Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2: Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
Speaker 2: returning shortly.
Speaker 3: They called me dead. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Andrew Treyforce Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. We are recording this on Monday,
Speaker 3: May twealth, Year of our Lord, twenty twenty five, which
Speaker 3: means here in the US, yesterday was Mother's Day. If
Speaker 3: you are able to chat with your mom or contactor,
Speaker 3: please do so. And we're sure that your mom will
Speaker 3: say you don't have to call on a specific day.
Speaker 3: She's just happy to.
Speaker 4: Hear from you.
Speaker 3: I'm starting absol positive note Matt for this one.
Speaker 2: Especially, Yeah, yeah, had a great Mother's Day over here.
Speaker 2: A bunch of mothers in a bunch of different types
Speaker 2: of mothers, right, different stages of life over here, in
Speaker 2: this sector of stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4: I don't know how to whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, anyway, if you can, you should. And we
Speaker 3: are with that positive note talking about something that has
Speaker 3: worried the heck out of civilization since the close of
Speaker 3: World War Two and rightly terrified people at times. Some
Speaker 3: of us in the crowd may be old enough to
Speaker 3: remember things like the Cuban missile crisis. You may have
Speaker 3: if your history buff read about any number of near
Speaker 3: misses in a launch of global catastrophes. We have been
Speaker 3: scared the civilization for the better part of a century
Speaker 3: now by the possibility of a full scale what we
Speaker 3: call a hotter kinetic war involving two or more nuclear
Speaker 3: capable actors. And Matt, I believe you and I are
Speaker 3: of a generation that still grew up under the shadow
Speaker 3: of the potential catastrophe between the USSR and the USA.
Speaker 3: Did you ever have to do any of those nuclear drills.
Speaker 2: No, I never got any of the nuke drills, but
Speaker 2: we definitely got the the fear talked into us about it.
Speaker 2: I mean, once you learn about a nuclear weapon and
Speaker 2: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you learn about all the testing
Speaker 2: and all that stuff, and yeah, I remember in school
Speaker 2: that was hammered Home is a big deal. But also
Speaker 2: I think it's a little bit nerved on purpose in
Speaker 2: the American education system.
Speaker 3: It is now. I remember, I remember fully the the
Speaker 3: like Catch twenty two, surreal nature of those drills where
Speaker 3: they would tell people to get under their desk in
Speaker 3: case of a nuclear attack, which was just I think
Speaker 3: even kids saw that that was in effective. The best
Speaker 3: it could do is maybe shield you from some collapsing buildings.
Speaker 3: But better than nothing, which seems to be the argument
Speaker 3: everybody makes this.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, one of the big reasons for that
Speaker 2: is because of the light blast that could occur depending
Speaker 2: on how far away you are.
Speaker 4: From the initial explosion.
Speaker 2: Because the it's the small small amount of increase in
Speaker 2: PSI that right causes whilch just burst all the windows.
Speaker 2: So actually being under the desk would probably be a
Speaker 2: lot safer than not being there.
Speaker 3: Sure again, better than nothing, right, but still you know,
Speaker 3: it's better than nothing, not a global nuclear war. And
Speaker 3: now to your point about nerving. Now the situation seems
Speaker 3: to have a vault. Humanity is worried about one thousand
Speaker 3: thousand things, the nuclear war situation or the conversation around it.
Speaker 3: Now it looks better in some ways a much more
Speaker 3: dangerous in others. So tonight we're asking what happens if
Speaker 3: everything goes wrong, You know, if one day the geopolitical
Speaker 3: breaks don't work and the car flies over the cliff.
Speaker 3: What does a nuclear war actually look like? Hopefully we
Speaker 3: get through this episode before we find out in person,
Speaker 3: so we're going to pause for a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 3: Here are the facts, all right, Matt. We've talked about
Speaker 3: this in previous episodes. I read listened to our Dead
Speaker 3: Hand episode, by the way, which holds up in a
Speaker 3: very frightening sense. But I think it's safe to say are,
Speaker 3: thankfully at this point, only two real world examples of
Speaker 3: high level wartime nuclear detonation in all of history, the
Speaker 3: US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's correct, two bombs dropped from one country on
Speaker 2: to another. The first one was August sixth, nineteen forty five.
Speaker 4: That was over Hiroshima.
Speaker 3: M Yeah, Yeah, it's one of those things we referred
Speaker 3: to as a chonky boy in Maybe it was Strange News.
Speaker 3: An American B twenty nine bomber is the first one.
Speaker 3: This explosion. We'll get into the mechanics of these explosions later,
Speaker 3: it immediately killed an estimated eighty thousand people, the majority
Speaker 3: of whom were innocent civilians. That's only the beginning. Three
Speaker 3: days later, a second B twenty nine, a second Chonky Boy,
Speaker 3: drops another bomb, this time on Nagasaki. This kills an
Speaker 3: estimated forty thousand people. And when we say eighty thousand
Speaker 3: and forty thousand, fellow conspiracy realists, keep in mind we're
Speaker 3: talking about the immediate pop the immediate deaths. Tens of
Speaker 3: thousands more people will die in both regions as a
Speaker 3: consequence of what we could call you know, total weapons
Speaker 3: in total war, radiation, poisoning, the related destruction flying glass,
Speaker 3: crashing buildings, and then of course the lack of medical care,
Speaker 3: clean water, and food which leads to you know, proliferation
Speaker 3: of dysentery disease. People are dying slow and agonizing deaths
Speaker 3: from birds. You can and should have you the chance
Speaker 3: visit places like the Hiroshima Piece memorial in the Peace Museum.
Speaker 3: You can get a first hand look at artifacts and
Speaker 3: consequences of this. It is a harrowing piece of history,
Speaker 3: which means it is a piece of history that all
Speaker 3: nations need to remember.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, For sure. Another thing to remember is
Speaker 2: that when the US deployed those B twenty nine, they
Speaker 2: deployed multiple for both of those you know what they
Speaker 2: would call missions, so that several different pilots and groups
Speaker 2: of people in planes actually dropped bombs, but only one
Speaker 2: of them within the group actually dropped the nuke. And
Speaker 2: that way nobody really knew who actually caused all of
Speaker 2: that destruction and mass death.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Similar in a macro sense to what we used
Speaker 3: to do with firing squads, right where you would have
Speaker 3: five or six soldiers shooting, shooting for an execution, and
Speaker 3: only one would have a live bullet. The idea that
Speaker 3: you could give people some sort of psychological soop, right,
Speaker 3: or reassurance. Maybe it was not me because otherwise how
Speaker 3: well you deal with the deaths of hundreds of thousands
Speaker 3: of people on your conscience?
Speaker 2: I mean, just one thing to think about, specifically with
Speaker 2: an A bomb, an H bomb, and a nuclear weapon
Speaker 2: of any kind that we're maybe in your mind think
Speaker 2: of the explosion and you can see the images that
Speaker 2: we've seen over the years of what these look like.
Speaker 2: One thing that I always kind of slips my mind,
Speaker 2: maybe because it is so horrifying, but just the number
Speaker 2: of fires that get started afterwards, like after that initial explosion,
Speaker 2: then the amount of fire that occurs on a much
Speaker 2: larger radius that consumes so many other people, especially depending
Speaker 2: on the time of you know, day or night that
Speaker 2: it's dropped, and all that other stuff, and how much
Speaker 2: warning and.
Speaker 3: Wise conditions relative industrial infrastructure, petroleum fields, things like that,
Speaker 3: forest forest coverage. Yeah, this is something that the Roti
Speaker 3: Museum I visited. I won't monologue about it, but this
Speaker 3: is something that they spend a lot of time on there.
Speaker 3: In addition to the human costs, the environmental costs, things
Speaker 3: that simply cannot be mitigated, cannot be repaired, right, this
Speaker 3: is a hard stop to a lot of what we
Speaker 3: would consider natural life and natural environmental processes on the planet.
Speaker 3: And you could consider war analysts would consider these operations
Speaker 3: in Japan and World War II a military success, in
Speaker 3: success being defined by the fact that the ruler in
Speaker 3: Burihiro Hito did surrender unconditionally as a result of these
Speaker 3: attacks and honestly the larger failing efforts of Japan during
Speaker 3: the war. But it was also inarguably a humanitarian disaster.
Speaker 3: This was a pyrrhic victory for the world overall. And
Speaker 3: if you visit either site today again, please do if
Speaker 3: you have the chance. You'll see that a chill still
Speaker 3: hangs in the air. This is almost more than almost
Speaker 3: a century ago now, and the areas are physically safe
Speaker 3: for humans, I can confirm that firsthand. But each city
Speaker 3: still bears the scars of those horrific acts. You can
Speaker 3: see the melted rubble of buildings, melted rubble of buildings,
Speaker 3: and this attack, this series of attacks, also provides historians,
Speaker 3: world leaders, and scholars and scientists with crucial data on
Speaker 3: what could happen in the modern day if these weapons
Speaker 3: or things like them are unleashed in other regions in
Speaker 3: larger quantities. As a result, we see the emergence of
Speaker 3: two incredibly different philosophies, each a reaction to the same
Speaker 3: inescapable truths.
Speaker 2: And when we're thinking about the devastation that was wrought
Speaker 2: above Hiroshima with that weapon, that atomic bomb, that bomb
Speaker 2: was known as Little Boy, and it was only a
Speaker 2: fifteen kilo ton bomb, which you know, only fifteen kilotons.
Speaker 2: Basically that's the amount of tons of T and T
Speaker 2: essentially that it is equal to theoretically, so fifteen thousand basically.
Speaker 3: And it did not reach near its full capability as well,
Speaker 3: the technology was still very much in its early days.
Speaker 3: And the other one, fat Man, had similar results in Nagasaki.
Speaker 3: It was fat Man and Little Boy I believe.
Speaker 4: For the dude names.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fat Man is Nagasaki, and it was only twenty kilotons.
Speaker 2: But just this concept of all of these other defensive forces,
Speaker 2: especially on the US side, calculating well, how much more
Speaker 2: devastation would be caused, and if we increased the kill
Speaker 2: a toonage, you know, by two or something like that,
Speaker 2: and then we'll talk about, as move towards the future,
Speaker 2: towards now, how much these weapons have grown in lethality
Speaker 2: kill a tons specifically to megatons, even agreed.
Speaker 3: The attacks also provided historians, world leaders, scholars, and scientists
Speaker 3: with crucial data on what might happen were these weapons
Speaker 3: unleashed in other regions or troublingly in larger quantities. So
Speaker 3: as a result, we witness the emergence of two vastly
Speaker 3: different philosophies. They're drawing very different conclusions and directives from
Speaker 3: the same set of now escapable truths. One school of thought,
Speaker 3: which we would loosely call non proliferation argues a spectrum
Speaker 3: of solutions, one that no new nukes should be created,
Speaker 3: no new nations should acquire nuclear power, that there must
Speaker 3: be a robust and force framework against building any more
Speaker 3: of these potential world enders. And on the far end
Speaker 3: of that spectrum, the non proliferation spectrum, you see some
Speaker 3: groups arguing that all existing nukes should be dismantled as well.
Speaker 3: So every nuclear nation then becomes Frodo right there in
Speaker 3: Mount Doom. And you're trying to talk them into throwing
Speaker 3: the ring into the fire spoiler, it does not work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that ring has some real I don't know what
Speaker 2: would you call it, pull just this concept if the
Speaker 2: ring is in fact the power that comes with having
Speaker 2: deployable nukes just in your back pocket there right.
Speaker 3: And Tolkien was not writing about nuclear power actually in
Speaker 3: Lord of the Rings. He found it irritating when people said, so,
Speaker 3: so we want to bust that myth on his half
Speaker 3: on his behalf posthumously.
Speaker 4: But it also works perfectly.
Speaker 3: It works perfectly, is the thing Jarr. So the other philosophy, again,
Speaker 3: drawing from the exact same set of data and objective observations,
Speaker 3: they go in a very different direction, and they argue
Speaker 3: any nation currently in possession of nukes must logically fight
Speaker 3: their damnedest to keep them, especially after the lessons of Libya,
Speaker 3: right or failing that, if you are a nation with
Speaker 3: the capability to acquire this power, then you need to
Speaker 3: do so immediately. And this is where we see things
Speaker 3: like the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, or
Speaker 3: of course, the philosophy of MAD mutual assured destruction. And
Speaker 3: here I want to pause to give a shout out
Speaker 3: to our old pal, good friend of the show, Josh Clark,
Speaker 3: who wrote an article for How Stuff Works that holds
Speaker 3: up regarding MAD. So just look up that article and
Speaker 3: you can get the quick skinny on this. The concept
Speaker 3: is counterintuitively, the more nations that have nuclear weapons, the
Speaker 3: more valuable nukes become as a deterrent instead of a
Speaker 3: gun you actually fire. So similar to the old you
Speaker 3: know standoff in wild West fiction or film, if everybody
Speaker 3: has a gun and we're all the same room, we're
Speaker 3: all pointing at each other, then the likelihood of anyone
Speaker 3: firing drops drastically. That is, for a time, that theory
Speaker 3: seem to hold true, especially because multiple other nations possed up,
Speaker 3: you know, like NATO Article five is probably the most
Speaker 3: famous example. You attack one of our guys and the
Speaker 3: whole gang jumps into the frame.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the game changes from who has nukes to
Speaker 2: who has the most outdated early detection system, who has
Speaker 2: the best early detection system for a launch?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: And does anybody glitch out all the time or send
Speaker 2: the wrong information? Because imagine that room where everybody's got
Speaker 2: a gun, right, and nobody's firing because everybody's got a gun.
Speaker 2: What if there's somebody who has a hearing aid that
Speaker 2: malfunctions and they think somebody shot, so they fire.
Speaker 3: And there have been a lot of close calls, right,
Speaker 3: some immortalized in film and fiction, but definitely based on
Speaker 3: real world events. We also know that once the first
Speaker 3: bullet in this comparison fires, other bullets inevitably follow. In
Speaker 3: the standoff, it's no longer standoff now it's a race
Speaker 3: to get rid of all your bullets. Right, And so,
Speaker 3: in other words, this scenario where to continue results in
Speaker 3: a world where the winner or the winners defined by
Speaker 3: whichever nations are left standing amid the rubble. What they're
Speaker 3: ruling over is little more than ashes and poison, and
Speaker 3: we know, we know this is a possibility. This is
Speaker 3: not just a mad cap thought experiment. Since the development
Speaker 3: of nuclear weaponry and it's later proliferation, there have been
Speaker 3: well over two thousand documented nuclear explosions, and a spooky
Speaker 3: thing about it is we don't know for sure how
Speaker 3: many have actually been exploded, right The majority have been
Speaker 3: tests right now, the estimation is something like twenty six
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty four. But then does it count things
Speaker 3: like the Vela incident. Does it count things that occurred
Speaker 3: somehow without observation, especially in the early days out in
Speaker 3: the stands of the USSR. Some of these were held
Speaker 3: in secret, But then if you look at the cases
Speaker 3: like the DPRK, these tests are loudly broadcast to send
Speaker 3: a message to the world, you know. So it's weird
Speaker 3: because we have to tell you hat in hand that
Speaker 3: it is difficult to know exactly how many detonations occurred.
Speaker 3: It is actually a matter of debate, as we record
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty five, but we do know with each detonation,
Speaker 3: civilization learn more about the possibilities on the horizon, which
Speaker 3: means that no matter what they said to their domestic
Speaker 3: population in power structures across the planet. Military leaders privately
Speaker 3: and at times publicly agreed. Look, nuclear bombs present terrifying possibilities.
Speaker 3: These warheads canned in the world, But the most terrifying
Speaker 3: possibility is that our nation might not have access to
Speaker 3: some of these capabilities. Right, we know that guns exist,
Speaker 3: we know that other people have guns. What can we
Speaker 3: do to protect ourselves? And there's a logic to that.
Speaker 3: It's a brutal logic, but it makes sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, So we'll.
Speaker 3: Fast forward to May twelfth, twenty twenty five. As we're
Speaker 3: recording this episode. The situation has changed, and Matt, I
Speaker 3: think it's fair to say there have been attempts at
Speaker 3: stepping down the global nuclear arsenal, but for people who
Speaker 3: want it eliminated, that's still not enough. We know that
Speaker 3: there have been various agreements, especially between the Russian Federation
Speaker 3: and the United States, to decommission and to disassemble some
Speaker 3: of their warheads. But at the same time, more nations
Speaker 3: acquired this ability, right, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel,
Speaker 3: and North Korea plus Russian in the US, those are
Speaker 3: what we call the Big Nine. And if you got
Speaker 3: these guys to all put aside their disagreements and count
Speaker 3: together how many warheads that is in total, the global
Speaker 3: tally is something like twelve thousand, three hundred and thirty one, which,
Speaker 3: just for a so off note for those of us
Speaker 3: playing along at home, Yes, that is more than enough
Speaker 3: to end civilization as we know it several times over
Speaker 3: according to current scientific estimates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's weird to look at the little map from
Speaker 2: the Federation of American Scientists looking at the US having
Speaker 2: around around three thousand, seven hundred and Russia having around
Speaker 2: four thousand, three hundred. But then I don't know lately,
Speaker 2: maybe just with the news, maybe simply because they are
Speaker 2: engaged in a current hot conflict that is in a
Speaker 2: quote ceasefire. The one hundred and seventy nukes that Pakistan
Speaker 2: holds and the one hundred and eighty that India holds,
Speaker 2: it's given me pause.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and also on my end, it gives me pause,
Speaker 5: even when you know, when I was studying this professionally,
Speaker 5: it gives me pause that the numbers are always caveated.
Speaker 3: With around yeah, and estimated. Maybe it factors and in
Speaker 3: factors in guests, secrecy, and a bunch of other things
Speaker 3: that they don't want enemy nations to know. But that
Speaker 3: also those caveats also come as a result of not
Speaker 3: knowing maintenance regimen for a lot of a lot of disarmaments,
Speaker 3: specifically Russian, but other countries as well. Because these are
Speaker 3: not like the old rotisseri made for old made for
Speaker 3: TV rotisserie chicken commercials, where you quote, set it and
Speaker 3: forget it. You have to keep checking in on these
Speaker 3: things because they're you know, they're finicky anyway. Point B.
Speaker 3: With all this, proponents of mad and other philosophies believe
Speaker 3: that they will tell you this results in a fragile stability.
Speaker 3: Critics of proliferation say, look twenty twenty five, the present,
Speaker 3: the current now is too different from the past for
Speaker 3: those old assumptions to remain serviceable. What about, for instance,
Speaker 3: non state actors acquiring nuclear weaponry, terrorist separatists, religious extremist
Speaker 3: with a dirty bomb and an act to grind What
Speaker 3: if one of those near misses that we alluded to
Speaker 3: earlier actually does go wrong? What if it's no longer
Speaker 3: a near miss? What happens then? Luckily the world hasn't
Speaker 3: found out yet. But we're going to pause for a
Speaker 3: word from our sponsors. And dive in. Here's where it
Speaker 3: gets crazy. Okay, Matt, we'll talk about some of the
Speaker 3: I think specific game theory and regional hotspots in a moment,
Speaker 3: but I think we can both agree a nuclear war
Speaker 3: as we've defined it now would result in things going
Speaker 3: extremely wrong, extremely quickly.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely. We've got a couple of different the
Speaker 2: scenarios that have been written about out recently and explored
Speaker 2: thoroughly pretty recently, from in twenty nineteen and then again
Speaker 2: last year in twenty twenty four. So we can shout
Speaker 2: out Annie Jacobsen for her book Nuclear War, A scenario
Speaker 2: then goes through pretty much what we're about to take
Speaker 2: you through. It's what happens if the world is at war,
Speaker 2: not just a NATO country versus let's say Russia, where
Speaker 2: it's just happening in one part of Europe and Asia
Speaker 2: over there, it's the entire world is launching nukes. Right,
Speaker 2: that's what we're going to talk about, first full scale war.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, let's get to that. Let's also shout out
Speaker 3: Nuclear Choices for the twenty first Century, a citizen's guide
Speaker 3: that's written by Richard Wolfson. We need to shout out
Speaker 3: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, because they do great
Speaker 3: work here, hosting as well the doomsday clock, which we've
Speaker 3: we've talked about in the past. Shout out to our
Speaker 3: pal Jack O'Brien.
Speaker 2: And definitely Princeton Signs and Global Security and Alex Glazer
Speaker 2: in particular, because there's a thing on YouTube you can
Speaker 2: watch that is basically what we're going to be walking
Speaker 2: through here of what happens when the nukes launched, where
Speaker 2: did they launch, and then what are the casualties.
Speaker 4: It's fun.
Speaker 3: It will also introduce, you know, just in the case
Speaker 3: of farness and injectivity here, some scientific disputes by various
Speaker 3: people who are questioning some of these calculations. But anyhow,
Speaker 3: let's go anecdotal first and we'll shout out more sources
Speaker 3: along the way. The harsh reality is that the days
Speaker 3: of World War two are long past, which means that
Speaker 3: people have been working on this technology pretty much around
Speaker 3: the clock since that time, since the discovery. So the
Speaker 3: capabilities of twenty twenty five are streets ahead, as community
Speaker 3: would say, of what was available in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 3: again the better part of a century ago. I would add,
Speaker 3: it's also important to recognize that population centers have shifted. Now,
Speaker 3: Unlike in the nineteen forties, most people live in large
Speaker 3: metro areas, cities, conurbations. That means that there are more
Speaker 3: targets in one place. There are also more bombs to
Speaker 3: hit those targets. And further, there are more efficient ways
Speaker 3: of moving those bombs across the planet from point A
Speaker 3: to point Z. And now we've got you know, we've
Speaker 3: got these posse contracts. I'll just loosely call them. We
Speaker 3: don't call them that in the Ivory Tower, but several
Speaker 3: of the Big Nine have almost all the Big Nine
Speaker 3: have hard limits and constraints about how these things could
Speaker 3: hypothetically be deployed. Several of them have something we call
Speaker 3: no first use policy, arguing that even in most regional
Speaker 3: conflicts or times of high tension, they're not going to
Speaker 3: be the first guys to launch a warhead. Their nukes
Speaker 3: therefore launch only as a counter attack or a response
Speaker 3: retaliation measure. But other countries like Pakistan don't bother to
Speaker 3: make such vows. And then yet other countries like Israel
Speaker 3: are reluctant to openly admit to any nuclear capability in
Speaker 3: the first place, which is a lot like a teenager
Speaker 3: coming home being very high and pretending they just like snacks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're talking about like Israel.
Speaker 2: But you know, officially on the books in all of
Speaker 2: these places anywhere that's talking about nuclear weapons nowadays, including
Speaker 2: the Federation of American Scientists points out that Israel has
Speaker 2: at least ninety nukes.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and for their credit, Israel has never denied it.
Speaker 3: They've just never confirmed it. And that's part of the strategy.
Speaker 4: There right now.
Speaker 2: Well, and how many of those are tactical nuclear weapons
Speaker 2: that would would register as a nuclear weapon but not
Speaker 2: in the same way as some of the older detection
Speaker 2: let's say technologies across the world could even probably see
Speaker 2: it's interesting. It's interesting that it's all going down, it's
Speaker 2: all that's all stuff. And you know, we're talking about
Speaker 2: capabilities still here in past World War two and if
Speaker 2: bombs dropped now and when they would drop. An important
Speaker 2: thing to take into account is, in most like gamed
Speaker 2: out scenarios of nuclear war, it's almost all military targets,
Speaker 2: at least in the first few salvos.
Speaker 3: In the first waves, yeah, the first two waves or
Speaker 3: military targets.
Speaker 2: And that could that could just be hours We're talking
Speaker 2: hours between when the military targets get taken out then
Speaker 2: the city centers could get taken out, right, which is
Speaker 2: just shorter than a conventional war. Yeah, it's much shorter,
Speaker 2: but it is just I guess it's in my mind.
Speaker 2: There's this thing called Plan A you can look up
Speaker 2: and that's by that Alex Glazer person, a bunch of
Speaker 2: other folks that where they actually use that nuke map
Speaker 2: site that you can go to and you can basically
Speaker 2: drop specific kiloton weapons on different places around the globe
Speaker 2: and you can map out where the nuclear fallout goes
Speaker 2: and how many casualties roughly because of the populations as
Speaker 2: they go through there. They built a scenario they called
Speaker 2: Plan A in twenty nineteen which basically shows all of
Speaker 2: those military targets happening if it started in Europe basically
Speaker 2: with NATO versus Russia, then expanded out to NATO calling
Speaker 2: in the US to launch their ICBMs, to then Russia
Speaker 2: launching their ICBMs. And it's all based on detection, right,
Speaker 2: It's not based on nuke's dropping. It's based on somebody
Speaker 2: got an alert that a nuke.
Speaker 3: Got launched, Detection of launch, not detection of detonation. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's an important point. We also want to shout
Speaker 3: out Alex Wellerstein, who I believe is the author or
Speaker 3: one of the maps I was using Nuclear Secrecy dot Com.
Speaker 3: That map. That's a pretty great one too, terrifying by
Speaker 3: which means great. This is the thing, right we're talking about.
Speaker 3: We and many other people much brighter than us, have
Speaker 3: gained out what they see as the potential call and response, right,
Speaker 3: the chain of action that occurs, and inevitably, in most scenarios,
Speaker 3: other people jump into the fray. NATO Article five. That's
Speaker 3: a great example. These countries are bound to back each
Speaker 3: other up depending on a type of conflict that occurs,
Speaker 3: and in backing each other up and enjoining that conflict conversation,
Speaker 3: the entire situation escalates. And this leads to this leads
Speaker 3: to the concern about what we could call regional hotspots,
Speaker 3: which I suggest we get to in a moment. But first,
Speaker 3: maybe we talked about this. What happens on the ground
Speaker 3: the first warhead launches and successfully detonates, that's the real
Speaker 3: what happens. And I suggest we stay pretty general because
Speaker 3: as we know, a wealth of factors and variables affect
Speaker 3: the aftermath. The key to variables here are going to
Speaker 3: be who attacks whom, and where those attacks occur. The
Speaker 3: most immediate effect of a nuclear explosion lasts under a second.
Speaker 3: It's an intense burst of nuclear radiation, mostly gamma rays
Speaker 3: and neutrons. Our friends thinks, our friends at MIT for
Speaker 3: confirming a lot of this. But the thing is, even
Speaker 3: though that lasts under a second, it travels. The direct
Speaker 3: radiation extends nearly a mile from say a ten kiloton explosion,
Speaker 3: and it's lethal. This weirdly enough, frighteningly enough, this is
Speaker 3: not that significant. Other lethal effects come into play at
Speaker 3: even greater distances. But if you're right there, if you
Speaker 3: have that tragic, heartbreaking front seat to this, you'll see
Speaker 3: an exploding nuclear weapon instantly vaporizes and for a time
Speaker 3: it generates a gas, or it becomes a gas that
Speaker 3: is hotter than the core of the Sun. And this
Speaker 3: hot gas has its own energy X rays. They heat
Speaker 3: the surrounding air. This creates, as we alluded to earlier,
Speaker 3: a fireball that forms and quickly grows. If you take
Speaker 3: a one megaton explosion, after ten seconds, you have a
Speaker 3: fireball a mile in diameter. And if you are fifty
Speaker 3: miles away, this still looks brighter than the sun.
Speaker 2: And just a reminder, we're talking about one megaton, which
Speaker 2: is like the big version, right. The first ICBM that
Speaker 2: China deployed was the dong Feing four and that was
Speaker 2: three point three mega tons. And if you go into
Speaker 2: just the current arsenals that many other countries have, including
Speaker 2: you know the US, the old minute Men warheads, those
Speaker 2: were a full megaton, and the old Soviet, the old
Speaker 2: Soviet missiles, the ones that were involved in the Cuban
Speaker 2: missile crisis, those were two point four to two mega tons.
Speaker 2: So they're big old bombs and they get a lot
Speaker 2: bigger than that too, and.
Speaker 3: Most dangerous potentially have never been detonated. Important note, folks,
Speaker 3: uh Matt saying deployed that means move somewhere, put into
Speaker 3: maybe activation. The possible use thereof deploy is not detonation.
Speaker 3: But deploy is a huge signal, right, and it's a
Speaker 3: signal that can be very difficult to walk back. We
Speaker 3: know that along with this fireball there comes a lot
Speaker 3: of heat. This is something called a thermal flash, and
Speaker 3: the thermal flash has a lot of consequences far after detonation,
Speaker 3: it ignites fires from far away as twenty miles. It
Speaker 3: can cause severe, even fatal burns, So twenty miles away,
Speaker 3: for instance, as we learned in the museum, two thirds
Speaker 3: of people who somehow survived Hiroshima did so with extensive,
Speaker 3: severe burns. You can look at plenty of documentation about this.
Speaker 3: We suggest that you have a strong stomach should you
Speaker 3: choose to do so. Then after that, of course, there's
Speaker 3: the blast wave, there's the ground wave. The blast wave
Speaker 3: is something we talked about briefly off air, but I
Speaker 3: know we both researched this extent. It goes down to
Speaker 3: psi pressure per square inch. The blast wave moves outward
Speaker 3: thousands of miles per hour. It slows as it spreads naturally,
Speaker 3: but it carries with it about half of a bomb's
Speaker 3: explosive energy, regardless of the yield size of the bomb.
Speaker 3: It's responsible for most of the physical destruction you see,
Speaker 3: and people can actually as odd People can actually, under
Speaker 3: some circumstances, deal with a deteriorating blast wave, but they
Speaker 3: are very vulnerable to collapsing buildings, to pieces of glass
Speaker 3: that become you know, a rainstorm of knives. Essentially the
Speaker 3: force of this wave can be such that glass, which
Speaker 3: is a breakable thing, right, you can break stone with glass,
Speaker 3: but the glass is flying at such a high speed
Speaker 3: that it can embed itself into stone structures. A human
Speaker 3: flesh stands no chance against this force can slam you
Speaker 3: through the air into walls, you know. I mean, if
Speaker 3: you're close enough to nuclear blast, your shadow can be
Speaker 3: burned into the material behind you. So that happens. That
Speaker 3: all happens very very.
Speaker 2: Quickly, right, yeah, yes, And the way an attack would function,
Speaker 2: if it was on any scale, there would be dozens,
Speaker 2: if not hundreds, of these types of explosions happening almost
Speaker 2: simultaneously across the world.
Speaker 3: And things get extraordinarily complicated if they start happening in
Speaker 3: areas close together. Right, So let's go to the midterm.
Speaker 3: Let's talk fallout. Fallout defined on two levels, First the
Speaker 3: actual radiation, and then second, I would argue the political,
Speaker 3: the geopolitical fallout as a result of that first nation. So,
Speaker 3: the most heavily analyzed scenario time after time has been
Speaker 3: Russia and the US attacking one another. Because of the
Speaker 3: relatively US centric analysis at play, that's the easiest stuff
Speaker 3: for Westerners to access. The assumption is always that Russia
Speaker 3: attacks first because it makes US look like the good
Speaker 3: guys in these scenarios. So let's say Russia attacks the
Speaker 3: US first. Then, because NATO members UK and France also
Speaker 3: have their own nuclear weapons, they are bound by NATO's
Speaker 3: Article five to defend the United States. So Russia, being
Speaker 3: well aware of this, logically hits UK and France as well,
Speaker 3: to the best of its abilities, with any military targets
Speaker 3: that they feel might be capable of launching nuclear weapons.
Speaker 3: The add on possibility here the bonus points would be
Speaker 3: to attack those places in such a way that uses
Speaker 3: their own weapons against them that also detonates the nuclear
Speaker 3: material on site. Double whemming. Yep, hasn't happened yet. But
Speaker 3: by this point, to your earlier note there, Matt, it's
Speaker 3: well known that by the time Russia is doing this,
Speaker 3: within a very short period of ours, probably retaliation has
Speaker 3: already occurred. The US and allies, assuming they retain any
Speaker 3: capability which spoiler they will, they strike back. So Moscow,
Speaker 3: Saint Petersburg, several military sites leveled. No stone upon a stone,
Speaker 3: and the dystopian theory would argue that this continues until
Speaker 3: someone is surrendering or incapable of continuing. In our standoff analogy,
Speaker 3: you fire the bullets until you're it clicks dry. So
Speaker 3: if Moscow is wiped immediately, we might finally see the
Speaker 3: dead Hand activate, which is just insane. I still wonder
Speaker 3: if it, if it could actually work, and I want
Speaker 3: to pause because that's just a personal hobby horse of mind.
Speaker 3: But Matt, do you think the dead Hand still functions?
Speaker 3: Do you think it ever did function?
Speaker 2: I think yes, but I think there I think there
Speaker 2: are still humans at the wheel with the Dead Hand,
Speaker 2: They're just in strategic places where they won't get touched,
Speaker 2: like in certain military facilities. I don't think it's this.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's a system where nukes just fire automatically,
Speaker 2: but there are Again, we go back to the detection systems.
Speaker 2: In that plan A that I was looking at. It
Speaker 2: starts with one tactical nuke being launched by Russia basically
Speaker 2: onto Ukraine or into a into a NATO controlled area,
Speaker 2: and then NATO retaliates with one of there like a
Speaker 2: small singular tactical nuclear weapon which is much smaller. Right,
Speaker 2: it's meant to take out a facility or something like that.
Speaker 3: So called bunker buster.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: But in that scenario, the only thing that messes up
Speaker 2: is the early detection systems that are aging out in Russia,
Speaker 2: so the system believes that it is a much larger salvo,
Speaker 2: so that it does activate basically the early warning system
Speaker 2: that says, hey, we're being attacked, we need to hit
Speaker 2: the military sites now before ours get taken out.
Speaker 3: And check out our episode on the dead hand, which
Speaker 3: bust some of the more extremist myths about it, but
Speaker 3: does give you a sense of how this would work. Essentially,
Speaker 3: it's a line of continual check ins with these various
Speaker 3: facilities to power structures of the Russian government, and if
Speaker 3: those power structures don't have the right communication protocol, then
Speaker 3: there's another series of tracks balances, and if that also
Speaker 3: goes for loop, then the then a satellite is launched,
Speaker 3: or excuse me, a missile is launched that communicates with
Speaker 3: other remaining nuclear facilities or par nuclear launch sites such
Speaker 3: that then they would begin to launch on their own
Speaker 3: preprogrammed paths.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there is a thing that we need to
Speaker 2: talk about that I just have to find here. It's
Speaker 2: something that Annie Jacobsen talks about in her book something
Speaker 2: that every single leader who is in charge of that
Speaker 2: decision of whether or not to launch a nuke, generally
Speaker 2: a president or somebody high up in an executive branch
Speaker 2: in any country. This concept of jamming that occurs in
Speaker 2: those moments, because we're talking about moments, not you know,
Speaker 2: the person in charge has a week to moll over
Speaker 2: the consequences of whether or not we unleash these ungodly weapons,
Speaker 2: because we've had them launched at US. You were talking minutes,
Speaker 2: literally minutes where you were going to have basically everyone
Speaker 2: in your ear that is of sufficient rank from the
Speaker 2: military trying to tell you what you need to do.
Speaker 2: And then you generally, as either a civilian leader if
Speaker 2: it's a democratic world country or like in the US,
Speaker 2: or if you're in another country where you've got more
Speaker 2: of an autocratic thing, you still have to make that
Speaker 2: decision so quickly, based on the best intelligence you have,
Speaker 2: based on the sensors that your country has deployed.
Speaker 3: And based on further your awareness of enemy force capability
Speaker 3: and distribution, which is why nuclear capable subs are such
Speaker 3: a crown jewel for the US and Western navies. This
Speaker 3: if we okay, so let's assume things continue to go wrong,
Speaker 3: with each detonation increasingly desperate and ruthless, and happening within
Speaker 3: a short period of time. We see the same consequences,
Speaker 3: and those consequences can become magnified and exacerbated depending upon
Speaker 3: how closely various detonations occur. So if, for instance, if
Speaker 3: Washington gets hit and then New York City also gets hit,
Speaker 3: then the areas between DC and New York City encounter
Speaker 3: a much higher degree of consequence and a horrific aftermath.
Speaker 3: And this applies not just to those regions, but to
Speaker 3: the number of detonations across the globe. This is where
Speaker 3: we enter the concept of nuclear winter. Long story short,
Speaker 3: If hundreds of nuclear explosions occur in a short enough
Speaker 3: span of time, civilization can encounter a new realm of
Speaker 3: environmental devastation called nuclear winter. Now, nuclear winter has not
Speaker 3: occurred at this point, scientists still argue about it, but
Speaker 3: one of the best comparisons we could have would be
Speaker 3: how gargantuan volcanic eruption events can darken the sky. Right,
Speaker 3: that is a thing that we know can happen. Concerns
Speaker 3: about nuclear winter they hit the forefront in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: We get this fellow conspiracy realist. The boffins knew about
Speaker 3: the damaging effects of light, heat, last radiation, and smoke
Speaker 3: caused by nuclear explosions. They knew about it for decades,
Speaker 3: and world leaders sort of ignored it. They didn't really
Speaker 3: talk about it, even though they knew well before the
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they did well, Yeah, because they figured out with
Speaker 2: some of the first nuclear testing what occurs when an
Speaker 2: atom bomb, a nuclear weapon, an h bomb, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: when it explodes.
Speaker 4: We talked about that.
Speaker 2: Giant sun essentially hotter than the sun, fireball that it
Speaker 2: creates when that explosion occurs, especially if there's like a
Speaker 2: city underneath where that fireball is, and all that combustible stuff,
Speaker 2: including the concrete, starts to vaporize and carbonize, basically turn
Speaker 2: into just carbon floating through the air. It creates this
Speaker 2: huge we've seen the mushroom clouds. We know what that
Speaker 2: looks like. But that mushroom cloud, as it's forced up
Speaker 2: from all the heat below it, it goes up past
Speaker 2: the rain clouds, past the tropopause where the rain clouds
Speaker 2: form like the biggest rain clouds, and you get what's
Speaker 2: called a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that is above all the other
Speaker 2: clouds and that crap. Once it's up there for each explosion,
Speaker 2: it sticks around for years, not days, not months, years,
Speaker 2: potentially up to a decade. It sticks up there, and
Speaker 2: it is a black dark cloud that covers up even
Speaker 2: the clouds below it, right, and the cities below it,
Speaker 2: and the agriculture below it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we also need to talk about the stratosphere. The
Speaker 3: stratosphere is home to a layer of what we call ozone.
Speaker 3: Ozone is running interference for life on Earth by shielding
Speaker 3: everyone from the harmful ultraviolet radiation of the sun. The
Speaker 3: ozone can be depleted by the large amount of nitrogen
Speaker 3: oxide produced by the nuclear explosions. To the studies about
Speaker 3: large amounts of dust and soot and smoke, Yes, they
Speaker 3: can potentially block sunlight from reaching Earth's surface. This leads
Speaker 3: to a temporary cooling of the air. It's exacerbated by
Speaker 3: the vast swaths of smoke and pollutants coming from the
Speaker 3: forest that will burn then the plastics, the oil fields,
Speaker 3: the petroleum stores. The best study for this, or I
Speaker 3: would say the most prominent, is the t TAPS study
Speaker 3: from nineteen eighty three. It's named after its four authors, RP. Turco, Optoon,
Speaker 3: TP Ackerman, JB. Pollock, and Carl Sagan. At least one
Speaker 3: of those guys is very well known to the public,
Speaker 3: and there the idea of nuclear winter hinges not so
Speaker 3: much on the emission of radiation from the initial blast.
Speaker 3: It's the fireballs, the smoke, the soot, the dust. They
Speaker 3: drift at high altitudes and they ride strong established west
Speaker 3: to east winds. If this happens between say, the USSR
Speaker 3: excuse me, Russia and the US, then this knock on
Speaker 3: consequence can form a uniform belt of particles that circle
Speaker 3: the northern hemisphere like a big girdle or corset from
Speaker 3: thirty to sixty degrees latitude. These clouds block out almost
Speaker 3: all all of the light from the sun, and initially
Speaker 3: their study said this could be several weeks. But even
Speaker 3: if it's just several weeks, the consequences are immediate. Surface
Speaker 3: temperatures plummet. Most importantly, plants photosynthesis halts because the plants
Speaker 3: can't eat anymore. This kills a huge portion of vegetation
Speaker 3: animal life, including human animals, and this occurs in step
Speaker 3: with the existing damage to all human infrastructure. So even
Speaker 3: if nuclear winter just happened without nuclear attax, we'd be
Speaker 3: in a tight spot. But for it to occur after
Speaker 3: all like medical rescue, communication infrastructure has just rolled craps,
Speaker 3: then the situation becomes very dire. Indeed, we're talking about
Speaker 3: a massive and sudden drop in human population. The immediate
Speaker 3: radiation could largely be a thing of the past. Now
Speaker 3: we're talking about starvation, exposure, disease, and of course crime,
Speaker 3: people become increasingly desperate.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I just want to differentiate the two sets of
Speaker 2: cloud cover that can occur, because you are absolutely right
Speaker 2: you're talking about there's there are different amounts, different amounts
Speaker 2: of smoke and types of smoke that.
Speaker 4: Are going to be generated.
Speaker 2: And as you're talking about the knock on effects like
Speaker 2: forest fires, those kinds of things, petroleum burning, anything that's
Speaker 2: just almost what I would call a normal insane fire
Speaker 2: happening on Earth that is going to do those things
Speaker 2: where it lasts, you know, a couple of weeks as
Speaker 2: those clouds kind of circulate around the Earth. But the
Speaker 2: really scary one that causes the winter, at least from
Speaker 2: what I'm my understanding, from a couple of sources is
Speaker 2: that it's the stuff that goes above the clouds. So
Speaker 2: imagine another layer of clouds up near that more ozone
Speaker 2: layer that you're talking not quite that high up in altitude,
Speaker 2: but near there. That that's the thing that actually blankets
Speaker 2: everything that doesn't it's not subject to the same system
Speaker 2: of rainfall and then clouds forming again, and then all
Speaker 2: those particulate, all that particular matter just falling back to
Speaker 2: the earth pretty rapidly. That's the stuff that can last
Speaker 2: for decades, which is that's how you get in some scenarios,
Speaker 2: two billion people starving quickly because the agricultural ability of
Speaker 2: humanity is halved. That's it. That's base. That's the basic
Speaker 2: scenario for if the US goes to war with Russia.
Speaker 2: Right now, you have the amount of food that humans
Speaker 2: can produce.
Speaker 3: And that would be do uh, that would be doing
Speaker 3: no small part to the geographic bread basket locations the
Speaker 3: interior of the United States and Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but and and also but hey, but the good
Speaker 2: thing is if you're in parts of Australia and Argentina,
Speaker 2: you're gonna be good to go because almost none of
Speaker 2: that stuff is going to affect you.
Speaker 4: In the southern hemisphere that far.
Speaker 3: South, depending again on the nature of the conflict, and
Speaker 3: you can check out a great thing video by our
Speaker 3: Fowls in a Nutshell for a quick explainer on that.
Speaker 3: We also need to note again it's important. It's important
Speaker 3: to acknowledge scientists still dispute the exact calculations evolved with
Speaker 3: those earlier studies. Thankfully, this dispute can occur because a
Speaker 3: nuclear winter has yet to occur. Again, thankfully, speaking of
Speaker 3: things that have yet to occur, We're going to take
Speaker 3: a break for a word from our sponsors, and then
Speaker 3: what do you think We'll dive into some of those
Speaker 3: regional hotspots. Okay, all of the things we've mentioned so far,
Speaker 3: and by the way, in that earlier conversation, both of
Speaker 3: those forms of messing with the air are very bad.
Speaker 3: There's not one that's better than the other. They're still
Speaker 3: terrible for people on the ground. This is why people
Speaker 3: are paying so much attention to what we call regional hotspots.
Speaker 3: These are areas of local conflict that in the pre
Speaker 3: nuclear days could still have sown chaos now right, you know,
Speaker 3: like Franz Ferdinand that was a non nuclear conflict. But
Speaker 3: these regional hotspots now more than ever, hold the potential
Speaker 3: for creating this existential threat nuclear exchange with global consequences,
Speaker 3: spelling doom for billions of people half a world away.
Speaker 3: When we talk about regional hotspots, it seems like three
Speaker 3: of the most prominent are going to be Russia, Eastern Europe,
Speaker 3: India and Pakistan, and of course the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, and India Pakistan is top of mind because
Speaker 2: there's currently a truce of some sort, there's a ceasefire,
Speaker 2: but that was not the case just several days ago.
Speaker 2: There was serious hot conflict happening with Indian Pakistan because
Speaker 2: of the Kashmir region. That is we talked about that
Speaker 2: in the line of actual control and the different groups
Speaker 2: that say, hey, this is ours or this is partly mine,
Speaker 2: and I get to have the military force and control
Speaker 2: this area.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as everyone watching the news is aware, India and Pakistan,
Speaker 3: who have been beefed up since more or less at
Speaker 3: each other's throats since nineteen forty seven, are reaching a
Speaker 3: new level of tension. They're both nuclear states, they're extremely
Speaker 3: hostile toward one another, and they are right next to
Speaker 3: another nuclear capable power, China. So almost all of the
Speaker 3: time they have had different propagandistic saber rattling events, right.
Speaker 3: We see this often in the form of missile tests.
Speaker 3: These tests have recently escalated into actual non nuclear missile
Speaker 3: launches against military sites in both countries. Something that concerned
Speaker 3: a lot of people here in the United States or
Speaker 3: in the global West was when the current Vice President JD. Vance,
Speaker 3: speaking about this rising conflict, said it was quote none
Speaker 3: of our business and just apolitically. This left nuclear scholars
Speaker 3: baffled because, you know, the logic being a nuclear exchange
Speaker 3: between these two densely populated countries will have effects on
Speaker 3: the rest of the world, definitely on the rest of
Speaker 3: the region. So what's kind of everybody's business?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3: You know, this also brings us to something you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: limited nuclear war scenarios, right, and tactical nukes. Even if
Speaker 3: there's a limited scenario and everybody else refuses to get
Speaker 3: involved to a greater degree, to a global degree, then
Speaker 3: India and Pakistan can still use like one hundred strategic
Speaker 3: weapons to attack military and urban centers, which means very
Speaker 3: quickly fatalities can reach fifty to one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: five million people. Again, just like Kiroshima and Nagasaki, the
Speaker 3: vast majority of these people are innocence. They are civilians.
Speaker 3: They're just trying to live their lives. That's why. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: maybe this is almost inspiring everyone outside the region. Every
Speaker 3: other nation has sort of put aside their concerns and
Speaker 3: disagreements to argue for restraint. Even you know, China and
Speaker 3: Russia and the US are unified on this, and those
Speaker 3: are three countries that do not like each other.
Speaker 2: It's weird because it would the effects would be roughly
Speaker 2: nuclear autumn. Right what we've described there was nuclear winter.
Speaker 2: This would be bad, and a lot of places wouldn't
Speaker 2: be able to produce food anymore, at least in the
Speaker 2: same way that they produce them now. A lot would
Speaker 2: have to change in order to make food production happen.
Speaker 4: In those areas.
Speaker 2: But you know, it would only cause a couple hundred
Speaker 2: million people to starve, he said sarcastically.
Speaker 3: And you know, also, while we're continuing with I guess
Speaker 3: cold comfort news, it's not that either country, Pakistan or
Speaker 3: India has officially declared they're going to launch nukes. It's
Speaker 3: that at any time either country could and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of sigan and analysis going into location and movement, right,
Speaker 3: and a lot of very frantic conversations on both sides.
Speaker 3: We know millions would die as a result. And then
Speaker 3: we go to we go to something that is probably
Speaker 3: a little more familiar to a lot of people in
Speaker 3: the quote unquote Global West. Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine
Speaker 3: began in twenty fourteen in earnest continues as we record
Speaker 3: in recent months and multiple news sources up to it,
Speaker 3: including just a few days ago. In fact, Russian President
Speaker 3: Vladimir Putin has made these repeated, at times cryptic statements
Speaker 3: about the possibility of deploying and detonating nukes in the conflict.
Speaker 3: As of so we said, we're recorded on May twelfth,
Speaker 3: As of May fourth, literally last week of Vladimir Putin
Speaker 3: stated the need to use nukes in Ukraine has not
Speaker 3: yet arisen, and he get this, hopes it will not.
Speaker 3: That is a world away from saying Russia will not
Speaker 3: attack in this manner.
Speaker 4: That's a yeah, that seems insane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just I just don't understand, because you you can't, Ben,
Speaker 2: Can you imagine a scenario where Russian forces for one reason,
Speaker 2: or another decide to launch a large ton like a
Speaker 2: several mega ton nuke in that conflict.
Speaker 4: I can't imagine that being a good strategic decision.
Speaker 3: It's not rational.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe that's it.
Speaker 3: That's the see axiom of all game theory, and arguably
Speaker 3: that can be a weakness when we're talking about you know,
Speaker 3: theocracies or people with nothing to lose. I mean, look,
Speaker 3: current game theory informs prudent statements from everything we can tell.
Speaker 3: Yet Western analysts remains skeptical, especially because of that. I
Speaker 3: hope we don't have to do it caveat, which is frightening.
Speaker 3: Russia conventional military is in dire straits. And we don't
Speaker 3: mean they're playing backup for the band haha. They've got
Speaker 3: hard supply manpower issues, multiple operations are disastrous. Their access
Speaker 3: to consumables like ammo and electronics have conspired to render
Speaker 3: this invasion a quagmire. You know, it seems like achieving
Speaker 3: the original Russian conditions for success is increasingly a pipe dream.
Speaker 3: But those same conditions make it almost impossible to fully
Speaker 3: withdraw it. As though Russia shot a barbed arrow into
Speaker 3: the West and now that arrow, like it or not,
Speaker 3: is stuck in the flesh, it's hard to pull it out.
Speaker 3: So the way you could win logically is by changing
Speaker 3: the rule of the game. And this goes to what
Speaker 3: you were talking about earlier. The prime axiom of game
Speaker 3: theory always assumes a rational actor. Any rational actor in
Speaker 3: charge of Russia would conclude, similar to what we just did,
Speaker 3: that deploy nukes is a no win situation. Population and
Speaker 3: industrial centers in Russia would be certainly hit within days
Speaker 3: or even hours afterward. So the concern in the West,
Speaker 3: the reason we're mentioning this on air. It's still whispered down,
Speaker 3: but it's increasingly prevalent. If Putin is somehow no longer
Speaker 3: a rational actor, what if all those rumors about his
Speaker 3: health for the last few years are true. What if
Speaker 3: he feels, for one reason or another, that he's gone
Speaker 3: too far into the water to return to the shore
Speaker 3: of logic, you know what I mean? What if it's
Speaker 3: all about legacy? What if he has what if he
Speaker 3: has This is speculation that I heard off book, and
Speaker 3: so we don't want to give too much credence to it.
Speaker 3: But what if what if he has a terminal diagnosis
Speaker 3: of some sort? How does that affect his decision.
Speaker 2: What if the people that oppose him are equally irrational.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, exactly, And that goes to the idea of irrationality. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that takes us, of course, to the Middle East, which
Speaker 3: I think we have to spend a little bit of
Speaker 3: time on the current crown jewel of potential nuclear disaster
Speaker 3: the Middle East, or if one be more accurate, we
Speaker 3: could call it West Asia. Only Israel currently possesses nuclear
Speaker 3: power in the region. Sorry, guys, everybody knows, but various
Speaker 3: other countries desperately want this power. And we talked about
Speaker 3: the lesson of Libya, but we didn't say what that was.
Speaker 3: Libya stepped back its efforts to become a nuclear power,
Speaker 3: and for people like the the Kim dynasty in North Korea,
Speaker 3: that's a parable. That is a warning. They see the
Speaker 3: death of Gaddafi in the toppling of that regime as
Speaker 3: a more or less direct consequence of complying with demands
Speaker 3: to become a non nuclear power.
Speaker 2: And well, he agreed in two thousand and three to disarm,
Speaker 2: right and then that was a long process and he
Speaker 2: wasn't taken out until twenty eleven something like that.
Speaker 3: And I'm on record saying I think that was more
Speaker 3: closely affiliated with him messing with the money.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you're on record for that. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't I don't. I don't know what killed him. But
Speaker 2: it's definitely one of those things where if you as
Speaker 2: a country give up that power, and what is to
Speaker 2: stop anyone with conventional weapons to come out in there?
Speaker 4: Who's more powerful to take over?
Speaker 3: Yeah, back to our Old West scenario. That's why it's
Speaker 3: relatively rare in a standoff for you know, that's why
Speaker 3: everybody says put the gun down, and people almost never
Speaker 3: do that, you know what I mean, unless there's a hostage.
Speaker 4: But instead they say pick up the gun.
Speaker 3: You put the gun down. But yeah, so because of
Speaker 3: what And again, to be clear, I'm giving the perspective
Speaker 3: of people in nation states pursuing nuclear power given the
Speaker 3: lessons of Libya. From their perspective, it's almost certain that
Speaker 3: none of these countries in the area would ever step
Speaker 3: back from nuclear status once they attained it. And if
Speaker 3: you are, if we're talking perspectives here, the chief concern
Speaker 3: of Israel is Iran. Iran is a powerful regional theocracy,
Speaker 3: and despite its public statements, it seems pretty set on
Speaker 3: acquiring nuclear technology. Now, the official statement of Iran is
Speaker 3: usually we're acquiring peaceful nuclear technology, right, not nuclear weaponry.
Speaker 3: But we've talked about the development and enrichment process. It's
Speaker 3: basically the same thing. The difference is the matter of iterations,
Speaker 3: kind of in your Centerfuges.
Speaker 4: Everybody is developing peaceful nuclear power.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, just like we have the
Speaker 3: Department of Defense almost when Chicago like defense.
Speaker 4: But our Department of Energy, right, you know, heavily involved in.
Speaker 3: Nukes in a very peaceful way, because so peaceful, peaceful
Speaker 3: AF which again I'm still startled that people thought that
Speaker 3: AF stood as as fore told, peaceful as for told.
Speaker 3: So much this concern is so big that Israel has
Speaker 3: repeatedly floated the idea of a preemptive nuclear strike on
Speaker 3: facilities before Iran acquires the bomb.
Speaker 4: And this or just kill all the scientists right.
Speaker 3: Right or implants stucksnet. Yeah. There have been many non
Speaker 3: nuclear operations to prevent this capability. So the idea of
Speaker 3: launching a nuke, even like a tactical one, is still
Speaker 3: for some parts of Israel's government and still very much
Speaker 3: on the table, or I should say they're military structures.
Speaker 3: So the thing is, even supporters of that plan, if
Speaker 3: you talk to them, they will honestly acknowledge. Yeah, preemptive
Speaker 3: attack would be pretty chaotic. It would trigger instability, there'd
Speaker 3: be hard conflict across the region. Right, it would exacerbate
Speaker 3: pre existing tensions and lead to inevitable attacks on the
Speaker 3: nation of Israel. But the argument amid the supporters is
Speaker 3: that not attacking, not doing a preemptive nuclear attack will
Speaker 3: result in something far worse. That's their perspective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm thinking more and more about how a nuke
Speaker 2: would be deployed because you tell me what you've found, Ben,
Speaker 2: Because what I've found is that most of these detection systems,
Speaker 2: going way back to like VELA, going way back to
Speaker 2: all these they are detecting ICBM launches mostly right like
Speaker 2: the exactly, so with all of the like we've been
Speaker 2: reading about how there are so many different rockets being
Speaker 2: sent up to deploy satellites right now across the world,
Speaker 2: humanity is just flinging thousands of these smaller scale satellites
Speaker 2: to float around the globe for a while. It does
Speaker 2: feel like if if a country decided to deploy a
Speaker 2: NW old school style, like with a bomber where you
Speaker 2: just drop it out of the sky. That's not going
Speaker 2: to be detected in the same way you detect the plane.
Speaker 2: But you wouldn't detect that it's a nuclear weapon falling
Speaker 2: to the earth until it needs.
Speaker 3: You would need to have you would need to have
Speaker 3: the ability to see what kind of payload is on
Speaker 3: the plane, and there are ways to do that. But yeah,
Speaker 3: you're you're right. You don't have a single No one
Speaker 3: who's got their vinegar about them, in my opinion, has
Speaker 3: a sig single detection strategy, meaning nothing depends on just
Speaker 3: the one basket of chicken eggs. Instead, you have a
Speaker 3: lot of cigarette You still even have humans, which is
Speaker 3: not a job, not a job most people want.
Speaker 2: Well, we're talking about physically watching where nuclear materials are,
Speaker 2: where warheads are and if some if materials are missing,
Speaker 2: or if a warhead is missing. In that kind of thing,
Speaker 2: and that intelligence gathering on every side, right, people are
Speaker 2: just watching each other for all of that stuff. And
Speaker 2: that's why the dirty bomb scenario was always kind of scary,
Speaker 2: right briefcase, quick look just on that nuke map site,
Speaker 2: and it's not absolute, right, but it's it's a pretty
Speaker 2: good idea when you're looking at that site, just to
Speaker 2: see the radiuses of different things like the fireball, and
Speaker 2: then where that that PSI change is going to be
Speaker 2: where glass shatters. But with a smaller like a dirty bomb,
Speaker 2: it is only rated, at least according to that website
Speaker 2: and some stuff I've just looked up, it would we're
Speaker 2: talking tons, not kill a tons with a dirty bomb, theoretically,
Speaker 2: at least from everything I've found. And if you look
Speaker 2: at that type of damage, it's still massive, but it
Speaker 2: is not in any way the same thing as a
Speaker 2: one of these larger, possibly mega ton bombs that have
Speaker 2: that a major country would drop on another.
Speaker 3: Right, and then we also have to consider and you're
Speaker 3: running along here, but we also have to consider the
Speaker 3: possibility of satellite deployment. Oh yeah, right, which is a
Speaker 3: big part of according to publicly available information, this is
Speaker 3: not a big part of X thirty seven b's mission X.
Speaker 4: Thirty seven boom.
Speaker 3: And there's a kicker combo to all of this, which
Speaker 3: needs to be said. Due to again, these what we
Speaker 3: call them earlier posse contracts held by almost all nuclear nations,
Speaker 3: in some degree or another, it is possible that a
Speaker 3: single exchange in one of these hot spots we mentioned
Speaker 3: could trigger exchanges in other, like non geographically related regions
Speaker 3: as well, And once a set of countries goes hot,
Speaker 3: the others are likewise emboldened to do so. This is
Speaker 3: not a good guys, bad guys thing at this point.
Speaker 3: It means that a nuclear launch is dangerous, not just
Speaker 3: because of the immediate physical consequences, but also because it
Speaker 3: makes it that much easier for everybody else in the
Speaker 3: standoff to say, oh, I can launch my toys too,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: I better because this moves quickly. In actual nuclear war,
Speaker 3: the period of deployment and detonation, or the period of
Speaker 3: detonation for sure, would be fairly short in duration, kind
Speaker 3: of like how real gunfights almost never last as long
Speaker 3: as they do in the films. Right, It's the consequences
Speaker 3: that get you, you know what I mean. If you
Speaker 3: are hearing this, the elephants make war. You are the grass,
Speaker 3: no matter what you believe, no matter what you agree with.
Speaker 3: You don't get to take a survey as the bomb
Speaker 3: is landing, and the bomb doesn't get to decide whether
Speaker 3: or not you get to survive some areas of the world,
Speaker 3: some small enclaves of people with the ability to prepare,
Speaker 3: they can solderraw On. It's a cold comfort, but it's comfort, nonetheless,
Speaker 3: and it's not a certainty yet, but it is certainly
Speaker 3: on the horizon. So what do you think, man, I
Speaker 3: feel like our next episode in this series should be.
Speaker 3: So we've talked about the facts and the crazy things
Speaker 3: that could happen. I think a lot of us in
Speaker 3: the audience right now are wondering after learning this, well,
Speaker 3: holy shit, what should I do? How can me and
Speaker 3: my loved ones survive a nuclear war? And all these implications?
Speaker 3: Do I feel like it's worth a follow up episode?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 2: You know, one of the things we talked about with
Speaker 2: Garrett Graft when we had him on a while ago,
Speaker 2: talked about, you know, like underground bases, bunkers, nuclear war,
Speaker 2: all that stuff we talked about in the Nuclear Football.
Speaker 2: We also talked about the fact that the US president,
Speaker 2: whoever is acting US president, whether that's the president or
Speaker 2: the president, dies, then you know, it goes down that
Speaker 2: chain of command. That single human being is the only
Speaker 2: person on the planet who can decide if the US
Speaker 2: launches nukes, and no advisor, vice president, no senator, no congressman,
Speaker 2: no anybody can have any say. No general can have
Speaker 2: any say on whether or not the nukes get.
Speaker 3: Launched unless that general, due to massive disaster, is now
Speaker 3: the top dog because the chain of command technically goes
Speaker 3: all the way down.
Speaker 4: Oh for sure.
Speaker 2: But that's what I mean. But that guy, that one
Speaker 2: general then is the person.
Speaker 3: And that, you know, that's it reminds me. I think
Speaker 3: I shared this story with you guys. Canmer was on
Speaker 3: era off air, it's probably off air, but I remember
Speaker 3: being so impressed with a local politician when I was
Speaker 3: as a very younger iteration, and the guy told me
Speaker 3: exactly how many people had to die for him to
Speaker 3: automatically become president of the United States, and it was
Speaker 3: a lot, but he knew the exact number, and I was,
Speaker 3: you know, in retrospect, I'm still so fascinated by that dude,
Speaker 3: who has long since passed, but I'm a little scared
Speaker 3: that he knew the exact number.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is scary.
Speaker 3: It makes you think about people and their pursuit of
Speaker 3: power and the dehumanizing effects of that.
Speaker 2: But well, it's weird that the continuity of government plans
Speaker 2: are available. Anybody can read them, like the chain of
Speaker 2: custody and all that other stuff, and anybody can read
Speaker 2: the nuclear deterrence plans that the US has in place.
Speaker 2: It's just as Amy Jacobson found, it's something we don't
Speaker 2: talk about, like, we just don't talk about it anymore.
Speaker 2: It just kind of gone away because we're so far
Speaker 2: removed from World War Two now, the thought of nuclear war,
Speaker 2: no matter how hot any of these other conflicts get,
Speaker 2: it's just kind of we we put it away. It's
Speaker 2: that's not really going to happen, because if it does happen,
Speaker 2: it's over.
Speaker 3: Well. With that in mind, I'm trying to and on
Speaker 3: some kind of comfort or some kind of good note,
Speaker 3: I want to shout out the work of Brian Martin,
Speaker 3: his critique of nuclear extinction published in the Journal of
Speaker 3: Peace Research. It may be worth your time to read
Speaker 3: if you want to see some of the folks who
Speaker 3: are challenging the dystopian assumptions or several of those dystopian
Speaker 3: assumptions at play. We'd also love to hear your personal
Speaker 3: take on the idea of full scale nuclear war. We'd
Speaker 3: love to hear any firsthand experience you have in related fields,
Speaker 3: and we'd love to hear from you anyway you wish
Speaker 3: to find us. You can find us online on YouTube, Instagram,
Speaker 3: all the social medis people sip where conspiracy stuff show
Speaker 3: or some derivation of conspiracy stuff. You can also give
Speaker 3: us a call on a telephonic device, or as long
Speaker 3: as there an emp doesn't hit, you can also email
Speaker 3: us at our good old fashioned email address.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 2: Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. It's a
Speaker 2: voicemail system. Call in, give yourself a nickname and let
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Speaker 3: Entities that read every piece of correspondence we receive. Be
Speaker 3: well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Would
Speaker 3: especially love to have a bit of a book club.
Speaker 3: Recommend your favorite nuclear disaster works of film or fiction.
Speaker 3: Thinking things like Canton Go for Leebowitz the day after tomorrow. Hey,
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