Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. Robert got of
Speaker 2: a sect me edition. These part tools and to celebrate
Speaker 2: you kidding, give a sectimy. We're talking about mutually assured
Speaker 2: nuclear destruction and the bastards who ensured that it was
Speaker 2: in fact mutually assured global destruction. If one of two
Speaker 2: countries ever got two pissed at each other.
Speaker 3: Is this here? No skin in the game episode?
Speaker 2: That's right, baby? Oh wow? Ok, yeah, that's why you
Speaker 2: should give me control of the nukes, because I'm gonna
Speaker 2: use them. But just on the Great Lakes. We just
Speaker 2: had the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's tragic sinking. You know,
Speaker 2: there's no better time than to remind people that this
Speaker 2: doesn't have to continue. We could stop the Great Lakes tomorrow.
Speaker 3: The Pearl Harbor of the Midwest.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. I have heard people comparing it
Speaker 2: to nine to eleven and then wondering why there's not
Speaker 2: like a really good nine to eleven song, And I
Speaker 2: think that is a good question. Wow, we just got
Speaker 2: a bunch of Lee Greenwood. Shit. You know, where's where's
Speaker 2: the Edmund Fitzgerald of nine to eleven?
Speaker 3: All right? I'll tell you a terrible embarrassing fact. I
Speaker 3: lived in New York City on nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I happened to be inside while the towers fell.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure he had something more important to day.
Speaker 3: I sure went from some towers to some smoke. But
Speaker 3: the goth band I was in, I wasn't the songwriter.
Speaker 3: I did a lot of the synthesizers and programming. We
Speaker 3: wrote a song about nine to eleven, and I didn't
Speaker 3: realize it until months later that our song Gone from
Speaker 3: the Sky was.
Speaker 2: About nine eleven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anything and the no, the uh, the hook at
Speaker 3: the end was dear God or Lord, where are you now?
Speaker 3: Just over and over again, and this like super bass
Speaker 3: voice that the singer had sick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I don't know, you know, we should have
Speaker 2: a good song. There is a good song about mutually
Speaker 2: assured nuclear destruction, and maybe we'll play it at the
Speaker 2: end of these episodes. It's Tom Lair's all go together
Speaker 2: when we go. It's like a joyous song about like look.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like on the beach, but like a beach party.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, yes, Uh, there will be no am when
Speaker 2: you see that. ICBM we will all go together when
Speaker 2: we go. H Okay, miss in the sky. Now, that's
Speaker 2: a great song, Margaret, that's a great that's a happier song.
Speaker 2: That's about one side getting destroyed. Good song, good IRA song.
Speaker 2: About the time Kadafi gave them sam missiles. I think,
Speaker 2: oh man.
Speaker 3: I will say that the thing you're saying about how
Speaker 3: bombing does it really work? I think this is true
Speaker 3: for terrorism too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean people have done a lot of it, and
Speaker 3: I don't know that it's done.
Speaker 2: It's I think it works actually really well. I mean
Speaker 2: Osama bin Laden got what he wanted pretty much, which
Speaker 2: is the continuing collapse of the United States. You can
Speaker 2: you can trace that to nine to eleven. The IRA
Speaker 2: largely got a lot of there. I mean, Northern Ireland's
Speaker 2: still part of the British Commonwealth, but they got a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff. I think, as data said in star
Speaker 2: Trek's and Next Generation, terrorism can be a very effective strategy. Look,
Speaker 2: that's not my conclusion, that's data from star Trek's conclusions.
Speaker 2: Is Android take it up with him, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so talking of of terrorists and look, there's I don't
Speaker 2: want this to come out as and this is sometimes
Speaker 2: the way it sounds saying that like strategic bombing did
Speaker 2: nothing in World War Two and that it was no
Speaker 2: part of the German defeat. Right, that's not accurate. But
Speaker 2: as we'll discuss what du Hay is claiming, what a
Speaker 2: lot of the people believe is that strategic bombers and
Speaker 2: a powerful enough air force render everything else unnecessary. And
Speaker 2: that's only true in the context of nuclear war, and
Speaker 2: even then it's not really true because subs are pretty
Speaker 2: important and ground based missile launches, so it's not really
Speaker 2: true with that right anyway, There's this group called the
Speaker 2: bomber Mafia that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on that
Speaker 2: had some terrible takes. But these are the guys who
Speaker 2: are like advocating for the massive and expanded use of
Speaker 2: like saturation bombing on civilian targets, you know. And Arthur Harris,
Speaker 2: Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay on the American side, are
Speaker 2: two very prominent members of this group. Like many American officers,
Speaker 2: Curtis LeMay came from humble origins. He is not a sir,
Speaker 2: very different from his counterpart in the RAF. He was
Speaker 2: born in nineteen oh six in Columbus, Ohio. His father
Speaker 2: was a handyman who I'm going to guess had some
Speaker 2: sort of maybe he was drinking. He's not stablely employed.
Speaker 2: He is not able to keep the family fed. Right.
Speaker 2: It's one of those kind of situations, and as a result,
Speaker 2: LeMay grows up poor. His first job was, in Eric
Speaker 2: Schlosser's words, shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed
Speaker 2: a neighbor's cat. So much backstory in that sentences the.
Speaker 3: Most Midwest that shit I've ever heard to beat his cat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his mother, Curtis LeMay's mother was a servant and
Speaker 2: the most stable earner during his childhood.
Speaker 3: Uh wasn't shooting sparrows. I'm really shocked by this. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that didn't keep the family going. Uh. Le May
Speaker 2: had to change schools in state several times. He was
Speaker 2: always the new kid, and he was seldom fit in.
Speaker 2: Schlosser describes him as shy, awkward, and bullied, and as
Speaker 2: a way of fighting back against both kind of the
Speaker 2: bullies and just the life he was born into. I
Speaker 2: think having this father figure he doesn't have a shit together,
Speaker 2: ma May becomes incredibly self disciplined. Right, This is sort
Speaker 2: of his like defense mechanism. He is an excellent student.
Speaker 2: He works constantly when he's not at school, and this
Speaker 2: leads him to feel quote cut off from normal life
Speaker 2: because he never has time for a childhood. He's just
Speaker 2: kind of like working constantly and very concerned from an
Speaker 2: early period with serious things. Right, he does not get
Speaker 2: to be a kid. Too many kids have experience during
Speaker 2: the fucking Great Depression, and today it's a bummer and
Speaker 2: it's not gonna make him a better person. He does
Speaker 2: save enough money to pay his way through Ohio State,
Speaker 2: where he studies civil engineering. He goes to school every
Speaker 2: day and works at a steel mill at night, usually
Speaker 2: until two or three in the morning, at which point
Speaker 2: he will sleep for a couple of hours and then
Speaker 2: go back to school. That's his college experience.
Speaker 3: Fuck yeah, so yeah, lots of people only sleep a
Speaker 3: couple hours of the night at college, but for very different.
Speaker 2: Different reason this has this kid's life is relentless. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he graduates. He joins the Air Corps in nineteen twenty nine.
Speaker 2: By this point, he has developed a love of hy
Speaker 2: adrenaline activities. He likes to drive race cars, you know,
Speaker 2: as a hobby, and he becomes a skilled pilot, But
Speaker 2: he differentiates himself from many young officers because everyone wants
Speaker 2: to be a fucking pilot. It is. It's still the
Speaker 2: cool job in the Air Force. But by this point
Speaker 2: planes are really new, you know, it's really cool, and
Speaker 2: most young officers want to be fighter pilots because that's
Speaker 2: the sexiest job than and now there's not really any
Speaker 2: sexier job than fighter pilot. I'm sorry, you.
Speaker 3: Get to be an ace?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly who else gets to be an ace? One
Speaker 2: of the things that differentiates LeMay from his colleagues is
Speaker 2: that he wants to be a bomber pilot. He is
Speaker 2: from the beginning not interested in fighter aircraft, he think,
Speaker 2: and this is part and partly because he knows that
Speaker 2: bombing is where the future is at now. I don't
Speaker 2: know precisely when Curtis encountered General do Hayes's theories. I
Speaker 2: don't know if he read his nineteen twenty one book
Speaker 2: or if he was. It was just kind of like
Speaker 2: cultural osmosis. Everyone is talking about do hay and strategic bombing,
Speaker 2: you know, when you're in like the Air Force cadet school, right,
Speaker 2: and so he just encounters a lot of that way yeah.
Speaker 3: Everyone, I know it's always talking about DeMay and strategic bombing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: in a non legally actionable way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we all love strategic bombing. It's it's
Speaker 2: become like the popular all the cool kids are talking
Speaker 2: about how many tons of bombs you need per square
Speaker 2: acre in an urban environment to really, you know, clean
Speaker 2: out the cities. Now the late generals thing. I can
Speaker 2: say this about do Hay's impact on LeMay. It's influential
Speaker 2: enough that during Vietnam, and for an idea of how
Speaker 2: long this guy is in the field, LeMay is running
Speaker 2: the US Air Force in Asia from World War II
Speaker 2: to the start of Vietnam. He will name his strategy
Speaker 2: for bombing North Vietnam the genteel dou Hay Plan. That's
Speaker 2: like the nickname. Everyone refers to it as like, so
Speaker 2: this is like the polite version of dou Hay's plan.
Speaker 2: We're not going to kill quite as many civilians as
Speaker 2: do Hay.
Speaker 3: What have That's I only know a little bit about
Speaker 3: bombing in Vietnam, and it didn't describe it.
Speaker 2: He's not in charge of the whole time, but he
Speaker 2: does get us started on a specific foot. As we'll
Speaker 2: talk about. So LeMay becomes a bomber pilot in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty seven. By this point, he had already decided he
Speaker 2: believed long rage bombing was the future of air power.
Speaker 2: He became one of the best navigators in the country
Speaker 2: and was stationed in Hawaii, where his career moved quickly.
Speaker 2: Curtis became a relentless advocate of constant training and preparation.
Speaker 2: He earned the nickname old iron Pants as a result. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's what is. That's what is, like the kind
Speaker 2: of lovingly his crews call him when.
Speaker 3: We're going down that tattooed on his knuckles or his
Speaker 3: pant iron pants. Never mind, that doesn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah unfortunately, Yeah, thing you consider knuckles when they give
Speaker 2: nicknames out. When World War Two started, he was a
Speaker 2: major in command of a B seventeen flying fortress unit.
Speaker 2: Curtis was quickly transferred into the eighth Air Force, and
Speaker 2: he served under General Eker. This is the guy who
Speaker 2: was wrong the Churchill about B seventeens not eating fighter escorts. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a barrel Eker e A K E R.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, like getting a little bit out, not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or like without the bee. Yeah. When he arrived
Speaker 2: in Europe. This you. When LeMay arrived in Europe, the
Speaker 2: US strategy, different from the British strategy, was daylight bombing raids.
Speaker 2: LeMay's first big move was to point out that the
Speaker 2: way the pilots were flying was getting them killed. Not
Speaker 2: the Daylight Party couldn't do anything about that. But the
Speaker 2: standard strategy among US bomber pilots was to zigzag to
Speaker 2: avoid anti aircraft fire. This caused your bombs to be
Speaker 2: really off target because she's zigzagging. May and the attitude
Speaker 2: was that like, well, if you're just flying straight, there's
Speaker 2: only a limited period of time in which you really
Speaker 2: low that you're super vulnerable to anti aircraft fire. And
Speaker 2: if you're just going straight, it's a death sentence. You're
Speaker 2: just marching directly into the enemy guns. And LeMay argued, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: flying straight is way safer because it's faster. You're out
Speaker 2: in half the time. Zigzagging doesn't do all that much
Speaker 2: to protect you, but getting out of there faster does.
Speaker 2: So just going straight and then getting out of the
Speaker 2: fucking death zone as quickly as you can is the
Speaker 2: best way for us to do this. And he created
Speaker 2: a new type of formation for bomber aircraft based on
Speaker 2: this that was optim that was supposed to like basically
Speaker 2: keep them with the optimal distance to offend each other
Speaker 2: with their guns. Now, everything about this new tactic was
Speaker 2: controversial among his pilots, and the way that LeMay stifled
Speaker 2: any disagreement was promising to fly in the lead plane,
Speaker 2: which was the one that would be in the most
Speaker 2: danger if his theory was wrong. Right, So he'd be like.
Speaker 3: I kind of like this guy.
Speaker 2: I mean, no, he's there's a lot about him that's likable,
Speaker 2: especially here.
Speaker 3: Hyland would love this man. Probably did love this man.
Speaker 2: I believe Hyland was very much felt positively towards LeMay,
Speaker 2: and his men love him because he's this kind of guy.
Speaker 2: He'll have these ideas that are sometimes really dangerous, and
Speaker 2: but he'll be like, I'll be in the first plane.
Speaker 2: Like you can't say, I'm not just telling you guys
Speaker 2: to do something like he is. He is leading from
Speaker 2: the front, which is the thing you can do in
Speaker 2: the Air Force that's not really possible in most other
Speaker 2: branches at this point, not to the extent that LeMay
Speaker 2: is doing it. Right, you know, another guy who's doing
Speaker 2: basically the same thing as LeMay. Around this period of time,
Speaker 2: actor James Stewart, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jimmy Stewart actually
Speaker 2: becomes a general and is like deeply involved in our
Speaker 2: air strategy and Korea too. He's he's arguably one of
Speaker 2: the highest body count like actors that has ever existed,
Speaker 2: like like a list actors. He's not the only one
Speaker 2: in contention, by the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's that Specops guy who's in Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I'm talking about like
Speaker 2: bomber pilots, and in terms of bodies, yeah, you have
Speaker 2: a whole crop of these guys in World War Two
Speaker 2: who are like big time actors and then like quit
Speaker 2: to fly, be seventeens or whatever. It is a crazy
Speaker 2: thing to have happened. Just imagine that if like we
Speaker 2: had like a five year period where everyone had to
Speaker 2: go to war and you're like, yeah, Timothy Chalamay killed
Speaker 2: six thousand people. Yeah, yeah, just the most body stacked
Speaker 2: by it.
Speaker 3: Billie Eilish would lead from the front, That's all I say.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I don't think the Rock serves, but Billie Eilish
Speaker 2: for sure does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think he does it.
Speaker 2: John Wayne, I mean he's like sixties in his fifties,
Speaker 2: he shouldn't be going to war. Yeah. Anyway, LeMay's ideas work,
Speaker 2: and they'd work well enough to have become sop for
Speaker 2: all American bomber crews. In the theater, LeMay I talked
Speaker 2: about that Reagansburg mission in the first episode to destroy
Speaker 2: that ball bearing plant. LeMay is in charge. He is
Speaker 2: the guy flying in lead for the Reagansburg mission, right, the.
Speaker 3: One that's sixty out of three hundred and sixty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, yeah, which leads us to something that we'll discuss.
Speaker 2: But like, yeah, in that mission, there's so many people
Speaker 2: die that the eighth test to curtail all their missions
Speaker 2: for five months until they get fighter escorts. And this
Speaker 2: brings about LeMay's second big success. Because of how many
Speaker 2: crews are dying. Leadership, notice that flights are starting to
Speaker 2: have a high abort rate. Pilots are pulling back and
Speaker 2: aborting the mission before they get into the kill zone.
Speaker 2: Robert McNamara, future Secretary of Defense for the most of
Speaker 2: the Vietnam War, came to believe that this abort rate
Speaker 2: was caused by cowardice, which he defined as pilots not
Speaker 2: wanting to die because their CEO had fucked up. McNamara
Speaker 2: credits LeMay with ending the abort problem. Quote, he was
Speaker 2: the finest combat commander of any service I came across
Speaker 2: in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal.
Speaker 2: He got the report, he issued an order, he said,
Speaker 2: I will be in the lead plan on every mission.
Speaker 2: Any plane that takes off will go over the target,
Speaker 2: or the crew will be court martialed. The abort rate
Speaker 2: dropped overnight. Now that's the kind of commander he was
Speaker 2: so seeing like the upsides and the downsides of this man.
Speaker 2: He's like, not a lot of sympathy for Creus, not
Speaker 2: wanting to die because somebody decided they don't need fighter escorts.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, you know I read that other really good
Speaker 3: book about this by Joseph Heller.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so you can both see. I can see
Speaker 2: why so many people admired him, and why he was
Speaker 2: so beloved, especially by the people directly above him, and
Speaker 2: why he was poppular with his cruise. And also, this
Speaker 2: is a man who's got a dangerous brain. This is
Speaker 2: a man who is really okay with people dying for principles, right,
Speaker 2: And this is a man who has no trouble baking
Speaker 2: human death into his operation plans, which is necessary in
Speaker 2: the military at some level. Yeah, but he's maybe better
Speaker 2: at it than you want someone to be maybe, right.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, I can see where this might go further
Speaker 3: based on the subject of these weeks. Yep, uh huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was one of those things US bomber
Speaker 2: Cruise suffered like a fifty percent killed in action rate
Speaker 2: during this period of time. It's a very dangerous job,
Speaker 2: and LeMay also has a reputation for being really dedicated
Speaker 2: to his men's safety within like the degree that was possible,
Speaker 2: which doesn't say as much objectively about how his plans
Speaker 2: made men safer, and more how he made men feel
Speaker 2: right like this, and there's a degree of like personal
Speaker 2: skill here. You know, of all the officers in these episodes,
Speaker 2: had you been in the military at the time, LeMay
Speaker 2: is probably the guy you would have wanted to serve under,
Speaker 2: not for logical reasons, but because that seems to have
Speaker 2: been how his men felt about him. Right. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 2: At the same time, his instincts made him perhaps the
Speaker 2: worst possible guy to wind up with the job that
Speaker 2: he gets, because he is the dude who directs the
Speaker 2: formation of our grand nuclear strategy. He winds up in
Speaker 2: charge of the Strategic Air Command. Correct fifty to fifty,
Speaker 2: so that's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: LeMay is a guy who, from the start of his
Speaker 2: career wants to reduce war to long range bombing. And
Speaker 2: this is a guy who has shattered by the time
Speaker 2: he's in charge of the Strategic Air Command. His sanity
Speaker 2: is shattered because of what he's seen in World War Two.
Speaker 2: You talked about the mission where everybody died. This is
Speaker 2: a guy who has watched cities burn from the position
Speaker 2: of setting them on fire. And he is a guy
Speaker 2: who has repeatedly walked headfirst into a situation where thirty
Speaker 2: to fifty percent of us are gonna die. Maybe you know,
Speaker 2: like he's done that so much that he has during
Speaker 2: like as a result of what happens to him in Europe,
Speaker 2: his face gets paralyzed. It's Bell's palsy. He gets an
Speaker 2: attack of Bell's palsy, and his face is completely paralyzed
Speaker 2: after this point, so he like can't smile or show emotion.
Speaker 3: To his least favorite things before that anyway, his.
Speaker 2: Face is frozen forever. So he choose a cigar constantly
Speaker 2: to hide the effects, to like animate his face so
Speaker 2: it doesn't creep people out.
Speaker 3: Like that's some, Like that's some, Like the world is
Speaker 3: better fiction than fiction.
Speaker 2: Exactly If you wrote this guy, people will be like,
Speaker 2: this is not really a believable much. But no, he
Speaker 2: was a he's a real ass dude. So he was
Speaker 2: not the kind of man who could have read an
Speaker 2: analysis of the Regensburg attack on that ball bearing place
Speaker 2: that said, well, this didn't work and like maybe some
Speaker 2: of our assumptions are wrong and a lot of guys
Speaker 2: died for no good reason because like, we didn't execute
Speaker 2: this as well as we could have. This was a
Speaker 2: guy who was going to go to his grave believing
Speaker 2: that area bombing not only worked, but it was the
Speaker 2: only way to win a war. Right. He is basically
Speaker 2: always convinced that do Hay was mostly right. And the
Speaker 2: problem with this is that he hadn't been, as we
Speaker 2: have discussed. And this is not just Robert, you know,
Speaker 2: old left wing radical Robert saying that the strategic bombing
Speaker 2: guy was that Reagansburg was a failure. Bernard Brodie of
Speaker 2: the Rand Corporation would later conclude in a study of
Speaker 2: dou Hay's theories in World War Two. If one disregards
Speaker 2: for a moment the overall visions and considers only specific
Speaker 2: assertions and theses, one has to conclude in World War
Speaker 2: Two that do Hay proved wrong and almost every salient
Speaker 2: point he made to assert the reverse, as is often done,
Speaker 2: is to engage in propaganda, not analysis, and that's just
Speaker 2: impossible to argue against. Bombing alone did not destroy the
Speaker 2: third right. Its capacity to wage war was degraded, not
Speaker 2: just through bombing, but through a mix of air, ground,
Speaker 2: and naval warfare. Like there's a lot of well, after
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, while we were strategically bombing German cities,
Speaker 2: their war production finally collapsed, and it's like we were
Speaker 2: also taking a lot of territory from them, like they
Speaker 2: were losing ground to other things were happening, and the
Speaker 2: air power played a role in us being able to
Speaker 2: take ground. But it's a much more complicated picture than
Speaker 2: do Hay and his advocates are making. It was not
Speaker 2: just strategic long range bombing, and that's what do Haye
Speaker 2: was saying, right, You can't just say, well, bombing was
Speaker 2: a useful part of the overall no, no, no, that's not
Speaker 2: what do Hay was claiming. And all of these air
Speaker 2: Force guys are going to be arguing for the rest
Speaker 2: of their careers. All we need is an air force, right,
Speaker 2: that's a big part of this.
Speaker 3: Is this the bomber mafia.
Speaker 2: They're just like, yeah, this is like and their descendants
Speaker 2: that this is a big thing for the next half
Speaker 2: a century and longer, and like air Force arguing that
Speaker 2: we don't really need as much of the other stuff
Speaker 2: because air force handle it can it can fix every problem,
Speaker 2: right and in war, through war, we don't get what
Speaker 2: we want through just bombing people. Right.
Speaker 3: Well, what you and I learned is that you could
Speaker 3: throw bombs at most problems and that would help alleviate
Speaker 3: the problems, but you also need someone with a spiked stick.
Speaker 2: Yes, we did learn that in our Pathfinder game that
Speaker 2: we played on the It could Happen Here book Club
Speaker 2: special weekend episodes that you can listen to right now, folks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So it's also kind of worth noting that a lot
Speaker 2: of these strategies to like, well, all we need to
Speaker 2: do is bomb these cities and that'll destroy x amount
Speaker 2: of factories and that will destroy German military production. It
Speaker 2: assumes an enemy, and this will later be a problem
Speaker 2: with our plans for nuclear war. They're always built assuming
Speaker 2: an enemy who doesn't adapt or change as we do
Speaker 2: things to them, because like Germans, yeah, we knock out
Speaker 2: some factories, so they decentralize their factories and they make
Speaker 2: them less vulnerable to bombing, so that they're assembling things
Speaker 2: in pieces and each individual's target is less important to
Speaker 2: the whole. Right, there's a bunch of the that with
Speaker 2: like manufacture of a bunch of different material, and German
Speaker 2: air defenses remained pretty good until late in the war.
Speaker 2: Like dou Hay is just really wrong on all of
Speaker 2: this stuff. Now, by nineteen forty five, over in the
Speaker 2: Pacific theater, similar lessons had been learned visa VI the
Speaker 2: wisdom of dou Hay's theories. Japan's bold air attack at
Speaker 2: Pearl Harbor had been a tactical success, but number one
Speaker 2: was not long range strategic bombing. These were planes that
Speaker 2: got there on aircraft carriers as part of a naval attack.
Speaker 2: It was pretty important to the overall thing, and it
Speaker 2: didn't knock the US out famously as a combatant. It
Speaker 2: really really just kind of pissed us off.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, were we going to join the war anyway?
Speaker 3: Do you think I mean.
Speaker 2: We FDR really wanted to. I's for one thing. Germany
Speaker 2: getting involved wasn't a necessity. Hitler declared war on US
Speaker 2: once Japan. We declared war in Japan, right, and he
Speaker 2: didn't really need to go all out on Japan's behalf.
Speaker 2: I'd say that was probably a mistake, but he was
Speaker 2: pretty pretty arrogant at that point in time. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 2: we would have gotten involved with Like again, FDR really
Speaker 2: wanted to, so I guess that's probably the smart money,
Speaker 2: as he would have figured some way out. But but
Speaker 2: this is the way Harbor figure out. Yeah, we Japan
Speaker 2: didn't need to do a Pearl Harbor and it didn't
Speaker 2: help them right now, they did a Pearl Harbor. This
Speaker 2: is again to get back to how the same logic
Speaker 2: that could really fuck us in terms of a global
Speaker 2: nuclear war that kills everybody is part of why I
Speaker 2: think it's reasonable to fear that is the same logic
Speaker 2: has repeatedly gotten humans in trouble in the past. The
Speaker 2: logic behind the attack at Pearl Harbor is the US
Speaker 2: is already fucking with us. Right by by throttling our
Speaker 2: access to stuff like fuel, They're going We're going to
Speaker 2: wind up fighting them anyway. It's inevitable, and so we
Speaker 2: need to launch a first strike to stop their capacity
Speaker 2: to hurt us, you know, Like it's the it's the
Speaker 2: same logic, right that, well, we have fight, some sort
Speaker 2: of conflict is inevitable, so we might as well hit
Speaker 2: them first. It's our only chance to survive.
Speaker 3: And I like, it's a weird comparison to this, Like
Speaker 3: I spent a while kind of hanging out more on
Speaker 3: the streets when I was younger, and the idea that
Speaker 3: like the way to survive the sort of like rough
Speaker 3: and tumble life of living under bridges or whatever is
Speaker 3: to like strike first is entirely incorrect. That is like
Speaker 3: absolutely how everyone would like instead, Like I think about
Speaker 3: this time, you know, like because like you know, sometimes
Speaker 3: when you're outside, people like randomly, drunkenly try to fight
Speaker 3: you or something, right, and it's like literally learning I'm
Speaker 3: not advocating passivism here, but literally learning. If someone just
Speaker 3: is looking for a fight and they punch you and
Speaker 3: you ignore them, that ends it, at least in my experience. Right,
Speaker 3: But as soon as actually trying to destroy you. You have
Speaker 3: to do something. So that's just like the whole concept. Sorry,
Speaker 3: I'm just like thinking a lot about this. Is it
Speaker 3: scales up next into guns and then into nukes or yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, wars or whatever.
Speaker 2: The part of the problem with this kind of logic
Speaker 2: is that it's logic that's true. Sometimes we've seen it
Speaker 2: be true sometimes right like the sometimes being from the
Speaker 2: Cold War up to the present moment, the strategy of
Speaker 2: deterrence has worked, right, But that doesn't mean it always
Speaker 2: will right because nothing, No, there's no one strategy that
Speaker 2: fits every scenario. And the problem is with nukes you
Speaker 2: don't really have you don't have room to do the
Speaker 2: less fucked up apocalyptic scenario that's not really an option.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just take part of the problem. If you
Speaker 3: take one nuke on the nose as a country, you
Speaker 3: can survive that. But then it's like it just what
Speaker 3: is It just destroys the deterrence effect and so then
Speaker 3: everyone's like, all right, well, it's like free game on
Speaker 3: nuk in you or whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know that's what the country would say.
Speaker 2: It would be political suicide probably for whatever party didn't
Speaker 2: respond with a nuke, you know, if you're talking from
Speaker 2: the US standpoint, if they got nuked, but also being
Speaker 2: willing to take a hit is the only way to
Speaker 2: stop the doom luke that kills everybody. Yeah, and that
Speaker 2: also that also predisposes you're just having one nuke at you, right,
Speaker 2: which is the most like and I think one of
Speaker 2: the things that does scary most is not and this
Speaker 2: is something that could easily turn into the apocalyptic scenario,
Speaker 2: but something that starts as like and this is kind
Speaker 2: of what the book Nuclear War Jacobson thea Like talks about.
Speaker 2: But like, essentially you get like a nuclear January sixth, right,
Speaker 2: one nuke goes up, gets launched at or goes off
Speaker 2: in one country because of some sort of like weird
Speaker 2: stupid fuck up that isn't going to be repeatable necessarily,
Speaker 2: Like it's easy to learn from. You could stop subsequent ones,
Speaker 2: but in the immediate wake of the fuck up, this
Speaker 2: precedent is set that number one, there's a really high
Speaker 2: chance that it just immediately leads to everyone shooting everything
Speaker 2: because like nobody has perfect data on what's happening. They
Speaker 2: just know that like a nuke has gone off, and
Speaker 2: everyone gets so like, if the country that gets nuked
Speaker 2: is becomes convinced any point they're under attack, they have
Speaker 2: about six minutes to choose to launch all of the
Speaker 2: missiles or not right. Right, That's how it works for
Speaker 2: a US president. It's no different as far as we
Speaker 2: know really for Russia's president. Right, if that nuke goes
Speaker 2: off anywhere, you're going to have like six minutes to
Speaker 2: figure out do I end the world over this or not?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And that's probably bad for us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's a bad system. I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: go ahead and say.
Speaker 2: Probably one person in any country shouldn't get to make
Speaker 2: that call. Probably no one should have to make that
Speaker 2: call in six minutes. But that's the reality of the
Speaker 2: of the technical reality of the systems we built. They
Speaker 2: don't have a lot of wiggle room, which is a problem.
Speaker 3: I'm glad I'm not the one in charge of designing
Speaker 3: the system.
Speaker 2: To be clear, No, Sophie is, and that's why it act.
Speaker 3: She works for me.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards has the most powerful nuclear deterrent of
Speaker 2: any podcast in the game.
Speaker 1: You know, damn straight motherfuckers.
Speaker 2: If the if the Pods save guys launch an ICBM,
Speaker 2: we can have a level one hundred missiles in the
Speaker 2: air in under six minutes.
Speaker 3: This is why there's that new cool Zone media podcast,
Speaker 3: The Bastards Behind Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 2: Wow, how did Robert assemble the most powerful nuclear arsenal
Speaker 2: in the podcasting game?
Speaker 3: And Sophie The answer, Sophie, we all have.
Speaker 2: The answer is Sophie bribed a guy at Fort Leonard Wood. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it was surprisingly easy. Anyway, here's ads. We're back
Speaker 2: and we're talking about where we are in nineteen forty five. Right,
Speaker 2: We've been fighting the Japanese military for several years now.
Speaker 2: There's been this like really brutal island hopping campaign, several
Speaker 2: massive naval engagements, and it's led to a situation my
Speaker 2: g oh yeah, which part of it?
Speaker 3: He was a submariner in the oh sassific.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds like it sucked.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. He's a torpedoman. And literally the fact that
Speaker 3: I exist is an accident of he stepped on a
Speaker 3: college application while repairing torpedoes on an island, and he
Speaker 3: filled it out and he sent it out and then
Speaker 3: they were like, yeah, all right, we're gonna send you
Speaker 3: to co be an engineer. And then his submarine didn't
Speaker 3: come back after he left, so he who it fell
Speaker 3: to the bottom of the sea. It's never been recovered.
Speaker 3: No one ever knows what happened to it.
Speaker 2: And probably fine then I'm sure they're probably around a
Speaker 2: farm up state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, all of his old buddies. Yeah. Anyway, yeah,
Speaker 3: South Pacific.
Speaker 2: South Pacific. So by nineteen forty five, you know, we've
Speaker 2: gone through a version of the same lessons that all
Speaker 2: of these guys learn in Europe, which is that a
Speaker 2: lot of what Douhey had said it doesn't really work out, right,
Speaker 2: we can't just bomb our way out of this. Naval
Speaker 2: power is important, and in fact, the aviation that's most
Speaker 2: influential in the early stage of the Pacific campaign or
Speaker 2: not long range bombers, it's navy tactical aircraft, right, because
Speaker 2: that's a lot of these naval engagements come down to
Speaker 2: our carrier group finds their carrier group, and we fucking
Speaker 2: killed the shit out of them with planes. But they're
Speaker 2: not doing like long range strategic bombing. You know, this
Speaker 2: is like really close combat in aeronautical terms, and it's
Speaker 2: pretty fucked up, and there's still a lot of work
Speaker 2: for infantry, right, No, matter how much, because we are
Speaker 2: bombing these islands like Okinawa, and we're shelling them before
Speaker 2: we send in ground troops. But no amount of bombing
Speaker 2: and shelling is sufficient to clear all of the infantry out.
Speaker 2: Soldiers are able to you know, they've got these bunker
Speaker 2: networks that the Japanese Army has built. These are sufficient
Speaker 2: enough that like we're not able to bomb them out
Speaker 2: right the future and past of war, right, tunnels always
Speaker 2: work really well. And this is again it's more refutation
Speaker 2: of this. All we need are bombers, Like, no, you
Speaker 2: keep needing to send an infantry with fucking knives to
Speaker 2: clear guys out right, we haven't made the fucking knife
Speaker 2: obsolete by nineteen forty five, like we're not doing everything
Speaker 2: with bombers. Duhey and his advocates had been irrationally optimistic.
Speaker 2: So that said, by like early nineteen forty five, we've
Speaker 2: isolated the Japanese home islands. And Colonel Rassioni and his
Speaker 2: piece summarizes the success of strategic bombing prior to nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five of Japan's heartland. Quote General Hansel commanding and
Speaker 2: directing bombing attacks on Japan and still unaware despite his
Speaker 2: extensive European experience that precision bombing was a myth, attempted
Speaker 2: to use it to destroy Japan's military industrial capacity. After
Speaker 2: three months of intensive precision operations, his B twenty nine
Speaker 2: bomber force had destroyed none of the designated high priority targets,
Speaker 2: a failure that brought about his dismissal. Right, three months
Speaker 2: of precision bombing, the Air Force is not able to
Speaker 2: destroy any of their high value industrial targets. Right, it
Speaker 2: just doesn't work. So they bring in Curtis LeMay. And again,
Speaker 2: LeMay is neither of these guys. Both these guys are.
Speaker 2: Both Hansel and LeMay are advocates of strategic bombing. Hansel
Speaker 2: is just saying it has to be tactical, it has
Speaker 2: to be like, you know, precision bombing. Sorry, and LeMay
Speaker 2: is saying, nah, you just got to fuck up everything, right,
Speaker 2: And his job is basically esque direct this air war
Speaker 2: to break the back of the Japanese without US needing
Speaker 2: to actually send in ground troops to invade the Home Islands,
Speaker 2: and he embarks on the most terrible bombing campaign of
Speaker 2: World War Two. As Rassioni describes, it was General Curtis
Speaker 2: LeMay who put duhayes theories to the ultimate test, all
Speaker 2: of Japan's major cities except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
Speaker 2: burned out with conventional weapons. LeMay starts his job commanding
Speaker 2: the air war against Japan. He is the youngest general
Speaker 2: in US history. He gets the rank at age thirty
Speaker 2: six after his work in Europe. The fire bombing of
Speaker 2: Tokyo is his idea, like that is his plan entirely,
Speaker 2: and when he takes the job he tells his deputies
Speaker 2: Japan will burn if I can get fire on it.
Speaker 2: And the book Commander Control Schlosser writes LeMay was involved
Speaker 2: in almost every aspect of the plan, from selecting the
Speaker 2: mix of bombs magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter,
Speaker 2: to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm.
Speaker 2: He is very nuts and bolts as a commander, he
Speaker 2: is the personal architect. This is his great work is
Speaker 2: the fire bombing of Tokyo, and he plans it to
Speaker 2: like the most intimate degree. Perission's article, LeMay studied the
Speaker 2: mission reports and reconnaissance photographs, realized that the Japanese had
Speaker 2: almost no air defense left, and sent three hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five pilots loaded with jellied gasoline fire bomb clusters
Speaker 2: over Tokyo in the early hours of March tenth, nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five. You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the
Speaker 2: Japanese have ever seen, he told his crews. As he
Speaker 2: waited impatiently for the bombers to return, he confided to McElway,
Speaker 2: who's like his adjutant, Basically, in a war, you've got
Speaker 2: to keep at least one punch ahead of the other
Speaker 2: guy all the time. A war is a tough kind
Speaker 2: of proposition. If you don't get the enemy, he gets you.
Speaker 2: I think we've figured out a punch he's not expecting
Speaker 2: this time, and the mission was a success. The US
Speaker 2: Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that quote probably more persons lost
Speaker 2: their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour
Speaker 2: period than at any time in the history of man.
Speaker 2: More than ninety thousand civilians are killed and roughly a
Speaker 2: million are made homeless in a one night of bombing.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, wait a second woo.
Speaker 2: Uh LeMay continues to order more fire bombings after this,
Speaker 2: consuming hundreds of thousands of men, will, women and children
Speaker 2: with flames and the fact that we need to keep
Speaker 2: doing this maybe is a sign that, like some of
Speaker 2: your attitudes about bombing aren't as accurate as you'd want.
Speaker 2: Certainly do Hay has been proven wrong by a pretty
Speaker 2: grand factor. But like German will didn't break until Hitler
Speaker 2: shot himself, and the Japanese are still We just incinerated
Speaker 2: their entire capital from the sky. We killed more human
Speaker 2: beings in an hour than have ever been killed in
Speaker 2: history in a similar period of time, probably, and they're
Speaker 2: they're still swinging. Uh. Maybe maybe we've got some assumptions
Speaker 2: here that aren't entirely correct. Now, that is not how
Speaker 2: anyone thinks. One of the men planning these raids with
Speaker 2: LeMay was a close subordinate of his General Thomas Sarsfield.
Speaker 2: Power is literally general power. Yes, he has a g
Speaker 2: I Joe name, and General power is going to help
Speaker 2: to build the nuclear doomsday machine we all sleep alongside today,
Speaker 2: right like he is one of the architects of this,
Speaker 2: alongside Lea May. And the fact that he has a
Speaker 2: name the name of a G I jo character belies
Speaker 2: the fact that his backstory is pretty tame. His parents
Speaker 2: are Irish immigrants from branches of wealthier families started by
Speaker 2: second or third sons who left the home country to
Speaker 2: find their fortune because how inheritance worked at the time.
Speaker 2: Thomas Power grew up working class in New York City.
Speaker 2: As a young adult, he entered the US Army Air
Speaker 2: Corps in nineteen twenty eight when it was still a baby.
Speaker 2: Since this was a comparatively dull time for the US military,
Speaker 2: his career was pretty dull until World War Two. Power
Speaker 2: was a gifted officer and hard working, and so once
Speaker 2: the military starts expanding massively to meet the demands of
Speaker 2: the war, officers like him are promoted rapidly. Power sees
Speaker 2: combat for the first time, flying B twenty four missions
Speaker 2: over Italy. He starts the war a major, and he
Speaker 2: ends it a brigadier general and Deputy Chief of Operations
Speaker 2: for all US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. Now.
Speaker 2: Power is not briefed immediately about the existence of nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2: LeMay is one of the first generals who learns about
Speaker 2: the Manhattan Project who learns that we have a nuke.
Speaker 2: Now he's not allowed to command the raid in person.
Speaker 2: He wants to. He tries to, but he's at this
Speaker 2: point too high ranking to be given that job, so
Speaker 2: the nuke one. Yeah, I mean he's not allowed to
Speaker 2: command raids in person in general, right, Power, I think
Speaker 2: is his guy doing a lot of that, And Power
Speaker 2: is the guy, Yeah, Power is the guy who is
Speaker 2: commanding the raid on Tokyo in person. Yeah. So I
Speaker 2: do think it's kind of worth noting in terms of
Speaker 2: how these guys are both thinking. They're still patterning their options.
Speaker 2: They've moved away from like the shit Eker was doing,
Speaker 2: but they're patterning their operations largely off of how bomber
Speaker 2: Harris had planned operations right in Tokyo as in Cologne.
Speaker 2: The military insisted its primary objective was the destruction of
Speaker 2: industrial buildings, but the Air Force planners working for LeMay
Speaker 2: in Power picked targets based not on industrial density, but
Speaker 2: how well they thought given neighborhoods would burn. The B
Speaker 2: twenty nine crews were informed that the purpose of the
Speaker 2: attack was to destroy small factories, but LeMay in Power
Speaker 2: both knew that was not the real target. And these
Speaker 2: guys have their way with the Army Air Corps in
Speaker 2: Japan for months, but final victory still proves elusive. We
Speaker 2: dropped more than sixteen hundred tons of explosives, on Tokyo
Speaker 2: on March tenth, and again, remember duhe had theorized three
Speaker 2: hundred was enough to wipe out any city on the earth,
Speaker 2: but the Empire refused to surrender. LeMay's entire philosophy of
Speaker 2: war was that victory could be achieved through the application
Speaker 2: of long range bombing, and the application of long range
Speaker 2: bombing alone. His only response when confronted with inconvenient facts
Speaker 2: like this isn't working was to escalate. In the book
Speaker 2: Fifteen Minutes, L. Douglas Keeney describes the generals escalating Mania,
Speaker 2: LeMay bombed with an increasing sense of urgency. He bombed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki,
Speaker 2: and Yokohama. He attacked when and where he was ordered to,
Speaker 2: but when he was finished, he pulled names out of
Speaker 2: almanacs or off maps and bombed some more. In his view,
Speaker 2: the only reason runways had been built on Tinian and
Speaker 2: the only reason that B twenty nine were fueled up
Speaker 2: and loaded with bombs. The only reason he was in
Speaker 2: the Marianas was to bomb Japan. Five hundred bombers against
Speaker 2: one city, eight hundred against another nine hundred bombers. Today
Speaker 2: one thousand bombers tomorrow. The only point was to end
Speaker 2: the war, one factory, one city at a time. So
Speaker 2: intense were his operations that by the end of May,
Speaker 2: LeMay eventually exceeded the supply of bombs the United States
Speaker 2: Navy could deliver to him and was forced to take
Speaker 2: a break. I feel that the destruction of Japan's ability
Speaker 2: to wage war lies within the capacity of this command,
Speaker 2: LeMay road of the bomber forces he commanded, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, just a when you have a hammer, everything needs
Speaker 3: to get exploded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and when you have a thousand bombers, you can't
Speaker 2: really have any ideas that aren't dropping bombs on people,
Speaker 2: you know. That's what else matters.
Speaker 3: The only other I'm not trying to defend this, but
Speaker 3: the only other, like primary option would be like getting
Speaker 3: a beachhead and then like trying to take this.
Speaker 2: I mean, and we'll talk more about that, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is not there's not any clear good options here.
Speaker 2: It's a war, there rarely are. But it's important to
Speaker 2: note that like through conventional methods, his plan doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to be working. Allied war planners find themselves preparing for
Speaker 2: an invasion. Right, we're still preparing this in ground troops
Speaker 2: into Japan. Now, this is where you get a lot
Speaker 2: of debate, right, And his book, Keeney describes the plans
Speaker 2: for an invasion of Japan by the Allies as unnecessary,
Speaker 2: and I think he expresses what I'd call significant faith
Speaker 2: that Japan was on the brink of collapse. This is
Speaker 2: not a conclusion shared by everyone, but I think there's
Speaker 2: a strong argument here. One of the issues that's already developing,
Speaker 2: as you can see though, is that a lot of guys,
Speaker 2: even at this point, had already forgotten what had made
Speaker 2: bombing Japan possible, Right that, Like, we're kind of narrowing
Speaker 2: it down to, like, okay, and we bombed, Like both
Speaker 2: sides of the nuke issue. One side is like, we
Speaker 2: didn't need de nuke Japan because we had already destroyed
Speaker 2: so much of them through bombing the island that they
Speaker 2: were going to surrender anyway. And the other side is
Speaker 2: Japan never would have surrendered unless nuked, and so we
Speaker 2: had to nuke them to avoid an even costlier invasion. Right,
Speaker 2: That's the basic argument. And both of these, if you're
Speaker 2: thinking in the grand strategic sense, ignore the fact that
Speaker 2: we only got to the point where we could bomb
Speaker 2: the Home Islands the way we were after defeating Japan
Speaker 2: in a series of more conventional engagements. Right, just in
Speaker 2: terms of the whole strategic bombing is all we need
Speaker 2: thing was never correct, right.
Speaker 3: Right, because they had to defeat them on the sea
Speaker 3: and on all the islands.
Speaker 2: By the point the Home Islands were isolated, it was
Speaker 2: cave possible to defeat Japan just through bombing, right, But
Speaker 2: there was a lot prior to that, right, Yeah. And
Speaker 2: so when LeMay learns that we have an atom bomb
Speaker 2: and here's how powerful this thing is, I think it
Speaker 2: kind of strikes him as salvation to his theory of warfare,
Speaker 2: right yea, And yeah, it's kind of this is kind
Speaker 2: of the prehistory of the modern argument that nukes are
Speaker 2: the only way to end Japan's willingness to fight, right,
Speaker 2: and so bombs save lives. Part of why that gets
Speaker 2: started is it's really convenient for guys like Curtis Leamy, Right,
Speaker 2: It really helps a lot with the bets that they've
Speaker 2: been making in their careers. If this is the only
Speaker 2: way to end the war. You know, that's not the
Speaker 2: only thing going on here, But they find it it's
Speaker 2: very helpful. It's not a non factor here. How helpful
Speaker 2: this is to a lot of people's beliefs about how
Speaker 2: war already works that have kind of been proven wrong.
Speaker 2: Is that nukes kind of retroactively make them right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's just such a different order of magnitude.
Speaker 3: It's just yeah, go in from a club to an
Speaker 3: AR fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's And it's like, look if someone's like, all, like,
Speaker 2: the only way to stop kids from like fucking with
Speaker 2: the plants in my yard is to hit him with
Speaker 2: a stick, and he hits kids with a stick, and
Speaker 2: they keep fucking with his yard, so he like, well
Speaker 2: I have to shoot them, and that stopped it, Like yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, were there other things you weren't considering.
Speaker 3: Could they have laid it just to go back and
Speaker 3: pretend like I'm in charge World War two? Could they
Speaker 3: just lay siege to Japan and like be like that
Speaker 3: we already beat you everywhere?
Speaker 2: Or just they were Yeah, I mean that that's what happened. Right,
Speaker 2: We cut off Japan. Ninety percent of their merchant shipping
Speaker 2: had ended, right, Like, we had cut them off pretty conclusively.
Speaker 2: And that's one side of this argument is that we
Speaker 2: never needed to nuke them. There were other reasons, largely
Speaker 2: we wanted to scare the shit out of the USSR.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's that's always what I assumed is basically, like,
Speaker 3: we have a new toy, we need to prove that
Speaker 3: we're like man enough to use.
Speaker 2: It, right, And and part of why that gets so
Speaker 2: much support among military leaders is that getting access to
Speaker 2: these weapons allows them to continue fighting wars the way
Speaker 2: they've been arguing is the only way we need to
Speaker 2: fight a war, right, Like, oh, all that does matter
Speaker 2: is bombers. Now, Now, I don't really think it's productive
Speaker 2: to like try to make an argument about whose view
Speaker 2: of the use of nuclear weapons was correct, you know,
Speaker 2: because there's no there's not a perfect answer to that,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it comes down to what you
Speaker 2: believe about ethics. And like I would argue, even if
Speaker 2: it would cost the lives of a million soldiers, that's
Speaker 2: better than mass killing civilians for the human race, Like,
Speaker 2: it's just bad. It opens us out, Like right now,
Speaker 2: we're all fifteen minutes away from the end of humanity,
Speaker 2: in part because decisions like this kept being made, and
Speaker 2: each one leads to a bigger decision that kills more people,
Speaker 2: and we probably shouldn't have started going down that road, right,
Speaker 2: That would be like my answer, But LeMay felt very differently.
Speaker 2: He himself laid out his theory of warfare pretty succinctly.
Speaker 2: And this is a direct quote from the man. I'll
Speaker 2: tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people,
Speaker 2: and when you've killed enough, they stop fighting. And this
Speaker 2: is like how the animating theory that the US brings
Speaker 2: into basically every war. You know, we dress it up differently.
Speaker 2: Very few of our general staff will say straight up,
Speaker 2: that's what I believe. But this is what we thought
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan and didn't work. This is what we thought
Speaker 2: in Vietnam. This is what like, well, you just got
Speaker 2: to kill enough of the bad guys. Eventually they run
Speaker 2: out of bad guys. And that's just not how things work. Really.
Speaker 3: It's the like that meme that's like, it's the everyone
Speaker 3: is twelve theory.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, but yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 3: But the thing is, though, that's frustrating because it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, people are always like, oh, you can't kill an ideology,
Speaker 3: and you're like, you know, what if you kill enough
Speaker 3: people who have an ideology, and the ideology goes away
Speaker 3: for a very long time. Yeah, like you actually kind
Speaker 3: of can You can't. Humans are squishy and soft and
Speaker 3: easily killed. Defense is always harder than offense. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I well, I'm not the friend of this.
Speaker 2: Sometimes sometimes you do have to kill people, and there
Speaker 2: are problems that you can kill your way out of,
Speaker 2: right that we have as a species. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: not all you need to do. Ever, now, it doesn't
Speaker 2: work a lot of the most of the kill people
Speaker 2: to solve problems. Advocates are saying things like, well, if
Speaker 2: we bomb these people who are doing suicide bombings because
Speaker 2: they're angry about their living conditions enough, they'll stop bombing us,
Speaker 2: And like, well, but no, you only thinks that really
Speaker 2: how it works in the long run. Yeah, Or this
Speaker 2: insurgency that is being supported by the local populace, if
Speaker 2: we make life miserable enough for the populace, they'll stop
Speaker 2: supporting the insurgents. Gotta be a no dog. Unfortunately, history
Speaker 2: is repeatedly shown it doesn't work as the way you
Speaker 2: think it does, right, those.
Speaker 3: Are the whole Like modern theory of warfare is that
Speaker 3: basically people support whoever feeds them and like you, actually.
Speaker 2: It helps sometimes Again, there's no one size fits all
Speaker 2: theory of like this is. But when you're thinking of
Speaker 2: one size right, when you limit it to the all
Speaker 2: we need to do is bomb them. You're not going
Speaker 2: to win the war unless you're using the bomb that
Speaker 2: kills all of the people everywhere. And that where this
Speaker 2: leads is them all being like, well, the only way
Speaker 2: to effectively plan for war is to destroy the whole species.
Speaker 2: And then we don't.
Speaker 3: Have a war, yeah until we have the like planetary
Speaker 3: destructo button like that, Yeah, explodes the inside of the planet.
Speaker 3: We've hit the top. There's no more kill everyone button.
Speaker 3: We found to kill everyone button.
Speaker 2: I feel like Margaret, the way we should govern is
Speaker 2: we should have a kill everyone buttons, and everyone has
Speaker 2: a no, no, no, and everyone has.
Speaker 3: A plot of Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I haven't read that.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's this old science fiction book. It might be
Speaker 3: called Tiger Tiger. I might be getting wrong. The spoiler
Speaker 3: at the end of this, just to say what I
Speaker 3: think you were about to say, is that he basically
Speaker 3: gives everyone in the world the plants of how to
Speaker 3: make nukes, and then we get world peace because everyone
Speaker 3: has mutually a shorted destruction on an individual level. Oh see, No,
Speaker 3: it's entirely incorrect.
Speaker 2: That that was a I mean, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 2: that would really work very well. It's a fun idea
Speaker 2: for her story. No, my theory is you give everyone
Speaker 2: a chip that lets them all vote whenever, like a
Speaker 2: vote is called about, like whether or not they want
Speaker 2: to destroy the world or not. And if fifty one
Speaker 2: percent of humanity votes to destroy the world, then a
Speaker 2: device goes off and it kills everybody, Right, so you
Speaker 2: have to keep life pleasant enough for at least fifty
Speaker 2: one I feel like it's better than the system we.
Speaker 3: Have, all right, what if that is actually always a
Speaker 3: ballot option on every elect.
Speaker 2: Every kill everyone, yes or no.
Speaker 3: So it's like, well, we give a Democrat, Republican or
Speaker 3: kill every kill everybody.
Speaker 2: I didn't kill everybody might have won last year.
Speaker 3: Yeah wait, I've changed my mind about this.
Speaker 2: Anyways, So yeah, let's go to ads. We're back. Real
Speaker 2: warfare had proven that strategic bombing and precision bombing were
Speaker 2: both more difficult and less effective in practice than their
Speaker 2: advocates hoped, and nukes were an answer to these prayers.
Speaker 2: They were a weapon system that seemed to justify all
Speaker 2: of their du Haey inspired theories of how aerial warfare
Speaker 2: ought to work. As soon as we use a nuke
Speaker 2: for the first time, there's this immediate, loud and growing
Speaker 2: chorus of voices within the Army Air Corps that like,
Speaker 2: maybe this is the only weapon we ever need in
Speaker 2: the future. And I want to read another quote from
Speaker 2: the book fifteen minutes. The fact that Japan, while still
Speaker 2: in possession of a formidable and intact land army, surrendered
Speaker 2: without having her homeland invaded by enemy landforces represents a
Speaker 2: unique and significant event in military history. LeMay would later say.
Speaker 2: General James H. Jimmy Doolittle agreed the Navy had the
Speaker 2: transport to make the invasion of Japan possible, the ground
Speaker 2: forces had the power to make it successful. The B
Speaker 2: twenty nine made it unnecessary, said General hap Arnold. The
Speaker 2: influence of atomic energy on airpower can be stated very simply.
Speaker 2: It has made airpower all important. Right, So this is
Speaker 2: immediately a lot of the most influential guys in the
Speaker 2: Air Corps are saying, this is kind of all it
Speaker 2: matters in war going forward right, Like, yeah, we finally
Speaker 2: figured it out. We were wrong last time, but like
Speaker 2: we weren't ready yet, but now we're ready to make
Speaker 2: bombers be the only thing that you need. Yeah, if
Speaker 2: you're wrong long enough, here become right right. Yes, that
Speaker 2: is how things work sometimes. And it may seem that
Speaker 2: I am not going into detail about the Manhattan Project
Speaker 2: and the guys who like developed and built the first
Speaker 2: nuclear bomb, because you'd think, if we're talking about the
Speaker 2: global nuclear doomsday device, the guys who made the first
Speaker 2: nuke are somewhat culpable for that, right, and they are.
Speaker 2: I don't think their role is worth me covering here
Speaker 2: for a couple of reasons. For one, there's been a
Speaker 2: pretty big budget movie recently about those guys, so I
Speaker 2: think there's a pretty high background level of understanding about
Speaker 2: like the Manhattan Project right now. And more to the point,
Speaker 2: I don't place most of the moral blame on a
Speaker 2: potential global nuclear war on the Manhattan Project guys. I
Speaker 2: think you have to put yourself in the shoes of
Speaker 2: guys like Sillard, who we started the series talking about, right,
Speaker 2: these people who are watching the worst war ever happen,
Speaker 2: and all of tens of millions die and they're being told, Hey,
Speaker 2: if we build a bomb big enough, maybe we can
Speaker 2: stop this war. Right, Given the knowledge a lot of
Speaker 2: these guys would have had at the time, and these
Speaker 2: guys are not all high level state actors with access
Speaker 2: to complete information about the strategic scenario, right, given the
Speaker 2: level of knowledge they would have had to understand, I
Speaker 2: think participation in the Manhattan Project is understandable, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: at that stage. And to make that point, let's talk
Speaker 2: about a guy called named Lewis Slotkin. I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: to go back and get his name right. I corrected myself.
Speaker 2: I spelled it wrong at the start. I had a
Speaker 2: K in there. I fucked up. I'm sorry, I'll correct
Speaker 2: it later. Lewis was Canadian by birth, but his parents
Speaker 2: were Yiddish speaking Jewish refugees from Russia's Mini Pagrams. So
Speaker 2: he grows up in Canada and he does well enough
Speaker 2: as an undergrad that he's accepted to a PhD program
Speaker 2: at King's College in London. He excels there as well.
Speaker 2: The nature of his work is beyond me, but he
Speaker 2: won prizes for his continuous contributions to physics. Right, I
Speaker 2: don't understand what he was smart about, but it was physics,
Speaker 2: and he was good at it. Here In's a reputation,
Speaker 2: a rare one for an engineering nerd, as being an
Speaker 2: adrenaline junkie. In the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,
Speaker 2: Robert Yunk says that Slotkin's colleagues at the time described
Speaker 2: in regularly going off quote in search of fighting, excitement,
Speaker 2: and adventure. He had volunteered for service in the Spanish
Speaker 2: Civil War more for the sake of the thrill of
Speaker 2: it than on political grounds. Jeez, he's that kind of dude, right,
Speaker 2: He's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. He gets
Speaker 2: hired by the University of Chicago in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2: He is invited to the Manhattan Project and he works
Speaker 2: directly with uranium and plutonium. Slotkin's particular expertise is in
Speaker 2: assembling the cores of atomic devices. This is very dangerous,
Speaker 2: high stakes work, and he seems to thrive on the
Speaker 2: thrill of it. I found one account of him by
Speaker 2: Martin Zelig, quoting a colleague who worked closely with Slotkin.
Speaker 2: It was Friday afternoon and Lewis wanted to shut down
Speaker 2: the reactor to make adjustments to an experiment at the
Speaker 2: bottom of the tank of water, which was used to
Speaker 2: absorb radiation. We said that was impossible, and we planned
Speaker 2: to shut down the reactor that weekend. When we came
Speaker 2: back on Monday morning, I found that Lewis had stripped
Speaker 2: down to his shorts, dived into the tank and made
Speaker 2: the adjustments underwater. I was appalled that anyone would take
Speaker 2: such risks. It shows what kind of a person he was.
Speaker 2: He was like a cowboy, but a good experimental scientist.
Speaker 2: So you've got like your cowboy nuclear engineer here, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who fought in the space of a war.
Speaker 2: Well he wanted to. Yeah, Oh, I thought he doesn't
Speaker 2: quite make it. Yeah, I don't think he makes it.
Speaker 2: Over and Lewis is he's he's literally the guy who
Speaker 2: builds the core of Trinity, our first nuke. He's like
Speaker 2: with his hands. He's made Chief Armor of the United
Speaker 2: States as an honor for this after the bomb goes off,
Speaker 2: like that's his job title. But the honors failed to
Speaker 2: make up for the downsides of his job, like the
Speaker 2: fact that in August of nineteen forty five, he watched
Speaker 2: his good friend Harry Dalling Daglin dagh La I n
Speaker 2: die horrific death. After there's this there's this thing you
Speaker 2: have to do sometimes where you're like switching out the
Speaker 2: core of a bomb. And I think this is basically
Speaker 2: at the time, how you have it like armed or
Speaker 2: disarmed pretty much, but you've got this this thing known
Speaker 2: as the demon core, which is this like plutonium gallium
Speaker 2: alloy bomb core. And these are insanely dangerous. The process
Speaker 2: of like moving them is called tickling the dragon's tail
Speaker 2: for a reason because it's it's this insanely like if
Speaker 2: this thing falls or breaks in any way, you're dying
Speaker 2: a horrific death. Like this is one of those rare
Speaker 2: things about nukes that's as dangerous as like the movie
Speaker 2: version would be. Like if anyone drops this thing, it's
Speaker 2: a fucking like hell is unleashed in the room and
Speaker 2: his so Slotkin's friend Harry dies this way, this nightmarish
Speaker 2: death from radiation exposure, just a few weeks after Hiroshima,
Speaker 2: and at this point in time, we don't know much
Speaker 2: about radiation sickness as it involves nuclear weapons, right, We've
Speaker 2: had very little experience medically with this. Dalaane's agonizing death
Speaker 2: provides Los Alamos researchers with some of their first hard
Speaker 2: data on acute radiation poisoning. Slotkin was shaken by the incident,
Speaker 2: and as the months after the bombing flew by, he
Speaker 2: grew disillusioned with the US military as an institution. You know,
Speaker 2: the sheer carnage of the first atom bombs may have
Speaker 2: influenced this. He helps build these with his bear he's
Speaker 2: not bear, but with his hands. And the bombings in
Speaker 2: Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between one hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 2: and two hundred and fifty thousand people as a general estimate, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're trying to stop the Nazis, and then you're like, whoops,
Speaker 3: I oh god, Yeah, build the bomb that killed one
Speaker 3: hundred two hundred thousand people.
Speaker 2: Fifty two hundred and fifty thousand people. Yeah, Like, that's
Speaker 2: that's got to wear on your soul, even if you
Speaker 2: think it was necessary, right yeah, And it does look
Speaker 2: that way to a lot of these guys. Japan surrenders
Speaker 2: unconditionally less than a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, right,
Speaker 2: and that probably balms some of their souls to an extent.
Speaker 2: But after victory in Japan. It becomes harder and harder
Speaker 2: for slot Can to justify what he's doing because the
Speaker 2: US is now a nation at peace and they're continuing
Speaker 2: to build nuclear weapons, and he is forced to grapple
Speaker 2: with a new reality, which is that the US does
Speaker 2: not have an enemy, and we are building a massive
Speaker 2: nuclear stockpile, right, and military leaders, it's generals who have
Speaker 2: direct troll over those weapons. You know, they theoretically have
Speaker 2: to follow the president's orders, but there's nothing stopping them
Speaker 2: physically from utilizing those nukes, right, yeah, Yeah, And he
Speaker 2: also is aware, being reasonably well read, because these guys
Speaker 2: are just talking about this, that a lot of these
Speaker 2: military leaders believe overwhelmingly that the use of nukes is
Speaker 2: to break the will of an enemy population through mass
Speaker 2: destruction of the civilian populace. Right like that, we're using them. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's not hard to imagine why he may have felt
Speaker 2: compelled to change his career. He committed to that course
Speaker 2: of action in nineteen forty six, and we'll discuss what
Speaker 2: happened to him in a little bit.
Speaker 3: Become a podcaster.
Speaker 2: He became a podcaster the very first Yes, the only
Speaker 2: thing worse, Yes, yeah, the only thing worse than a
Speaker 2: nuclear weapons engineer. He now works on Pod Save America. Yeah. Really,
Speaker 2: the only place to go, the only downward trend you can.
Speaker 1: Take, the only podcast name you can remember today.
Speaker 2: I don't know a lot of pod Sophie. I don't
Speaker 2: know a lot of podcasts. What else is there? Last
Speaker 2: podcast on the left.
Speaker 1: Cool People Did Cool Stuff by Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 2: Well those are all. I'm not going to say that
Speaker 2: a nuclear engineer joined one of our podcasts, Sophie. That
Speaker 2: man has so much blood on his hands. We don't
Speaker 2: need that kind of heat fair enough.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to start a war here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well you don't have to start a war if
Speaker 2: you have enough nukes. That's why we can feel confident
Speaker 2: that the Chopo guys are never going to nucas first
Speaker 2: is because we always keep a fleet of cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media nuclear subs off the coast of wherever those guys live.
Speaker 3: Sophie is just trying to wash her hands of work
Speaker 3: that she did all the work for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, getting all those nukes in our hands.
Speaker 3: Sure, so tired everyone.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I'm just making the point that I'm not really
Speaker 2: going to detail on all the Manhattan Project guys because
Speaker 2: I don't think that they're deserve nearly as much blame
Speaker 2: as the guys who consciously built the global nuclear doomsday device.
Speaker 2: Right now, there were there is overla. There are some
Speaker 2: people who were on both teams, and one of the
Speaker 2: guys who was on both teams was General Leslie Groves.
Speaker 2: He is the military minder for the Manhattan Project scientists.
Speaker 2: He is their producer, for lack of a better word, Sophie,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the great producers in all of history,
Speaker 2: Leslie Groves.
Speaker 3: There's a play about it called The Producers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is that is largely about him and his
Speaker 2: time in Manhattan.
Speaker 3: W'd you got to say it like that?
Speaker 1: Why'd you go to put my name in there?
Speaker 2: It's kind of accurate, Sophie. In nineteen forty two, a
Speaker 2: lot of people call Leslie Groves the safety electormen of
Speaker 2: the Manhattan Project, Robert, you know Robert. In nineteen forty two,
Speaker 2: General Groves gives a lecture to a group of civilian scientists.
Speaker 2: This is when we're kind of trying to get people
Speaker 2: on board the Manhattan Project. He gives a lecture and
Speaker 2: he's basically trying to He's talking about why we should
Speaker 2: build a nuke. And part of the lectures he has
Speaker 2: to convince these scientists, why if we get a nuke,
Speaker 2: other countries won't immediately start trying to develop nukes, leading
Speaker 2: to like a nuclear arms race. And he says, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: once we've got a nuke, everyone will be too scared
Speaker 2: to try to get a nuke. And he described his
Speaker 2: reasoning as fear of counter employment. Right, this is why.
Speaker 2: And this will evolve into they won't use a nuke
Speaker 2: if we've got enough nukes because they know that we'll
Speaker 2: use them in return. Right, But it starts with no
Speaker 2: one will even try to get one, you know, because
Speaker 2: they'll be so scared of our nuke. You just move
Speaker 2: the logic when it proves ineffective. That's how logic works.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, Promises like this have been key to
Speaker 2: weapons development since the creation of the machine gun and dynamite.
Speaker 2: And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the logic shifted. We now
Speaker 2: had to assume our adversaries would develop a nuclear arsenal,
Speaker 2: so we'd have to expand ours until it was sufficient
Speaker 2: to destroy the enemy. Right before we have a nuke,
Speaker 2: We're like, no one will even try to get these
Speaker 2: after we have them, and then as soon as we
Speaker 2: set one off, So obviously everyone's gonna have one of these.
Speaker 2: You gotta get enough of them to stop them. General
Speaker 2: Omar Bradley summed up the general thinking among the brass
Speaker 2: after World War Two. And this is Bradley talking in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty five. Our greatest strength lies in the threat
Speaker 2: of quick retaliation the event we are attacked, and the
Speaker 2: only retaliation Bradley believed would be atomic quote. The a
Speaker 2: bomb is the most powerfully destructive device known today. As
Speaker 2: a believer in humanity, I deplore its use, and as
Speaker 2: a soldier I respect it, and as an American citizen,
Speaker 2: I believe we should be prepared to use its full
Speaker 2: psychological and military effect towards preventing war, and if we
Speaker 2: are attacked, towards winning it right and a pillar of
Speaker 2: Bradley's and this is how all these guys talk to
Speaker 2: this day in a lot of ways, which is like, look,
Speaker 2: the only job of a you know, a president should
Speaker 2: not have any any actual role in how we operate
Speaker 2: as a military. His job is to decide when we're
Speaker 2: at war. The civilians decide when we go to war,
Speaker 2: and then we should be the ones who decide how
Speaker 2: to win it, right, Like, that's a very common school
Speaker 2: of thought among military people, especially in this period of time.
Speaker 2: And you get part of the danger is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: then when war is on the table, the guy whose
Speaker 2: job is to advise the president on war has only
Speaker 2: been thinking of nuki everybody, right, like, and maybe that's bad.
Speaker 3: Well, what's funny is that? Okay, so in this, you know,
Speaker 3: as an American citizen, that's why I care about nukes, right,
Speaker 3: And it it gets back to what Wells. I think
Speaker 3: I have an inverse conclusion as Wells. But you look
Speaker 3: at this and you're like, well, the end of national
Speaker 3: borders seems like the only way out of this mess.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's just interesting that
Speaker 3: Wells used it as like therefore we're gonna have world government,
Speaker 3: you know, and since he's like that type of socialist,
Speaker 3: that's like, yeah, his hope for it. But it's just like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe maybe I'm being too utopian of like, well,
Speaker 3: it's the national borders, it's the idea that like there's
Speaker 3: this US versus them anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just no, no, no, I yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2: I agree. Yeah. So a pillar of Bradley's logic here
Speaker 2: is the understanding, which for him is reflexive that the
Speaker 2: US would not attack for right. And you do have
Speaker 2: to understand that a lot of these because even the
Speaker 2: only country that ever has right. Yes, I'm not trying
Speaker 2: to argue for this from a logical standard. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: his understanding for why we need to be ready to
Speaker 2: kill everything everywhere if we get nuked is that we
Speaker 2: will be nuked first. Right, He's only everything in terms
Speaker 2: of defense, and this is not where the logic is now,
Speaker 2: So this is important. Initially, the argument by guys like
Speaker 2: Bradley is that if we are nuked, hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of Americans or millions will be dead. Right, we might
Speaker 2: nearly all be dead, and so the only response we
Speaker 2: can prepare for is an overwhelming nuclear one that will
Speaker 2: wipe out the enemy in a similar level. Right, That's
Speaker 2: not where things are today. No one waits. No one's
Speaker 2: policy among the two primary nuclear powers. Neither policy is
Speaker 2: wait until we have a bloody nose to calculate our
Speaker 2: strike back. Right. That is important, you understand, But it's
Speaker 2: important to understand. That's where a guy like Bradley is
Speaker 2: starting from, and what became our current nuclear strategy diverged
Speaker 2: from Bradley's purely defensive strategy when guys like General Leslie
Speaker 2: Groves started pondering what the future had to bring. Groves
Speaker 2: described a theoretical nuclear war as unendurable and believe that
Speaker 2: the existence of nuclear weapons made that such a war unthinkable.
Speaker 2: But that wasn't just a statement of recognition, it was
Speaker 2: a strategic plan in order to protect itself. Groves thought
Speaker 2: the US had to make the concept of nuclear war
Speaker 2: unthinkable to its enemies. And this is going to end.
Speaker 2: This is going to start with, well, we need to
Speaker 2: have some nukes of our own. Well, we need to
Speaker 2: have bombers that are spread out and always ready to
Speaker 2: take off, and those planes need to always have bombs
Speaker 2: in them so that it could cut down the amount
Speaker 2: of time it would take them to get into the air,
Speaker 2: so that we can guarantee we'll have a response. And
Speaker 2: if we can guarantee that we'll have response no matter
Speaker 2: how quickly the enemy bombs us first, then they'll never
Speaker 2: bomb us because they know that they're going to get
Speaker 2: nuked back into the Stone Age in return. Right, But
Speaker 2: then where we go from here is well, actually, with
Speaker 2: ICBMs and shit, it's not enough to just have planes
Speaker 2: on the runway. You need to always have some planes
Speaker 2: in the air and some subs at sea that are
Speaker 2: nuclear armed and ready to strike, which means you always
Speaker 2: have planes with live nuclear bombs. Flanger right. You see
Speaker 2: how the logic starts in this with Bradley. There's a reason,
Speaker 2: there's some rationality, and if an enemy kills millions of us,
Speaker 2: we need to be ready to strike back. And the
Speaker 2: only possible strike back is going to be cataclysmic because
Speaker 2: we've been nuked, right, And it goes to we always
Speaker 2: have to have planes in the air and submarines in
Speaker 2: the ground with live nuclear missiles one hundred percent of
Speaker 2: the time. That esk and you get there very quickly.
Speaker 2: That escalation chain hits that point as soon as the
Speaker 2: technology becomes available, right an extent, it drives the technology.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty five, military leaders in the US started
Speaker 2: putting forward variations of a battle plan that called for
Speaker 2: simultaneous nuclear attacks on multiple cities. Dale Osmith, and Air
Speaker 2: Force colonel, wrote an article for Air Force Quarterly Review
Speaker 2: where he described this sort of strike simultaneously hitting a
Speaker 2: bunch of enemy cities as a bullet of the heart.
Speaker 2: Smith wrote, the most effective air siege will result by
Speaker 2: concurrently attacking every critical element of an enemy's economy at
Speaker 2: the same time. If all critical systems could be destroyed
Speaker 2: at one blow, so that recuperation were impossible with any
Speaker 2: foreseeable time, there seems to be little question that a
Speaker 2: nation would die, just as surely as a man will
Speaker 2: die if a bullet pierces his heart and his circulating
Speaker 2: system has stopped. Another military planner wrote that his primary
Speaker 2: concern was quote the bomb's potential to break the will
Speaker 2: of nations and peoples by the stimulation of man's primordial fears,
Speaker 2: those of the unknown, the invisible, the mysterious.
Speaker 3: So it's just the same shit that they've been saying,
Speaker 3: but at a bigger scale.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting how that last guy is
Speaker 2: almost writing is like, we need to create the supernatural
Speaker 2: figure of death and make it real in.
Speaker 3: Order to.
Speaker 2: Ensure that no one will ever fuck with us. Yeah, basically,
Speaker 2: but yeah, it is where we've gone from. You have
Speaker 2: to destroy of an enemy's civilian population that they lose
Speaker 2: them morale to fight. That doesn't work. It doesn't really
Speaker 2: work anywhere. Maybe it works in Japan at the very end, right,
Speaker 2: highly debatable, but it hasn't really turned out. So No,
Speaker 2: we just have to kill all of their civilians, right,
Speaker 2: and we have to be always ready to kill all
Speaker 2: of their civilians, otherwise someone might kill all of our civilians.
Speaker 2: We get there very quickly, and in terms of how
Speaker 2: quickly we get there after the bombing of Hiroshima, but
Speaker 2: before Nagasaki, world War II is not over yet. General
Speaker 2: Groves receives a list from US Army Air Forces of
Speaker 2: potential targets for subsequent nuclear strikes. In the book fifteen minutes,
Speaker 2: Kini writes, quote highlighted were forty key or leading cities,
Speaker 2: each assigned a priority for destruction. A map accompanied the chart,
Speaker 2: and on it were drawn lines that showed the likely
Speaker 2: penetration routes for the A bomb carriers. The forty cities
Speaker 2: were in the Soviet Union. We're still allied with them,
Speaker 2: and we're putting forward plans for the strategic annihilation of
Speaker 2: Soviet cities in nineteen forty five before we bombed Nagasaki. Oh,
Speaker 2: they're talking about the possibility, right. If you want to
Speaker 2: wonder how much of this was to scare the Soviets. Also, oh,
Speaker 2: that's on the table in nineteen forty five, we're still
Speaker 2: fighting with them, like ally.
Speaker 3: I mean that guys, like we're always fighting the last war,
Speaker 3: but they're also always fighting the next ward.
Speaker 2: It's the I mean, just in other because I know
Speaker 2: I'm not a Soviet Union Stan, but the amount of
Speaker 2: bad faith the US is engaging in from the beginning
Speaker 2: and our relationship with them is fucking nuts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, I understand why they wanted the nuke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get why they were paranoid about US nuking them.
Speaker 2: We really wanted to nuke them. Yeah, So all of
Speaker 2: what's happening comes as a nightmare to the man who'd
Speaker 2: helped set everything into motion, Leo Zillard. He seems to
Speaker 2: have seen what was coming before the first bomb was dropped,
Speaker 2: after LeMay began his firebombing campaign. I think maybe this
Speaker 2: is just a situation. He saw what a bombing on
Speaker 2: that scale would do, right, And he decides he had
Speaker 2: been wrong really like maybe not wrong about trying to
Speaker 2: get a nuke before the Nazis got it, but that
Speaker 2: it shouldn't be used under any circumstances. And he starts
Speaker 2: protesting the slaughter of Japanese civilians by US air power.
Speaker 2: In June of nineteen forty five, Leo leads a group
Speaker 2: of scientists from the University of Chicago to send a
Speaker 2: report to the Manhattan Project leadership. In it, he requests
Speaker 2: that they demonstrate their nuclear de weapon for the first
Speaker 2: time in an uninhabited area, right so, before we bomb Heroshima.
Speaker 2: He has a letter of reports sent to the Manhattan
Speaker 2: Project being like, please don't set this off for the
Speaker 2: first time in a city full of people, Like set
Speaker 2: it off in the middle of nowhere, to scare Japan
Speaker 2: at a surrendering right now, we don't do this. There's
Speaker 2: a few reasons for We're not sure the bomb's gonna work,
Speaker 2: and it would be really bad if we promised Japan
Speaker 2: the biggest bomb ever and then nothing happens, Right, So
Speaker 2: there's a worry of that now. Sillard his justification for
Speaker 2: why we need to not murder a city with a
Speaker 2: nuke is that it'll harm the US's reputation going forward,
Speaker 2: and it'll set off a deadly chain reaction. Right if
Speaker 2: the first use of a nuclear weapon is in war,
Speaker 2: destroying a civilian city. Sillard believes quote. This new means
Speaker 2: of indiscriminate destruction will spark an arms race, and soon
Speaker 2: every powerful country will want a nuclear arsenal of their own,
Speaker 2: and the entire survival of humanity will be imperiled. Like
Speaker 2: if we start by nuking a city, we have no
Speaker 2: we have no sort of moral standing to be like,
Speaker 2: don't none of.
Speaker 3: You use these? Right?
Speaker 2: You guys stay away from them. Well, we'll keep ours,
Speaker 2: but you guys don't build them. You can trust us
Speaker 2: not to use them, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, ouck, this is less than one hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: It's like the other less yes thing, Like I've met
Speaker 3: people who you know are older than this. Yep, you know, yep,
Speaker 3: some of you listening are older than this.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, there must be a couple, right, It's it's
Speaker 2: good stuff, so you know. Sillard starts off being the
Speaker 2: guy who sends Roosevelt a letter saying we need to
Speaker 2: build this thing, and he ends out being like, we,
Speaker 2: under no circumstances can we use these things? Yeah, please
Speaker 2: please don't embark down this road to madness. That poor man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fucked up. And another poor man is Lewis Slutton.
Speaker 2: So Lewis sluttin finds himself increasingly horrified. In March of
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six, he writes to a friend, I have
Speaker 2: become involved in the Navy tests, much to my disgust.
Speaker 2: The reason for this is that I am one of
Speaker 2: the few people left here who are experienced bomb put
Speaker 2: her togetherers. He's already disgusted it being with the Navy.
Speaker 2: He doesn't like what he's doing. In an article for
Speaker 2: The Beaver, a Canadian publication of record, Zelig writes, despite
Speaker 2: his seeming zeal, there are hints that Slutin might not
Speaker 2: have been enamored with Adam Baum's per se. And in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two, Winnipeg Free Press story journalist Val Wearer
Speaker 2: writes that Slotin's father was astonished to hear after Hiroshima
Speaker 2: that his son had been working on the atomic bomb.
Speaker 2: The response was, we had to get it before the Germans.
Speaker 2: Winnipeg lawyer Israel Ludwig Slowden's nephew recalls his mother saying
Speaker 2: that Uncle Lou was troubled by what he was doing
Speaker 2: in Los Alamos. In November of nineteen eighty nine, Philip Morrison,
Speaker 2: in a terse note to me scribbled at the bottom
Speaker 2: of my letter of inquiry to him, wrote that he
Speaker 2: and Slowtin talked a good deal about war in peace,
Speaker 2: so he is starting to He's become pretty quickly after
Speaker 2: the war decided that like this is not a good
Speaker 2: path to be going down, and he puts his notice
Speaker 2: in at Los Alamos in nineteen forty six, upset at
Speaker 2: the future that he sees looming for his troubled part child. Tragically,
Speaker 2: just days before he would have quit, Slotin performs a
Speaker 2: demonstration of the same basic tickling the dragon's tail technique
Speaker 2: that had so recently killed his friend. He's teaching a
Speaker 2: new guy how to do it. History repeated itself. Slowdin
Speaker 2: drops the core and he throws himself in front of
Speaker 2: the new guy to take the brunt of the radiation,
Speaker 2: and he like, within hours he's vomiting and like his
Speaker 2: body is starting to turn into soup. They keep him
Speaker 2: alive for nine days in the hospital, but there's never
Speaker 2: any hope. They would it would have been kinder to
Speaker 2: shoot him in the head.
Speaker 3: And one of the kid who I knew, a kid
Speaker 3: who survived Chernobyl and was living in the US and
Speaker 3: was like a kid and was like going to die
Speaker 3: of chernobyl.
Speaker 2: Oh god, h cool stuff. Yeah, and one of the
Speaker 2: I mean one of Slotan's an amazing guy. As soon
Speaker 2: as he realizes what's happening, everybody else evacuates. He knows
Speaker 2: that he's been exposed too much to evacuate. He immediately
Speaker 2: draws a map of where everyone had been in the room,
Speaker 2: so that when they're researching what had happened to him,
Speaker 2: they can gain a better understanding of how nuclear radiation
Speaker 2: kills people. That's his like immediate action is to like
Speaker 2: sketch out where everyone was when the device went off.
Speaker 3: Yah, and live by the science, die by the science.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like that, he's he's consciously being studied. He like
Speaker 2: knows that he's trying to be a better at least
Speaker 2: get something out of his death. Annie Jacobson describes it
Speaker 2: in a like the aftermath of this in a harrowing
Speaker 2: way in her book Nuclear War A scenario quote, the
Speaker 2: mess inside Slowtin's dead body was like a sea of
Speaker 2: rotten soup. His blood was uncoaggulable at autopsy. One of
Speaker 2: the doctors wrote in a classified postmodem report the radiation
Speaker 2: poisoning had caused the near complete loss of tissue that
Speaker 2: once separated one of Slowtin's organs from the next. Without
Speaker 2: this lining, his organs had merged into one.
Speaker 3: So bad, don't build the torment nexus.
Speaker 2: Don't build the torment nexus. You might wind up soup.
Speaker 3: Fuck cool.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Margaret, how are you feeling about nukes?
Speaker 3: Jesus from you know, I'm pretty excited that uh, if
Speaker 3: I buck, it be completely gone.
Speaker 2: I thought it happened this second.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, I quantum immortality says that I'm
Speaker 3: going to continue to live in a timeline where I
Speaker 3: don't die this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'll probably be fine. It'll probably be fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's it's so
Speaker 3: interesting because you know, fear of nuclear annihilation was like
Speaker 3: such an important part of my parents' generations lives, and
Speaker 3: it's watching it creep back in is not fun, No,
Speaker 3: but it I don't know, I don't know where I'm
Speaker 3: going with this. It's just it's a it's a nightmareish thing.
Speaker 3: But it it's so frustrating because you look at this,
Speaker 3: it's that game theory shit that all of the worst
Speaker 3: people you know are excited about. Yeah, Like it's like,
Speaker 3: if you take any lethal weapons self defense class They're like,
Speaker 3: the best way to win a gunfight is don't get
Speaker 3: into a gunfight.
Speaker 2: Avoid a gunfight at all. It's the same way to
Speaker 2: win a knife fight, really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, the best way to win a knife fight
Speaker 3: is to run before the knives touch anybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is to be nowhere near a knife fight. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're a winner of a knife fight every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And it's just so frustrating because it's I
Speaker 3: don't know, I've been, I've been, you know. I with
Speaker 3: my podcast Cool People Did Cool Stuff, talked a lot
Speaker 3: about the you know, early punk and the stuff that
Speaker 3: led into a lot of modern protest movement stuff, and
Speaker 3: a lot of it is from the anti nuke movement. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's confusing to look at from the modern perspective,
Speaker 3: but if you put yourselves in the shoes of like
Speaker 3: the kids who grew up in this m you're like, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: that actually just makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean, we could talk about because a
Speaker 2: lot of the fear of nuclear power is because of
Speaker 2: how prominent the fear of annihilation from nukes, and if
Speaker 2: they never start out being a weapon for killing civilians,
Speaker 2: maybe there's not the kind of resistance to nuclear power,
Speaker 2: which could have avoided a lot of problems VIASA, the
Speaker 2: climate change. You know, maybe that's maybe not, but I
Speaker 2: do think that a lot of our fears which are
Speaker 2: not fully rational. There are some rational fears regarding nuclear power,
Speaker 2: but a lot of it is just people that are
Speaker 2: scared of nukes for other reasons. Right, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Margaret, like the we probably shouldn't always
Speaker 2: have a doomsday device. I will say where I differ
Speaker 2: from a lot of people right now, and this has
Speaker 2: become increasingly the case the more I've studied it. I'm
Speaker 2: not really more worried about Trump being the president than
Speaker 2: anybody else in regards to that. Okay, I think maybe,
Speaker 2: I guess maybe there's an argument maybe he'd be dumb
Speaker 2: enough to try and use make a limited nuclear strike,
Speaker 2: right or maybe his policies in terms of like the
Speaker 2: military or degrading readiness to a degree that might make
Speaker 2: it likelier for one of these missiles to wind up
Speaker 2: in the wind or something. Certainly, the fact that we
Speaker 2: are now like both the US and Russia are talking
Speaker 2: about resuming nuclear tests is bad. But in terms of
Speaker 2: how how would Trump behave if he was put in
Speaker 2: that you got six minutes to destroy whether or not
Speaker 2: to kill everyone on Earth scenario. I'm not sure anyone's
Speaker 2: more competent than anyone else in that scenario. Yeah, fair right,
Speaker 2: Like it's fundamentally and this is something Jacobsen points out
Speaker 2: in her book is that when you talk to because
Speaker 2: a lot of guys whose job was in the nuclear
Speaker 2: weapons thing for the Department of Defense or for the
Speaker 2: like the Strategic Air Command, like a lot of those
Speaker 2: guys have versions of the same thing, which is that
Speaker 2: like the president, didn't the president at my time, They've
Speaker 2: said this about multiple presidents. The presidents that I dealt
Speaker 2: with never seemed very interested in it. They didn't ask questions,
Speaker 2: they didn't want to know much. They didn't like thinking
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 3: Right, That's that's what I would do if I was
Speaker 3: the president, as I would not want to think about it.
Speaker 3: And like and well, we haven't told anyone about your
Speaker 3: run for president yet, but we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm talking about that later. I'm going to use them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we know, defensively, we're going to go and dry
Speaker 3: up the lakes ahead of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but yeah, it's a defensive first strike on the lakes.
Speaker 3: The thing that maybe I shouldn't be worried about, the
Speaker 3: thing I worry about. People always talk about AI destroying
Speaker 3: humanity because it will take control of the weapons. That's
Speaker 3: not what I'm worried about. But people have been worried
Speaker 3: about that for decades. Right, I'm worried about AI taking
Speaker 3: control of the military systems that track things and do stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and hallucinate in ICBM Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we've had that happen the analog way, right,
Speaker 2: Someone's put in the wrong tape and they've accidentally started
Speaker 2: a training mission that it looks like ICBMs are headed
Speaker 2: towards our Like variants of that have happened to the
Speaker 2: US and the Soviet Union, right, Yeah, and human decision
Speaker 2: making is largely what stopped a catastrophe from happening. And yeah,
Speaker 2: the impulse to remove humans from it is really bad. Like,
Speaker 2: I don't believe in skynet. I think it's silly to
Speaker 2: believe that, like, oh, this AI will automatically seek to
Speaker 2: destroy humanity. I think it's very reasonable to be like, well,
Speaker 2: if we connect AI to any of this at all,
Speaker 2: it's just going to amplify the chances that somebody fucks
Speaker 2: up in a way that ends with the nukes aal
Speaker 2: going off. Right, Yeah, you've just you're making you're making
Speaker 2: it more complicated, and that increases the odds that we
Speaker 2: kill everybody every time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes more mistakes than people, which is embarrassing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because we make a lot of mistakes.
Speaker 2: And this is you know, you've had both Obama and
Speaker 2: Biden promised during their runs to basically take us a
Speaker 2: little bit back from where we always stand on the
Speaker 2: escalation ladder, to like change our policies so that we
Speaker 2: would not basically our policy would not be launched the
Speaker 2: nukes as soon as we get scared, and neither of
Speaker 2: them did anything. You know, there's and this is there's
Speaker 2: a couple of stories like that. One of the things
Speaker 2: Jacobson talks about is that like once North Korea started
Speaker 2: using ICBMs and it became clear that because you can't
Speaker 2: really stop an ICBM, we have these we have like
Speaker 2: forty something of these intercept missiles that are supposed to
Speaker 2: be able to shoot down an ICBM, but they don't.
Speaker 2: They have like a fifty percent success rate in like tests.
Speaker 2: But that's even overstating it because the way they work.
Speaker 2: They're not even a bombs, they're dumb. They're bullets. They
Speaker 2: have to hit the missile directly while it's in flight.
Speaker 2: And if they don't, you missed by an inch, You
Speaker 2: missed by a mile, right, like, Yeah, and we have
Speaker 2: very few of them, so the odds of us and
Speaker 2: we would have very little time to actually deploy any
Speaker 2: or have them ready.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that new movie is actually pretty well researched
Speaker 3: about it. I can't remember what it's called, but I
Speaker 3: watched it a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I've heard it's good. But the fear in
Speaker 2: me we should be scared, should we should not be
Speaker 2: doing anything the way that we're doing it when in
Speaker 2: regards to nuclear weapons. But if history is a guide,
Speaker 2: we're going to keep doing it. So anyway, people should
Speaker 2: check out your podcast Cool People who did cool stuff
Speaker 2: while they can. Yeah, while they can, they should check
Speaker 2: out our Pathfinder tabletop gaming episodes of it could happen
Speaker 2: here on our book club weekend show. That's fun. That'll
Speaker 2: distract you briefly at the looming apocalypse that awaits us.
Speaker 2: All yea, and for other distractions from the apocalypse, keep
Speaker 2: listening to podcasts. Don't think about how bad things are.
Speaker 2: Don't think about the fact that literally nothing can save
Speaker 2: you if the nukes all fall. There's no defense, there's
Speaker 2: no prepping for it. There's just death on a scale
Speaker 2: almost uncomprehensible. Don't think about that, think about podcasts.
Speaker 3: Just remember that you were going to die anyway.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell your friends you love them.
Speaker 2: Tell your friends you love them, and tell them to
Speaker 2: listen to Behind the Bastards and cool people who did
Speaker 2: cool stuff. That's what's most important.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: If you can't tell them you love them, tell them
Speaker 2: about the podcast that you love. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's actually a way to tell people you love them.
Speaker 3: If you can't struggling to say I love you, just
Speaker 3: say listen to cool people did cool stuff and Behind
Speaker 3: Your Bastards.
Speaker 2: Or take their phone, like when they're asleep, use their
Speaker 2: face to unlock it and subscribe automatically to all of
Speaker 2: our podcasts on their phone. Jesus Christ, Sophie. That's like
Speaker 2: a third of our listeners.
Speaker 3: Robert got we got it in the podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah We're done, bye, all right bye everyone.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 1: at Behind the Bastards