Speaker 1: Also media, I was just doing the atonal screaming for you, Robert.
Speaker 2: Now now you fucked up the introduction. So he doesn't
Speaker 2: feel good now, does it. It's bad. It's harder than
Speaker 2: it sounds.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm honestly kind of fun.
Speaker 2: I'm just hoping that the listeners here will appreciate how
Speaker 2: much work goes into my atonal screeches, because, to be polite,
Speaker 2: they sound a lot better than your atonal screeches. That's
Speaker 2: all I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I absolutely agree, So give the listeners one.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I think they've gotten enough atonal screeches. Okay, Instead,
Speaker 2: let's talk about I don't know. I'm not We're not
Speaker 2: on video this week, folks. I'm not feeling well. I
Speaker 2: just had a vasectomy, which I debated on because I
Speaker 2: don't like talking about my private life on the show
Speaker 2: too much. But I also think it's a good thing
Speaker 2: to encourage. So guys out there, if you're thinking about
Speaker 2: getting the visectomy, if you're like, should I get a vasectomy?
Speaker 2: Go do it or do it yourself. You know, it
Speaker 2: doesn't look that hard. The doctor wasn't down there very long.
Speaker 2: You could figure it out, you know. Pruners sure, you
Speaker 2: know whatever, it takes a rubber band. That's how we
Speaker 2: do it on the sheep anyway, Margaret, Okay, how are
Speaker 2: you doing.
Speaker 3: I'm good. I didn't have surgery this week.
Speaker 2: That's also good. That's better than having surgery, is a.
Speaker 1: General I love that for you, Magpie.
Speaker 2: I certainly prefer the weeks when I don't have surgery,
Speaker 2: even if it's minor surgery. It's never very fun. Margaret.
Speaker 2: How often do you think about the fact that, at
Speaker 2: any given moment we're at the most thirty minutes away
Speaker 2: from the entire planet being wiped out?
Speaker 3: Well more recently was depressed?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I watched a movie about this recently.
Speaker 2: It is a lot of them will have a lot,
Speaker 2: which is kind of why I haven't actually seen that
Speaker 2: movie yet. But this is always on my mind. It's
Speaker 2: a special The whole nuclear doomsday planetary nuclear doomsday device
Speaker 2: that we largely co created with Russia is on my
Speaker 2: mind a lot. I'm just interested in the facts of
Speaker 2: how it came together and who made it. And I'm
Speaker 2: interested in because our subjects this week are broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: all of the people in the US at least who
Speaker 2: built that. Because we don't have quite as much granular
Speaker 2: detail on their counterparts in the Soviet Union, you can
Speaker 2: generally assume a version of everything we're talking about. This
Speaker 2: we happened over there too, right, Like, they didn't not
Speaker 2: create a planetary killing doomstate device. We both just kind
Speaker 2: of built one that was heavily based on our game
Speaker 2: theory understanding of how the other side would respond in
Speaker 2: like an escalating nuclear scenario, And the end result of
Speaker 2: that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still
Speaker 2: today ready at all times to wipe out more or
Speaker 2: less all of human civilization. But in roughly fifteen to
Speaker 2: thirty minutes, that's about how long it would take.
Speaker 4: Do you ever think about quantum immortality? Sorry, I'm just
Speaker 4: going to go straight into wig that shit.
Speaker 2: That's a nice thing to think about. It's comforting at
Speaker 2: least the idea that like will never experience the worst
Speaker 2: case scenario because our consciousness doesn't persist in those moments.
Speaker 4: Except kind that's okay, that is, And I think about
Speaker 4: that specifically around nuclear destruction because I think about how
Speaker 4: often the people of the generation ahead of mine are like,
Speaker 4: they almost seem silly, how worried they were about nuclear
Speaker 4: apocalypse because it didn't happen during the Cold War, So
Speaker 4: we're like, oh, obviously humanity would never do that, But
Speaker 4: it would be impossible for me to be alive now
Speaker 4: if the world had been destroyed. So even if nine
Speaker 4: times out of ten we destroyed the world, we're stuck
Speaker 4: being alive.
Speaker 3: In the one out of ten.
Speaker 4: So it actually makes me more fearful because I'm like, well,
Speaker 4: it might just be pure raw luck that we didn't
Speaker 4: annihilate ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yes, and unfortunately, I think that is if you're trying
Speaker 2: to look at this from an educated and accurate perspective,
Speaker 2: that is the only reason we're all alive, because it
Speaker 2: we nearly wiped out. Like the number of times that
Speaker 2: the whole world nearly got wiped out in atomic hell
Speaker 2: fire is like you have too many to count on
Speaker 2: all of our fingers and toes in this podcast combined, right, God,
Speaker 2: it happened so many times, and the amount of resistance
Speaker 2: whenever someone pointed out, oh, hey, the way this was
Speaker 2: built could kill us all at any moment. Accidentally, that
Speaker 2: happened so many times. We'll be talking about the fucking
Speaker 2: minute Men missiles and how they were initially set up
Speaker 2: But what's interesting about this week is that our subjects
Speaker 2: are kind of like Schrodinger's bastards, where some of these
Speaker 2: guys do have big body counts, especially the folks who were,
Speaker 2: you know, responsible for getting the new like Leslie Groves right,
Speaker 2: who was the general whoever saw Manhattan Project right, You
Speaker 2: can put a lot of deaths under his his name,
Speaker 2: But most of the people who built this system never
Speaker 2: killed anybody, even indirectly, really, but they could at any moment. Guys,
Speaker 2: in fact, guys whose last bit of work was in
Speaker 2: the sixties, could fifteen minutes from now, if the right
Speaker 2: things had started happening fifteen minutes ago, or a couple
Speaker 2: of seconds ago, fifteen minutes from now, all of these
Speaker 2: guys could become the biggest murderers in world history right collectively.
Speaker 3: But they won't be remembered.
Speaker 2: But they won't. No one will be nothing will be right.
Speaker 2: That's the beauty of atomic hell fire.
Speaker 3: History is written by the victors. That there's no victor.
Speaker 2: There's going to be no victors of a nuclear war,
Speaker 2: simply no history written. But they are interesting in that
Speaker 2: because a lot of them are not like bad, and
Speaker 2: some of them are even deeply sympathetic. There's a guy
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about who may have saved all
Speaker 2: of human life but also helped still did help build
Speaker 2: the machine that could at any moment end at all. Right,
Speaker 2: because it's and I need to correct this from the start,
Speaker 2: all of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has
Speaker 2: been done to make the system safer since the end
Speaker 2: of the Cold War, and in fact, it's significantly more
Speaker 2: dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 2: in part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be
Speaker 2: in a launch on warn situation, which is where both
Speaker 2: both Russia and the United States are today is launch
Speaker 2: on warn, which means that the policy of both governments
Speaker 2: is to start shooting everything they have when they have
Speaker 2: a credible warning that they're being nuked. Right, and our
Speaker 2: best case scenario would be like one crazy country like
Speaker 2: North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the
Speaker 2: United States, but that would still trigger a massive nuclear response.
Speaker 2: And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch
Speaker 2: with the Russian government, And as a heads up, there
Speaker 2: have been times where we've been out of touch with
Speaker 2: them for as much as forty eight hours when there's
Speaker 2: been like critical things to like like that happens, the
Speaker 2: gaps and comms like that, especially since Ukraine happened. And
Speaker 2: if we started launching missiles the way that most of
Speaker 2: our missiles would work, a lot of them would go
Speaker 2: through or at least appear to be going towards Russi
Speaker 2: aspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of
Speaker 2: these radar systems are perfect, So there's a very good
Speaker 2: chance even if we weren't didn't have it set up
Speaker 2: to Crossrustner Chinese airspace, they would think that for a
Speaker 2: period of time that is longer than the amount of
Speaker 2: time they know they have to choose to launch their
Speaker 2: arsenals in response. As per the way to Terrence theory works,
Speaker 2: this could happen at any moment. This could have started
Speaker 2: happening seconds ago. Right. So that's what we're talking about
Speaker 2: this week, is how we got to this point that
Speaker 2: we have not ever stepped back from. We are just
Speaker 2: as close as we were during the Cold War. That's
Speaker 2: very important for people to understand. So these next couple
Speaker 2: of weeks we're going to talk about how this all
Speaker 2: came to be. Right, because all of the men were
Speaker 2: talking about this week most of whom again have no
Speaker 2: body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives. All of
Speaker 2: these guys put the work in to make this machine
Speaker 2: knowing that they were building a system that, if used,
Speaker 2: would lead to planetary genocide, and they built it anyway.
Speaker 2: They built it because they knew it would work that way. Right,
Speaker 2: So we're gonna talk about why we're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: because they thought they were doing the morally right thing,
Speaker 2: and up until now you could make a case, up
Speaker 2: until the missiles fly, you could continue making a case
Speaker 2: that it was the right thing to do, which is
Speaker 2: part of one of the fucked up things about it, right, Right,
Speaker 2: So this is this is a complicated topic, but I
Speaker 2: do think these people are worth discussing in part because
Speaker 2: these are all people who sat down and had conversations
Speaker 2: about like, Okay, we do this and that'll kill about
Speaker 2: six hundred million people. Yeah, build it, you know, like
Speaker 2: the these are the talks that they were having. There's
Speaker 2: a joke that gets made online today a lot, a
Speaker 2: meme about a tech company building the Torment Nexus, an
Speaker 2: imitation of classic sci fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a joke about the way a lot
Speaker 2: of tech broke, a lot of tech projects. Feel now
Speaker 2: where it's like, this is exactly what the sci fi
Speaker 2: that inspired you was warning against, right, But that really
Speaker 2: is the reality of the atom bomb. And this is
Speaker 2: not something I knew until I read the book Command
Speaker 2: and Control by Eric Schlasser, which is one of the sources,
Speaker 2: one of several books that I used to sources for
Speaker 2: these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlosser
Speaker 2: points out that the first person to conceive directly of
Speaker 2: an atomic bomb was HG. Wells, who wrote a nineteen
Speaker 2: fourteen novel titled The World Set Free. I was not aware,
Speaker 2: and now there's some other candidates, but this is like
Speaker 2: the first. I'll tell you why this is I think
Speaker 2: the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine
Speaker 2: an accurate, semi accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it,
Speaker 2: Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the
Speaker 2: backstory of the Federation. In Star Trek, scientists create the
Speaker 2: ultimate explosive, a radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry
Speaker 2: in a purse or suitcase quote an amount of latent
Speaker 2: energy sufficient to wreck half a city. As Schlosser writes,
Speaker 2: these atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind as every
Speaker 2: nation seeks to obtain them and use them before being attacked.
Speaker 2: Millions die, the world's great capitals are destroyed, and civilization
Speaker 2: nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note,
Speaker 2: as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment
Speaker 2: of world government. And this is Wells. The catastrophe of
Speaker 2: the atomic bombs, which shook men out of cities, shook
Speaker 2: them also out of their old established habits of thought.
Speaker 2: Wells wrote full of hope, and yeah, I think that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: I didn't know any of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, he also he is really into wargaming.
Speaker 2: He also he would have he would have been so
Speaker 2: into Warhammer if he was.
Speaker 4: He genuinely was into wargaming. I know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: yeah him as Warhammer man.
Speaker 3: I like that idea.
Speaker 2: He would have been. Also another war big wargaming nerd
Speaker 2: who would have been into Warhammer was the guy who
Speaker 2: played Grand Moth tarkan early Napoleonic wargamer. Anyway, Yeah, Wells's
Speaker 2: nukes didn't work quite like the real things. They went
Speaker 2: off slowly and they lot of huge amounts of radiation
Speaker 2: over years of time. But Wells came pretty close to
Speaker 2: foreseeing that the real thing, close enough to foreseeing the
Speaker 2: real thing that in nineteen twenty nine, a Hungarian physicist
Speaker 2: named Leo Sillard sz I l r d. Met with
Speaker 2: Wells to try and purchase the literary rights to publish
Speaker 2: his novel in Central Europe. This is relevant ter of
Speaker 2: like who was the closest to a nuke? Because Leo
Speaker 2: Zillard is one of the fathers of the Adam Baum.
Speaker 2: A decade or so after trying to buy the rights
Speaker 2: to this this is true, he comes to the US
Speaker 2: and he's he becomes one of the architects of the
Speaker 2: Manhattan Project, and he's a guy. You can't really blame Sillard,
Speaker 2: right again, if we're talking about where does the moral
Speaker 2: blame lay. He has the most understandable reason for wanting
Speaker 2: to help the US build a nuke of anybody. And
Speaker 2: it's kind of good to talk about him because it
Speaker 2: does make the point that it's a little unfair to
Speaker 2: judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the
Speaker 2: world that formed them. Sillard was a Jewish refugee. He
Speaker 2: fled Nazi Germany, and he wound up in the United States.
Speaker 2: Because he was a physicist, and because he was a
Speaker 2: refugee of the Holocaust, he knew not only the threat
Speaker 2: that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a
Speaker 2: bomb program going. In nineteen thirty nine, he sends a
Speaker 2: letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears, and Einstein
Speaker 2: is the guy who've sent the letter to Einstein. And
Speaker 2: then yeah, Einstein helps him write a letter to FDR.
Speaker 2: Yeah please, Yeah, like the Einstein helps him craft this
Speaker 2: letter and he sends it to FDR. And this letter
Speaker 2: warns about bombs of a new type, and FDR takes
Speaker 2: the warning seriously that he keeps exploring the idea, which
Speaker 2: helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty two. Like, that's Leo Zillard and he ties
Speaker 2: directly back to the Wells idea.
Speaker 3: That's awful.
Speaker 4: Let's so the fact that we could like literally say,
Speaker 4: not only don't build the tournament nexus, but maybe don't
Speaker 4: write the tournament maybe.
Speaker 2: Don't read about the tournament nexus. I mean it's I
Speaker 2: think Sillard probably was. I think he probably was into
Speaker 2: Wells because he, like people had theorized before Wells that
Speaker 2: something like an Adam bomb might be feasible on like
Speaker 2: like the physicists had and I think Sillard was impressed
Speaker 2: that Wells had gotten something so close. And also he
Speaker 2: clearly wanted to warn the world about this thing, which
Speaker 2: I think is why he was interested in purchasing the
Speaker 2: rights to this. And we'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 2: about him later, but is it is so tragic because
Speaker 2: you can't blame him, like he's like his attitude is like,
Speaker 2: we need, we need to have this because Hitler might
Speaker 2: have it, right, yeah, which like, yeah, maybe I don't know,
Speaker 2: but that's the same logic that like, and you know,
Speaker 2: the USSR is not Nazi Germany, obviously we can the
Speaker 2: proof of that is as simple as what happened in
Speaker 2: the Cold War. Right, And to be fair, neither is
Speaker 2: the United States. Neither country use the damn things on
Speaker 2: the scale that would have ended civilization.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You know, we'll talk about Heroshima and Nagasaki too, but
Speaker 2: it's you understand, like Sillard's motivations are deeply sympathetic, right,
Speaker 2: And a number of scientists behind the Manhattan Projects, some
Speaker 2: of them are refugees, right, But the ones that aren't
Speaker 2: still get into it because they're reading the news they see,
Speaker 2: they're aware of how dangerous the US, like the US's
Speaker 2: enemies are during World War Two, and it's a legitimate
Speaker 2: threat that Germany in particular might get the bomb before
Speaker 2: we do, right, And those stories are like half the
Speaker 2: reason this happened, because a lot of people of goodwill
Speaker 2: got involved with the Manhattan Project because they were like, well,
Speaker 2: this is probably the lesser It's probably better that the
Speaker 2: US has this than that a fascist country is the
Speaker 2: only one with a nuke, right, right, Like that's their
Speaker 2: logic here, and they they had to operate on. We
Speaker 2: know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke, right,
Speaker 2: just based on the choice because they didn't, right, they
Speaker 2: went in different directions. They did not make the choices
Speaker 2: ultimately that would have given you have.
Speaker 3: You heard this thing?
Speaker 4: Maybe it's in the script or maybe I'm like wrong
Speaker 4: about this, that there was a work slow down of
Speaker 4: the Nazi the Nazi bomb program where they were like
Speaker 4: and they went and they tried to tell their US
Speaker 4: counterparts like, hey, we're slowing down this bomb. You all
Speaker 4: need to slow it down too. But the person that
Speaker 4: they told didn't believe them and was like, oh shit,
Speaker 4: they're trying to lie to us. They must be like
Speaker 4: right about to build this bomb. Have you heard this story?
Speaker 2: No, ipant, actually no, no, no, it's not.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: I can never remember the name of the book because
Speaker 4: I found it in a trash can twenty years ago.
Speaker 4: It was about the social history of building of the
Speaker 4: bomb and I read this and and it like changed
Speaker 4: the way that I was perceiving this stuff.
Speaker 3: But I've since read.
Speaker 4: More about this and research more about this, and I
Speaker 4: think it's like messier than that. But I think again
Speaker 4: just from memory, that there was like a work slowdown
Speaker 4: in the Nazi program because it was all of these
Speaker 4: physicists who used to work with Jews because before all
Speaker 4: the Jews got kicked out of the physicist programs.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't know if that's sure or not.
Speaker 2: Uh maybe do I so check on that, But I
Speaker 2: want to believe. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple, there's
Speaker 2: some good. There's some stories, I mean, and the espionage
Speaker 2: is heavily baked into the whole story of how this
Speaker 2: all happened, right, Yeah, And it's the spies in the
Speaker 2: US who bring bomb information to the USSR. Are people
Speaker 2: working on a similar logic to Zillard, where they're like, well,
Speaker 2: the US is obviously not a good actor, and if
Speaker 2: they're the only ones with the nuke, they're going to
Speaker 2: kill everyone in the Soviet Union, right? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like and maybe you know we talked about it any
Speaker 2: you guys talked about it. We had a plan to
Speaker 2: do it, you know, so you're not and maybe by
Speaker 2: by the way, it's if it's arguable that building this
Speaker 2: doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people argue that to this day,
Speaker 2: then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak
Speaker 2: information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the US would
Speaker 2: have killed six hundred or so million people, right, right,
Speaker 2: We know that because we talked about doing it a lot.
Speaker 3: You're really right with the like Schrodinger's bastards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: People are heroes or bastards and we will never know.
Speaker 4: And then half the timelines.
Speaker 3: They're one, and then half for the other.
Speaker 2: I guess part of why I'm doing this is that
Speaker 2: if this happens like fifteen minutes after you finished listening
Speaker 2: to this podcast, you'll know who to be angry at
Speaker 2: and your last couple seconds of consciousness, assuming you're not
Speaker 2: near ground zero for one of these things, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: and you probably want to be at ground zero. It's
Speaker 2: the least painful option available. The road is optimistic in
Speaker 2: terms of like the aftermath of thermonuclear war and a
Speaker 2: planetary scale anyway, So those guy, but guys with that
Speaker 2: logic basically that like, well, this is a messy thing.
Speaker 2: I don't really want to be building a giant bomb,
Speaker 2: but it might save a lot of lives in the
Speaker 2: long run. That's like a sizeable chunk of the Manhattan Project. Right.
Speaker 2: That's like a big amount of the logic behind the
Speaker 2: reason individual people got involved. Right. The other half, though,
Speaker 2: is and this is largely on the military side of things.
Speaker 2: It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is how the
Speaker 2: military thinks of these weapons, both when we're starting to
Speaker 2: plan one and then immediately after we start using them. Right.
Speaker 2: And the military logic for why this is, why building
Speaker 2: this system, why getting as many of these things as
Speaker 2: possible is a good idea is based on a military
Speaker 2: theory that starts to take hold after the end of
Speaker 2: the First World War, and this is ultimately the theory
Speaker 2: that leads us to the system of internet national usually
Speaker 2: assured destruction that we live in today. Right, And there's
Speaker 2: an element of historical rhyming here that we build this
Speaker 2: global real literal global doomsdaate device as a result of
Speaker 2: a theory that takes off in the end of World
Speaker 2: War One, based on what happened in World War One,
Speaker 2: because World War One is itself the result of a
Speaker 2: doomsday device going off, a device that was never supposed
Speaker 2: to go off, and a device that a lot of
Speaker 2: people a lot if you right up until the start
Speaker 2: of World War One, if you talked about this, this
Speaker 2: system of alliances and military build up, right and like
Speaker 2: an arms build up that like you've got all these munitions,
Speaker 2: refit schedules and whatnot and interlocking alliances was meant to
Speaker 2: ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war,
Speaker 2: Right That was the people who would defend it would
Speaker 2: say that, like, well, if everyone's really well armed, and
Speaker 2: if everybody's always and if we have all these alliances
Speaker 2: between different powers that make it an unwinnable situation, we
Speaker 2: won't have this war. Right, people would make that argument.
Speaker 2: You know now obviously the technology at the time, they
Speaker 2: didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines, so they
Speaker 2: had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one
Speaker 2: country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf. And
Speaker 2: these do work like a machine, right, and that's that
Speaker 2: is what happens. You know, you have Austria declares war
Speaker 2: on Serbia that brings France and Germany into it. The
Speaker 2: German plan that they had built meant that like, well,
Speaker 2: the only way we can possibly win this war is
Speaker 2: we have to do this specific kind of invasion that
Speaker 2: takes us through Belgium that brings Great Britain into the
Speaker 2: you know, and so on and so forth, right, and
Speaker 2: a maxim gun and they've got that. Everyone's got a
Speaker 2: version of the maxim gun, and everyone's got your Everyone's
Speaker 2: also thinking, well, I just re like we just refurbished
Speaker 2: and upgraded our artillery, and France is France has just
Speaker 2: upgraded this thing, but they haven't upgraded this thing. And
Speaker 2: if we go now, they won't have the new version
Speaker 2: of this thing, and ours will still be Like that's
Speaker 2: a big part of the thinking too, right, And this
Speaker 2: is like always the case and it had been for
Speaker 2: decades prior to World War and prior to World War One,
Speaker 2: the fact that it would be so costly and it
Speaker 2: was so like everyone's plan for victory rested on so
Speaker 2: many like assumptions and was sketchy enough, no one really
Speaker 2: wanted to do this, right. I mean, with the exception
Speaker 2: of the military thinkers who had spent their entire lives
Speaker 2: building and planning out the system of like, this is
Speaker 2: how we're going to activate our troops, this is the
Speaker 2: order at which we'll get the marching, and this is
Speaker 2: where they'll move in. They really So you have this
Speaker 2: mix of nobody on the civilian side of governance wants
Speaker 2: to think about this seriously because it would be a
Speaker 2: calamity and they know it, and everyone in the military
Speaker 2: is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start
Speaker 2: having leaders need to make a decision as to whether
Speaker 2: or not they're going to go to war, the loudest
Speaker 2: voice in the ear is this general who's thought of
Speaker 2: nothing else's entire professional life. And by the way, in
Speaker 2: the six minutes a US president would have to decide
Speaker 2: whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice
Speaker 2: in his ear is going to be a guy who
Speaker 2: thinks about using the nukes NonStop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like his job, it's his job.
Speaker 4: This is like the you know, the whole like an
Speaker 4: armed society is a polite society, logical fallacy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: Like it's it's just so interesting that's this written large
Speaker 4: where we have Yeah, we have data that shows that
Speaker 4: an armed society is not a polite society.
Speaker 2: It sure isn't.
Speaker 1: Not.
Speaker 4: I pro Second Amendment for complicated reasons, but very complicated,
Speaker 4: but like it's just not It's like you could watch
Speaker 4: all the videos of people being like you parked in
Speaker 4: my space and now they're shooting at each other. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and they would have been punching each other in a
Speaker 4: different world.
Speaker 2: Yes, And it's one of those things I have had.
Speaker 2: I've literally had the exact situation of, like, I had
Speaker 2: a situation that would have been violent, but we all
Speaker 2: had guns and knew it and so nobody started shit, right.
Speaker 2: And I'm also more than aware of the fact that
Speaker 2: like the United States is more violent than a lot
Speaker 2: of unarmed societies, right.
Speaker 4: And yeah, because if you carry a gun, you have
Speaker 4: to have an entirely mindset where you kind.
Speaker 2: Of changes everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you actually can't stand up to you for yourself.
Speaker 4: You kind of have to take possibly even the first punch, right,
Speaker 4: You have to do everything, possibly literally everything to avoiding
Speaker 4: taken a couple hits. Yeah, because you know that you're
Speaker 4: capable of an overwhelming capacity of violence. Yeah, and it
Speaker 4: people don't do that. Instead they're like, isn't this sick?
Speaker 4: I've got overwhelming capacity of violence?
Speaker 2: And that's one of the worries with like the nukes,
Speaker 2: is when they go from because prior, one thing I
Speaker 2: will say, and this is something I'll even give Nixon.
Speaker 2: Basically all of our leaders and all of the Soviet leaders, right,
Speaker 2: it's it's a mistake to leave them out too. This
Speaker 2: is the thing that would only have worked if both
Speaker 2: sides were similar. For all of the flaws of all
Speaker 2: of the men running both countries the duration of the
Speaker 2: Cold War, all of them had one thing in common,
Speaker 2: which is they were guys who were like, no, that
Speaker 2: would be fucked up. Yeah, that that'd be fucked up.
Speaker 2: We're just not gonna do that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: There's some great I mean fucking Reagan has some really
Speaker 2: good quotes of like, oh, like where he's like having
Speaker 2: this conscience of like, I can't believe we as human
Speaker 2: beings created this nightmare system. This is so much worse
Speaker 2: than I ever knew it was. What's wrong with people?
Speaker 2: Raygan had those moments.
Speaker 4: Right, because he wants to punch people. Yeah, you know
Speaker 4: he wants that. Yeah, he's want the lower level of violence, like, and.
Speaker 2: There's some good there's a good JFK quote when this
Speaker 2: all got explained to him for the first because JFK
Speaker 2: one of the things he did is he took away
Speaker 2: the military's control of the nukes right and made it
Speaker 2: because the military used to be have a basically theoretically
Speaker 2: could have made the call to launch the missiles, went
Speaker 2: without presidential authority. It wasn't mechanically necessary the way it
Speaker 2: is now, right, like the way the code system works now,
Speaker 2: you mechanically have to have the president looped in. Right,
Speaker 2: although there will talk about that it's not a perfect
Speaker 2: system either, but that that became the way we do
Speaker 2: it during JFK's administration. And when he when all of
Speaker 2: this got explained to him how this works, I think
Speaker 2: his exact quote was like, can we call ourselves the
Speaker 2: human race?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: What the fuck? Yeah, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they all like, there's a lot. You get a
Speaker 2: lot of reactions like that from presidents, and that's the
Speaker 2: only reason we're all alive to this day. And that's
Speaker 2: the thing, not just with the US and Russia, but
Speaker 2: with any country that gets a nuclear power, is maybe
Speaker 2: you get someone at the head of that country who
Speaker 2: can think about that, and who can think about for
Speaker 2: whom it's not an unthinkable, right, And that changes everybody's
Speaker 2: calculus to a startling degree. Right, This is why a
Speaker 2: lot of people there's a good book called Nuclear War
Speaker 2: by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in
Speaker 2: a pretty unsparing term, and she provides like a theoretical
Speaker 2: and her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles
Speaker 2: for unclear reasons, right. And what I don't like about
Speaker 2: it is I don't really agree with the whole the
Speaker 2: Kim family are like crazy thing. I think they're pretty
Speaker 2: rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the
Speaker 2: same things that other countries aren't. Entirely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're back to the wall, Like I'm not trying
Speaker 3: to apologize for him, but.
Speaker 2: I see a logic in what they're doing. I don't
Speaker 2: think they're crazy, right, and which is there's a what
Speaker 2: I think is I don't think his book is as good.
Speaker 2: But there was another book that came out a year
Speaker 2: or two previously, by another like a scholar interested in
Speaker 2: the nuclear mutually shared destruction system that was also a
Speaker 2: North Korea US exchange hypothetical, but that didn't rely on
Speaker 2: North Korea being crazy. In fact, everyone was performing logically right.
Speaker 2: It like, basically the premise was North Korea does something
Speaker 2: that kills some South Korean civilians, right. I think that's
Speaker 2: they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits,
Speaker 2: which has happened before. Right, North Korea has in fact
Speaker 2: killed South Korean civilians, not all that long ago. Right.
Speaker 2: And as a result, the North Korean present, without seeking
Speaker 2: US approval, fires missiles at military targets non nuclear missiles
Speaker 2: at military targets in North Korea. But the leader of
Speaker 2: North Korea doesn't know that the US didn't approve of
Speaker 2: the firing of missiles, and their system can't entirely tell
Speaker 2: what's incoming and what's not, and they see one. Once
Speaker 2: North or South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the
Speaker 2: US starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes
Speaker 2: aware and anyway, it's this whole it's this whole cycle
Speaker 2: of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just
Speaker 2: requires And by the way, one of the things we
Speaker 2: found at very recently is that the currently imprisoned former
Speaker 2: president of South Korea, who is being charged with I
Speaker 2: believe insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into
Speaker 2: North Korea illegally without getting US approval or anything while
Speaker 2: he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically
Speaker 2: get to declare martial law. Right, So, like this stuff,
Speaker 2: like shit like that happens all the time. It just
Speaker 2: hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple
Speaker 2: stages of a few different apocalypses occur. This is not
Speaker 2: a crazy This is not crazy, and it doesn't require
Speaker 2: any power Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes
Speaker 2: to be like mustache twirling mad man. It just requires
Speaker 2: them to all be have incomplete, imperfect information and focused
Speaker 2: on their own survival. Right, Yeah, it's it's good.
Speaker 4: I'm like, while you're talking, I'm thinking about all the
Speaker 4: other countries that also have nukes and like their own
Speaker 4: things going on, Like yeah, you know, like like I mean,
Speaker 4: Israel and North Korea are like comparable entities in my
Speaker 4: mind in terms of being like small powers with that
Speaker 4: are like pariah states. Yeah that probably aren't going to
Speaker 4: do something to get themselves. Like I actually could see personally,
Speaker 4: I could see a big state feeling more confident to
Speaker 4: do it, you know.
Speaker 2: But yeah, uh, anyway, we'll keep talking about this, Margaret.
Speaker 2: But uh, first, here's some ads. We're back. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: we got off on a little bit of a tangent.
Speaker 2: But I wanted to get back to a point I
Speaker 2: was making, which is the history rhyming between the system.
Speaker 2: Like the mutually assured destruction is a product of a
Speaker 2: military theory that gets born at the This this theory
Speaker 2: of strategic bombing that gets born at the end of
Speaker 2: World War One, Right, And that theory only exists because
Speaker 2: World War One happens, and World War One is the
Speaker 2: result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go
Speaker 2: off going off. Right, You have all these treaties and
Speaker 2: stuff that basically guarantee that if one of a couple
Speaker 2: of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them,
Speaker 2: it will start a chain reaction that leads to a
Speaker 2: general European war, right, and because of the way that
Speaker 2: armies work in this period, right and all basically all
Speaker 2: military wisdom at this point is based on the last war,
Speaker 2: as it always is, and the last war for Europe
Speaker 2: is the Franco Prussian War of eighteen seventy to eighteen
Speaker 2: seventy one. That's not literally the last conflict in Europe
Speaker 2: during this period, but it's the last big one that
Speaker 2: people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions, like.
Speaker 4: This versus France, is the only way to have a
Speaker 4: European war, right, It's like.
Speaker 2: Ah, man, I mean, we have not had a good
Speaker 2: European war since those two got their shit together, and
Speaker 2: that's why I think we should start tweaking them both.
Speaker 2: You know, just just start see who we can make
Speaker 2: angrier at the other. You know, Germany, I hear France
Speaker 2: has been talking hell of shit. You know, just set
Speaker 2: the radiant a little bit, yeah, shit, set the right
Speaker 2: on Firefuck it, let's see what happens. Only France has nukes,
Speaker 2: so we should be fine. Anyway. The great land powers
Speaker 2: of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent,
Speaker 2: Austro Hungary knew that the instant war was declared. There
Speaker 2: was this clock ticking, right, because most of your army
Speaker 2: is reserves, right, The largest amount of manpower you have
Speaker 2: isn't your active duty. It's this this mass of like
Speaker 2: reserve troops, these guys who when they're eighteen or whatever,
Speaker 2: they're basically drafted. They sometimes serve like a year and
Speaker 2: then for a period of time they have to do.
Speaker 2: It's basically they're all in the national guard, right, that's
Speaker 2: the norm. In most of these states. You have some
Speaker 2: version of that, and so it takes a period of
Speaker 2: time to call these guys up from civilian life, to
Speaker 2: issue them their gear, to get them moved into their units,
Speaker 2: and then to get them moved to the front. So
Speaker 2: everyone is working not just not only do have this
Speaker 2: interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side
Speaker 2: knows I have to be able to get my reserves
Speaker 2: ready for active duty before the enemy can. Otherwise they're
Speaker 2: going to invade before I have my army, which means
Speaker 2: I have a ticket like I. Once the Archdeoke of
Speaker 2: Austria Hungary is assassinated, and then people start to realize
Speaker 2: that generally European war is in play. It's not just
Speaker 2: a matter of diplomatically, can we smooth this, It's that
Speaker 2: all of my generals are shouting that, like, if we
Speaker 2: don't mobilize now, we don't know that France isn't mobilizing, right,
Speaker 2: we can't tell they might be mobilizing, and if they're mobilizing,
Speaker 2: we only have this period of time to start mobilizing
Speaker 2: in turn. Right, that's a big part of everybody's thinking here.
Speaker 2: And that's the same with nuclear war, right, where you
Speaker 2: don't know entirely what the other side is doing. We
Speaker 2: the US have pretty good data on when people are
Speaker 2: because we have this nuts insane like level of life spice,
Speaker 2: satellites and shit like that, although all of it has errors,
Speaker 2: all of it has things that can go wrong. Right,
Speaker 2: none of it's perfect Today, I will run it.
Speaker 3: It'll be fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So everyone's acting off of imperfect information, and everybody
Speaker 2: has a very limited timeframe, and they're being shouted at
Speaker 2: by their generals that if we don't move in time,
Speaker 2: were fucked, right, the whole country could be fucked. And
Speaker 2: you have x amount of time now they have it's
Speaker 2: days and weeks, you know, in the case of these
Speaker 2: European monarchs, right, but that's still a ticking clock. Right. Anyway,
Speaker 2: we all know how World War One goes not great
Speaker 2: at least for everyone. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide
Speaker 2: and basically all of the one of the things that's
Speaker 2: fascinated to me, and this is the case in a
Speaker 2: lot of wars. Everyone's planning at the start of World
Speaker 2: War One is based on how the last war had gone,
Speaker 2: and everyone's planning is wrong. Germany. Germany's plan to knock
Speaker 2: France out of the war in the first couple of
Speaker 2: months doesn't work. France and Russia have this plan where
Speaker 2: we'll both hit Germany on either side, right, if Germany
Speaker 2: starts some shit, we'll come in on both flanks and
Speaker 2: we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute
Speaker 2: the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain
Speaker 2: has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, well,
Speaker 2: we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up,
Speaker 2: and it'll probably be fine, right, And they realize, oh no,
Speaker 2: actually we're kind of you have to have actually millions
Speaker 2: of guys with guns, you know, how fast can we
Speaker 2: draft all the coal miners, all of these and Germany
Speaker 2: or Great Britain's plans are based in part on like, well,
Speaker 2: we've got this great navy, that's probably all we'll need, right,
Speaker 2: And they have a Tolkien and they got Jero Tolkien
Speaker 2: somewhere in there. You know, surely will be okay. Anyway,
Speaker 2: everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war,
Speaker 2: and it leads to disaster. And so after the carnage
Speaker 2: a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying
Speaker 2: what had happened to try to make predictions about what
Speaker 2: would happen in the next war, which is the same
Speaker 2: thing that did happened after eighteen seventy one. And they'd
Speaker 2: made the wrong predictions. But they're sure this time we'll
Speaker 2: get it. Wal we're smarter than that. Last generation of
Speaker 2: military thinkers will make conclusions from the last war that
Speaker 2: are right, you know. And one of these guys, among
Speaker 2: the most influential of these fuckers, is an Italian general
Speaker 2: named Guilio Duhey. Now. He had been born in Caserta,
Speaker 2: Italy in eighteen sixty nine, but his family were refugees
Speaker 2: from Savoy, which was a former Italian possession that had
Speaker 2: been ceded to the perfidious French. As a young man,
Speaker 2: he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer
Speaker 2: in the Italian Army. He continued his formal education by
Speaker 2: studying engineering at a university in Turin. Du Haey rose
Speaker 2: steadily through the ranks, and by the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 2: he was a member of the Italian General Staff, basically
Speaker 2: their joint chiefs. Right, that's kind of the idea. He
Speaker 2: had been an early advocate for dirigibles, initially used as
Speaker 2: spots for artillery and the like, and once the first
Speaker 2: aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for
Speaker 2: aircraft as a weapons system. Right now, this on its
Speaker 2: own is a noteworthy He was right, obviously aircraft are
Speaker 2: pretty important in modern war. Yeah, but very a lot
Speaker 2: of people, I'm not. It wasn't universal. There were certainly
Speaker 2: some guys being like, no, the infantryman with a rifless
Speaker 2: will be the always be the core of any war
Speaker 2: fighting effort. We don't need planes. There were some nuts,
Speaker 2: but most intelligent people were like, obviously planes are going
Speaker 2: to be useful, you know, being able to have the
Speaker 2: sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict and
Speaker 2: do Hay. But one thing that did make him noteworthy
Speaker 2: where he was kind of seeing far ahead, was that
Speaker 2: he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of
Speaker 2: ground commanders, right, it would effectively need to be its
Speaker 2: own kind of service, you know. And this is something
Speaker 2: even during World War Two. There's not an air force
Speaker 2: in the US. We have the Army Air Corps, right,
Speaker 2: it's a part of the Army, do Hay ahead of
Speaker 2: times it's like, no, the air power should be its
Speaker 2: own independent branch. It's different enough, right, it's like the navy.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eleven, he got a chance to act on
Speaker 2: some of his theories when Italy went to war again
Speaker 2: in Libya against the Ottomans, because an awful lot of
Speaker 2: Italians had never really gotten over Roman Empire. That's the
Speaker 2: gist of why we keep fucking with Ethiopia. Du Hay's
Speaker 2: conclusion from this was and this was like the first
Speaker 2: real world use of air combat power for Italy. And
Speaker 2: his conclusion is that in the future planes will get
Speaker 2: better and high altitude bombing will become the number one
Speaker 2: battlefield role of planes. Right, this is not true for
Speaker 2: World War Two entirely. I mean it's debatable, right, but
Speaker 2: there's a lot of argument that that that that's not
Speaker 2: entirely that high altitude bombing was not the number one
Speaker 2: battlefield use of air power.
Speaker 4: It wasn't high altitude bombing more like bombing civilians civilians.
Speaker 2: But close air support is less high altitude because you
Speaker 2: can't do it as accurately, right, Like you need to
Speaker 2: be closer to not hit your own guys as much.
Speaker 2: This is one of those things technologies made this kind
Speaker 2: of true because like even a lot of what we'd
Speaker 2: call close air support today is still pretty high altitude
Speaker 2: because you can fire a missile from pretty high altitude, right,
Speaker 2: like if like modern like modern weapon systems, you can
Speaker 2: shoot from higher up. But he's wrong in spirit, right,
Speaker 2: which is that like this is not the way most
Speaker 2: effective combat use of airpower in World War two is
Speaker 2: not high altitude bombing, right, And even if you look
Speaker 2: in the Pacific theater, right, like, it's a lot of
Speaker 2: naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but
Speaker 2: it's not really high altitude bombing. You know, Pearl Harbor
Speaker 2: isn't high altitude bombing, right, Like it's a different kind
Speaker 2: of use of aircraft. But dou Haey is certain that
Speaker 2: high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the
Speaker 2: not just like critical, but basically the only thing that
Speaker 2: airpower will be used for. Right, And he's he's so
Speaker 2: certain of this that he becomes kind of an asshole
Speaker 2: about it, right, Like he illegally orders the construction of
Speaker 2: bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money,
Speaker 2: and it burns out his career. He gets forced into
Speaker 2: the infantry, and he spends the early stages of World
Speaker 2: War One basically screaming that Italy can win. We can
Speaker 2: break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make
Speaker 2: the enemy harmless if we could just gain command of
Speaker 2: the air. And he calls for the construction of five
Speaker 2: hundred bombers to drop one hundred and twenty five tons
Speaker 2: of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the
Speaker 2: stalemate of trench warfare. Now, yeah, so this is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing It seems ahead of its time, right,
Speaker 2: because this is sort of where military thinking went, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking World
Speaker 2: War two because of dou Hay. But it's not correct
Speaker 2: ahead of its time in part like Italy simply couldn't
Speaker 2: have built five hundred high altitude bombers to drop that
Speaker 2: kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have
Speaker 2: the capacity, like the Italian industry, the Italian military in
Speaker 2: the middle of World War One was not going to
Speaker 2: be able to do that. Right, It's just not a
Speaker 2: realistic ask of the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is not getting slaughtered in the war already.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't have at the spare resources. And also
Speaker 2: bombers aren't that good yet right, like they will be
Speaker 2: by World War two. But do Hay is not saying
Speaker 2: this is what I mean. He will eventually say this
Speaker 2: is how the future should work, But he is also
Speaker 2: arguing we should be trying to do this right now,
Speaker 2: and Italy just doesn't have the resources or technical know
Speaker 2: how to create the bomber fleet he wants in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 2: when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen,
Speaker 2: and he is such an asshole about this that he
Speaker 2: is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about
Speaker 2: how because he's calling his superiors incompetent for not following
Speaker 2: through with this impossible plan.
Speaker 3: Like Yeah, you don't get away with that during a war.
Speaker 2: No, they lock him up for a while, but he
Speaker 2: keeps writing about his ideas while he's in jail, and
Speaker 2: the war gets worse and worse for Italy, and he's
Speaker 2: eventually brought back and given command of the Aviation Bureau,
Speaker 2: which shows you how desperate Italy is. After the end
Speaker 2: of hostilities, he starts work on his magnum opus, a
Speaker 2: manifesto on the future of strategic air power. In nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty one, it was published under the title The Command
Speaker 2: of the Air. Now, some of his arguments are pretty strong, right.
Speaker 2: One of the things he's saying is that, like, look
Speaker 2: at what happened in this fucking First World War. It
Speaker 2: was a shit show. Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right,
Speaker 2: You can get right over them. You can hit targets
Speaker 2: behind the trenches like their artillery, right, and you could
Speaker 2: maybe knock infantry out of trenches. Now, this is actually
Speaker 2: something One of the things will be proved wrong on
Speaker 2: that is that infantry and trenches are a lot less
Speaker 2: vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be. Right.
Speaker 2: Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people, especially
Speaker 2: with the kind of technology they're going to have by
Speaker 2: World War two, it's better than just shelling them endlessly.
Speaker 2: But it is not the get out of trench free card.
Speaker 2: Do Hey pretends it is right now? Du Hay is
Speaker 2: also he's one of a number of growing military theorists
Speaker 2: who had learned from the last war that these huge
Speaker 2: conscript armies that everybody has moved towards. Like, if that's
Speaker 2: how war works, if the whole male civilian population is
Speaker 2: potentially part of the military, and the whole country is
Speaker 2: being mobilized to support the military, then you can't limit
Speaker 2: yourself to just striking troops in the field. In future
Speaker 2: wars civilian populations. Do hey attitude is, civilian populations make
Speaker 2: continued resistance possible, and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure
Speaker 2: of war must be attacked, right yeap. Oops.
Speaker 4: You know it's funny whenever there's these things that are
Speaker 4: technologically developed that I just would have assumed or older,
Speaker 4: like I would have just assumed somehow that like bombing
Speaker 4: civilian populations is somehow older than this as a like,
Speaker 4: I mean tactic.
Speaker 2: You know, it is like this duet is not the
Speaker 2: first military leader to be like civilians are a valid This,
Speaker 2: in fact, is the norm in a lot of ancient warfare, right, Like,
Speaker 2: fucking a lot of times in ancient Greece, one city
Speaker 2: state goes to war against another. The one that loses
Speaker 2: does not get to keep being a city state. You
Speaker 2: inihilate them, right, you kill the men, you rape the women, right, Like,
Speaker 2: That's not every war, but a lot of wars in
Speaker 2: classical history go that way.
Speaker 4: So I've been reading that for my show recently, and
Speaker 4: I suddenly like had to realize. I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: the concept of surren under yeah, is sort of new.
Speaker 4: It's a new technology, is to actually like let people
Speaker 4: go home after you beat That's.
Speaker 2: It's more that it had stopped being the norm to
Speaker 2: consider the whole country to be enemies. But even during
Speaker 2: World War One, right, Great Britain starves a million Germans
Speaker 2: to death by by blocking ports Germany. We know they
Speaker 2: can't grow, they don't have the ability to produce sufficient
Speaker 2: food stuffs on their own. That's part of the military effort. Right.
Speaker 2: It's not as direct as bombing civilians, but it would be.
Speaker 2: It would be very inaccurate to pretend Duhey is the
Speaker 2: first guy who is like civilians are on the table, right.
Speaker 4: No, totally, but specifically the idea of this standard ice, Yeah,
Speaker 4: exactly exactly, it's meaningful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Like I think that that is important that
Speaker 2: he is the guy writing in a book this is
Speaker 2: the this is a logical strategy for how modern war
Speaker 2: ought to be pursued, is the systematic destruction of civilian
Speaker 2: populations through strategic bombing, Right, it is does matter that
Speaker 2: he's the first guy to write that, you know, like
Speaker 2: that's that's upon his soul. Yeah, yeah, Which is not
Speaker 2: to say that nobody would have thought to do stuff
Speaker 2: like this if he hadn't been around, right.
Speaker 4: No, But I mean just because someone else will invent
Speaker 4: the torment nexus is not a reason to invent the
Speaker 4: torment nexis.
Speaker 2: And no, nor does it erase your culpability and making
Speaker 2: it now. One of my sources for this episode is
Speaker 2: an article by Colonel Everest Rascioni of the One of
Speaker 2: the more who's one of the more influential pilots in
Speaker 2: US combat aviation history, is an interesting guy. He was
Speaker 2: a key member of what became known as the Fighter Mafia,
Speaker 2: which is a group of guys in the Air Force
Speaker 2: who argue and this is in like the latter half
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century, they argue that like the branch's
Speaker 2: bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about the This is like
Speaker 2: right before the birth of I think the F sixteen.
Speaker 2: They're they're they're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt
Speaker 2: and it's lying about how well certain weapons systems work
Speaker 2: for corrupt reasons. And as a result, they have all
Speaker 2: these complaints about like hybrid role fighters as opposed to
Speaker 2: dedicated anti aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debatus to
Speaker 2: whether or not the fighter mafia was right bringing this up,
Speaker 2: because this is a guy who has a history of
Speaker 2: being on controversial sides of arguments right, and he wrote
Speaker 2: an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for
Speaker 2: the Air Force right where he is kind of laying
Speaker 2: out his thinking as to why do Hay was wrong,
Speaker 2: and he summarizes do Hay's arguments this way. He also
Speaker 2: believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land
Speaker 2: and at sea, and that an enemy's ability to sustain
Speaker 2: a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of
Speaker 2: enemy airpower in the air and on the ground. The
Speaker 2: need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but
Speaker 2: also to destroy their eggs and their nests. Hay wrote
Speaker 2: enemy aircraft production plants were defined as prime strategic targets.
Speaker 2: He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses
Speaker 2: against them were useless. He believed that attacking populations with
Speaker 2: relatively small amounts of explosives, incendiary and gas weapons would
Speaker 2: make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He
Speaker 2: believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential
Speaker 2: enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the
Speaker 2: way very influential people in military plannings still think to
Speaker 2: this day. Do Hayes thinking is incredibly common, or at
Speaker 2: least a descendants of do Hayes thinking is incredibly common
Speaker 2: within military planners to this day. And this is the
Speaker 2: root of mutually assured destruction. It starts with these ideas, right,
Speaker 2: particularly the idea, yeah.
Speaker 4: That people won't put up with it from their leaders.
Speaker 2: That people won't put up with it that well, and
Speaker 2: that a powerful strategic bombing force can deter an attack,
Speaker 2: right right, Okay, because your ability because they can't be stopped.
Speaker 2: You can't stop a bombing run right, it's impossible. Part
Speaker 2: of his attitudes that the sky is too big, right,
Speaker 2: you can't actually stop bombers from getting to where they're
Speaker 2: going to go. So if you have a powerful enough
Speaker 2: bombing fleet, like no one will attack you because they
Speaker 2: know they're doomed in that instance, right, And this is
Speaker 2: basically how we think about near peer nuclear warfare to
Speaker 2: this day, right, and that knowledge deters those soda of wars.
Speaker 2: So this is part of why people will argue to
Speaker 2: Hey round up being right even though he did not.
Speaker 2: We're seeing nuclear weapons right in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, he's not right right.
Speaker 4: He was wrong about bombers, but he was right for
Speaker 4: now about nukes.
Speaker 2: Well. This is kind of the theme of our episodes
Speaker 2: is that a lot of people buy into do Hayes's
Speaker 2: theories and base their careers in the Air Force on
Speaker 2: believing that this is more or less right. And once
Speaker 2: nukes come around, that's the thing that makes that they're
Speaker 2: the things they had already believed true and as part
Speaker 2: of why they become such advocates for nuclear warfare. Right now,
Speaker 2: I want to really emphasize how wrong Duhey is here,
Speaker 2: because he is not making grand predictions about the distant future.
Speaker 2: Nor is he theorizing about twenty first century nuclear warfare
Speaker 2: or even late twentieth century warfare. He is discussing the
Speaker 2: war he expected to break out in the next twenty
Speaker 2: years or so, and on basically every technical point, du
Speaker 2: Haey was desperately wrong. Again. He argues, the sky is
Speaker 2: so big that airpower should only be offensive because airpower
Speaker 2: cannot defend territory, and the only way to protect the
Speaker 2: homeland is to build an air force that can bomb
Speaker 2: the enemy into the ground before you're opponent can do
Speaker 2: the same. He makes really specific predictions, arguing in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty eight that dropping a payload of just three hundred
Speaker 2: tons of bombs over a capital city and under a
Speaker 2: month would be enough to end a war. This would
Speaker 2: all be proven catastrophically wrong, but for the later period
Speaker 2: of his life do Hay as effectively the first air
Speaker 2: power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but
Speaker 2: it becomes the bible of how to make an air
Speaker 2: force for basically all of the men who were in
Speaker 2: charge of the air forces in World War Two. Like
Speaker 2: on every side, he's super influential, and that's not entirely accurate.
Speaker 2: He has his detractors, obviously, but he's massively influential, and
Speaker 2: I'm sure to Hay would have been thrilled to have
Speaker 2: had such an influence because everyone in World War Two
Speaker 2: tries out his ideas, but he never gets a chance
Speaker 2: to see that. Shortly after Benito Mussolini makes him the
Speaker 2: Italian chief of Aviation, he dies of a heart attack
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty. So, by the way, ends's life is
Speaker 2: a fascist two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, couldn't happen to a worse guy.
Speaker 2: Really tragic. You know who else died of a heart
Speaker 2: attack in nineteen thirty after being made the Fascist Minister
Speaker 2: of Aviation by Benita Mussolini.
Speaker 3: His twin brother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, or these sponsors, I don't know. Great, and
Speaker 2: we're back. I was an awkward ad pivot. I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna lie, Margaret. I'm not gonna lie. But I think
Speaker 2: the audience will forgive us.
Speaker 4: I think they will. I think they'll be able to
Speaker 4: find it in their heart attack to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's actually what I'm trying to do is make
Speaker 4: you feel better by making a terrible joke. So those
Speaker 4: people have already forgotten about your bad ad pivot.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you, Margaret. Let's continue talking about this
Speaker 2: guy's stupid ideas about how planes work. Right.
Speaker 4: Three hundred bombs, Yeah, three hundred tons of bombs all
Speaker 4: you need that'll wipe out any cities, will to fight.
Speaker 2: So, German war planners, influenced by dou Haye, built a
Speaker 2: bomber fleet that was tailored for the attack, not operations
Speaker 2: on enemy cities, but providing close support to their advancing
Speaker 2: infantry and armour. And this is you could call this
Speaker 2: an adaptation of some of de Haetes, certainly influenced by it,
Speaker 2: this idea that like air power should just be for
Speaker 2: the offense, right, like that that's its primary purpose. And
Speaker 2: so it's kind of an adaptation, right. England also dou
Speaker 2: Hayes attitudes have a lot of influence on how the
Speaker 2: Royal Air Force is constructed in the inter war period,
Speaker 2: and England spins a lot of resources creating a bomber
Speaker 2: command that was meant to deter German action on the
Speaker 2: continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids.
Speaker 2: You know, that does not exactly work out. Here's how
Speaker 2: Colonel Risioni describes what happened next. Germany then turned to
Speaker 2: the invasion of England and its first test of dou
Speaker 2: Hayes's theories. The Battle of Britain was engaged to gain
Speaker 2: air superiority for operations Sea Lion. Britain's bomber command had
Speaker 2: failed to deter the war and the attacks on England,
Speaker 2: but Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to
Speaker 2: its knees. The Luftwaffa tried to gain superiority over England.
Speaker 2: The initially frail fighter force of the Royal Air Force,
Speaker 2: under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Doubting
Speaker 2: and using the nascent technology of radar, was able to
Speaker 2: inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts.
Speaker 2: After the Battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler
Speaker 2: turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population
Speaker 2: to its knees. Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened
Speaker 2: the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to
Speaker 2: a higher pitch. So from the start do hay has
Speaker 2: proven wrong, just immediately on boccounts about yes, yeah, the
Speaker 2: having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also,
Speaker 2: you can defend from a bombing attack, and aircraft are
Speaker 2: great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works
Speaker 2: really fucking well.
Speaker 4: It's funny because like this is the Europe gave medieval
Speaker 4: warfare was a big part of medieval Europe, right, and
Speaker 4: like the development of armor until.
Speaker 3: You get to guns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like really it's the development of armor that
Speaker 4: is the new technology that's changing.
Speaker 3: Shit.
Speaker 4: You put a fucking armored knight against anybody and they're
Speaker 4: just like, yeah, you kind of can't do anything unless
Speaker 4: you get a dagger to my throat, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, that's it. Like it is. It is
Speaker 2: the same. It takes place over a shorter period of
Speaker 2: time with airpower because shit moves faster now, right, But
Speaker 2: it is the I mean this it's the it's the
Speaker 2: the red Queen hypothesis, right, like everyone is constantly moving
Speaker 2: as fast as they can just to stay in place,
Speaker 2: you know, like you were you you build up this
Speaker 2: great bomber fleet just in time to get attacked by
Speaker 2: a bomber fleet of your own and realize, actually, we
Speaker 2: probably should have had more fighters that might have been handier.
Speaker 2: It's to jump right, yeah, But also the Germans are
Speaker 2: learning all you need is a bunch of bombers. We've
Speaker 2: got a bunch of bombers. Oh shit, fighter aircraft really
Speaker 2: fuck up bombers. Oh no, all our pilots are gone.
Speaker 4: Who'd have thought Mussolidi would have named a guy who
Speaker 4: wasn't actually as good at things as he said he was.
Speaker 2: Would have thought the Italian fascist Minister of Aviation was
Speaker 2: wrong about some important points right now. One of the
Speaker 2: things that is important for what will come next is
Speaker 2: it is true air power is great on the defensive,
Speaker 2: and it's actually very possible to interdict and damage bombers
Speaker 2: before they can hit their targets. But not a single
Speaker 2: group of bombers on any side during the war is
Speaker 2: turned back right entirely without being able to drop any bombs.
Speaker 2: That doesn't happen, which for nuclear planning. This again, one
Speaker 2: of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes do Hey correct
Speaker 2: on is that like, well, once you've got nukes, if
Speaker 2: you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs,
Speaker 2: then yeah, fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers
Speaker 2: and do enough damage that it renders like, you know,
Speaker 2: the Germans will drop some bombs in response, but you
Speaker 2: can make it be more costly for the Germans than
Speaker 2: it is for Great Britain. Right, if a thousand bombers
Speaker 2: each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from
Speaker 2: hitting and all they need is one, right, Right, That
Speaker 2: is an important point about this is another lesson that's
Speaker 2: being learned right at the same time as we're learning
Speaker 2: how wrong dou Hay is. Once nukes come into the picture,
Speaker 2: people are going to be looking at this data and
Speaker 2: seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a
Speaker 2: nuclear attack of sufficient size even before ICBMs.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the scale of destructiveness of a nuke is just
Speaker 4: so different. Yeah yeah, it's huh yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I do want to really emphasize the wrongness that
Speaker 2: do Hay was because again he said that about three
Speaker 2: hundred tons of explosives in a month dropped over an
Speaker 2: enemy capital would be enough to break any people's will
Speaker 2: to fight. During a single night, during the Battle of
Speaker 2: Britain May tenth to May eleventh, nineteen forty one, Germany
Speaker 2: dropped more than seven hundred tons of high explosives on
Speaker 2: London as well as eighty six thousand incendiary devices. England
Speaker 2: kept fighting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, they came up with the whole crazy slogan
Speaker 4: about it. Yeah, everyone pulled together of like orwell like
Speaker 4: organizing in the home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people felt better. Yeah yeah, which
Speaker 2: is a fun story.
Speaker 3: Gives us punk rock that people grew up out of.
Speaker 2: That gives us punk rock. Sure. Yeah, but yeah, that
Speaker 2: is an important point again just to how wrong dow
Speaker 2: Hay is, Like, yeah, we took more than twice as
Speaker 2: much as he said would break any city in a
Speaker 2: month and a night. London did, and people don't break
Speaker 2: under bombing, you know, which is also going to influence
Speaker 2: nuclear thinkers because then the attitude becomes, well you just
Speaker 2: have to kill all of them then.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So despite the fact that do Hay is right
Speaker 2: out the gate proven wrong, war planners on the Allied
Speaker 2: side continue to give a great deal of credence to
Speaker 2: his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris,
Speaker 2: also known as Bomber Harris, who became head of the
Speaker 2: RAF's Bomber Command. He was a huge advocate of area
Speaker 2: bombing precision bombing, which is another thing people are. The
Speaker 2: strategic bombing side also breaks down to a couple of
Speaker 2: broad schools, and as is always the case, most people
Speaker 2: are you know, have are a little take some from
Speaker 2: column as from Colum b. But there's you've got area
Speaker 2: bombing and precision bombing, right, And the idea behind precision
Speaker 2: bombing is that you can hit just the target you want.
Speaker 2: That is, like the factory making bombs or the factory
Speaker 2: making planes, right, or a barracks, and not hit the
Speaker 2: high rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is
Speaker 2: a lie, right, it's especially it's it's not all that
Speaker 2: true today, but it's especially a lie in World War Two. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a lot. Now you can kind of do it,
Speaker 2: although it never works as well as planners like to
Speaker 2: claim it does. But in World War Two it's just
Speaker 2: a fantasy, right, And so there's a lot of that
Speaker 2: that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris,
Speaker 2: who are like, well, fuck precision bombing, just bomb desaturate
Speaker 2: an area with bombing, right, you accept greater civilian casualties
Speaker 2: so that you can cripple their industrial capabilities. Right, that's
Speaker 2: the public argument. In private, they're saying something different, But
Speaker 2: the public argument is that this is just the way
Speaker 2: it has to work. The first area bombings by the
Speaker 2: RAF on German cities was in nineteen forty one, in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty two, and they did not work very well. Right.
Speaker 2: They's spun as wins, but on an actual strategic level,
Speaker 2: they're not huge hits. They caused some shock to the
Speaker 2: German citizenry, but they don't accomplish the stated goal, which
Speaker 2: is to damage war production. Right, and the RAF suffers
Speaker 2: high casualties because German air defenses are excellent. You know,
Speaker 2: do Hay continues to be very wrong about air defense.
Speaker 2: It is popular possible. I mean in Vietnam, North Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Part of why the war goes the way it does
Speaker 2: is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air defenses. Right,
Speaker 2: something gets lost in the whole. It was just some
Speaker 2: farmers in the jungle that beat the US. No, they
Speaker 2: had an army, they had radar guided missiles and everything.
Speaker 2: You know. When Arthur Harris took over bomber command for
Speaker 2: Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign,
Speaker 2: Operation Millennium. On May thirtieth of nineteen forty two, nearly
Speaker 2: eleven hundred Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some six hundred
Speaker 2: acres of the city and rendering one hundred thousand people homeless.
Speaker 2: Harris declared the raid a success. The British press did too,
Speaker 2: but they focused on the destruction of war industry, not
Speaker 2: the civilian cost, and this frustrated Harris, in part because
Speaker 2: it was inaccurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged
Speaker 2: or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent of a
Speaker 2: month's war production. The real cost to Germany, as bomber
Speaker 2: Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later described
Speaker 2: the purpose of bomber Command. In his eyes, the aim
Speaker 2: is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers,
Speaker 2: and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It
Speaker 2: should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities,
Speaker 2: transport and lives, the creation of a refugee prob an
Speaker 2: unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home
Speaker 2: and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and
Speaker 2: intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy.
Speaker 2: They are not by products of attempts to hit factories.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes sense. So does the same stealing the reserve.
Speaker 4: Like I've I've met someone whose family I think it
Speaker 4: was Colne or Cologne. I just did the ass whole
Speaker 4: thing where I've been to a city, so I'm like, let.
Speaker 3: Me use the whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah. But you know, it's like I've met someone who
Speaker 4: was like, oh, yeah, my whole family was like staunch
Speaker 4: anti Nazis, and then eighty percent of the family was
Speaker 4: wiped out in one night by an by a bombing,
Speaker 4: and then they all join the army And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 4: they still joined the Nazi army, so fuck them. But
Speaker 4: like also like, yeah, I couldn't tell you that anyone
Speaker 4: I've ever met would do anything.
Speaker 2: That's just how people work when their family gets killed
Speaker 2: in a bombing. Yeah, if they get pissed, they don't
Speaker 2: always they're not their best selves, you know exactly. That's
Speaker 2: that's just how people be. Homie, I don't know what
Speaker 2: to tell you. They don't like having their families killed
Speaker 2: by bombs. Yeah, And there's as we'll talk about a
Speaker 2: lot of debate as to the influence of strategic bombing
Speaker 2: on the German civilian population, but what we can say
Speaker 2: is that it's not why they lose. However, however, whatever
Speaker 2: it does to morale doesn't in the war. You know,
Speaker 2: So Bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude right
Speaker 2: as to like what would work to actually in the war,
Speaker 2: and he doesn't. He never gets called on that because
Speaker 2: we win the war anyway, and everyone kind of thinks,
Speaker 2: fuck those guys, low key a high key but and
Speaker 2: you know, fuck them, but it doesn't work. That is important. Now.
Speaker 2: There's not agreement and in fact a huge a lot
Speaker 2: of conflict between the US and Great Britain over the strategy. Initially,
Speaker 2: the guys in the US Army Air Command do not
Speaker 2: all agree with Harris, and in fact we keep conducting
Speaker 2: the Brits are doing night time raids, which allows you
Speaker 2: to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians
Speaker 2: or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for
Speaker 2: a long time, which are way more dangerous because the
Speaker 2: idea is it gives these civilians more of a chance
Speaker 2: to get away, right, that's part of why you're doing it.
Speaker 2: It's more honorable basically, right, which it is, but it
Speaker 2: also means you lose a lot more guys right, like,
Speaker 2: it's way more dangerous. Yeah, it's very dnerable thing I
Speaker 2: think that we're doing for a while. We're not always
Speaker 2: going to be that way. So yeah, this debate really
Speaker 2: starts to erupt after this point. And on one end
Speaker 2: you've got these area bombing strategic bombing advocates saying like,
Speaker 2: you know, I know it hasn't quite worked yet, right, Like,
Speaker 2: we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not
Speaker 2: giving up yet, but if we just get more bombers, bro,
Speaker 2: it'll work.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And on the other side, and again a lot of
Speaker 2: people do kind of wind up in the middle here,
Speaker 2: but the other side broadly are like, well, close air
Speaker 2: support is what's most important, right. Airpower's primary use is
Speaker 2: its ability to augment conventional forces in taking and holding territory, right,
Speaker 2: And it works really well. It had proved to be
Speaker 2: tantalizingly potent in North Africa, and guys in the US
Speaker 2: like General Pete Cassada were bullish about its potential in
Speaker 2: a future invasion of France. An early test for the
Speaker 2: strategic bombing advocates, on the other hand, came prior to
Speaker 2: the invasion of Sicily. There's this island called Antillaria, which
Speaker 2: is garrisoned with about eleven thousand Italian troops that we
Speaker 2: need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote for an article in National
Speaker 2: Interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pantelleria became
Speaker 2: an experiment when anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt
Speaker 2: that bombing would ratify what up to then had been
Speaker 2: a matter of faith, but would soon offer proof through
Speaker 2: bombing alone, surrender was a certainty. All these forces were
Speaker 2: assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what
Speaker 2: a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing
Speaker 2: more in, then in due course of time it becomes
Speaker 2: impossible for him to defend himself. Major General Jimmy Doolittle said,
Speaker 2: if bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies
Speaker 2: planned to invade the island by June eleventh. In an
Speaker 2: attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, the Allies
Speaker 2: generated five two hundred and eighty four sorties, dropping a
Speaker 2: total of twelve point four million pounds of bombs on Pantelleria.
Speaker 2: Jesus did it work kay After a month of unopposed
Speaker 2: round the clock bombing. The Italians surrendered after Allied ground
Speaker 2: troops had approached the island. Right, They did surrender on
Speaker 2: their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops
Speaker 2: came in. Now you can still say, but that still worked. Right. However,
Speaker 2: there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses
Speaker 2: were remarkably intact still given the force deployed against them,
Speaker 2: because nearly every bomb missed. The B seventeens were most accurate,
Speaker 2: with a twenty two percent hit rate. That's defined as
Speaker 2: landing a bomb within one hundred yards of its target.
Speaker 2: So the B seventeens hit twenty two percent of the time,
Speaker 2: and that's our best bomber.
Speaker 3: And that's within a football field, because that's still within
Speaker 3: a football field.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and our medium bombers hit rate is about six percent. Now,
Speaker 2: this is a problem because we had been claiming very
Speaker 2: different things about the accuracy of our bombs. Back at
Speaker 2: the start of nineteen forty three, we'd had something called
Speaker 2: the Casablanca Conference, in which Winston Churchill sat down with
Speaker 2: the eighth Air Force Commander Ira Eaker, who promised the
Speaker 2: British Prime Minister that the B seventeen flying fortress. That's
Speaker 2: fancy knew. We had these things called the Norden bomb Site,
Speaker 2: which was like, this is the shit. This makes precision
Speaker 2: bombing possible. It's like almost it's like a little computerized
Speaker 2: bombing system that like, we can do things with bombs
Speaker 2: we never could do before. You can drop a bomb
Speaker 2: for twenty five thousand feet and hit a target the
Speaker 2: size of a pickle barrel. Right, that's the promise Iri
Speaker 2: Echer makes Winston Churchill when he's like they're sitting there,
Speaker 2: He's like, we can hit a pickle barrel at twenty
Speaker 2: five thousand feet. Now in combat. A few months later,
Speaker 2: these things would hit within a football field only twenty
Speaker 2: two percent of the time. Yeah, so you're getting this.
Speaker 2: This is going to be also a theme with all
Speaker 2: of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They
Speaker 2: will make all these claims about yes, you know, it'll
Speaker 2: it's it's this accurate, and it's this safe, and it
Speaker 2: can only be activated if this and this and this happens,
Speaker 2: so it like could never be accidentally fired. And they're like,
Speaker 2: oh wait, but what if this thing happens that happens
Speaker 2: every day, Oh yeah, that could accidentally launch all of
Speaker 2: our missiles. Yeah, are you guys gonna fix it? We
Speaker 2: actually don't wanna. That's the story of the minute Man
Speaker 2: in a nutshell, but we'll talk more about that later. Anyway,
Speaker 2: with a fleet of these eager price we can disembowel
Speaker 2: the German Reich and destroy its industrial capacity with no
Speaker 2: need for ground forces. Right, we can just get the
Speaker 2: Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct
Speaker 2: experience with aerial warfare, and he does not believe Eger, right,
Speaker 2: he doesn't believe about the accuracy. And the other thing
Speaker 2: that iri Eker is saying is we don't need fighter
Speaker 2: escorts for our B seventeens because they have all these
Speaker 2: guns on them that will that'll be enough to deter attack.
Speaker 2: We can send the fortress. Yeah, that's basically the idea
Speaker 2: behind that title. But like, yeah, because these B seventeens
Speaker 2: are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to
Speaker 2: if they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate.
Speaker 2: And that that's necessary because the bombers can fly a
Speaker 2: lot further than the fighters. So what Eker is saying
Speaker 2: is we can send these bombers into the heart of
Speaker 2: enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range
Speaker 2: of the fighters, and they'll be fine. And he's going
Speaker 2: to be wrong about that too. So one result of
Speaker 2: this the Casablanca Conference, is that the Allies put together
Speaker 2: a list of military assets they want prioritize destroying or
Speaker 2: disabling a task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power.
Speaker 2: These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities,
Speaker 2: and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first
Speaker 2: of these targets was a ball bearing production facility in Regensburg.
Speaker 2: Ball bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and number of
Speaker 2: other important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by
Speaker 2: Major General Ekers eighth Army Air Force on August seventeenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty three. Three hundred and seventy six bombers plowed
Speaker 2: deep into German territory, beyond the range of any fighters
Speaker 2: to escort them. Per the website code names operations of
Speaker 2: World War II, The mission inflicted heavy damage on the
Speaker 2: Regensburg target, but only at catastrophic loss to the force
Speaker 2: inasmuch as sixty bombers were lost and many more damaged
Speaker 2: beyond economical repair. As a result, the Eighth Air force
Speaker 2: was incapable of immediately following double strike with a second
Speaker 2: attack that might have seriously crippled German industry when Schweinfert,
Speaker 2: that's the industrial facility was attacked again two months later.
Speaker 2: The lack of long range fighter escorts still had not
Speaker 2: been addressed, and losses were even higher. As a consequence,
Speaker 2: the US deep penetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for
Speaker 2: five months.
Speaker 4: Could you imagine going on a thing where you're like, well,
Speaker 4: last time we did this about uh, you know, one
Speaker 4: in six of us died anyway, so we didn't change anything.
Speaker 2: Are we so different? Yeah? Are we doing anything new? Yeah? No,
Speaker 2: same plan huh okay, yeah. I mean you talk to
Speaker 2: anyone who saw heavy combat and they have stories like
Speaker 2: that where it's like, well this was this went really badly.
Speaker 2: We're just doing the same thing. Huh yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: that is that is how armies work. Now, this was
Speaker 2: a double failure, not just for Eager but for douheyes theories.
Speaker 2: Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a
Speaker 2: defending military for women inflicting severe casualties on a farmer fleet,
Speaker 2: and that despite the damaged under the Regensburg Plant. German
Speaker 2: industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. As Reich Minister of
Speaker 2: Supply Albert Spear stated at after the war, no plane
Speaker 2: or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings.
Speaker 2: Colonel Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Rassioni noted in
Speaker 2: his article the Allies failed in their choice of a
Speaker 2: target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad. Germany
Speaker 2: was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point,
Speaker 2: and it also stop. They had foreseen this and stockpiled
Speaker 2: pre war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft
Speaker 2: and shit to not see as many ball bearings.
Speaker 4: This was for like a home alone style plan they
Speaker 4: had that was actually the stockpile was unrelated.
Speaker 2: It was they were dropping it down the stairs.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Did a horrible damage to the Third Army. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah. Rassioni writes this was a failure both in
Speaker 2: target definition and target priority. Worse, because it was vulnerable,
Speaker 2: the Eighth Air Force had become the target. Now over
Speaker 2: in England, Arthur Harris never accepted the primary contentions of
Speaker 2: the advocates of precision strategic bombing. In October of nineteen
Speaker 2: forty three. Not long after Regensburg, he stated the aimous
Speaker 2: destruction of germanies, the killing of German workers, and the
Speaker 2: disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be
Speaker 2: emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives,
Speaker 2: the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale,
Speaker 2: and the breakdown of morale both at home and at
Speaker 2: the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are
Speaker 2: acceptable in intended aims of our bombing policy. They are
Speaker 2: not byproducts if attempts to hit factories. Yeah, Bobara Harris,
Speaker 2: one thing you have to give him. He's very clear. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: this is about killing women and children and riten'ing them homeless.
Speaker 2: That's what we're doing. That's the business the RAF is in.
Speaker 2: You guys need to stop pretending that you're fucking with
Speaker 2: ball bearings.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's an honesty to that that I respect.
Speaker 2: Yes, the man knows what he's about. It's killing civilians,
Speaker 2: but he's about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he has made his peace with whatever he believes,
Speaker 4: and he thinks that this is the lesser evil is
Speaker 4: by doing a lot of evil, and like you know,
Speaker 4: it's not evil quickly, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: A little before the Regensburg attack, bomber Harris had launched
Speaker 2: a nighttime raid on Hamburg. It was the opposite of
Speaker 2: a precise attempt to destroy a specific target. Incendiaries created
Speaker 2: a firestorm that swept through the downtown area, incinerating roughly
Speaker 2: forty thousand civilians. This is like, and this is one
Speaker 2: of the this becomes a theory, Right, there's a theory
Speaker 2: put into practice. But there had been this theory that
Speaker 2: by dropping incendiaries in the right place, in a certain
Speaker 2: parts of a city, you can create these firestorms that
Speaker 2: massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign. Right, And
Speaker 2: this is like when it when it really works for
Speaker 2: the first time. This is going to be a massive
Speaker 2: part of our strategy. And when we're bombing the Japanese
Speaker 2: home islands, right, is creating these these hideous firestorms. And
Speaker 2: this also this becomes I think the term is literally
Speaker 2: like bonus damage. Basically, this is like a concept of
Speaker 2: nuclear war too. Is a big part of the appeal
Speaker 2: of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them
Speaker 2: is that you create these firestorms the size of states,
Speaker 2: and like, that's really handy It really amplifies the amount
Speaker 2: of a country you can destroy when you create firestorms
Speaker 2: that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain.
Speaker 4: So it has never occurred to me until this moment
Speaker 4: that the phrase firestorm. I'm aware that firestorms happen in wildfires,
Speaker 4: it has never really actually occurred to me until this
Speaker 4: moment that people artificially create them. And that's where a
Speaker 4: firestorm like, you know, a firestorm to purify if you're
Speaker 4: in a shitty hardcore music yeah, yep, okay.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep. I mean, I think most people have learned
Speaker 2: the term firestorm from Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun firestorm
Speaker 2: obviously the Tiberian Sun expansion pack. That was pretty good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But some people learned it from history. I'm sure I
Speaker 2: learned it from a shitty hardcore band. So I learned
Speaker 2: it from a hardcore band. I learned it from Command
Speaker 2: and Conquer. Yeah. In November of nineteen forty three. In
Speaker 2: March of nineteen forty four, there were vast raids on
Speaker 2: Berlin which left much of the capital in ruins, and
Speaker 2: yet German morale continued to hold this is the thing,
Speaker 2: Bomber Harris, He's more honest, But what he's saying will
Speaker 2: happen still doesn't happen. Yeah, he's No amount of bombing
Speaker 2: causes Germany to give up. By the time the war
Speaker 2: in Europe enters its endgame, there were very mixed conclusions
Speaker 2: to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and
Speaker 2: precision bombing. Both ideologies had suffered failures, and both had
Speaker 2: claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success.
Speaker 2: Months earlier, bomber Harris had considered strategic bombing the same
Speaker 2: as opening a new front, summarizing a write up for
Speaker 2: the Juno Beach Center quote until D Day, he was
Speaker 2: convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force
Speaker 2: Germany into submission without the Allied casualties that were bound
Speaker 2: to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe.
Speaker 2: In Part two, we're going to talk about what happens next.
Speaker 2: We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll start talking about
Speaker 2: the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the
Speaker 2: foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device
Speaker 2: that we all live under right now. Like this second,
Speaker 2: an incident could have started, maybe just because a radar
Speaker 2: station was wrong, that will in fifteen to thirty minutes
Speaker 2: result in the annihilation of all organized life human life
Speaker 2: on the planet. That could have happened, as I say
Speaker 2: this sentence, and we mostly won't know until the bombs fall,
Speaker 2: and there's really nothing. Like One thing that maybe will
Speaker 2: comfort you is that that like, none of the facilities
Speaker 2: we have to protect our government will work, like none
Speaker 2: of them are sufficient for the amount, the tonnage, the
Speaker 2: mega tonnage of explosives coming at them. That little like
Speaker 2: this is a good This is a good thing about
Speaker 2: Jacobson's book Nuclear War. One thing she points out is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone
Speaker 2: will bake to death slowly as if they're in an oven.
Speaker 2: Like we know what kind of forces will be deployed
Speaker 2: against DC. There's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a
Speaker 2: much worse death than the people top side will have.
Speaker 2: Well that's good, that's good anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up.
Speaker 2: We roll out of part one.
Speaker 4: I appreciate this idea of like I hadn't put together
Speaker 4: this idea that World War One, the powder keg was intentional.
Speaker 4: You know that it was this mutually assured destruction concept
Speaker 4: and like seeing the through line is yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 2: It wasn't as direct because it did kind of a
Speaker 2: lot of this started to like this evolved accidentally out
Speaker 2: of stuff that it existed before. It was not constructed
Speaker 2: as consciously as nuclear mad, right, but it was something
Speaker 2: people were conscious of, people talked about. That's a reason
Speaker 2: why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances
Speaker 2: and like military armament schedules and like the different like
Speaker 2: arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device, right, because
Speaker 2: it worked that way, and it is really relevant to
Speaker 2: discuss that in the context of the doom state device
Speaker 2: that we all live under, right now, Yeah, yep, cool, cool?
Speaker 2: All right, all right, everybody.
Speaker 3: Magpie, do you want marketing blood?
Speaker 4: Oh well, if you respond to the possible eminent destruction
Speaker 4: of all things by retreating a little bit into escapism,
Speaker 4: you could listen to me and Robert and some of
Speaker 4: our friends play Pathfinder, where we're just pretending to be
Speaker 4: people in a fantasy world.
Speaker 2: You don't know what Pathfinder is. It's a tabletop game thing,
Speaker 2: much in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons or a
Speaker 2: number of other games just legally distinct, legally distinct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and if you like weird history, I have a
Speaker 4: podcast called Cool People Didical Stuff with a totally original
Speaker 4: the format, Robert, you got to try this format. What
Speaker 4: I do is that I research a topic every week, okay,
Speaker 4: and then I get a guest who doesn't know as
Speaker 4: much about that topic but sometimes knows like kind of
Speaker 4: related things around that topic, and then I tell them
Speaker 4: what I've learned.
Speaker 2: Is that that seems like the newest idea in podcasting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are.
Speaker 1: A producer named Sophie there that doesn't say very much
Speaker 1: but sometimes talks a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you should, actually, Robert, you should. You should use
Speaker 4: that part too. Get a producer named Sophie.
Speaker 2: I'll see, I'll think about it, Markka, I'll think about it.
Speaker 2: I'll think about it.
Speaker 4: But uh, but don't take my name. You are you
Speaker 4: have a decent name from behind the bastards. Mine's cool
Speaker 4: people who did cool stuff?
Speaker 2: Okay, cool people who did cool stuff. Check out us
Speaker 2: playing Pathfinder on it could happen. Here's book club. And remember,
Speaker 2: if there is a nuclear war, all of the people
Speaker 2: who got us into it will also die unthinkable deaths.
Speaker 4: So yay.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Try to live near the center of
Speaker 2: a city and just you know, say the things to
Speaker 2: your loved ones that you need to say. Yeah, tell
Speaker 2: your friends you love you, Tell your friends you love them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, bye bye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: and Friday.
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