Part Two: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. Robert got of
a sect me edition. These part tools and to celebrate
you kidding, give a sectimy. We're talking about mutually assured
nuclear destruction and the bastards who ensured that it was
in fact mutually assured global destruction. If one of two
countries ever got two pissed at each other.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Is this here? No skin in the game episode?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
That's right, baby? Oh wow? Ok, yeah, that's why you
should give me control of the nukes, because I'm gonna
use them. But just on the Great Lakes. We just
had the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's tragic sinking. You know,
there's no better time than to remind people that this
doesn't have to continue. We could stop the Great Lakes tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
The Pearl Harbor of the Midwest.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's right, that's right. I have heard people comparing it
to nine to eleven and then wondering why there's not
like a really good nine to eleven song, And I
think that is a good question. Wow, we just got
a bunch of Lee Greenwood. Shit. You know, where's where's
the Edmund Fitzgerald of nine to eleven?

Speaker 3 (01:06):
All right? I'll tell you a terrible embarrassing fact. I
lived in New York City on nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, no, I happened to be inside while the towers fell.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
But I'm sure he had something more important to day.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
I sure went from some towers to some smoke. But
the goth band I was in, I wasn't the songwriter.
I did a lot of the synthesizers and programming. We
wrote a song about nine to eleven, and I didn't
realize it until months later that our song Gone from
the Sky was.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
About nine eleven.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, anything and the no, the uh, the hook at
the end was dear God or Lord, where are you now?
Just over and over again, and this like super bass
voice that the singer had sick.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, it's I don't know, you know, we should have
a good song. There is a good song about mutually
assured nuclear destruction, and maybe we'll play it at the
end of these episodes. It's Tom Lair's all go together
when we go. It's like a joyous song about like look.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, like on the beach, but like a beach party.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah exactly, yes, Uh, there will be no am when
you see that. ICBM we will all go together when
we go. H Okay, miss in the sky. Now, that's
a great song, Margaret, that's a great that's a happier song.
That's about one side getting destroyed. Good song, good IRA song.

(02:33):
About the time Kadafi gave them sam missiles. I think,
oh man.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
I will say that the thing you're saying about how
bombing does it really work? I think this is true
for terrorism too.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
I mean people have done a lot of it, and
I don't know that it's done.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
It's I think it works actually really well. I mean
Osama bin Laden got what he wanted pretty much, which
is the continuing collapse of the United States. You can
you can trace that to nine to eleven. The IRA
largely got a lot of there. I mean, Northern Ireland's
still part of the British Commonwealth, but they got a
lot of stuff. I think, as data said in star

(03:10):
Trek's and Next Generation, terrorism can be a very effective strategy. Look,
that's not my conclusion, that's data from star Trek's conclusions.
Is Android take it up with him, you know. Yeah,
so talking of of terrorists and look, there's I don't

(03:33):
want this to come out as and this is sometimes
the way it sounds saying that like strategic bombing did
nothing in World War Two and that it was no
part of the German defeat. Right, that's not accurate. But
as we'll discuss what du Hay is claiming, what a
lot of the people believe is that strategic bombers and
a powerful enough air force render everything else unnecessary. And
that's only true in the context of nuclear war, and

(03:55):
even then it's not really true because subs are pretty
important and ground based missile launches, so it's not really
true with that right anyway, There's this group called the
bomber Mafia that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on that
had some terrible takes. But these are the guys who
are like advocating for the massive and expanded use of

(04:17):
like saturation bombing on civilian targets, you know. And Arthur Harris,
Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay on the American side, are
two very prominent members of this group. Like many American officers,
Curtis LeMay came from humble origins. He is not a sir,
very different from his counterpart in the RAF. He was
born in nineteen oh six in Columbus, Ohio. His father

(04:38):
was a handyman who I'm going to guess had some
sort of maybe he was drinking. He's not stablely employed.
He is not able to keep the family fed. Right.
It's one of those kind of situations, and as a result,
LeMay grows up poor. His first job was, in Eric
Schlosser's words, shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed
a neighbor's cat. So much backstory in that sentences the.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Most Midwest that shit I've ever heard to beat his cat.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, his mother, Curtis LeMay's mother was a servant and
the most stable earner during his childhood.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Uh wasn't shooting sparrows. I'm really shocked by this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, that didn't keep the family going. Uh. Le May
had to change schools in state several times. He was
always the new kid, and he was seldom fit in.
Schlosser describes him as shy, awkward, and bullied, and as
a way of fighting back against both kind of the
bullies and just the life he was born into. I
think having this father figure he doesn't have a shit together,
ma May becomes incredibly self disciplined. Right, This is sort

(05:40):
of his like defense mechanism. He is an excellent student.
He works constantly when he's not at school, and this
leads him to feel quote cut off from normal life
because he never has time for a childhood. He's just
kind of like working constantly and very concerned from an
early period with serious things. Right, he does not get
to be a kid. Too many kids have experience during

(06:01):
the fucking Great Depression, and today it's a bummer and
it's not gonna make him a better person. He does
save enough money to pay his way through Ohio State,
where he studies civil engineering. He goes to school every
day and works at a steel mill at night, usually
until two or three in the morning, at which point
he will sleep for a couple of hours and then
go back to school. That's his college experience.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Fuck yeah, so yeah, lots of people only sleep a
couple hours of the night at college, but for very different.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Different reason this has this kid's life is relentless. Yeah,
he graduates. He joins the Air Corps in nineteen twenty nine.
By this point, he has developed a love of hy
adrenaline activities. He likes to drive race cars, you know,
as a hobby, and he becomes a skilled pilot, But
he differentiates himself from many young officers because everyone wants
to be a fucking pilot. It is. It's still the

(06:50):
cool job in the Air Force. But by this point
planes are really new, you know, it's really cool, and
most young officers want to be fighter pilots because that's
the sexiest job than and now there's not really any
sexier job than fighter pilot. I'm sorry, you.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
Get to be an ace?

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, exactly who else gets to be an ace? One
of the things that differentiates LeMay from his colleagues is
that he wants to be a bomber pilot. He is
from the beginning not interested in fighter aircraft, he think,
and this is part and partly because he knows that
bombing is where the future is at now. I don't
know precisely when Curtis encountered General do Hayes's theories. I
don't know if he read his nineteen twenty one book

(07:26):
or if he was. It was just kind of like
cultural osmosis. Everyone is talking about do hay and strategic bombing,
you know, when you're in like the Air Force cadet school, right,
and so he just encounters a lot of that way yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Everyone, I know it's always talking about DeMay and strategic bombing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
in a non legally actionable way.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean, we all love strategic bombing. It's it's
become like the popular all the cool kids are talking
about how many tons of bombs you need per square
acre in an urban environment to really, you know, clean
out the cities. Now the late generals thing. I can
say this about do Hay's impact on LeMay. It's influential
enough that during Vietnam, and for an idea of how

(08:06):
long this guy is in the field, LeMay is running
the US Air Force in Asia from World War II
to the start of Vietnam. He will name his strategy
for bombing North Vietnam the genteel dou Hay Plan. That's
like the nickname. Everyone refers to it as like, so
this is like the polite version of dou Hay's plan.
We're not going to kill quite as many civilians as
do Hay.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
What have That's I only know a little bit about
bombing in Vietnam, and it didn't describe it.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
He's not in charge of the whole time, but he
does get us started on a specific foot. As we'll
talk about. So LeMay becomes a bomber pilot in nineteen
thirty seven. By this point, he had already decided he
believed long rage bombing was the future of air power.
He became one of the best navigators in the country
and was stationed in Hawaii, where his career moved quickly.
Curtis became a relentless advocate of constant training and preparation.

(08:56):
He earned the nickname old iron Pants as a result. Yeah,
that's that's what is. That's what is, like the kind
of lovingly his crews call him when.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
We're going down that tattooed on his knuckles or his
pant iron pants. Never mind, that doesn't.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah unfortunately, Yeah, thing you consider knuckles when they give
nicknames out. When World War Two started, he was a
major in command of a B seventeen flying fortress unit.
Curtis was quickly transferred into the eighth Air Force, and
he served under General Eker. This is the guy who
was wrong the Churchill about B seventeens not eating fighter escorts. Yeah,

(09:30):
a barrel Eker e A K E R.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, okay, like getting a little bit out, not.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, or like without the bee. Yeah. When he arrived
in Europe. This you. When LeMay arrived in Europe, the
US strategy, different from the British strategy, was daylight bombing raids.
LeMay's first big move was to point out that the
way the pilots were flying was getting them killed. Not
the Daylight Party couldn't do anything about that. But the
standard strategy among US bomber pilots was to zigzag to

(09:57):
avoid anti aircraft fire. This caused your bombs to be
really off target because she's zigzagging. May and the attitude
was that like, well, if you're just flying straight, there's
only a limited period of time in which you really
low that you're super vulnerable to anti aircraft fire. And
if you're just going straight, it's a death sentence. You're
just marching directly into the enemy guns. And LeMay argued, no, no, no,
flying straight is way safer because it's faster. You're out

(10:21):
in half the time. Zigzagging doesn't do all that much
to protect you, but getting out of there faster does.
So just going straight and then getting out of the
fucking death zone as quickly as you can is the
best way for us to do this. And he created
a new type of formation for bomber aircraft based on
this that was optim that was supposed to like basically
keep them with the optimal distance to offend each other

(10:43):
with their guns. Now, everything about this new tactic was
controversial among his pilots, and the way that LeMay stifled
any disagreement was promising to fly in the lead plane,
which was the one that would be in the most
danger if his theory was wrong. Right, So he'd be like.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
I kind of like this guy.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
I mean, no, he's there's a lot about him that's likable,
especially here.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Hyland would love this man. Probably did love this man.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
I believe Hyland was very much felt positively towards LeMay,
and his men love him because he's this kind of guy.
He'll have these ideas that are sometimes really dangerous, and
but he'll be like, I'll be in the first plane.
Like you can't say, I'm not just telling you guys
to do something like he is. He is leading from
the front, which is the thing you can do in
the Air Force that's not really possible in most other

(11:26):
branches at this point, not to the extent that LeMay
is doing it. Right, you know, another guy who's doing
basically the same thing as LeMay. Around this period of time,
actor James Stewart, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jimmy Stewart actually
becomes a general and is like deeply involved in our
air strategy and Korea too. He's he's arguably one of

(11:47):
the highest body count like actors that has ever existed,
like like a list actors. He's not the only one
in contention, by the way.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Yeah, there's that Specops guy who's in Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I'm talking about like
bomber pilots, and in terms of bodies, yeah, you have
a whole crop of these guys in World War Two
who are like big time actors and then like quit
to fly, be seventeens or whatever. It is a crazy
thing to have happened. Just imagine that if like we
had like a five year period where everyone had to
go to war and you're like, yeah, Timothy Chalamay killed

(12:21):
six thousand people. Yeah, yeah, just the most body stacked
by it.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Billie Eilish would lead from the front, That's all I say.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Absolutely, I don't think the Rock serves, but Billie Eilish
for sure does.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, I think he does it.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
John Wayne, I mean he's like sixties in his fifties,
he shouldn't be going to war. Yeah. Anyway, LeMay's ideas work,
and they'd work well enough to have become sop for
all American bomber crews. In the theater, LeMay I talked
about that Reagansburg mission in the first episode to destroy
that ball bearing plant. LeMay is in charge. He is
the guy flying in lead for the Reagansburg mission, right, the.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
One that's sixty out of three hundred and sixty.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, yes, yeah, which leads us to something that we'll discuss.
But like, yeah, in that mission, there's so many people
die that the eighth test to curtail all their missions
for five months until they get fighter escorts. And this
brings about LeMay's second big success. Because of how many
crews are dying. Leadership, notice that flights are starting to
have a high abort rate. Pilots are pulling back and

(13:20):
aborting the mission before they get into the kill zone.
Robert McNamara, future Secretary of Defense for the most of
the Vietnam War, came to believe that this abort rate
was caused by cowardice, which he defined as pilots not
wanting to die because their CEO had fucked up. McNamara
credits LeMay with ending the abort problem. Quote, he was
the finest combat commander of any service I came across

(13:42):
in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal.
He got the report, he issued an order, he said,
I will be in the lead plan on every mission.
Any plane that takes off will go over the target,
or the crew will be court martialed. The abort rate
dropped overnight. Now that's the kind of commander he was
so seeing like the upsides and the downsides of this man.
He's like, not a lot of sympathy for Creus, not

(14:04):
wanting to die because somebody decided they don't need fighter escorts.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah right, you know I read that other really good
book about this by Joseph Heller.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, yeah, so you can both see. I can see
why so many people admired him, and why he was
so beloved, especially by the people directly above him, and
why he was poppular with his cruise. And also, this
is a man who's got a dangerous brain. This is
a man who is really okay with people dying for principles, right,
And this is a man who has no trouble baking

(14:33):
human death into his operation plans, which is necessary in
the military at some level. Yeah, but he's maybe better
at it than you want someone to be maybe, right.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
Oh, okay, I can see where this might go further
based on the subject of these weeks. Yep, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yeah, And it was one of those things US bomber
Cruise suffered like a fifty percent killed in action rate
during this period of time. It's a very dangerous job,
and LeMay also has a reputation for being really dedicated
to his men's safety within like the degree that was possible,
which doesn't say as much objectively about how his plans
made men safer, and more how he made men feel

(15:07):
right like this, and there's a degree of like personal
skill here. You know, of all the officers in these episodes,
had you been in the military at the time, LeMay
is probably the guy you would have wanted to serve under,
not for logical reasons, but because that seems to have
been how his men felt about him. Right. Yeah. Now,
At the same time, his instincts made him perhaps the

(15:29):
worst possible guy to wind up with the job that
he gets, because he is the dude who directs the
formation of our grand nuclear strategy. He winds up in
charge of the Strategic Air Command. Correct fifty to fifty,
so that's good.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
LeMay is a guy who, from the start of his
career wants to reduce war to long range bombing. And
this is a guy who has shattered by the time
he's in charge of the Strategic Air Command. His sanity
is shattered because of what he's seen in World War Two.
You talked about the mission where everybody died. This is
a guy who has watched cities burn from the position
of setting them on fire. And he is a guy

(16:04):
who has repeatedly walked headfirst into a situation where thirty
to fifty percent of us are gonna die. Maybe you know,
like he's done that so much that he has during
like as a result of what happens to him in Europe,
his face gets paralyzed. It's Bell's palsy. He gets an
attack of Bell's palsy, and his face is completely paralyzed

(16:25):
after this point, so he like can't smile or show emotion.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
To his least favorite things before that anyway, his.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Face is frozen forever. So he choose a cigar constantly
to hide the effects, to like animate his face so
it doesn't creep people out.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Like that's some, Like that's some, Like the world is
better fiction than fiction.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Exactly If you wrote this guy, people will be like,
this is not really a believable much. But no, he
was a he's a real ass dude. So he was
not the kind of man who could have read an
analysis of the Regensburg attack on that ball bearing place
that said, well, this didn't work and like maybe some
of our assumptions are wrong and a lot of guys

(17:05):
died for no good reason because like, we didn't execute
this as well as we could have. This was a
guy who was going to go to his grave believing
that area bombing not only worked, but it was the
only way to win a war. Right. He is basically
always convinced that do Hay was mostly right. And the
problem with this is that he hadn't been, as we
have discussed. And this is not just Robert, you know,

(17:27):
old left wing radical Robert saying that the strategic bombing
guy was that Reagansburg was a failure. Bernard Brodie of
the Rand Corporation would later conclude in a study of
dou Hay's theories in World War Two. If one disregards
for a moment the overall visions and considers only specific
assertions and theses, one has to conclude in World War
Two that do Hay proved wrong and almost every salient

(17:48):
point he made to assert the reverse, as is often done,
is to engage in propaganda, not analysis, and that's just
impossible to argue against. Bombing alone did not destroy the
third right. Its capacity to wage war was degraded, not
just through bombing, but through a mix of air, ground,
and naval warfare. Like there's a lot of well, after
nineteen forty four, while we were strategically bombing German cities,

(18:12):
their war production finally collapsed, and it's like we were
also taking a lot of territory from them, like they
were losing ground to other things were happening, and the
air power played a role in us being able to
take ground. But it's a much more complicated picture than
do Hay and his advocates are making. It was not
just strategic long range bombing, and that's what do Haye

(18:32):
was saying, right, You can't just say, well, bombing was
a useful part of the overall no, no, no, that's not
what do Hay was claiming. And all of these air
Force guys are going to be arguing for the rest
of their careers. All we need is an air force, right,
that's a big part of this.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Is this the bomber mafia.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
They're just like, yeah, this is like and their descendants
that this is a big thing for the next half
a century and longer, and like air Force arguing that
we don't really need as much of the other stuff
because air force handle it can it can fix every problem,
right and in war, through war, we don't get what
we want through just bombing people. Right.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Well, what you and I learned is that you could
throw bombs at most problems and that would help alleviate
the problems, but you also need someone with a spiked stick.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yes, we did learn that in our Pathfinder game that
we played on the It could Happen Here book Club
special weekend episodes that you can listen to right now, folks. Yeah,
So it's also kind of worth noting that a lot
of these strategies to like, well, all we need to
do is bomb these cities and that'll destroy x amount
of factories and that will destroy German military production. It
assumes an enemy, and this will later be a problem

(19:37):
with our plans for nuclear war. They're always built assuming
an enemy who doesn't adapt or change as we do
things to them, because like Germans, yeah, we knock out
some factories, so they decentralize their factories and they make
them less vulnerable to bombing, so that they're assembling things
in pieces and each individual's target is less important to
the whole. Right, there's a bunch of the that with

(20:00):
like manufacture of a bunch of different material, and German
air defenses remained pretty good until late in the war.
Like dou Hay is just really wrong on all of
this stuff. Now, by nineteen forty five, over in the
Pacific theater, similar lessons had been learned visa VI the
wisdom of dou Hay's theories. Japan's bold air attack at
Pearl Harbor had been a tactical success, but number one

(20:21):
was not long range strategic bombing. These were planes that
got there on aircraft carriers as part of a naval attack.
It was pretty important to the overall thing, and it
didn't knock the US out famously as a combatant. It
really really just kind of pissed us off.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
You know, yeah, were we going to join the war anyway?
Do you think I mean.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
We FDR really wanted to. I's for one thing. Germany
getting involved wasn't a necessity. Hitler declared war on US
once Japan. We declared war in Japan, right, and he
didn't really need to go all out on Japan's behalf.
I'd say that was probably a mistake, but he was
pretty pretty arrogant at that point in time. Yeah, maybe

(21:02):
we would have gotten involved with Like again, FDR really
wanted to, so I guess that's probably the smart money,
as he would have figured some way out. But but
this is the way Harbor figure out. Yeah, we Japan
didn't need to do a Pearl Harbor and it didn't
help them right now, they did a Pearl Harbor. This
is again to get back to how the same logic
that could really fuck us in terms of a global

(21:24):
nuclear war that kills everybody is part of why I
think it's reasonable to fear that is the same logic
has repeatedly gotten humans in trouble in the past. The
logic behind the attack at Pearl Harbor is the US
is already fucking with us. Right by by throttling our
access to stuff like fuel, They're going We're going to
wind up fighting them anyway. It's inevitable, and so we
need to launch a first strike to stop their capacity

(21:47):
to hurt us, you know, Like it's the it's the
same logic, right that, well, we have fight, some sort
of conflict is inevitable, so we might as well hit
them first. It's our only chance to survive.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
And I like, it's a weird comparison to this, Like
I spent a while kind of hanging out more on
the streets when I was younger, and the idea that
like the way to survive the sort of like rough
and tumble life of living under bridges or whatever is
to like strike first is entirely incorrect. That is like
absolutely how everyone would like instead, Like I think about

(22:21):
this time, you know, like because like you know, sometimes
when you're outside, people like randomly, drunkenly try to fight
you or something, right, and it's like literally learning I'm
not advocating passivism here, but literally learning. If someone just
is looking for a fight and they punch you and
you ignore them, that ends it, at least in my experience. Right,

(22:41):
But as soon as actually trying to destroy you. You have
to do something. So that's just like the whole concept. Sorry,
I'm just like thinking a lot about this. Is it
scales up next into guns and then into nukes or yeah,
you know, wars or whatever.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
The part of the problem with this kind of logic
is that it's logic that's true. Sometimes we've seen it
be true sometimes right like the sometimes being from the
Cold War up to the present moment, the strategy of
deterrence has worked, right, But that doesn't mean it always
will right because nothing, No, there's no one strategy that

(23:14):
fits every scenario. And the problem is with nukes you
don't really have you don't have room to do the
less fucked up apocalyptic scenario that's not really an option.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Yeah, you just take part of the problem. If you
take one nuke on the nose as a country, you
can survive that. But then it's like it just what
is It just destroys the deterrence effect and so then
everyone's like, all right, well, it's like free game on
nuk in you or whatever.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Well, I mean, you know that's what the country would say.
It would be political suicide probably for whatever party didn't
respond with a nuke, you know, if you're talking from
the US standpoint, if they got nuked, but also being
willing to take a hit is the only way to
stop the doom luke that kills everybody. Yeah, and that
also that also predisposes you're just having one nuke at you, right,

(24:00):
which is the most like and I think one of
the things that does scary most is not and this
is something that could easily turn into the apocalyptic scenario,
but something that starts as like and this is kind
of what the book Nuclear War Jacobson thea Like talks about.
But like, essentially you get like a nuclear January sixth, right,

(24:21):
one nuke goes up, gets launched at or goes off
in one country because of some sort of like weird
stupid fuck up that isn't going to be repeatable necessarily,
Like it's easy to learn from. You could stop subsequent ones,
but in the immediate wake of the fuck up, this
precedent is set that number one, there's a really high

(24:42):
chance that it just immediately leads to everyone shooting everything
because like nobody has perfect data on what's happening. They
just know that like a nuke has gone off, and
everyone gets so like, if the country that gets nuked
is becomes convinced any point they're under attack, they have
about six minutes to choose to launch all of the
missiles or not right. Right, That's how it works for
a US president. It's no different as far as we

(25:05):
know really for Russia's president. Right, if that nuke goes
off anywhere, you're going to have like six minutes to
figure out do I end the world over this or not?

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Right?

Speaker 2 (25:19):
And that's probably bad for us.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Yeah, I think it's a bad system. I'm just gonna
go ahead and say.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Probably one person in any country shouldn't get to make
that call. Probably no one should have to make that
call in six minutes. But that's the reality of the
of the technical reality of the systems we built. They
don't have a lot of wiggle room, which is a problem.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
I'm glad I'm not the one in charge of designing
the system.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
To be clear, No, Sophie is, and that's why it act.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
She works for me.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Behind the Bastards has the most powerful nuclear deterrent of
any podcast in the game.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
You know, damn straight motherfuckers.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
If the if the Pods save guys launch an ICBM,
we can have a level one hundred missiles in the
air in under six minutes.

Speaker 3 (26:03):
This is why there's that new cool Zone media podcast,
The Bastards Behind Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Wow, how did Robert assemble the most powerful nuclear arsenal
in the podcasting game?

Speaker 3 (26:13):
And Sophie The answer, Sophie, we all have.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
The answer is Sophie bribed a guy at Fort Leonard Wood. Yeah,
and it was surprisingly easy. Anyway, here's ads. We're back
and we're talking about where we are in nineteen forty five. Right,
We've been fighting the Japanese military for several years now.

(26:39):
There's been this like really brutal island hopping campaign, several
massive naval engagements, and it's led to a situation my
g oh yeah, which part of it?

Speaker 3 (26:50):
He was a submariner in the oh sassific.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, that sounds like it sucked.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
Oh yeah. He's a torpedoman. And literally the fact that
I exist is an accident of he stepped on a
college application while repairing torpedoes on an island, and he
filled it out and he sent it out and then
they were like, yeah, all right, we're gonna send you
to co be an engineer. And then his submarine didn't
come back after he left, so he who it fell
to the bottom of the sea. It's never been recovered.

(27:16):
No one ever knows what happened to it.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
And probably fine then I'm sure they're probably around a
farm up state.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Yeah, yeah, all of his old buddies. Yeah. Anyway, yeah,
South Pacific.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
South Pacific. So by nineteen forty five, you know, we've
gone through a version of the same lessons that all
of these guys learn in Europe, which is that a
lot of what Douhey had said it doesn't really work out, right,
we can't just bomb our way out of this. Naval
power is important, and in fact, the aviation that's most
influential in the early stage of the Pacific campaign or

(27:50):
not long range bombers, it's navy tactical aircraft, right, because
that's a lot of these naval engagements come down to
our carrier group finds their carrier group, and we fucking
killed the shit out of them with planes. But they're
not doing like long range strategic bombing. You know, this
is like really close combat in aeronautical terms, and it's

(28:11):
pretty fucked up, and there's still a lot of work
for infantry, right, No, matter how much, because we are
bombing these islands like Okinawa, and we're shelling them before
we send in ground troops. But no amount of bombing
and shelling is sufficient to clear all of the infantry out.
Soldiers are able to you know, they've got these bunker
networks that the Japanese Army has built. These are sufficient

(28:31):
enough that like we're not able to bomb them out
right the future and past of war, right, tunnels always
work really well. And this is again it's more refutation
of this. All we need are bombers, Like, no, you
keep needing to send an infantry with fucking knives to
clear guys out right, we haven't made the fucking knife
obsolete by nineteen forty five, like we're not doing everything

(28:54):
with bombers. Duhey and his advocates had been irrationally optimistic.
So that said, by like early nineteen forty five, we've
isolated the Japanese home islands. And Colonel Rassioni and his
piece summarizes the success of strategic bombing prior to nineteen
forty five of Japan's heartland. Quote General Hansel commanding and

(29:16):
directing bombing attacks on Japan and still unaware despite his
extensive European experience that precision bombing was a myth, attempted
to use it to destroy Japan's military industrial capacity. After
three months of intensive precision operations, his B twenty nine
bomber force had destroyed none of the designated high priority targets,
a failure that brought about his dismissal. Right, three months

(29:36):
of precision bombing, the Air Force is not able to
destroy any of their high value industrial targets. Right, it
just doesn't work. So they bring in Curtis LeMay. And again,
LeMay is neither of these guys. Both these guys are.
Both Hansel and LeMay are advocates of strategic bombing. Hansel
is just saying it has to be tactical, it has
to be like, you know, precision bombing. Sorry, and LeMay

(29:58):
is saying, nah, you just got to fuck up everything, right,
And his job is basically esque direct this air war
to break the back of the Japanese without US needing
to actually send in ground troops to invade the Home Islands,
and he embarks on the most terrible bombing campaign of
World War Two. As Rassioni describes, it was General Curtis
LeMay who put duhayes theories to the ultimate test, all
of Japan's major cities except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki were

(30:21):
burned out with conventional weapons. LeMay starts his job commanding
the air war against Japan. He is the youngest general
in US history. He gets the rank at age thirty
six after his work in Europe. The fire bombing of
Tokyo is his idea, like that is his plan entirely,
and when he takes the job he tells his deputies
Japan will burn if I can get fire on it.

(30:44):
And the book Commander Control Schlosser writes LeMay was involved
in almost every aspect of the plan, from selecting the
mix of bombs magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter,
to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm.
He is very nuts and bolts as a commander, he
is the personal architect. This is his great work is
the fire bombing of Tokyo, and he plans it to

(31:05):
like the most intimate degree. Perission's article, LeMay studied the
mission reports and reconnaissance photographs, realized that the Japanese had
almost no air defense left, and sent three hundred and
twenty five pilots loaded with jellied gasoline fire bomb clusters
over Tokyo in the early hours of March tenth, nineteen
forty five. You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the
Japanese have ever seen, he told his crews. As he

(31:27):
waited impatiently for the bombers to return, he confided to McElway,
who's like his adjutant, Basically, in a war, you've got
to keep at least one punch ahead of the other
guy all the time. A war is a tough kind
of proposition. If you don't get the enemy, he gets you.
I think we've figured out a punch he's not expecting
this time, and the mission was a success. The US
Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that quote probably more persons lost

(31:50):
their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour
period than at any time in the history of man.
More than ninety thousand civilians are killed and roughly a
million are made homeless in a one night of bombing.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, wait a second woo.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Uh LeMay continues to order more fire bombings after this,
consuming hundreds of thousands of men, will, women and children
with flames and the fact that we need to keep
doing this maybe is a sign that, like some of
your attitudes about bombing aren't as accurate as you'd want.
Certainly do Hay has been proven wrong by a pretty
grand factor. But like German will didn't break until Hitler

(32:30):
shot himself, and the Japanese are still We just incinerated
their entire capital from the sky. We killed more human
beings in an hour than have ever been killed in
history in a similar period of time, probably, and they're
they're still swinging. Uh. Maybe maybe we've got some assumptions
here that aren't entirely correct. Now, that is not how

(32:51):
anyone thinks. One of the men planning these raids with
LeMay was a close subordinate of his General Thomas Sarsfield.
Power is literally general power. Yes, he has a g
I Joe name, and General power is going to help
to build the nuclear doomsday machine we all sleep alongside today,
right like he is one of the architects of this,
alongside Lea May. And the fact that he has a
name the name of a G I jo character belies

(33:13):
the fact that his backstory is pretty tame. His parents
are Irish immigrants from branches of wealthier families started by
second or third sons who left the home country to
find their fortune because how inheritance worked at the time.
Thomas Power grew up working class in New York City.
As a young adult, he entered the US Army Air
Corps in nineteen twenty eight when it was still a baby.
Since this was a comparatively dull time for the US military,

(33:35):
his career was pretty dull until World War Two. Power
was a gifted officer and hard working, and so once
the military starts expanding massively to meet the demands of
the war, officers like him are promoted rapidly. Power sees
combat for the first time, flying B twenty four missions
over Italy. He starts the war a major, and he
ends it a brigadier general and Deputy Chief of Operations

(33:56):
for all US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. Now.
Power is not briefed immediately about the existence of nuclear weapons.
LeMay is one of the first generals who learns about
the Manhattan Project who learns that we have a nuke.
Now he's not allowed to command the raid in person.
He wants to. He tries to, but he's at this
point too high ranking to be given that job, so

(34:17):
the nuke one. Yeah, I mean he's not allowed to
command raids in person in general, right, Power, I think
is his guy doing a lot of that, And Power
is the guy, Yeah, Power is the guy who is
commanding the raid on Tokyo in person. Yeah. So I
do think it's kind of worth noting in terms of
how these guys are both thinking. They're still patterning their options.

(34:39):
They've moved away from like the shit Eker was doing,
but they're patterning their operations largely off of how bomber
Harris had planned operations right in Tokyo as in Cologne.
The military insisted its primary objective was the destruction of
industrial buildings, but the Air Force planners working for LeMay
in Power picked targets based not on industrial density, but
how well they thought given neighborhoods would burn. The B

(35:00):
twenty nine crews were informed that the purpose of the
attack was to destroy small factories, but LeMay in Power
both knew that was not the real target. And these
guys have their way with the Army Air Corps in
Japan for months, but final victory still proves elusive. We
dropped more than sixteen hundred tons of explosives, on Tokyo
on March tenth, and again, remember duhe had theorized three
hundred was enough to wipe out any city on the earth,

(35:23):
but the Empire refused to surrender. LeMay's entire philosophy of
war was that victory could be achieved through the application
of long range bombing, and the application of long range
bombing alone. His only response when confronted with inconvenient facts
like this isn't working was to escalate. In the book
Fifteen Minutes, L. Douglas Keeney describes the generals escalating Mania,

(35:45):
LeMay bombed with an increasing sense of urgency. He bombed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki,
and Yokohama. He attacked when and where he was ordered to,
but when he was finished, he pulled names out of
almanacs or off maps and bombed some more. In his view,
the only reason runways had been built on Tinian and
the only reason that B twenty nine were fueled up
and loaded with bombs. The only reason he was in

(36:06):
the Marianas was to bomb Japan. Five hundred bombers against
one city, eight hundred against another nine hundred bombers. Today
one thousand bombers tomorrow. The only point was to end
the war, one factory, one city at a time. So
intense were his operations that by the end of May,
LeMay eventually exceeded the supply of bombs the United States
Navy could deliver to him and was forced to take
a break. I feel that the destruction of Japan's ability

(36:29):
to wage war lies within the capacity of this command,
LeMay road of the bomber forces he commanded, I.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Mean, just a when you have a hammer, everything needs
to get exploded.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, and when you have a thousand bombers, you can't
really have any ideas that aren't dropping bombs on people,
you know. That's what else matters.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
The only other I'm not trying to defend this, but
the only other, like primary option would be like getting
a beachhead and then like trying to take this.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
I mean, and we'll talk more about that, right, Like,
this is not there's not any clear good options here.
It's a war, there rarely are. But it's important to
note that like through conventional methods, his plan doesn't seem
to be working. Allied war planners find themselves preparing for
an invasion. Right, we're still preparing this in ground troops
into Japan. Now, this is where you get a lot

(37:22):
of debate, right, And his book, Keeney describes the plans
for an invasion of Japan by the Allies as unnecessary,
and I think he expresses what I'd call significant faith
that Japan was on the brink of collapse. This is
not a conclusion shared by everyone, but I think there's
a strong argument here. One of the issues that's already developing,
as you can see though, is that a lot of guys,

(37:43):
even at this point, had already forgotten what had made
bombing Japan possible, Right that, Like, we're kind of narrowing
it down to, like, okay, and we bombed, Like both
sides of the nuke issue. One side is like, we
didn't need de nuke Japan because we had already destroyed
so much of them through bombing the island that they
were going to surrender anyway. And the other side is
Japan never would have surrendered unless nuked, and so we

(38:06):
had to nuke them to avoid an even costlier invasion. Right,
That's the basic argument. And both of these, if you're
thinking in the grand strategic sense, ignore the fact that
we only got to the point where we could bomb
the Home Islands the way we were after defeating Japan
in a series of more conventional engagements. Right, just in
terms of the whole strategic bombing is all we need

(38:26):
thing was never correct, right.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Right, because they had to defeat them on the sea
and on all the islands.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
By the point the Home Islands were isolated, it was
cave possible to defeat Japan just through bombing, right, But
there was a lot prior to that, right, Yeah. And
so when LeMay learns that we have an atom bomb
and here's how powerful this thing is, I think it
kind of strikes him as salvation to his theory of warfare,
right yea, And yeah, it's kind of this is kind

(38:54):
of the prehistory of the modern argument that nukes are
the only way to end Japan's willingness to fight, right,
and so bombs save lives. Part of why that gets
started is it's really convenient for guys like Curtis Leamy, Right,
It really helps a lot with the bets that they've
been making in their careers. If this is the only
way to end the war. You know, that's not the

(39:14):
only thing going on here, But they find it it's
very helpful. It's not a non factor here. How helpful
this is to a lot of people's beliefs about how
war already works that have kind of been proven wrong.
Is that nukes kind of retroactively make them right.

Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, I mean there's just such a different order of magnitude.
It's just yeah, go in from a club to an
AR fifteen.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah, it's And it's like, look if someone's like, all, like,
the only way to stop kids from like fucking with
the plants in my yard is to hit him with
a stick, and he hits kids with a stick, and
they keep fucking with his yard, so he like, well
I have to shoot them, and that stopped it, Like yeah, totally.
I don't know, man, were there other things you weren't considering.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
Could they have laid it just to go back and
pretend like I'm in charge World War two? Could they
just lay siege to Japan and like be like that
we already beat you everywhere?

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Or just they were Yeah, I mean that that's what happened. Right,
We cut off Japan. Ninety percent of their merchant shipping
had ended, right, Like, we had cut them off pretty conclusively.
And that's one side of this argument is that we
never needed to nuke them. There were other reasons, largely
we wanted to scare the shit out of the USSR.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Right, Yeah, that's that's always what I assumed is basically, like,
we have a new toy, we need to prove that
we're like man enough to use.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
It, right, And and part of why that gets so
much support among military leaders is that getting access to
these weapons allows them to continue fighting wars the way
they've been arguing is the only way we need to
fight a war, right, Like, oh, all that does matter
is bombers. Now, Now, I don't really think it's productive
to like try to make an argument about whose view

(40:55):
of the use of nuclear weapons was correct, you know,
because there's no there's not a perfect answer to that,
and a lot of it comes down to what you
believe about ethics. And like I would argue, even if
it would cost the lives of a million soldiers, that's
better than mass killing civilians for the human race, Like,
it's just bad. It opens us out, Like right now,

(41:18):
we're all fifteen minutes away from the end of humanity,
in part because decisions like this kept being made, and
each one leads to a bigger decision that kills more people,
and we probably shouldn't have started going down that road, right,
That would be like my answer, But LeMay felt very differently.
He himself laid out his theory of warfare pretty succinctly.

(41:38):
And this is a direct quote from the man. I'll
tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people,
and when you've killed enough, they stop fighting. And this
is like how the animating theory that the US brings
into basically every war. You know, we dress it up differently.
Very few of our general staff will say straight up,
that's what I believe. But this is what we thought

(41:58):
in Afghanistan and didn't work. This is what we thought
in Vietnam. This is what like, well, you just got
to kill enough of the bad guys. Eventually they run
out of bad guys. And that's just not how things work. Really.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
It's the like that meme that's like, it's the everyone
is twelve theory.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Right, yeah, but yes, yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
But the thing is, though, that's frustrating because it's like,
you know, people are always like, oh, you can't kill an ideology,
and you're like, you know, what if you kill enough
people who have an ideology, and the ideology goes away
for a very long time. Yeah, like you actually kind
of can You can't. Humans are squishy and soft and
easily killed. Defense is always harder than offense. I don't know.

(42:42):
I well, I'm not the friend of this.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Sometimes sometimes you do have to kill people, and there
are problems that you can kill your way out of,
right that we have as a species. Yeah, it's just
not all you need to do. Ever, now, it doesn't
work a lot of the most of the kill people
to solve problems. Advocates are saying things like, well, if
we bomb these people who are doing suicide bombings because

(43:08):
they're angry about their living conditions enough, they'll stop bombing us,
And like, well, but no, you only thinks that really
how it works in the long run. Yeah, Or this
insurgency that is being supported by the local populace, if
we make life miserable enough for the populace, they'll stop
supporting the insurgents. Gotta be a no dog. Unfortunately, history

(43:30):
is repeatedly shown it doesn't work as the way you
think it does, right, those.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
Are the whole Like modern theory of warfare is that
basically people support whoever feeds them and like you, actually.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
It helps sometimes Again, there's no one size fits all
theory of like this is. But when you're thinking of
one size right, when you limit it to the all
we need to do is bomb them. You're not going
to win the war unless you're using the bomb that
kills all of the people everywhere. And that where this
leads is them all being like, well, the only way

(44:02):
to effectively plan for war is to destroy the whole species.
And then we don't.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Have a war, yeah until we have the like planetary
destructo button like that, Yeah, explodes the inside of the planet.
We've hit the top. There's no more kill everyone button.
We found to kill everyone button.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
I feel like Margaret, the way we should govern is
we should have a kill everyone buttons, and everyone has
a no, no, no, and everyone has.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
A plot of Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
I don't know. I haven't read that.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
Oh, there's this old science fiction book. It might be
called Tiger Tiger. I might be getting wrong. The spoiler
at the end of this, just to say what I
think you were about to say, is that he basically
gives everyone in the world the plants of how to
make nukes, and then we get world peace because everyone
has mutually a shorted destruction on an individual level. Oh see, No,
it's entirely incorrect.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
That that was a I mean, yeah, I don't think
that would really work very well. It's a fun idea
for her story. No, my theory is you give everyone
a chip that lets them all vote whenever, like a
vote is called about, like whether or not they want
to destroy the world or not. And if fifty one
percent of humanity votes to destroy the world, then a
device goes off and it kills everybody, Right, so you
have to keep life pleasant enough for at least fifty

(45:15):
one I feel like it's better than the system we.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Have, all right, what if that is actually always a
ballot option on every elect.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Every kill everyone, yes or no.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
So it's like, well, we give a Democrat, Republican or
kill every kill everybody.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
I didn't kill everybody might have won last year.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Yeah wait, I've changed my mind about this.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Anyways, So yeah, let's go to ads. We're back. Real
warfare had proven that strategic bombing and precision bombing were
both more difficult and less effective in practice than their
advocates hoped, and nukes were an answer to these prayers.

(45:56):
They were a weapon system that seemed to justify all
of their du Haey inspired theories of how aerial warfare
ought to work. As soon as we use a nuke
for the first time, there's this immediate, loud and growing
chorus of voices within the Army Air Corps that like,
maybe this is the only weapon we ever need in
the future. And I want to read another quote from
the book fifteen minutes. The fact that Japan, while still
in possession of a formidable and intact land army, surrendered

(46:19):
without having her homeland invaded by enemy landforces represents a
unique and significant event in military history. LeMay would later say.
General James H. Jimmy Doolittle agreed the Navy had the
transport to make the invasion of Japan possible, the ground
forces had the power to make it successful. The B
twenty nine made it unnecessary, said General hap Arnold. The
influence of atomic energy on airpower can be stated very simply.

(46:41):
It has made airpower all important. Right, So this is
immediately a lot of the most influential guys in the
Air Corps are saying, this is kind of all it
matters in war going forward right, Like, yeah, we finally
figured it out. We were wrong last time, but like
we weren't ready yet, but now we're ready to make
bombers be the only thing that you need. Yeah, if
you're wrong long enough, here become right right. Yes, that

(47:04):
is how things work sometimes. And it may seem that
I am not going into detail about the Manhattan Project
and the guys who like developed and built the first
nuclear bomb, because you'd think, if we're talking about the
global nuclear doomsday device, the guys who made the first
nuke are somewhat culpable for that, right, and they are.
I don't think their role is worth me covering here
for a couple of reasons. For one, there's been a

(47:25):
pretty big budget movie recently about those guys, so I
think there's a pretty high background level of understanding about
like the Manhattan Project right now. And more to the point,
I don't place most of the moral blame on a
potential global nuclear war on the Manhattan Project guys. I
think you have to put yourself in the shoes of
guys like Sillard, who we started the series talking about, right,

(47:46):
these people who are watching the worst war ever happen,
and all of tens of millions die and they're being told, Hey,
if we build a bomb big enough, maybe we can
stop this war. Right, Given the knowledge a lot of
these guys would have had at the time, and these
guys are not all high level state actors with access
to complete information about the strategic scenario, right, given the

(48:07):
level of knowledge they would have had to understand, I
think participation in the Manhattan Project is understandable, right, Yeah, yeah,
at that stage. And to make that point, let's talk
about a guy called named Lewis Slotkin. I'm gonna have
to go back and get his name right. I corrected myself.
I spelled it wrong at the start. I had a
K in there. I fucked up. I'm sorry, I'll correct
it later. Lewis was Canadian by birth, but his parents

(48:29):
were Yiddish speaking Jewish refugees from Russia's Mini Pagrams. So
he grows up in Canada and he does well enough
as an undergrad that he's accepted to a PhD program
at King's College in London. He excels there as well.
The nature of his work is beyond me, but he
won prizes for his continuous contributions to physics. Right, I
don't understand what he was smart about, but it was physics,

(48:49):
and he was good at it. Here In's a reputation,
a rare one for an engineering nerd, as being an
adrenaline junkie. In the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,
Robert Yunk says that Slotkin's colleagues at the time described
in regularly going off quote in search of fighting, excitement,
and adventure. He had volunteered for service in the Spanish
Civil War more for the sake of the thrill of
it than on political grounds. Jeez, he's that kind of dude, right,

(49:12):
He's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. He gets
hired by the University of Chicago in nineteen forty two.
He is invited to the Manhattan Project and he works
directly with uranium and plutonium. Slotkin's particular expertise is in
assembling the cores of atomic devices. This is very dangerous,
high stakes work, and he seems to thrive on the
thrill of it. I found one account of him by

(49:33):
Martin Zelig, quoting a colleague who worked closely with Slotkin.
It was Friday afternoon and Lewis wanted to shut down
the reactor to make adjustments to an experiment at the
bottom of the tank of water, which was used to
absorb radiation. We said that was impossible, and we planned
to shut down the reactor that weekend. When we came
back on Monday morning, I found that Lewis had stripped
down to his shorts, dived into the tank and made
the adjustments underwater. I was appalled that anyone would take

(49:56):
such risks. It shows what kind of a person he was.
He was like a cowboy, but a good experimental scientist.
So you've got like your cowboy nuclear engineer here, right.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
Yeah, who fought in the space of a war.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Well he wanted to. Yeah, Oh, I thought he doesn't
quite make it. Yeah, I don't think he makes it.
Over and Lewis is he's he's literally the guy who
builds the core of Trinity, our first nuke. He's like
with his hands. He's made Chief Armor of the United
States as an honor for this after the bomb goes off,
like that's his job title. But the honors failed to

(50:29):
make up for the downsides of his job, like the
fact that in August of nineteen forty five, he watched
his good friend Harry Dalling Daglin dagh La I n
die horrific death. After there's this there's this thing you
have to do sometimes where you're like switching out the
core of a bomb. And I think this is basically
at the time, how you have it like armed or

(50:50):
disarmed pretty much, but you've got this this thing known
as the demon core, which is this like plutonium gallium
alloy bomb core. And these are insanely dangerous. The process
of like moving them is called tickling the dragon's tail
for a reason because it's it's this insanely like if
this thing falls or breaks in any way, you're dying

(51:10):
a horrific death. Like this is one of those rare
things about nukes that's as dangerous as like the movie
version would be. Like if anyone drops this thing, it's
a fucking like hell is unleashed in the room and
his so Slotkin's friend Harry dies this way, this nightmarish
death from radiation exposure, just a few weeks after Hiroshima,

(51:30):
and at this point in time, we don't know much
about radiation sickness as it involves nuclear weapons, right, We've
had very little experience medically with this. Dalaane's agonizing death
provides Los Alamos researchers with some of their first hard
data on acute radiation poisoning. Slotkin was shaken by the incident,
and as the months after the bombing flew by, he

(51:54):
grew disillusioned with the US military as an institution. You know,
the sheer carnage of the first atom bombs may have
influenced this. He helps build these with his bear he's
not bear, but with his hands. And the bombings in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between one hundred and fifty thousand
and two hundred and fifty thousand people as a general estimate, right.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
Yeah, you're trying to stop the Nazis, and then you're like, whoops,
I oh god, Yeah, build the bomb that killed one
hundred two hundred thousand people.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Fifty two hundred and fifty thousand people. Yeah, Like, that's
that's got to wear on your soul, even if you
think it was necessary, right yeah, And it does look
that way to a lot of these guys. Japan surrenders
unconditionally less than a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, right,
and that probably balms some of their souls to an extent.
But after victory in Japan. It becomes harder and harder
for slot Can to justify what he's doing because the

(52:43):
US is now a nation at peace and they're continuing
to build nuclear weapons, and he is forced to grapple
with a new reality, which is that the US does
not have an enemy, and we are building a massive
nuclear stockpile, right, and military leaders, it's generals who have
direct troll over those weapons. You know, they theoretically have

(53:03):
to follow the president's orders, but there's nothing stopping them
physically from utilizing those nukes, right, yeah, Yeah, And he
also is aware, being reasonably well read, because these guys
are just talking about this, that a lot of these
military leaders believe overwhelmingly that the use of nukes is
to break the will of an enemy population through mass

(53:24):
destruction of the civilian populace. Right like that, we're using them. Yes,
it's not hard to imagine why he may have felt
compelled to change his career. He committed to that course
of action in nineteen forty six, and we'll discuss what
happened to him in a little bit.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
Become a podcaster.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
He became a podcaster the very first Yes, the only
thing worse, Yes, yeah, the only thing worse than a
nuclear weapons engineer. He now works on Pod Save America. Yeah. Really,
the only place to go, the only downward trend you can.

Speaker 1 (53:55):
Take, the only podcast name you can remember today.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
I don't know a lot of pod Sophie. I don't
know a lot of podcasts. What else is there? Last
podcast on the left.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
Cool People Did Cool Stuff by Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Well those are all. I'm not going to say that
a nuclear engineer joined one of our podcasts, Sophie. That
man has so much blood on his hands. We don't
need that kind of heat fair enough.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
I'm not going to start a war here.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
Yeah, Well you don't have to start a war if
you have enough nukes. That's why we can feel confident
that the Chopo guys are never going to nucas first
is because we always keep a fleet of cool Zone
Media nuclear subs off the coast of wherever those guys live.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Sophie is just trying to wash her hands of work
that she did all the work for.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah, getting all those nukes in our hands.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Sure, so tired everyone.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Anyway, I'm just making the point that I'm not really
going to detail on all the Manhattan Project guys because
I don't think that they're deserve nearly as much blame
as the guys who consciously built the global nuclear doomsday device.
Right now, there were there is overla. There are some
people who were on both teams, and one of the
guys who was on both teams was General Leslie Groves.
He is the military minder for the Manhattan Project scientists.

(55:08):
He is their producer, for lack of a better word, Sophie,
you know, one of the great producers in all of history,
Leslie Groves.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
There's a play about it called The Producers.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Yeah, that is that is largely about him and his
time in Manhattan.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
W'd you got to say it like that?

Speaker 1 (55:22):
Why'd you go to put my name in there?

Speaker 2 (55:24):
It's kind of accurate, Sophie. In nineteen forty two, a
lot of people call Leslie Groves the safety electormen of
the Manhattan Project, Robert, you know Robert. In nineteen forty two,
General Groves gives a lecture to a group of civilian scientists.
This is when we're kind of trying to get people
on board the Manhattan Project. He gives a lecture and
he's basically trying to He's talking about why we should

(55:46):
build a nuke. And part of the lectures he has
to convince these scientists, why if we get a nuke,
other countries won't immediately start trying to develop nukes, leading
to like a nuclear arms race. And he says, no, no, no,
once we've got a nuke, everyone will be too scared
to try to get a nuke. And he described his
reasoning as fear of counter employment. Right, this is why.
And this will evolve into they won't use a nuke

(56:08):
if we've got enough nukes because they know that we'll
use them in return. Right, But it starts with no
one will even try to get one, you know, because
they'll be so scared of our nuke. You just move
the logic when it proves ineffective. That's how logic works.
So yeah, yeah, Promises like this have been key to
weapons development since the creation of the machine gun and dynamite.

(56:28):
And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the logic shifted. We now
had to assume our adversaries would develop a nuclear arsenal,
so we'd have to expand ours until it was sufficient
to destroy the enemy. Right before we have a nuke,
We're like, no one will even try to get these
after we have them, and then as soon as we
set one off, So obviously everyone's gonna have one of these.
You gotta get enough of them to stop them. General

(56:50):
Omar Bradley summed up the general thinking among the brass
after World War Two. And this is Bradley talking in
nineteen forty five. Our greatest strength lies in the threat
of quick retaliation the event we are attacked, and the
only retaliation Bradley believed would be atomic quote. The a
bomb is the most powerfully destructive device known today. As
a believer in humanity, I deplore its use, and as

(57:11):
a soldier I respect it, and as an American citizen,
I believe we should be prepared to use its full
psychological and military effect towards preventing war, and if we
are attacked, towards winning it right and a pillar of
Bradley's and this is how all these guys talk to
this day in a lot of ways, which is like, look,
the only job of a you know, a president should

(57:31):
not have any any actual role in how we operate
as a military. His job is to decide when we're
at war. The civilians decide when we go to war,
and then we should be the ones who decide how
to win it, right, Like, that's a very common school
of thought among military people, especially in this period of time.
And you get part of the danger is that, like, well,

(57:53):
then when war is on the table, the guy whose
job is to advise the president on war has only
been thinking of nuki everybody, right, like, and maybe that's bad.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Well, what's funny is that? Okay, so in this, you know,
as an American citizen, that's why I care about nukes, right,
And it it gets back to what Wells. I think
I have an inverse conclusion as Wells. But you look
at this and you're like, well, the end of national
borders seems like the only way out of this mess.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's just interesting that
Wells used it as like therefore we're gonna have world government,
you know, and since he's like that type of socialist,
that's like, yeah, his hope for it. But it's just like,
I don't know, maybe maybe I'm being too utopian of like, well,
it's the national borders, it's the idea that like there's
this US versus them anyway. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Yeah, just no, no, no, I yeah, I get it.
I agree. Yeah. So a pillar of Bradley's logic here
is the understanding, which for him is reflexive that the
US would not attack for right. And you do have
to understand that a lot of these because even the
only country that ever has right. Yes, I'm not trying

(59:07):
to argue for this from a logical standard. Yeah, but
his understanding for why we need to be ready to
kill everything everywhere if we get nuked is that we
will be nuked first. Right, He's only everything in terms
of defense, and this is not where the logic is now,
So this is important. Initially, the argument by guys like
Bradley is that if we are nuked, hundreds of thousands

(59:27):
of Americans or millions will be dead. Right, we might
nearly all be dead, and so the only response we
can prepare for is an overwhelming nuclear one that will
wipe out the enemy in a similar level. Right, That's
not where things are today. No one waits. No one's
policy among the two primary nuclear powers. Neither policy is

(59:49):
wait until we have a bloody nose to calculate our
strike back. Right. That is important, you understand, But it's
important to understand. That's where a guy like Bradley is
starting from, and what became our current nuclear strategy diverged
from Bradley's purely defensive strategy when guys like General Leslie
Groves started pondering what the future had to bring. Groves
described a theoretical nuclear war as unendurable and believe that

(01:00:13):
the existence of nuclear weapons made that such a war unthinkable.
But that wasn't just a statement of recognition, it was
a strategic plan in order to protect itself. Groves thought
the US had to make the concept of nuclear war
unthinkable to its enemies. And this is going to end.
This is going to start with, well, we need to
have some nukes of our own. Well, we need to
have bombers that are spread out and always ready to

(01:00:35):
take off, and those planes need to always have bombs
in them so that it could cut down the amount
of time it would take them to get into the air,
so that we can guarantee we'll have a response. And
if we can guarantee that we'll have response no matter
how quickly the enemy bombs us first, then they'll never
bomb us because they know that they're going to get
nuked back into the Stone Age in return. Right, But
then where we go from here is well, actually, with

(01:00:58):
ICBMs and shit, it's not enough to just have planes
on the runway. You need to always have some planes
in the air and some subs at sea that are
nuclear armed and ready to strike, which means you always
have planes with live nuclear bombs. Flanger right. You see
how the logic starts in this with Bradley. There's a reason,
there's some rationality, and if an enemy kills millions of us,

(01:01:19):
we need to be ready to strike back. And the
only possible strike back is going to be cataclysmic because
we've been nuked, right, And it goes to we always
have to have planes in the air and submarines in
the ground with live nuclear missiles one hundred percent of
the time. That esk and you get there very quickly.
That escalation chain hits that point as soon as the
technology becomes available, right an extent, it drives the technology.

(01:01:42):
In nineteen forty five, military leaders in the US started
putting forward variations of a battle plan that called for
simultaneous nuclear attacks on multiple cities. Dale Osmith, and Air
Force colonel, wrote an article for Air Force Quarterly Review
where he described this sort of strike simultaneously hitting a
bunch of enemy cities as a bullet of the heart.
Smith wrote, the most effective air siege will result by

(01:02:03):
concurrently attacking every critical element of an enemy's economy at
the same time. If all critical systems could be destroyed
at one blow, so that recuperation were impossible with any
foreseeable time, there seems to be little question that a
nation would die, just as surely as a man will
die if a bullet pierces his heart and his circulating
system has stopped. Another military planner wrote that his primary
concern was quote the bomb's potential to break the will

(01:02:26):
of nations and peoples by the stimulation of man's primordial fears,
those of the unknown, the invisible, the mysterious.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
So it's just the same shit that they've been saying,
but at a bigger scale.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting how that last guy is
almost writing is like, we need to create the supernatural
figure of death and make it real in.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Order to.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Ensure that no one will ever fuck with us. Yeah, basically,
but yeah, it is where we've gone from. You have
to destroy of an enemy's civilian population that they lose
them morale to fight. That doesn't work. It doesn't really
work anywhere. Maybe it works in Japan at the very end, right,
highly debatable, but it hasn't really turned out. So No,

(01:03:15):
we just have to kill all of their civilians, right,
and we have to be always ready to kill all
of their civilians, otherwise someone might kill all of our civilians.
We get there very quickly, and in terms of how
quickly we get there after the bombing of Hiroshima, but
before Nagasaki, world War II is not over yet. General
Groves receives a list from US Army Air Forces of

(01:03:37):
potential targets for subsequent nuclear strikes. In the book fifteen minutes,
Kini writes, quote highlighted were forty key or leading cities,
each assigned a priority for destruction. A map accompanied the chart,
and on it were drawn lines that showed the likely
penetration routes for the A bomb carriers. The forty cities
were in the Soviet Union. We're still allied with them,

(01:03:59):
and we're putting forward plans for the strategic annihilation of
Soviet cities in nineteen forty five before we bombed Nagasaki. Oh,
they're talking about the possibility, right. If you want to
wonder how much of this was to scare the Soviets. Also, oh,
that's on the table in nineteen forty five, we're still
fighting with them, like ally.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
I mean that guys, like we're always fighting the last war,
but they're also always fighting the next ward.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
It's the I mean, just in other because I know
I'm not a Soviet Union Stan, but the amount of
bad faith the US is engaging in from the beginning
and our relationship with them is fucking nuts.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Yeah, Like, I understand why they wanted the nuke.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Yeah, I get why they were paranoid about US nuking them.
We really wanted to nuke them. Yeah, So all of
what's happening comes as a nightmare to the man who'd
helped set everything into motion, Leo Zillard. He seems to
have seen what was coming before the first bomb was dropped,
after LeMay began his firebombing campaign. I think maybe this

(01:04:59):
is just a situation. He saw what a bombing on
that scale would do, right, And he decides he had
been wrong really like maybe not wrong about trying to
get a nuke before the Nazis got it, but that
it shouldn't be used under any circumstances. And he starts
protesting the slaughter of Japanese civilians by US air power.
In June of nineteen forty five, Leo leads a group

(01:05:19):
of scientists from the University of Chicago to send a
report to the Manhattan Project leadership. In it, he requests
that they demonstrate their nuclear de weapon for the first
time in an uninhabited area, right so, before we bomb Heroshima.
He has a letter of reports sent to the Manhattan
Project being like, please don't set this off for the
first time in a city full of people, Like set

(01:05:40):
it off in the middle of nowhere, to scare Japan
at a surrendering right now, we don't do this. There's
a few reasons for We're not sure the bomb's gonna work,
and it would be really bad if we promised Japan
the biggest bomb ever and then nothing happens, Right, So
there's a worry of that now. Sillard his justification for
why we need to not murder a city with a

(01:06:02):
nuke is that it'll harm the US's reputation going forward,
and it'll set off a deadly chain reaction. Right if
the first use of a nuclear weapon is in war,
destroying a civilian city. Sillard believes quote. This new means
of indiscriminate destruction will spark an arms race, and soon
every powerful country will want a nuclear arsenal of their own,
and the entire survival of humanity will be imperiled. Like

(01:06:22):
if we start by nuking a city, we have no
we have no sort of moral standing to be like,
don't none of.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
You use these? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
You guys stay away from them. Well, we'll keep ours,
but you guys don't build them. You can trust us
not to use them, right?

Speaker 3 (01:06:39):
Yeah? Yeah, ouck, this is less than one hundred years ago.
It's like the other less yes thing, Like I've met
people who you know are older than this. Yep, you know, yep,
some of you listening are older than this.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Yeah yeah, there must be a couple, right, It's it's
good stuff, so you know. Sillard starts off being the
guy who sends Roosevelt a letter saying we need to
build this thing, and he ends out being like, we,
under no circumstances can we use these things? Yeah, please
please don't embark down this road to madness. That poor man, Yeah,

(01:07:15):
it's fucked up. And another poor man is Lewis Slutton.
So Lewis sluttin finds himself increasingly horrified. In March of
nineteen forty six, he writes to a friend, I have
become involved in the Navy tests, much to my disgust.
The reason for this is that I am one of
the few people left here who are experienced bomb put
her togetherers. He's already disgusted it being with the Navy.

(01:07:36):
He doesn't like what he's doing. In an article for
The Beaver, a Canadian publication of record, Zelig writes, despite
his seeming zeal, there are hints that Slutin might not
have been enamored with Adam Baum's per se. And in
nineteen eighty two, Winnipeg Free Press story journalist Val Wearer
writes that Slotin's father was astonished to hear after Hiroshima
that his son had been working on the atomic bomb.

(01:07:57):
The response was, we had to get it before the Germans.
Winnipeg lawyer Israel Ludwig Slowden's nephew recalls his mother saying
that Uncle Lou was troubled by what he was doing
in Los Alamos. In November of nineteen eighty nine, Philip Morrison,
in a terse note to me scribbled at the bottom
of my letter of inquiry to him, wrote that he
and Slowtin talked a good deal about war in peace,
so he is starting to He's become pretty quickly after

(01:08:20):
the war decided that like this is not a good
path to be going down, and he puts his notice
in at Los Alamos in nineteen forty six, upset at
the future that he sees looming for his troubled part child. Tragically,
just days before he would have quit, Slotin performs a
demonstration of the same basic tickling the dragon's tail technique
that had so recently killed his friend. He's teaching a

(01:08:41):
new guy how to do it. History repeated itself. Slowdin
drops the core and he throws himself in front of
the new guy to take the brunt of the radiation,
and he like, within hours he's vomiting and like his
body is starting to turn into soup. They keep him
alive for nine days in the hospital, but there's never
any hope. They would it would have been kinder to

(01:09:03):
shoot him in the head.

Speaker 3 (01:09:05):
And one of the kid who I knew, a kid
who survived Chernobyl and was living in the US and
was like a kid and was like going to die
of chernobyl.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Oh god, h cool stuff. Yeah, and one of the
I mean one of Slotan's an amazing guy. As soon
as he realizes what's happening, everybody else evacuates. He knows
that he's been exposed too much to evacuate. He immediately
draws a map of where everyone had been in the room,
so that when they're researching what had happened to him,
they can gain a better understanding of how nuclear radiation

(01:09:36):
kills people. That's his like immediate action is to like
sketch out where everyone was when the device went off.

Speaker 3 (01:09:42):
Yah, and live by the science, die by the science.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
Yeah. Like that, he's he's consciously being studied. He like
knows that he's trying to be a better at least
get something out of his death. Annie Jacobson describes it
in a like the aftermath of this in a harrowing
way in her book Nuclear War A scenario quote, the
mess inside Slowtin's dead body was like a sea of
rotten soup. His blood was uncoaggulable at autopsy. One of

(01:10:06):
the doctors wrote in a classified postmodem report the radiation
poisoning had caused the near complete loss of tissue that
once separated one of Slowtin's organs from the next. Without
this lining, his organs had merged into one.

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
So bad, don't build the torment nexus.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Don't build the torment nexus. You might wind up soup.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
Fuck cool.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
Anyway, Margaret, how are you feeling about nukes?

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Jesus from you know, I'm pretty excited that uh, if
I buck, it be completely gone.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
I thought it happened this second.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
Yeah, well, you know, I quantum immortality says that I'm
going to continue to live in a timeline where I
don't die this way.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
Yeah, it'll probably be fine. It'll probably be fine.

Speaker 3 (01:10:54):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's it's so
interesting because you know, fear of nuclear annihilation was like
such an important part of my parents' generations lives, and
it's watching it creep back in is not fun, No,
but it I don't know, I don't know where I'm

(01:11:15):
going with this. It's just it's a it's a nightmareish thing.
But it it's so frustrating because you look at this,
it's that game theory shit that all of the worst
people you know are excited about. Yeah, Like it's like,
if you take any lethal weapons self defense class They're like,
the best way to win a gunfight is don't get
into a gunfight.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
Avoid a gunfight at all. It's the same way to
win a knife fight, really.

Speaker 3 (01:11:39):
Yeah, Yeah, the best way to win a knife fight
is to run before the knives touch anybody.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
Yeah, is to be nowhere near a knife fight. Yeah,
you're a winner of a knife fight every day.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
Yeah, exactly. And it's just so frustrating because it's I
don't know, I've been, I've been, you know. I with
my podcast Cool People Did Cool Stuff, talked a lot
about the you know, early punk and the stuff that
led into a lot of modern protest movement stuff, and
a lot of it is from the anti nuke movement. Yeah,
and it's confusing to look at from the modern perspective,

(01:12:11):
but if you put yourselves in the shoes of like
the kids who grew up in this m you're like, yeah, no,
that actually just makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
Well, yeah, I mean, we could talk about because a
lot of the fear of nuclear power is because of
how prominent the fear of annihilation from nukes, and if
they never start out being a weapon for killing civilians,
maybe there's not the kind of resistance to nuclear power,
which could have avoided a lot of problems VIASA, the
climate change. You know, maybe that's maybe not, but I

(01:12:39):
do think that a lot of our fears which are
not fully rational. There are some rational fears regarding nuclear power,
but a lot of it is just people that are
scared of nukes for other reasons. Right, Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know, Margaret, like the we probably shouldn't always
have a doomsday device. I will say where I differ

(01:13:00):
from a lot of people right now, and this has
become increasingly the case the more I've studied it. I'm
not really more worried about Trump being the president than
anybody else in regards to that. Okay, I think maybe,
I guess maybe there's an argument maybe he'd be dumb
enough to try and use make a limited nuclear strike,
right or maybe his policies in terms of like the

(01:13:22):
military or degrading readiness to a degree that might make
it likelier for one of these missiles to wind up
in the wind or something. Certainly, the fact that we
are now like both the US and Russia are talking
about resuming nuclear tests is bad. But in terms of
how how would Trump behave if he was put in
that you got six minutes to destroy whether or not
to kill everyone on Earth scenario. I'm not sure anyone's

(01:13:46):
more competent than anyone else in that scenario. Yeah, fair right,
Like it's fundamentally and this is something Jacobsen points out
in her book is that when you talk to because
a lot of guys whose job was in the nuclear
weapons thing for the Department of Defense or for the
like the Strategic Air Command, like a lot of those
guys have versions of the same thing, which is that

(01:14:07):
like the president, didn't the president at my time, They've
said this about multiple presidents. The presidents that I dealt
with never seemed very interested in it. They didn't ask questions,
they didn't want to know much. They didn't like thinking
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:20):
Right, That's that's what I would do if I was
the president, as I would not want to think about it.
And like and well, we haven't told anyone about your
run for president yet, but we'll talk about that later.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Yeah, I'm talking about that later. I'm going to use them.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
Yeah, we know, defensively, we're going to go and dry
up the lakes ahead of time.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
Yeah, but yeah, it's a defensive first strike on the lakes.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
The thing that maybe I shouldn't be worried about, the
thing I worry about. People always talk about AI destroying
humanity because it will take control of the weapons. That's
not what I'm worried about. But people have been worried
about that for decades. Right, I'm worried about AI taking
control of the military systems that track things and do stuff. Yeah,
and hallucinate in ICBM Like.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
Yeah, because we've had that happen the analog way, right,
Someone's put in the wrong tape and they've accidentally started
a training mission that it looks like ICBMs are headed
towards our Like variants of that have happened to the
US and the Soviet Union, right, Yeah, and human decision
making is largely what stopped a catastrophe from happening. And yeah,

(01:15:26):
the impulse to remove humans from it is really bad. Like,
I don't believe in skynet. I think it's silly to
believe that, like, oh, this AI will automatically seek to
destroy humanity. I think it's very reasonable to be like, well,
if we connect AI to any of this at all,
it's just going to amplify the chances that somebody fucks
up in a way that ends with the nukes aal
going off. Right, Yeah, you've just you're making you're making

(01:15:47):
it more complicated, and that increases the odds that we
kill everybody every time.

Speaker 3 (01:15:52):
Yeah, it makes more mistakes than people, which is embarrassing. Yeah,
because we make a lot of mistakes.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
And this is you know, you've had both Obama and
Biden promised during their runs to basically take us a
little bit back from where we always stand on the
escalation ladder, to like change our policies so that we
would not basically our policy would not be launched the
nukes as soon as we get scared, and neither of
them did anything. You know, there's and this is there's

(01:16:22):
a couple of stories like that. One of the things
Jacobson talks about is that like once North Korea started
using ICBMs and it became clear that because you can't
really stop an ICBM, we have these we have like
forty something of these intercept missiles that are supposed to
be able to shoot down an ICBM, but they don't.
They have like a fifty percent success rate in like tests.

(01:16:43):
But that's even overstating it because the way they work.
They're not even a bombs, they're dumb. They're bullets. They
have to hit the missile directly while it's in flight.
And if they don't, you missed by an inch, You
missed by a mile, right, like, Yeah, and we have
very few of them, so the odds of us and
we would have very little time to actually deploy any
or have them ready.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03):
Yeah, and that new movie is actually pretty well researched
about it. I can't remember what it's called, but I
watched it a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
And yeah, I've heard it's good. But the fear in
me we should be scared, should we should not be
doing anything the way that we're doing it when in
regards to nuclear weapons. But if history is a guide,
we're going to keep doing it. So anyway, people should
check out your podcast Cool People who did cool stuff
while they can. Yeah, while they can, they should check

(01:17:29):
out our Pathfinder tabletop gaming episodes of it could happen
here on our book club weekend show. That's fun. That'll
distract you briefly at the looming apocalypse that awaits us.
All yea, and for other distractions from the apocalypse, keep
listening to podcasts. Don't think about how bad things are.
Don't think about the fact that literally nothing can save

(01:17:52):
you if the nukes all fall. There's no defense, there's
no prepping for it. There's just death on a scale
almost uncomprehensible. Don't think about that, think about podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:18:01):
Just remember that you were going to die anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Yeah, tell your friends you love them.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
Tell your friends you love them, and tell them to
listen to Behind the Bastards and cool people who did
cool stuff. That's what's most important.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
If you can't tell them you love them, tell them
about the podcast that you love. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:15):
That's actually a way to tell people you love them.
If you can't struggling to say I love you, just
say listen to cool people did cool stuff and Behind
Your Bastards.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
Or take their phone, like when they're asleep, use their
face to unlock it and subscribe automatically to all of
our podcasts on their phone. Jesus Christ, Sophie. That's like
a third of our listeners.

Speaker 3 (01:18:34):
Robert got we got it in the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
Yeah We're done, bye, all right bye everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:18:41):
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. Describe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:19:02):
at Behind the Bastards

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Robert Evans

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