):
the angels as you incinerate cities, villages largely. But yeah,
once again, though this is really important. Actual war disproves
all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off,
North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has
troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge
and strategic bombing per the theories that LeMay and do

(42:25):
Hey both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic
bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right, that's the point.
It just doesn't work. It's never true. That Also are
the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop
North Korea from fighting effectively, and none of the bombing
we do it doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a

(42:47):
strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes
as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had
gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier,
we really cut back on the military after World War Two,
and in fact, all military development outside of making the
SAC stronger took a back seat. And as a result,
when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South
Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained.

(43:10):
I've talked to my grandpa about because he was there
the whole war, and he was like, yeah, we were
in shit shape when the war started, and it was
because they had let like we had, like fucking our
bazukas wouldn't fire and shit like we had, Like there
were serious issues with like the maintenance of basic equipment
because guys like the LeMay were like, all we need
are bombers, bro, trust ye, all we need o bombers,
you know.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, whereas they actually needed the life ray.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Right, we needed the life A couple of life rays
would have really solved this w old problem. They wouldn't
have even tried if we had a life ray. That's
what I'm saying now. After North Korea invades, they pushed
the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down
the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur, at the head of
a un amphibious landing force, came aground at Incheon and
pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with China.

(43:55):
Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes,
and suddenly the un forced are in full retreat and
they get pushed backs. It's really it's a it doesn't
not enough study of not enough people. Americans know anything
about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War
two and then Vietnam. That's what I know, right, it's
a little.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
It's it's in Korea is kind of halfway between World
War Two and Vietnam in terms of like fighting tactics
and all that stuff. You know, you do have a
lot of these big armored clashes, you have dog fights
and stuff, but you also have more advanced these you know,
you have these guided missiles and stuff right early ones.
So Douglas MacArthur, as he's getting the shit hammered out
of him, requests ten atomic bombers with live nukes be

(44:37):
put on standby in Guam, right, because he wants to
have the option to use them if in an emergency situation. Right,
Uh huh. Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants
these planes in their nukes placed under his direct control.
And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may
have saved a lot of people's lives, and I don't
think it's for a good reason. But he steps in
and he sent begs Truman to say no and keep

(44:59):
the bomb under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay
with the SAC right, he wants to have control over them.
But I do think he is less I don't think
he would have I don't think he certainly was not
unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested
in doing it than MacArthur. Right, he was not convinced
it was the only path forward, and MacArthur was really
convinced it was the only way to win right now

(45:23):
for decades because the fact that we sent nukes to
Guam during the Korean War has been well known. But
if you look up any histories that are like older
prior to the twenty first century, it will say the
SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam.
We now know that this was inaccurate, and I'm going
to quote from the book fifteen Minutes here. The first

(45:44):
nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last
B twenty nine accelerated down the runway. Two propellers ran
away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to
shut down two engines, and what would later be described
as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel laden
bomb ladd bomber into the air and managed to turn
back towards the runway, but as he did, he lost
altitude and the bombers simply went into the ground. The

(46:06):
crash was not hard, reported an aid to General le May,
but twelve men were dead and eight were trapped in
the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge
of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke.
We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And
that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes,
because they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about

(46:28):
they cover this the fuck up, right, So this is
like this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe. Kind
of The good news is that because of how nukes work,
they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set
up for. In order to get the big, the explosion
that we all recognize as a nuclear blast, you have
to set off a nuke in a specific way. The
bad news is that even if it's not set off

(46:50):
in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're
still talking about five thousand pounds of conventional explosives in
the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it
can still make from what I've seen, because this happens
a few times. It doesn't always make a dirty bomb,
but it can. You can get radiation contamination when one
of these things explodes in a plane crash, right. That
does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does

(47:12):
in this case because of how much was covered up.
I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians
and the base house got radsick. But the blast of
this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt
thirty miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel, and it
injures one hundred and eighty one civilians. The Air Force
immediately lies and says, oh, that was just loaded with
normal bombs. It was a training mission, sorry, guys, not

(47:35):
a nuke though. Don't worry.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
Yeah, unlike the nine planes next to it.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Right. It was forty four years before the fact that
a fucking nuke exploded was declassified and Margaret that's not
close to the only nuke we lost. This is the
thing I did not know. We fucking lose so many nukes,
it's crazy. On November tenth of nineteen fifty, an essays

(48:00):
bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an
Mk four atom bomb set to self destruct, one hundred
miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That
was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from
the end of World War two to November of nineteen
fifty five lost nukes in five years.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
And that counts as a success because we self destruct
the nuke, so it doesn't just land. Right. We'll get
to that. Back to the Korean War, because this is
all going right. As this is all going on, you know,
MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear warfare as the
situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan
that would have involved dropping between thirty and fifty tactical

(48:46):
atom bombs on enemy air bases and depots, and then
he would have followed up by a massive invasion of
Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from
China were to be blocked. This army that he's going
to have basically cut Korea off from China. They're going
to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in
order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross

(49:08):
into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is to
radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
That's like salty in the earth behind you. But another level.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
I cannot exaggerate how fucking insane Douglas MacArthur is at
this point, Like he is completely dangerously unhinged, one of
the craziest men to ever command a US military force.
Truman refused this insane plan, thank fucking god, and as
a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to
him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with

(49:41):
a shitload of dead people and without a real peace,
but also without additional nuclear explosions. So you know, that's good.
It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
You know, so civilian control of government is better than
the military.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
Yeah, government, Yeah, because again, these people lose their fucking minds,
and MacArthur, like Curtis LeMay is a voice of reason here.
That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice
of reason, but a little bit of one, because MacArthur
is batshit crazy.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
At the start of the Korean War, the US moved
almost ninety nuclear weapons into Europe how to fears that
a wider Communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now,
the Soviet arsenal's really small at this stage, and again
there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good, so time
is not as much of a factor. Right, We don't
have to have these things ready to detonate at five
minutes notice, right, And so for safety's sake, again, this

(50:39):
is one of these the Atomic Energy Commission kind of
comes in and is, like Wilson, the bombs over, but
not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores
in the US so that we can airlift them over
to Europe on a moment's notice.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
But because they're smaller than the bombs themselves.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Right, right, And it's safer than just having a live
nuke where someone could deal it set it off. Right.

Speaker 3 (51:02):
You store the AMMO and the gun in a different place,
and there's children around.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah. This is The moments like this of just minimal
sanity are so rare in the nuke story that it's
just like a breath of fresh air, like, oh, somebody
who wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind, but you
know who is out of their goddamn mind, Margaret, Is.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
It our sponsor Life Ray?

Speaker 2 (51:22):
That's right, Life Ray. Because it turns out Life ray
is incredibly radioactive. They will fry your brain. Even being
in the same state as one is very dangerous by
one today, I think it's worth it, uh huh for safety. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(51:45):
and we're back. So at this point, the Atomic Energy
Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were
not actively in use. The DoD never likes this, and
they use the opportunity to argue that the military should
have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed
to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Gwam. Right,

(52:06):
this is kind of the first time that the military
gets direct custody for a long period of time. Is
in Guam. During the Korean War in nineteen fifty one,
the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from
two hundred ninety nine to four hundred and thirty eight,
twice the number of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had
been told in an internal report, could destroy civilization. As
I noted, the USSR has around fifty bombs. Their stockpile
will go rapidly after this point. But to deal with

(52:28):
the fact that the gap is starting to close, we
start working on a bigger bomb.

Speaker 4 (52:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
It's first known by its nickname the super and this
is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. And
as a brief aside, most post apocalyptic post atomic apocalypse
movies and fictions imagine a bunch of bombs, kind of
like the Horotima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does,
really because like you look at DC in Fallout, what

(52:57):
is it three or four? I forget what DC is an.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
I've played some of them, but I don't remember them.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
If you look at DC and like a lot most
of the buildings are still relatively intact, right, that doesn't
happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over,
like like if one of the standard hydrogen bombs were
dropped on DC, like and these are actively aimed at
DC at all times. Right, the Russians always have some
aim at DC, you know, just like we've got shit

(53:22):
aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them, Yeah, like we're
both doing this crazy shit. Everyone within a mile of
the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles
of the blast is incinerated over the course of a
few seconds. Right, You're talking millions of deaths in the
space of a minute or two. Like, yeah, these these
are not survivable. Everything is there's no buildings left, everything

(53:44):
is combusted. You'ar like, like the power of these bombs
cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not
an after thermonuclear war.

Speaker 3 (53:55):
Is it a different It's like a fundamentally different technology.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
It's a it's a it's the craziest thing you can imagine.
Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, right, Like thermonuclear weapons work on
the premise, what if you set off a nuke with
a nuke? Right, here's Andy Jacobson describing how these work.
The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of
an uncontrolled, self sustaining chain reaction which hydrogen isotopes fuse

(54:20):
under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.
An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people,
as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A
thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York
or Soul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash.
These are so I think.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
It's fission versus fusion maybe or something.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Yeah, I think that's basically what's going on here. But
you're setting instead of using conventional explosives to start the
nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a
nuke basically, right.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Yeah, you know, dog, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
It's just the craziest thing. The prototype thermonuclear weapon was
designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a
ten point four megaton explosive capacity, made it equivalent to
a thousand Hiroshima bombs.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Or an idea of what that's the first one of
these we make? Right, these things when we start detonating them,
we'll talk about it. But like we repeatedly horribly irradiate
and like permanently injure huge numbers of US troops because
we don't get nearly far away enough, Because we don't
realize how big they're going to be. Like one of
these is like fifty percent larger than we'd expected it

(55:24):
to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist,
actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not
to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb. Quote.
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of
this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of
its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It
is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. Don't

(55:48):
build the torment nexus.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
I know, yeah, but what if a torment nexus is
built by the torment nexus? Right?

Speaker 2 (55:54):
Right, right?

Speaker 3 (55:55):
But Garvin wants to solve this fun problem. I love
that They're like, we built the altar weapon. It can
kill God, and people are like, not enough.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Not enough. What if we use one of those to
make a bigger one of those. Truman ignores this letter
from Fermi. The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the
Marshall Islands in November of nineteen fifty two. It left
behind a crater large enough to hold fifteen pentagons. In
her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after
image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power

(56:24):
of this device. Sophie is going to put it up.
But you can see the bomb was detonated on an
island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before there's
a Luge Lab, it's an island, and then in the
after there's just no island.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Yeah, that's just a black spot on the mappen.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
It's gone. The island is gone. Yeah, year or two ago,
James Stout over it. It could happen here, went to the
Marshall Islands to report on I mean, there's still ongoing fallout,
both in the literal and figurative sense for the people
of the Marshall Islands because of how many fucking nukes
we set off there. Right, Like, there's tremendous suffering in
the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this onquote unquote,

(57:00):
I mean they're to this extent that they're uninhabitants because
we forced people off, right Like, this is a crime
against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall
Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out
James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that.
After this series right, I'm not going to be getting
into it because he did that series. But no, I
can see that. Yeah, yeah, you can see just in

(57:22):
the picture how catastrophic these weapons are.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
In the immediate wake of the IVY mic test, President
Truman gave his farewell address. He mourned that quote, the
war of the future would be one in which man
could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the
great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements
of the past. Such a war is not a possible
policy for rational men. Now that's not wrong. But you're
one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like

(57:48):
you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman, Like, come on, man,
you gave the call to use the first of these
fucking things. Yeah. Jacobsen goes into more detail about how
military planners respond despite what Truman says to the existence
now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, what happened after US war

(58:09):
planners saw what ten point four megatons could instantly destroy
simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad,
mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds
and then by the thousands. In nineteen fifty two, the
United States had eight hundred and forty one nuclear weapons.
A year before Truman left office. In nineteen fifty one,

(58:30):
a group of scientists and researchers that included doctor Robert
Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze
if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy
for responding to a Soviet invasion. They concluded that having
the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their
one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead,
who yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO

(58:54):
should replace manpower with low yield, tactical nuclear weapons that
would evaporated vance Soviet forces and that could be deployed
by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree
to which they're trying to do a kind of noble
thing here, Right. The stated goal here is bring the
battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on

(59:15):
soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every
city in Europe with atomic hell fire. Right, That's what
Project Vista's kind of trying to argue for, and their
conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the
Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces
the influence of the SAC. Right, the SAC has the nukes.

(59:36):
Now the army wants some nukes of its own. Right, right, A.
Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would
be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low yield
tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of
physile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult
to keep under centralized control. The only way to win
a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first
and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can

(59:59):
now no only lesson defeat, LeMay told his commanders. Moreover,
an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer
the SAC's top priority. La May now thought it would
be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability
to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers,
and nuclear facilities became SAC's primary targets. Lamay did not
make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's not completely off base here.

(01:00:22):
LeMay did not advocate preventative war. An American surprise attack
on the Soviet Union out of a blue, but the
counter force strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war,
sac planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to
be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable,
were no longer the goal. Offensive airpower must now be
aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction

(01:00:43):
against the United States or its allies. LeMay argued. This
transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might
be paid with national survival.

Speaker 4 (01:00:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
This is the origin of what becomes launch on warn. Right,
So you don't wait to get a bloody no, you
don't wait for them to hit you. You wait until
you're pretty sure they're about to hit you, and you
hit them. That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right. You
can understand Kina how he gets there, but that that

(01:01:12):
ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly once you're
now saying we won't wait to get hit. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
It's so interesting too, because it's it's all predicated on
this idea that national survival.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
He's very concerned about national survival, like I'm much more
concerned about humanity is survival. Not even because I'm a humanitarian,
people think, but because I'm a human right, like all,
if you destroy all life on earth, the nation's gone.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Yeah, there's there's well, And that's that's part of the craziness.
Like the understated crazin in that paragraph is that LeMay
thinks tactical nukes are a waste of physile material. Broyeh,
you have four times as many nukes by nineteen fifty
one as it would take to end civilization and just
your country. What's wasted? Bro, You're gonna have enough of

(01:01:58):
these fuckers.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
That's by before they made them, the god killing machine
that kills by God.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Right, we need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in
the fucking yes now. One of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
first concerns when he took office would be to bring
a resolution to this conflict, right, this conflict between the
Army and the Air Force via the SAC Right. After
having his National security team take a new look at
US defense policies, Iike decided both sides were right. The

(01:02:26):
US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe,
but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that
could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all,
in late nineteen fifty three, the USSR detonated its first
thermo nuclear device. By nineteen fifty four, the United States
had more than seventeen hundred nuclear weapons. By nineteen fifty five,
that number had climbed to nearly twenty five hundred. We

(01:02:47):
were building roughly two bombs a day. By nineteen fifty nine,
the United States had an arsenal of more than twelve
thousand nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five
per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You
see just how quickly like there's not any conceivable use
for twelve thousand nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand,

(01:03:10):
at least, you know, maybe less right Like surprisingly, it
was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant
budget cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has
kind of been forgotten, but Ike does you know, people
are generally aware of like the military industrial complex speech.
But at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes

(01:03:32):
the military budget and actually causes like kind of an
eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower,
because he's cutting back so much. The Army, in order
to deal with this loss of ban power, starts lobbying
for more nukes of its own, because that's the only
thing you can get funded for now, right, that's all
they're giving out. You know. General James R. Gavin, during
secret testimony before Congress laid out the number of atomic shells,

(01:03:55):
anti aircraft missiles, and land mines the Army needed. These
are all nuclear artillery, nuclear anti aircraft missiles, and nuclear
land mines.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
Nuclear landmine's a great plan. I can't come up with
negative sounds good sounds safe. Yeah, what's crazy is how
many Gavin wanted. One hundred and six thousand for battlefield use,
twenty five thousand for air defense, and twenty thousand to
hand out to the rest of NATO. Jesus Christ, bro,
these people aren't so crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
And I will say there is some Maybe the only
arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are
the air defense nuclear weapons, because the plan of this
is if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in,
the only way you can stop them maybe and ensure
that none of them drop a nuke on a city,
is you nuke them in the air, because nuke's fuck

(01:04:46):
up planes really bad. And that's actually kind of reasonable
if there's this many of these things like he's shooting
also is only going to kill soldiers, right, I mean
the fallout and write there will be consequences to that too,
But it's a defensible position as compared to everything else
that they're doing, right, Like, I can see how you
might want to be able to just like try to
blow up five hundred planes in the air with a

(01:05:07):
big nuke, right, that kind of makes sense. Like this
is all crazy, but I get it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
You know what, It's so interesting because I'm under the
impression of our current system, is that like shooting a
bullet with a bullet approach?

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
Yes, yep, yep.

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):
Did we move away from skeet shooting?

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
We definitely have moved away from nuclear anti aircraft artillery.
We have the ability to use that. But also we've
gotten a lot better and so have our quote unquote
adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from
EMP and the like. It's I don't think it's as much.
There's just not much point in defenses. The other reason
is that, like sure, you could stop some bombers, but

(01:05:44):
it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and
the sub launched nukes. And you can kind of again,
we have these things called like fad batteries that could
be if we actually had any place in the US,
could be useful against like a sub attack. Right. You
could actually stop a good number of sub based nuclear weapons,
right with these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas, protecting

(01:06:06):
like Israel and the like. Right, we don't have any
One of the scenarios Jacobsen talks about is like a
North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant
on the coast of California, which would cause this app
titanic environmental catastrophe. And she points out, like there are
plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing,
but we just we're using them all overseas, so we

(01:06:28):
don't have any set.

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
Up, huh.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
And that's one of those things where I'm like, well,
I guess I'm if we're going to be spending money
on something, I would like to spend money on more
of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet
in the air or more nookes. I don't know. Yeah,
but none of this really is gonna be enough if
there's a full scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best
hope is that maybe someone it's just one or two nukes,
they get fires, and maybe we're able to stop them,

(01:06:51):
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Anyway, that's part three, Margaret Yay, got any pluggables to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:06:58):
Well, if you like hiss, Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is the opposite of the show, although I still
have to end up talking about terrible things all the time.
And you can go listen to that Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, And you can also listen to Robert
and I Plane Pathfinder's right on the it could happen
here feed or the Cool Zone Media book Club feed.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
That's right. You can check all that out, and you
can check me out in the II coad day when
we do the next episode, because you're getting a bonus
one this week, you lucky gus. Anyway, assuming that you know,
we don't all die in newbout Fire, which is entirely possible,
it could happen right now. Oh nope, We're good, all right,
Oh okay.

Speaker 4 (01:07:42):
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. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:08:03):
at Behind the Bastards