1
00:00:01,720 --> 00:00:09,120
Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special

2
00:00:09,360 --> 00:00:12,720
Speaker 1: episodes on how We're all possibly going to die in

3
00:00:12,840 --> 00:00:13,880
Speaker 1: nuclear hell fire.

4
00:00:14,040 --> 00:00:17,960
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing

5
00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:21,599
Speaker 2: over the course of two weeks, five episodes. We're in

6
00:00:21,640 --> 00:00:23,680
Speaker 2: our second week, so we'll be getting a bonus episode

7
00:00:23,680 --> 00:00:27,280
Speaker 2: this week about the sons of bitches who created the

8
00:00:27,280 --> 00:00:30,560
Speaker 2: doomsday device that again could kill every single person you've

9
00:00:30,600 --> 00:00:33,440
Speaker 2: ever known and loved in every animal and on earth

10
00:00:33,479 --> 00:00:37,640
Speaker 2: except for you know, cockroaches and the like fifteen minutes

11
00:00:37,680 --> 00:00:39,960
Speaker 2: from now or right now. You know, we'd have no

12
00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:42,440
Speaker 2: way of knowing unless you're I don't know, in the

13
00:00:42,440 --> 00:00:46,080
Speaker 2: White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, Welcome to

14
00:00:46,159 --> 00:00:48,600
Speaker 2: the show. How are you doing. You're thinking about nukes?

15
00:00:48,880 --> 00:00:51,599
Speaker 3: Well, I got promise this is about Warhammer forty k

16
00:00:52,159 --> 00:00:56,040
Speaker 3: but no, I suppose we're learning about the nuclear of Poculus.

17
00:00:56,400 --> 00:00:58,520
Speaker 2: I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show.

18
00:00:59,080 --> 00:01:01,800
Speaker 2: That'll oh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of genocide in

19
00:01:01,840 --> 00:01:02,200
Speaker 2: that too.

20
00:01:02,440 --> 00:01:04,319
Speaker 3: I could be the podcast today for that because I

21
00:01:04,360 --> 00:01:06,280
Speaker 3: actually don't know anything about Warhammer.

22
00:01:06,600 --> 00:01:09,080
Speaker 2: It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation, poisoning,

23
00:01:09,720 --> 00:01:12,199
Speaker 2: which is what we ended our last episode talking about

24
00:01:12,600 --> 00:01:15,959
Speaker 2: our friend Lewis Sloton, who was the partial father of

25
00:01:15,959 --> 00:01:19,920
Speaker 2: the first atomic bomb, had his inards dissolved due to

26
00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:21,240
Speaker 2: a horrible nuclear error.

27
00:01:21,680 --> 00:01:24,920
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's like kind of like leave a record

28
00:01:24,959 --> 00:01:27,640
Speaker 3: for science because he was a pretty cool guy. Like

29
00:01:27,720 --> 00:01:31,280
Speaker 3: that's that's badass, Like when you know that, like, Okay,

30
00:01:31,319 --> 00:01:33,800
Speaker 3: well I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation.

31
00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:36,559
Speaker 2: I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time

32
00:01:36,600 --> 00:01:41,640
Speaker 2: to take notes like fucking that's cool. That's cool, Like

33
00:01:42,959 --> 00:01:44,440
Speaker 2: and I guess so acting.

34
00:01:44,080 --> 00:01:47,760
Speaker 3: With agency is like a really good way to not stress, right, yes,

35
00:01:47,840 --> 00:01:50,080
Speaker 3: you know, and like I have a job. I'm just

36
00:01:50,080 --> 00:01:50,800
Speaker 3: doing my job.

37
00:01:51,120 --> 00:01:53,760
Speaker 2: And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrate, like

38
00:01:53,760 --> 00:01:56,120
Speaker 2: he did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed,

39
00:01:56,120 --> 00:01:59,360
Speaker 2: there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards,

40
00:01:59,480 --> 00:01:59,800
Speaker 2: you know.

41
00:02:00,160 --> 00:02:01,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, has come up AND's happened.

42
00:02:01,560 --> 00:02:11,360
Speaker 2: I'm taking them off the list of guys I'm pissed at. Yeah,

43
00:02:11,440 --> 00:02:14,120
Speaker 2: so before we move on past World War Two, we

44
00:02:14,120 --> 00:02:16,560
Speaker 2: should at least linger on what guys like LeMay and

45
00:02:16,720 --> 00:02:19,800
Speaker 2: General Power would have argued was the most important question

46
00:02:19,919 --> 00:02:22,160
Speaker 2: of the whole war, Right, which is still a question

47
00:02:22,200 --> 00:02:25,520
Speaker 2: that people debate today. Did the use of atomic weapons

48
00:02:25,520 --> 00:02:28,600
Speaker 2: against the Empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender,

49
00:02:28,720 --> 00:02:32,400
Speaker 2: thus sparing both Japan and the allies, primarily the US,

50
00:02:32,760 --> 00:02:36,160
Speaker 2: a hideously bloody ground invasion. Right, this is a question

51
00:02:36,240 --> 00:02:40,160
Speaker 2: people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here.

52
00:02:40,280 --> 00:02:42,360
Speaker 2: I think you'll it'll be pretty clear where I tend

53
00:02:42,360 --> 00:02:44,160
Speaker 2: to land once we get through this. Right, But this

54
00:02:44,200 --> 00:02:46,919
Speaker 2: isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right.

55
00:02:47,600 --> 00:02:49,160
Speaker 2: I'm not going to come in and just give one

56
00:02:49,200 --> 00:02:52,440
Speaker 2: side of this. Again, I have my my take on

57
00:02:52,520 --> 00:02:55,200
Speaker 2: the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing even if you

58
00:02:55,360 --> 00:02:58,200
Speaker 2: argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan

59
00:02:58,240 --> 00:03:02,240
Speaker 2: to surrender, that the military Japan never independently agreed to

60
00:03:02,280 --> 00:03:04,919
Speaker 2: call it quits, and if the Emperor of Japan had

61
00:03:04,960 --> 00:03:08,760
Speaker 2: not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations,

62
00:03:09,160 --> 00:03:12,520
Speaker 2: we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued

63
00:03:12,560 --> 00:03:14,960
Speaker 2: supporting the war effort, no matter how many fire bombs

64
00:03:15,040 --> 00:03:17,360
Speaker 2: or even additional nukes fell. Right, We actually don't know

65
00:03:17,480 --> 00:03:22,400
Speaker 2: that there's a that's a valid point. There's also an

66
00:03:22,520 --> 00:03:25,000
Speaker 2: argument that the view pushed after the war, which is

67
00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:28,240
Speaker 2: that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding

68
00:03:28,280 --> 00:03:30,720
Speaker 2: a greater slaughter in Japan. That like, if we had

69
00:03:30,720 --> 00:03:33,480
Speaker 2: invaded the main islands, so many more people would have died.

70
00:03:33,960 --> 00:03:36,600
Speaker 2: That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as

71
00:03:36,600 --> 00:03:39,480
Speaker 2: a single weapons system. In an article for outrider dot

72
00:03:39,600 --> 00:03:42,360
Speaker 2: org Jasmine Power Rights, there is general agreement that the

73
00:03:42,400 --> 00:03:44,720
Speaker 2: bombing of Nagasaki did little in the way of changing

74
00:03:44,720 --> 00:03:47,320
Speaker 2: the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming

75
00:03:47,360 --> 00:03:50,280
Speaker 2: their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet

76
00:03:50,360 --> 00:03:52,960
Speaker 2: Union having a hand in the post war reconstruction process.

77
00:03:53,240 --> 00:03:55,520
Speaker 2: Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to

78
00:03:55,560 --> 00:03:58,120
Speaker 2: push a communist regime onto the country. It was also

79
00:03:58,280 --> 00:04:01,360
Speaker 2: very convenient for the US that the attributed their surrender

80
00:04:01,440 --> 00:04:03,720
Speaker 2: to the atomic bombings, and.

81
00:04:03,880 --> 00:04:06,360
Speaker 3: Oh shit, so it was a way to stay capitalist,

82
00:04:06,520 --> 00:04:08,000
Speaker 3: was to be like, oh, it was the nukes, the

83
00:04:08,080 --> 00:04:08,680
Speaker 3: nukes to us.

84
00:04:08,720 --> 00:04:10,880
Speaker 2: In more than that, it was a way to avoid

85
00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:14,720
Speaker 2: whatch happened to Germany? Right, they're watching Germany get split up? Right,

86
00:04:15,320 --> 00:04:18,040
Speaker 2: that's obvious at this point, and they don't want that,

87
00:04:18,480 --> 00:04:23,080
Speaker 2: you know, and surrendering now before the Soviets are in,

88
00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:25,760
Speaker 2: you know, in the mix, so to speak, means that

89
00:04:25,800 --> 00:04:28,039
Speaker 2: the country doesn't get split up. Right, You're not gonna

90
00:04:28,040 --> 00:04:31,240
Speaker 2: have Tokyo divided or whatever. Right, that's one argument people

91
00:04:31,240 --> 00:04:34,599
Speaker 2: will make, you know, And in this view, pretty simply,

92
00:04:34,800 --> 00:04:38,239
Speaker 2: Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's

93
00:04:38,279 --> 00:04:40,520
Speaker 2: not a non factor, but they were defeated because they

94
00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:45,440
Speaker 2: were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor.

95
00:04:45,600 --> 00:04:47,599
Speaker 2: It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we

96
00:04:47,680 --> 00:04:51,200
Speaker 2: beat the shit of them all across the Pacific, right, yeah, like,

97
00:04:51,640 --> 00:04:54,400
Speaker 2: which is probably, i mean, certainly a more accurate view

98
00:04:54,440 --> 00:04:56,560
Speaker 2: than just saying it was the nukes, right Like, there

99
00:04:56,600 --> 00:04:58,400
Speaker 2: was a whole war. A lot of guys had to

100
00:04:58,480 --> 00:05:02,839
Speaker 2: die to finish that thing, right And Yeah, Harry Truman,

101
00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:06,159
Speaker 2: the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on

102
00:05:06,240 --> 00:05:09,080
Speaker 2: record basically saying that military planners had told him that

103
00:05:09,160 --> 00:05:11,880
Speaker 2: when they were looking into like what how many people

104
00:05:11,920 --> 00:05:14,240
Speaker 2: would die in an invasion of the Japanese Home islands,

105
00:05:14,960 --> 00:05:17,640
Speaker 2: American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of

106
00:05:17,640 --> 00:05:21,239
Speaker 2: five hundred thousand to a million, and if you're talking

107
00:05:21,279 --> 00:05:24,520
Speaker 2: about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on

108
00:05:24,560 --> 00:05:26,480
Speaker 2: these other island hopping campaigns, and that would have meant

109
00:05:26,520 --> 00:05:29,359
Speaker 2: both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have

110
00:05:29,360 --> 00:05:32,479
Speaker 2: been higher than that. Right Now, that said, this is

111
00:05:32,520 --> 00:05:34,760
Speaker 2: not a real estimate, as best as I can tell,

112
00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:38,400
Speaker 2: you will encounter it often. It comes up constantly, but

113
00:05:38,440 --> 00:05:41,080
Speaker 2: it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers that five

114
00:05:41,160 --> 00:05:45,039
Speaker 2: hundred to a million American casualties estimate have any basis

115
00:05:45,040 --> 00:05:50,039
Speaker 2: in reality. Lose in Europe we lost in the whole war,

116
00:05:50,120 --> 00:05:53,159
Speaker 2: the United States lost about half a million people, Okay,

117
00:05:53,640 --> 00:05:57,240
Speaker 2: Like so this this would be basically doing World War

118
00:05:57,279 --> 00:05:59,520
Speaker 2: Two all over again for US more or less. Right,

119
00:06:00,040 --> 00:06:02,560
Speaker 2: It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I

120
00:06:02,600 --> 00:06:04,640
Speaker 2: want to quote from an article by Alfi Khne on

121
00:06:04,800 --> 00:06:08,760
Speaker 2: kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein

122
00:06:08,800 --> 00:06:11,159
Speaker 2: writes that military planners at the time put the number

123
00:06:11,160 --> 00:06:14,440
Speaker 2: of American casualties between twenty thousand and forty six thousand.

124
00:06:14,680 --> 00:06:16,960
Speaker 2: But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong

125
00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:19,400
Speaker 2: possibility that neither an invasion nor in nuclear attack was

126
00:06:19,400 --> 00:06:21,800
Speaker 2: actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is

127
00:06:22,240 --> 00:06:25,360
Speaker 2: an interesting point because if you're saying, oh, five hundred

128
00:06:25,360 --> 00:06:28,000
Speaker 2: thousand to do a million Americans killed and injured, millions

129
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:31,239
Speaker 2: of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes save lives.

130
00:06:31,279 --> 00:06:33,040
Speaker 2: But if you're looking at well twenty to forty six,

131
00:06:33,520 --> 00:06:36,840
Speaker 2: forty or fifty thousand American casualties, probably twice that many

132
00:06:36,920 --> 00:06:42,480
Speaker 2: Japanese casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuke the islands. Right, Yeah,

133
00:06:42,600 --> 00:06:42,880
Speaker 2: you know.

134
00:06:42,960 --> 00:06:44,680
Speaker 3: What, could they have just laid siege the whole because

135
00:06:44,680 --> 00:06:46,320
Speaker 3: they were already they weren't.

136
00:06:46,120 --> 00:06:48,600
Speaker 2: In fact doing Yeah, and that's another point, as we'll

137
00:06:48,600 --> 00:06:50,280
Speaker 2: get to. That's another point people will make, is that

138
00:06:50,400 --> 00:06:52,880
Speaker 2: Japan would have broken on its own right. In a

139
00:06:52,880 --> 00:06:54,920
Speaker 2: good essay on the subject for his book You Know

140
00:06:54,960 --> 00:06:57,720
Speaker 2: What They Say, The Truth About Popular Belief, Alfie Cone

141
00:06:57,760 --> 00:06:59,880
Speaker 2: gives a succinct version of what we might call this

142
00:07:00,040 --> 00:07:03,640
Speaker 2: skeptic's case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

143
00:07:04,040 --> 00:07:06,920
Speaker 2: He notes that the US fire bombs had already incinerated

144
00:07:07,839 --> 00:07:11,720
Speaker 2: Japan's six largest cities and are basically the siege that

145
00:07:11,760 --> 00:07:13,960
Speaker 2: we put on the Home Islands had blocked all oil

146
00:07:14,040 --> 00:07:17,640
Speaker 2: from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was

147
00:07:17,680 --> 00:07:20,320
Speaker 2: in part a desire for the Emperor to retain his title,

148
00:07:20,680 --> 00:07:22,920
Speaker 2: con sites in nineteen forty six report from the War

149
00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:27,160
Speaker 2: Department Strategic Bombing Surveys Study Group, which concluded the Hiroshima

150
00:07:27,240 --> 00:07:30,800
Speaker 2: and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by

151
00:07:30,800 --> 00:07:33,000
Speaker 2: the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war,

152
00:07:33,080 --> 00:07:36,640
Speaker 2: did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor,

153
00:07:36,720 --> 00:07:39,440
Speaker 2: the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister,

154
00:07:39,480 --> 00:07:41,680
Speaker 2: and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May

155
00:07:41,720 --> 00:07:43,720
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty five that the war should be ended,

156
00:07:43,960 --> 00:07:46,880
Speaker 2: even if it meant acceptance of defeat on Allied terms.

157
00:07:47,160 --> 00:07:49,680
Speaker 2: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, supported

158
00:07:49,680 --> 00:07:52,320
Speaker 2: by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, is

159
00:07:52,360 --> 00:07:55,000
Speaker 2: the survey's opinion that, certainly prior to his thirty first

160
00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:57,920
Speaker 2: of December nineteen forty five, and in all probability prior

161
00:07:57,960 --> 00:08:01,200
Speaker 2: to first November nineteen forty five, pan would have surrendered

162
00:08:01,240 --> 00:08:03,680
Speaker 2: even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, Even

163
00:08:03,680 --> 00:08:05,640
Speaker 2: if Russia had not entered the war, and even if

164
00:08:05,680 --> 00:08:08,400
Speaker 2: no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the

165
00:08:08,520 --> 00:08:10,080
Speaker 2: US War Department.

166
00:08:10,720 --> 00:08:12,960
Speaker 3: So that's the They were already beat theory.

167
00:08:13,040 --> 00:08:15,440
Speaker 2: They were beat. They were beat. And I would say

168
00:08:15,480 --> 00:08:18,160
Speaker 2: that's by far the strongest argument if you're going with

169
00:08:18,160 --> 00:08:20,160
Speaker 2: the fact based argument. Not that it's the only one,

170
00:08:20,160 --> 00:08:23,200
Speaker 2: but I think it's the strongest. You know, your feelings

171
00:08:23,240 --> 00:08:25,840
Speaker 2: may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm

172
00:08:25,880 --> 00:08:30,040
Speaker 2: convinced pretty well now. There was at least one other

173
00:08:30,120 --> 00:08:32,800
Speaker 2: secret intelligence assessment from the same time, done by the

174
00:08:32,920 --> 00:08:36,359
Speaker 2: US Armies planning an operations group, which reached a similar conclusion,

175
00:08:36,559 --> 00:08:40,360
Speaker 2: and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Lahey, the

176
00:08:40,400 --> 00:08:43,160
Speaker 2: president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision

177
00:08:43,200 --> 00:08:45,560
Speaker 2: to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time adopting

178
00:08:45,720 --> 00:08:48,560
Speaker 2: quote an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the

179
00:08:48,640 --> 00:08:52,079
Speaker 2: dark Ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's

180
00:08:52,120 --> 00:08:58,120
Speaker 2: chief of staff to say about. Like Dwight Eisenhower reached

181
00:08:58,120 --> 00:09:01,240
Speaker 2: a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to

182
00:09:01,320 --> 00:09:04,880
Speaker 2: hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I

183
00:09:04,960 --> 00:09:07,560
Speaker 2: go with Ike on this. One. Not a perfect man,

184
00:09:07,679 --> 00:09:10,320
Speaker 2: but he pretty much he knew World War two pretty well.

185
00:09:11,720 --> 00:09:13,560
Speaker 3: That's why he had the I'm with Ike button.

186
00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:16,559
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm with Ike. It wasn't necessary to hit them

187
00:09:16,559 --> 00:09:20,400
Speaker 2: with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that. Yeah,

188
00:09:20,480 --> 00:09:23,080
Speaker 2: now I've allowed that. There's still some room for argument

189
00:09:23,120 --> 00:09:25,760
Speaker 2: here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's

190
00:09:25,760 --> 00:09:29,559
Speaker 2: decision to surrender, because the bombing campaign in general influenced

191
00:09:29,559 --> 00:09:31,840
Speaker 2: their decision to surrender, and the nukes were part of that. Right,

192
00:09:32,320 --> 00:09:35,640
Speaker 2: But what isn't arguable is this President Truman and men

193
00:09:35,679 --> 00:09:38,280
Speaker 2: in high positions within the US Army like Curtis LeMay

194
00:09:38,640 --> 00:09:42,600
Speaker 2: never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew

195
00:09:42,760 --> 00:09:45,839
Speaker 2: they had a bomb. Right, there was never any possibility

196
00:09:45,880 --> 00:09:49,080
Speaker 2: in their minds but that they would use it. Percne's article,

197
00:09:49,760 --> 00:09:52,040
Speaker 2: the fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option

198
00:09:52,080 --> 00:09:54,559
Speaker 2: of last resort. It would be easier to accept the

199
00:09:54,640 --> 00:09:56,840
Speaker 2: argument that he Truman had no choice but to drop

200
00:09:56,880 --> 00:09:59,520
Speaker 2: the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power

201
00:09:59,559 --> 00:10:02,720
Speaker 2: to Japan the leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender,

202
00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:05,920
Speaker 2: had been carefully considered. They were not there was never

203
00:10:05,960 --> 00:10:08,199
Speaker 2: a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of

204
00:10:08,200 --> 00:10:12,079
Speaker 2: obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist

205
00:10:12,160 --> 00:10:15,120
Speaker 2: Kai Eriksson put it, using nuclear weapons was not, by

206
00:10:15,120 --> 00:10:18,160
Speaker 2: any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration.

207
00:10:18,520 --> 00:10:20,640
Speaker 2: We have it on the authority of virtually all the

208
00:10:20,640 --> 00:10:22,920
Speaker 2: principal players that no one in a position to do

209
00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:25,840
Speaker 2: anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the

210
00:10:25,840 --> 00:10:26,600
Speaker 2: bombs on Japan.

211
00:10:27,200 --> 00:10:28,800
Speaker 3: So that's pretty much we have a new toy. Weird,

212
00:10:28,800 --> 00:10:32,439
Speaker 3: We're gonna see what this thing does. Yeah, this sphenometer

213
00:10:32,559 --> 00:10:34,640
Speaker 3: goes up to two hundred, I'm going to two hundred.

214
00:10:34,760 --> 00:10:37,640
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're already planning for the next war. Like they

215
00:10:37,679 --> 00:10:41,680
Speaker 2: handed Lameya list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right,

216
00:10:41,760 --> 00:10:44,000
Speaker 2: Like they wanted to use this thing in part to

217
00:10:44,040 --> 00:10:46,160
Speaker 2: scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that

218
00:10:46,320 --> 00:10:47,720
Speaker 2: was part of their logic, right.

219
00:10:48,800 --> 00:10:49,559
Speaker 3: Yeah.

220
00:10:49,800 --> 00:10:52,800
Speaker 2: Now it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped

221
00:10:52,800 --> 00:10:54,760
Speaker 2: in Japan killed between one hundred and fifty thousand and

222
00:10:54,800 --> 00:10:57,800
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand people. The initial death toll

223
00:10:57,880 --> 00:11:00,120
Speaker 2: was horrific enough, but it was what came after. It

224
00:11:00,200 --> 00:11:03,720
Speaker 2: really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor

225
00:11:03,840 --> 00:11:06,880
Speaker 2: and she described the site of thousands of blinded, burnt

226
00:11:06,880 --> 00:11:09,480
Speaker 2: people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to

227
00:11:09,520 --> 00:11:12,880
Speaker 2: quench their burning bodies, and all of these, like a

228
00:11:12,960 --> 00:11:15,120
Speaker 2: huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were

229
00:11:15,120 --> 00:11:18,079
Speaker 2: just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had

230
00:11:18,120 --> 00:11:21,800
Speaker 2: tossed themselves, burnt and singing and like melting basically into

231
00:11:21,840 --> 00:11:25,319
Speaker 2: the water. It was horrible, And in the days and

232
00:11:25,360 --> 00:11:28,720
Speaker 2: weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood,

233
00:11:28,760 --> 00:11:31,440
Speaker 2: pulling their hair out, and clumps from radiation poisoning. Right, Like,

234
00:11:31,880 --> 00:11:35,800
Speaker 2: this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that

235
00:11:36,240 --> 00:11:38,640
Speaker 2: not only does the bomb kill a shitload of people

236
00:11:38,640 --> 00:11:40,760
Speaker 2: when it goes off, but there are knock on effects

237
00:11:40,760 --> 00:11:43,480
Speaker 2: that continue killing people. Right even though we didn't have

238
00:11:43,480 --> 00:11:45,760
Speaker 2: a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good

239
00:11:45,880 --> 00:11:48,440
Speaker 2: understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people

240
00:11:48,440 --> 00:11:51,880
Speaker 2: with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best

241
00:11:51,920 --> 00:11:55,040
Speaker 2: to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of

242
00:11:55,120 --> 00:11:58,320
Speaker 2: nineteen forty five, General Leslie Groves, who again the military

243
00:11:58,360 --> 00:12:01,199
Speaker 2: head of the Manhattan Project, that before the US Senate

244
00:12:01,280 --> 00:12:03,480
Speaker 2: Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read

245
00:12:03,520 --> 00:12:07,320
Speaker 2: you a selected Q and A from that meeting, Senator Milligan. General,

246
00:12:07,400 --> 00:12:10,920
Speaker 2: is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves.

247
00:12:11,080 --> 00:12:13,160
Speaker 2: I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway.

248
00:12:13,240 --> 00:12:16,240
Speaker 2: I always love it when people say that the radio

249
00:12:16,320 --> 00:12:18,520
Speaker 2: act of casualty can be of several classes. He can

250
00:12:18,559 --> 00:12:20,199
Speaker 2: have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He

251
00:12:20,240 --> 00:12:21,839
Speaker 2: can have a smaller amount which will cause him to

252
00:12:21,840 --> 00:12:24,200
Speaker 2: die rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors,

253
00:12:24,200 --> 00:12:26,640
Speaker 2: without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a

254
00:12:26,760 --> 00:12:29,520
Speaker 2: very pleasant way to die. Oh yeah, that's what people

255
00:12:29,559 --> 00:12:36,880
Speaker 2: say about people say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied, pleasant, chill.

256
00:12:38,320 --> 00:12:40,000
Speaker 3: All the parts of you that tell you that you're

257
00:12:40,040 --> 00:12:41,600
Speaker 3: in trouble are also destroyed.

258
00:12:41,640 --> 00:12:43,880
Speaker 2: So yeah, exactly, you're fine.

259
00:12:44,080 --> 00:12:46,959
Speaker 3: You're chillin now happens to everyone.

260
00:12:47,760 --> 00:12:50,120
Speaker 2: That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing.

261
00:12:50,200 --> 00:12:52,719
Speaker 2: That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more

262
00:12:52,720 --> 00:12:56,560
Speaker 2: palatable for Americans when he said that the average citizen,

263
00:12:56,559 --> 00:12:58,960
Speaker 2: and indeed the average senator, would not have had to

264
00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:02,080
Speaker 2: dig very deep to find at least a little countervailing

265
00:13:02,120 --> 00:13:05,600
Speaker 2: evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had

266
00:13:05,640 --> 00:13:07,800
Speaker 2: happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not

267
00:13:07,920 --> 00:13:11,280
Speaker 2: yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of

268
00:13:11,280 --> 00:13:13,840
Speaker 2: horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast sight

269
00:13:13,960 --> 00:13:16,599
Speaker 2: were available. More to the point, you've heard about the

270
00:13:16,640 --> 00:13:19,079
Speaker 2: radium girls in the like. People had been exposing themselves

271
00:13:19,080 --> 00:13:22,160
Speaker 2: to different kinds of radiation for decades and they died horribly.

272
00:13:22,520 --> 00:13:25,520
Speaker 2: We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever

273
00:13:25,559 --> 00:13:31,160
Speaker 2: dropped an atomic bomb. Right now. Again, the point here

274
00:13:31,200 --> 00:13:33,240
Speaker 2: is that Groves was he was not just lying, He

275
00:13:33,280 --> 00:13:35,760
Speaker 2: was engaged in a cover up. This is a conspiracy,

276
00:13:35,800 --> 00:13:37,920
Speaker 2: and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of

277
00:13:37,960 --> 00:13:40,920
Speaker 2: the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, the campaign

278
00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:44,240
Speaker 2: to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that

279
00:13:44,280 --> 00:13:46,840
Speaker 2: campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors

280
00:13:46,880 --> 00:13:49,240
Speaker 2: of atomic weapons for a little while, longer we knew

281
00:13:49,280 --> 00:13:52,000
Speaker 2: eventually it would get out. Right. These generals all knew

282
00:13:52,240 --> 00:13:56,280
Speaker 2: you can't lie about this forever, right, But the longer

283
00:13:56,320 --> 00:13:58,160
Speaker 2: we lie about it, the more money we get into

284
00:13:58,200 --> 00:14:00,800
Speaker 2: these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the

285
00:14:00,840 --> 00:14:04,600
Speaker 2: more we can centralize the US military and defense apparatus

286
00:14:04,640 --> 00:14:07,640
Speaker 2: around nukes, which was their goal right Their goal was

287
00:14:07,640 --> 00:14:10,360
Speaker 2: replaced as many humans as possible with atomic weapons, and

288
00:14:10,400 --> 00:14:13,880
Speaker 2: they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as

289
00:14:13,920 --> 00:14:16,679
Speaker 2: for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems

290
00:14:16,720 --> 00:14:19,400
Speaker 2: to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark,

291
00:14:19,520 --> 00:14:22,920
Speaker 2: animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after

292
00:14:22,920 --> 00:14:25,000
Speaker 2: the war's end, they set to work launching a new

293
00:14:25,080 --> 00:14:28,560
Speaker 2: kind of campaign, a media blitz targeted at convincing decision

294
00:14:28,560 --> 00:14:31,000
Speaker 2: makers in the US that nukes were the only future

295
00:14:31,040 --> 00:14:33,840
Speaker 2: for the military that was worth caring. About three months

296
00:14:33,880 --> 00:14:36,960
Speaker 2: after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society

297
00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:39,440
Speaker 2: in New York City to give a speech. He warned

298
00:14:39,480 --> 00:14:41,800
Speaker 2: slash promise the men a symbol that the next war,

299
00:14:41,880 --> 00:14:44,200
Speaker 2: understood to be the next World War, would be fought

300
00:14:44,240 --> 00:14:48,120
Speaker 2: with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that

301
00:14:48,200 --> 00:14:50,640
Speaker 2: all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster

302
00:14:50,800 --> 00:14:54,560
Speaker 2: than sound and involve atomic power. So he's he's got

303
00:14:54,560 --> 00:14:58,280
Speaker 2: a pretty clear vision of the future. Our friend Curtis Lamay,

304
00:14:58,400 --> 00:15:00,040
Speaker 2: and he is now trying to sell.

305
00:14:59,880 --> 00:15:04,280
Speaker 3: It and like, are there other because Okay, we have

306
00:15:04,360 --> 00:15:06,600
Speaker 3: this like thing where apparently people who build bombs are

307
00:15:06,600 --> 00:15:08,400
Speaker 3: obsessed with how bombs are the only thing?

308
00:15:08,600 --> 00:15:08,840
Speaker 2: Yes?

309
00:15:08,920 --> 00:15:13,320
Speaker 3: Right? Are there other character classes who feel like similar

310
00:15:13,360 --> 00:15:15,760
Speaker 3: about like, like are like the fighter jets being like, no,

311
00:15:15,920 --> 00:15:17,920
Speaker 3: all that matters is fighter jets?

312
00:15:18,840 --> 00:15:21,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, go ahead, yes there are, and what we will

313
00:15:21,960 --> 00:15:25,200
Speaker 2: talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree

314
00:15:25,200 --> 00:15:27,640
Speaker 2: with le may just want nukes to be used differently.

315
00:15:28,560 --> 00:15:31,160
Speaker 2: But there are some people, there's a couple of decent

316
00:15:31,280 --> 00:15:34,280
Speaker 2: human beings still in the military establishment in this period

317
00:15:34,280 --> 00:15:36,200
Speaker 2: who are like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?

318
00:15:36,800 --> 00:15:37,960
Speaker 2: Are you at our minds?

319
00:15:38,480 --> 00:15:41,800
Speaker 3: Yeah? You know what this thing does? Yeah, I'm able

320
00:15:41,800 --> 00:15:43,960
Speaker 3: to figure out this means to destroy the world.

321
00:15:44,120 --> 00:15:46,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems bad. Why are we building the world

322
00:15:46,880 --> 00:15:48,840
Speaker 2: killing machine? Why are we doing this?

323
00:15:49,400 --> 00:15:50,120
Speaker 3: We live here?

324
00:15:50,480 --> 00:15:53,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the one planet that we've got.

325
00:15:54,160 --> 00:15:54,920
Speaker 3: Yeah.

326
00:15:55,280 --> 00:15:57,720
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen twenty one, do Hay had argued that

327
00:15:57,760 --> 00:16:00,080
Speaker 2: the invention of the bomber craft basically rendered all all

328
00:16:00,120 --> 00:16:02,840
Speaker 2: other types of weaponry obsolete, and LeMay was making a

329
00:16:02,880 --> 00:16:05,400
Speaker 2: similar argument, but with the nuclear weapon at the heart

330
00:16:05,440 --> 00:16:07,840
Speaker 2: of this fabled air force that could finally do the

331
00:16:07,880 --> 00:16:11,240
Speaker 2: whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote,

332
00:16:11,320 --> 00:16:14,560
Speaker 2: the air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained.

333
00:16:14,600 --> 00:16:17,680
Speaker 2: There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to

334
00:16:17,720 --> 00:16:20,840
Speaker 2: our air power development. That doesn't sound at all like

335
00:16:20,840 --> 00:16:25,280
Speaker 2: a crazy man, No, and it's you know, this is

336
00:16:25,320 --> 00:16:27,520
Speaker 2: a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say. One

337
00:16:27,520 --> 00:16:30,000
Speaker 2: thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis Lemy tried

338
00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:32,880
Speaker 2: harder than any single human ever has to end the

339
00:16:32,960 --> 00:16:35,800
Speaker 2: human race and he didn't do it. And I don't

340
00:16:35,880 --> 00:16:39,960
Speaker 2: quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived. Curtis Lamay,

341
00:16:40,120 --> 00:16:42,720
Speaker 2: he would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace

342
00:16:42,800 --> 00:16:45,160
Speaker 2: just to like tweak them, Like he was such a

343
00:16:45,280 --> 00:16:47,800
Speaker 2: piece of shit, And they always had.

344
00:16:47,720 --> 00:16:52,480
Speaker 3: Nukes, right, quantum immortality as a species. That that's all

345
00:16:52,520 --> 00:16:52,840
Speaker 3: I got.

346
00:16:53,480 --> 00:16:57,640
Speaker 2: It's nuts, Like no one has ever tried harder to

347
00:16:57,720 --> 00:17:01,400
Speaker 2: wipe out the human race than Curtis fucking went with

348
00:17:01,560 --> 00:17:05,320
Speaker 2: his fucking dead face. Oh man, it's nuts. I wonder

349
00:17:05,320 --> 00:17:05,760
Speaker 2: if like.

350
00:17:05,720 --> 00:17:08,440
Speaker 3: The villains and pulp stuff from like two hundred years

351
00:17:08,440 --> 00:17:11,280
Speaker 3: ago didn't even claim that they're going to destroy the world,

352
00:17:11,359 --> 00:17:13,760
Speaker 3: whereas like now we have villains who are like, I'm

353
00:17:13,760 --> 00:17:18,560
Speaker 3: going to destroy the world, like yeah, yeah, because people

354
00:17:18,600 --> 00:17:19,560
Speaker 3: can now.

355
00:17:19,440 --> 00:17:22,280
Speaker 2: People can now, and we have examples of people who

356
00:17:22,320 --> 00:17:24,520
Speaker 2: really worked hard to try to do that, you know.

357
00:17:25,160 --> 00:17:27,919
Speaker 2: And this is ultimately kind of why we are now

358
00:17:27,960 --> 00:17:30,040
Speaker 2: at the point where the whole human race is, you know,

359
00:17:30,119 --> 00:17:32,920
Speaker 2: fifteen to thirty minutes away from annihilation at any given

360
00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:35,800
Speaker 2: moment in time, which is Curtis LeMay and a bunch

361
00:17:35,880 --> 00:17:38,320
Speaker 2: of guys that followed him felt the air force, and

362
00:17:38,359 --> 00:17:41,359
Speaker 2: to them this means the nuclear air force must be

363
00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:45,560
Speaker 2: allowed to develop, unhindered and unschained. I cannot emphasize enough

364
00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:47,919
Speaker 2: how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio Society was

365
00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:51,080
Speaker 2: just warmed up do Hay. He insisted no air attack,

366
00:17:51,160 --> 00:17:54,080
Speaker 2: once it is launched, can be completely stopped. This was

367
00:17:54,080 --> 00:17:55,960
Speaker 2: an echo of du Hay's argument that the sky was

368
00:17:55,960 --> 00:17:59,439
Speaker 2: too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right, And

369
00:17:59,520 --> 00:18:01,920
Speaker 2: this hadn't proved true in World War Two, But when

370
00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:04,960
Speaker 2: you got nukes, it kind of is true. Right. If

371
00:18:04,960 --> 00:18:07,440
Speaker 2: you send five hundred bombers and they each have a nuke,

372
00:18:07,680 --> 00:18:09,600
Speaker 2: one of them is going to drop that fucker, you know.

373
00:18:09,880 --> 00:18:14,280
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, yeah,

374
00:18:14,520 --> 00:18:17,280
Speaker 3: this feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure.

375
00:18:18,359 --> 00:18:21,280
Speaker 3: Do May and lou Hay, Yeah, do Hay and le May?

376
00:18:21,800 --> 00:18:24,720
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It is weird how history literally rhyme.

377
00:18:24,840 --> 00:18:27,480
Speaker 3: Yeah. I hadn't even got that fuck no, because I

378
00:18:27,520 --> 00:18:29,320
Speaker 3: was trying to remember which one was which.

379
00:18:29,400 --> 00:18:32,240
Speaker 2: Yeah. Dueyes, the old Italian guy who was like in

380
00:18:32,359 --> 00:18:35,320
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty one Bombers of the Future all, we need

381
00:18:35,560 --> 00:18:37,480
Speaker 2: no use in having anything else.

382
00:18:38,080 --> 00:18:40,600
Speaker 3: Yeah. A couple decades later, the man who rhymes says

383
00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:42,320
Speaker 3: the same thing, right, nuke.

384
00:18:42,600 --> 00:18:44,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you get if anyone gets into the military

385
00:18:44,840 --> 00:18:47,439
Speaker 2: whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we

386
00:18:47,560 --> 00:18:52,879
Speaker 2: need to redact it immediately. So, as Richard, I'm going

387
00:18:52,920 --> 00:18:54,359
Speaker 2: to quote now from a piece in The New Yorker

388
00:18:54,359 --> 00:18:56,480
Speaker 2: by Richard Rhodes in which he lays out le May's

389
00:18:56,560 --> 00:18:59,040
Speaker 2: thinking in the rest of this speech, and it all

390
00:18:59,119 --> 00:19:01,680
Speaker 2: kind of follows from the bay that you can't stop

391
00:19:01,720 --> 00:19:04,720
Speaker 2: an aerial nuclear attack. Quote. This meant to le May

392
00:19:04,800 --> 00:19:06,560
Speaker 2: that the United States would have to have an air

393
00:19:06,600 --> 00:19:10,320
Speaker 2: force in being that could immediately move immediately to retaliate

394
00:19:10,320 --> 00:19:13,399
Speaker 2: if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the

395
00:19:13,440 --> 00:19:15,440
Speaker 2: thread of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in

396
00:19:15,480 --> 00:19:18,160
Speaker 2: the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come.

397
00:19:18,200 --> 00:19:20,800
Speaker 2: It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare

398
00:19:20,840 --> 00:19:23,360
Speaker 2: to attack us if we are prepared. So in November

399
00:19:23,400 --> 00:19:25,960
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty five, l May was already thinking in

400
00:19:26,040 --> 00:19:28,920
Speaker 2: terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein

401
00:19:29,000 --> 00:19:32,480
Speaker 2: lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped,

402
00:19:32,600 --> 00:19:35,399
Speaker 2: then retaliation would not protect the country, It would only

403
00:19:35,480 --> 00:19:39,359
Speaker 2: destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right, And what he

404
00:19:39,440 --> 00:19:42,359
Speaker 2: means by an air force in being is you always

405
00:19:42,400 --> 00:19:47,200
Speaker 2: have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs ready to fly

406
00:19:47,880 --> 00:19:50,560
Speaker 2: minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean

407
00:19:50,560 --> 00:19:53,239
Speaker 2: you always have planes in the air with nukes. And

408
00:19:53,280 --> 00:19:55,639
Speaker 2: that's going to mean for a period of like a

409
00:19:55,640 --> 00:19:59,359
Speaker 2: couple decades, there are never not nukes flying around in

410
00:19:59,400 --> 00:20:05,040
Speaker 2: the air always. And this is before there's no governor

411
00:20:05,080 --> 00:20:07,920
Speaker 2: on these. This is not a thing today. Every nuke

412
00:20:07,960 --> 00:20:09,240
Speaker 2: that we have you have to get like codes and

413
00:20:09,280 --> 00:20:12,040
Speaker 2: shit from the nuclear football. This is some guys in

414
00:20:12,080 --> 00:20:15,560
Speaker 2: a plane have the ability to activate these things.

415
00:20:15,320 --> 00:20:17,840
Speaker 3: Right, You're like, oh, my wife left me.

416
00:20:18,080 --> 00:20:21,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the

417
00:20:21,800 --> 00:20:27,800
Speaker 2: Cold War. Yeah yeah, so yeah. What we see in

418
00:20:27,800 --> 00:20:29,639
Speaker 2: this period as early as nineteen forty five as men

419
00:20:29,680 --> 00:20:32,199
Speaker 2: in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in

420
00:20:32,240 --> 00:20:35,400
Speaker 2: minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians.

421
00:20:35,680 --> 00:20:38,720
Speaker 2: People were tired after World War Two, soldiers long deployed

422
00:20:38,760 --> 00:20:41,760
Speaker 2: wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed

423
00:20:41,760 --> 00:20:44,200
Speaker 2: to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military.

424
00:20:44,440 --> 00:20:46,280
Speaker 2: Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the

425
00:20:46,359 --> 00:20:49,959
Speaker 2: US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments.

426
00:20:50,240 --> 00:20:52,959
Speaker 2: Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an

427
00:20:52,960 --> 00:20:56,240
Speaker 2: impossible problem. I'm gonna quote from Rhodes again. In the

428
00:20:56,280 --> 00:20:58,280
Speaker 2: four years that the United States held a monopoly on

429
00:20:58,359 --> 00:21:01,479
Speaker 2: nuclear weapons, it reduced its mild terry forces to bare bones,

430
00:21:01,600 --> 00:21:03,920
Speaker 2: shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly

431
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:06,919
Speaker 2: ninety billion dollars to less than fifteen billion dollars, and

432
00:21:07,000 --> 00:21:09,360
Speaker 2: counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter

433
00:21:09,480 --> 00:21:12,040
Speaker 2: as Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war ravaged

434
00:21:12,080 --> 00:21:15,840
Speaker 2: Western Europe right. And this is kind of the first

435
00:21:16,200 --> 00:21:19,080
Speaker 2: use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

436
00:21:19,119 --> 00:21:22,159
Speaker 2: which is, we can't keep all these soldiers in the field,

437
00:21:22,160 --> 00:21:25,280
Speaker 2: but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the

438
00:21:25,640 --> 00:21:28,879
Speaker 2: scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes

439
00:21:28,920 --> 00:21:30,479
Speaker 2: all over the place. That way, we don't need as

440
00:21:30,480 --> 00:21:32,159
Speaker 2: many guys. We can just set off a shitload of

441
00:21:32,240 --> 00:21:35,360
Speaker 2: nukes and we can slow these these Russians down while

442
00:21:35,400 --> 00:21:37,639
Speaker 2: we get our shit in gear, you know. And this

443
00:21:38,400 --> 00:21:41,439
Speaker 2: works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have

444
00:21:41,520 --> 00:21:43,840
Speaker 2: a bomb, right, because they don't have anything to counter

445
00:21:43,920 --> 00:21:47,639
Speaker 2: this with. Hap Arnold sent a letter in nineteen forty

446
00:21:47,640 --> 00:21:50,160
Speaker 2: five laying out he's an air force general laying out

447
00:21:50,160 --> 00:21:52,080
Speaker 2: some of the first principles. While the air force doesn't

448
00:21:52,119 --> 00:21:55,680
Speaker 2: exist yet, he's an army air thing general laying out

449
00:21:55,680 --> 00:21:57,479
Speaker 2: some of the first principles for what would become the

450
00:21:57,480 --> 00:22:00,560
Speaker 2: theory of deterrence. Quote. We must thereforece it cure our

451
00:22:00,680 --> 00:22:04,280
Speaker 2: nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques

452
00:22:04,440 --> 00:22:06,960
Speaker 2: required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to

453
00:22:06,960 --> 00:22:10,840
Speaker 2: deter them from launching. A modern devastating war. In order

454
00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:14,040
Speaker 2: to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific

455
00:22:14,080 --> 00:22:16,600
Speaker 2: projects the Air Force should support over the next twenty

456
00:22:16,600 --> 00:22:19,760
Speaker 2: to thirty years. This resulted in nineteen forty six and

457
00:22:19,840 --> 00:22:22,880
Speaker 2: the Air Force setting up the RAND Corporation. You've heard

458
00:22:22,920 --> 00:22:23,920
Speaker 2: of the RAND Corporation.

459
00:22:24,160 --> 00:22:26,359
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did not know that they were Air Force.

460
00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:29,280
Speaker 2: Yes, that's how they start. And RAND just means R

461
00:22:29,320 --> 00:22:31,840
Speaker 2: and D like literally, that's why it's brand. Right.

462
00:22:32,600 --> 00:22:34,680
Speaker 3: Oh shit, Okay, I assume to someone's name.

463
00:22:35,080 --> 00:22:37,320
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the RAND Corporation that They're set up in

464
00:22:37,359 --> 00:22:42,040
Speaker 2: Santa Monica, right on the coast, beautiful area, and a

465
00:22:42,080 --> 00:22:45,919
Speaker 2: former defense engineer named James Rubell later wrote of this

466
00:22:46,080 --> 00:22:49,520
Speaker 2: is the first RAND project. Rand quickly proposed a death

467
00:22:49,600 --> 00:22:54,080
Speaker 2: ray project, which the Air Force approved. So top man, guys,

468
00:22:54,119 --> 00:22:57,280
Speaker 2: everyone's super sane. Not a bunch of dudes whose brains

469
00:22:57,280 --> 00:22:59,560
Speaker 2: have been melted by lead and war trauma just trying

470
00:22:59,600 --> 00:23:02,720
Speaker 2: to come up with apocalypse weapons. I don't know, guys,

471
00:23:02,760 --> 00:23:05,359
Speaker 2: death ray feels like a good idea. Let's get one

472
00:23:05,359 --> 00:23:07,280
Speaker 2: of those fuckers. I watched War of the World's to

473
00:23:07,280 --> 00:23:10,880
Speaker 2: hell with it now, And to be honest, if we've

474
00:23:10,880 --> 00:23:12,760
Speaker 2: made a death ray. That would be pretty cool.

475
00:23:13,440 --> 00:23:15,000
Speaker 3: Yeah, would it be a second amendment? You know?

476
00:23:15,200 --> 00:23:19,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret. Yeah,

477
00:23:19,840 --> 00:23:23,280
Speaker 2: I'm ready for a death ray. I think I think

478
00:23:23,320 --> 00:23:24,320
Speaker 2: certain people should know it.

479
00:23:24,960 --> 00:23:27,520
Speaker 3: Death ray is a one on one It's not really

480
00:23:27,560 --> 00:23:29,560
Speaker 3: a major step up from bullets, you know.

481
00:23:29,680 --> 00:23:34,440
Speaker 2: No, it's probably faster and less painless to get shot with. Yeah,

482
00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:37,520
Speaker 2: you know, and I bet it's I don't know, good

483
00:23:37,520 --> 00:23:39,800
Speaker 2: at killing martians, which we might need to do if

484
00:23:39,800 --> 00:23:43,320
Speaker 2: Elon Musk ever sets up a colony on Mars anyway.

485
00:23:43,040 --> 00:23:45,240
Speaker 3: So I think we're both pro death rays.

486
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:48,360
Speaker 2: I actually I've come around on the Rand Corporation, Margaret,

487
00:23:48,800 --> 00:23:52,119
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be honest with you. Yeah, speaking of the

488
00:23:52,200 --> 00:23:55,359
Speaker 2: Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast. Not the

489
00:23:55,440 --> 00:23:58,320
Speaker 2: Rand Corporation, because we're primarily talking about how they nearly

490
00:23:58,400 --> 00:23:59,960
Speaker 2: killed everyone like a million times.

491
00:24:00,640 --> 00:24:03,439
Speaker 3: It's the we're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why

492
00:24:03,520 --> 00:24:06,600
Speaker 3: we were coming out so strong on deathrays right now.

493
00:24:06,520 --> 00:24:09,600
Speaker 2: That's right. And actually, our the company, the death ray

494
00:24:09,640 --> 00:24:12,159
Speaker 2: company that sponsors us, is called life Ray, you know,

495
00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:14,080
Speaker 2: because it'll it's it's a it's a it's a death

496
00:24:14,160 --> 00:24:17,560
Speaker 2: Ray for personal defense. You know, yeah, keep say lives,

497
00:24:17,800 --> 00:24:28,200
Speaker 2: It saves lives. That's that's the life Ray. And we're

498
00:24:28,320 --> 00:24:32,760
Speaker 2: back having a good time. So right around the time

499
00:24:32,760 --> 00:24:35,320
Speaker 2: the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war

500
00:24:35,440 --> 00:24:38,760
Speaker 2: is over, because the normal normal life is starting to

501
00:24:38,800 --> 00:24:41,639
Speaker 2: reassert itself, for at least the new normal, some people

502
00:24:41,800 --> 00:24:44,320
Speaker 2: have begun to question the logic with which men like

503
00:24:44,359 --> 00:24:47,160
Speaker 2: bomber Harris Curtis LeMay in General Power. I still can't

504
00:24:47,160 --> 00:24:50,119
Speaker 2: believe his literal name was General fucking Power approached a

505
00:24:50,240 --> 00:24:55,960
Speaker 2: real warfare. Was it really possible to break in? Yeah? Right?

506
00:24:56,040 --> 00:24:57,240
Speaker 3: Yeah?

507
00:24:57,440 --> 00:25:00,320
Speaker 2: Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing? Right?

508
00:25:00,359 --> 00:25:03,040
Speaker 2: This was a question that people. You know, there are

509
00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:05,080
Speaker 2: guys like LeMay that like, obviously it is, look at

510
00:25:05,119 --> 00:25:07,239
Speaker 2: what we did, And there are more thoughtful men who

511
00:25:07,280 --> 00:25:10,160
Speaker 2: are like, actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out.

512
00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:12,359
Speaker 2: And I want to read a quote here about members

513
00:25:12,359 --> 00:25:15,719
Speaker 2: of the Strategic Bombing Survey from Kinney's book Fifteen Minutes,

514
00:25:16,920 --> 00:25:19,480
Speaker 2: How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective

515
00:25:19,480 --> 00:25:23,119
Speaker 2: were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants,

516
00:25:23,119 --> 00:25:26,120
Speaker 2: the loss of which ravaged the Germans war, making capabilities

517
00:25:26,119 --> 00:25:28,920
Speaker 2: and destroyed their economy. This led to post war air

518
00:25:28,960 --> 00:25:32,639
Speaker 2: atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike,

519
00:25:32,920 --> 00:25:34,960
Speaker 2: key targets that, if destroyed, would have a large and

520
00:25:35,000 --> 00:25:38,200
Speaker 2: effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction. These plants

521
00:25:38,200 --> 00:25:41,080
Speaker 2: were often located in major urban areas, said one Air

522
00:25:41,119 --> 00:25:43,440
Speaker 2: Force general of this conundrum. I think it was sort

523
00:25:43,440 --> 00:25:45,040
Speaker 2: of a shock to people when a few began to

524
00:25:45,080 --> 00:25:48,520
Speaker 2: talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital, and particularly

525
00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:50,240
Speaker 2: when they began to ask, what was a city but

526
00:25:50,280 --> 00:25:55,399
Speaker 2: a collection of industry and that's an important Yeah, it's hideous.

527
00:25:55,640 --> 00:25:58,160
Speaker 3: Fuck do they live? It must be these are suburbanites.

528
00:25:58,200 --> 00:25:59,960
Speaker 3: This is because suburbanites have entered the world.

529
00:26:00,080 --> 00:26:02,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and are out running the army share.

530
00:26:03,160 --> 00:26:03,480
Speaker 3: Yeah.

531
00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:06,159
Speaker 2: But that term bonus effects is used a lot in

532
00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:09,200
Speaker 2: nuclear war planning, and a bonus effect is the added

533
00:26:09,240 --> 00:26:13,000
Speaker 2: destruction that you get while destroying the targets you're actually

534
00:26:13,080 --> 00:26:14,840
Speaker 2: aiming at. In atomic war, so.

535
00:26:14,760 --> 00:26:16,879
Speaker 3: You're trying to take out of collateral damage. But it's

536
00:26:16,880 --> 00:26:17,760
Speaker 3: the same concept, but.

537
00:26:17,760 --> 00:26:21,280
Speaker 2: It's collateral damage but good, right, Like, yeah, we needed

538
00:26:21,280 --> 00:26:23,000
Speaker 2: to take out this tank factory and we killed a

539
00:26:23,040 --> 00:26:27,040
Speaker 2: million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby, right, Yeah,

540
00:26:27,080 --> 00:26:30,760
Speaker 2: And there's other bonus effects. Radiation, poisoning causes bonus effects.

541
00:26:30,840 --> 00:26:34,320
Speaker 2: Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they

542
00:26:34,359 --> 00:26:38,480
Speaker 2: cause fire storms, massive firestorms, some theoretically some like the

543
00:26:38,520 --> 00:26:40,879
Speaker 2: size of states, right, And that's a bonus effect, you know.

544
00:26:41,320 --> 00:26:42,880
Speaker 3: I mean, as they've been trying to do that since

545
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:45,240
Speaker 3: the beginning, based on what you've told me last week.

546
00:26:45,280 --> 00:26:47,879
Speaker 2: And they have been you know, a firestorm really fucks

547
00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:50,040
Speaker 2: people up. People don't like firestorms.

548
00:26:50,440 --> 00:26:50,480
Speaker 4: No.

549
00:26:51,040 --> 00:26:53,960
Speaker 2: The argument military leaders were making about the future for

550
00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:56,320
Speaker 2: the first four years after World War Two can best

551
00:26:56,320 --> 00:26:59,920
Speaker 2: be summarized by a memo General Loris Norstad, Assistant Chief

552
00:27:00,119 --> 00:27:02,760
Speaker 2: Staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in nineteen

553
00:27:02,840 --> 00:27:04,960
Speaker 2: forty five. He laid out the need for a ready

554
00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:07,720
Speaker 2: force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere

555
00:27:07,720 --> 00:27:10,040
Speaker 2: in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives,

556
00:27:10,040 --> 00:27:12,400
Speaker 2: he argued the existence of this ready force would act

557
00:27:12,400 --> 00:27:15,600
Speaker 2: as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons.

558
00:27:15,880 --> 00:27:17,960
Speaker 2: So first, we need a ready force so that no

559
00:27:18,000 --> 00:27:20,680
Speaker 2: one else will get nukes. If we always have planes

560
00:27:20,720 --> 00:27:22,720
Speaker 2: ready to nuke people, no one else will even try

561
00:27:22,760 --> 00:27:25,160
Speaker 2: to get them, right, this is this is their first argument,

562
00:27:25,280 --> 00:27:25,480
Speaker 2: you know.

563
00:27:25,800 --> 00:27:28,480
Speaker 3: Yeah, not as strong as the argument that I think

564
00:27:28,560 --> 00:27:30,400
Speaker 3: this coming based on what you told me last week.

565
00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:33,320
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah. Now, this Ready Force is established in March

566
00:27:33,359 --> 00:27:35,320
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty six as part of what becomes known

567
00:27:35,320 --> 00:27:40,040
Speaker 2: as the Strategic Air Command. The ESSAC is responsible not

568
00:27:40,160 --> 00:27:42,560
Speaker 2: just for nukes, but for the Air force's long range

569
00:27:42,600 --> 00:27:46,000
Speaker 2: bombing operations. Right when we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam,

570
00:27:46,320 --> 00:27:48,840
Speaker 2: the SACS, especially in Korea, going to be heavily involved.

571
00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:51,240
Speaker 2: And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars, but

572
00:27:51,840 --> 00:27:54,000
Speaker 2: they come to control a lot of our nukes, and

573
00:27:54,000 --> 00:27:56,159
Speaker 2: they come to control our long range missile assets. I

574
00:27:56,200 --> 00:28:00,080
Speaker 2: say control. Technically all of our nuclear weapons at this

575
00:28:00,119 --> 00:28:03,080
Speaker 2: point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right,

576
00:28:03,400 --> 00:28:06,199
Speaker 2: and they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that

577
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:07,960
Speaker 2: we're starting to build in the post war period.

578
00:28:08,080 --> 00:28:08,280
Speaker 4: Right.

579
00:28:08,640 --> 00:28:10,760
Speaker 2: But what you're going to see happen during these first

580
00:28:10,800 --> 00:28:13,720
Speaker 2: four or five years after the war is we're increasingly

581
00:28:13,760 --> 00:28:17,520
Speaker 2: deploying nuclear weapons around the world to have this this

582
00:28:17,640 --> 00:28:21,440
Speaker 2: air force in readiness, right, this ready Force, and so Basically,

583
00:28:21,480 --> 00:28:24,320
Speaker 2: they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and SAC is

584
00:28:24,680 --> 00:28:27,399
Speaker 2: maintaining control of them. Right, but you know, the SAC

585
00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:30,080
Speaker 2: gets them from the Atomic Energy Commission and the.

586
00:28:30,119 --> 00:28:32,920
Speaker 3: SC surprise that none of them got stolen.

587
00:28:33,119 --> 00:28:37,040
Speaker 2: Oh they oh, Margaret, just wait, none of them got stolen. Maybe,

588
00:28:37,240 --> 00:28:40,880
Speaker 2: but we lose a lot of these fucking bombs, okadh huh,

589
00:28:41,080 --> 00:28:43,840
Speaker 2: We'll get to that. But the SAC today. One of

590
00:28:43,880 --> 00:28:46,120
Speaker 2: the things that scares me about our current nuclear force

591
00:28:46,240 --> 00:28:48,640
Speaker 2: is that it is the shittiest job in the Air Force,

592
00:28:48,640 --> 00:28:51,160
Speaker 2: maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this,

593
00:28:51,280 --> 00:28:52,760
Speaker 2: but I've talked to a couple of nukes and they

594
00:28:53,080 --> 00:28:56,080
Speaker 2: did not like it. It is not a prestigious job.

595
00:28:56,160 --> 00:28:58,760
Speaker 2: It is not a fun job. It is boring that

596
00:28:58,880 --> 00:29:01,560
Speaker 2: people cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in

597
00:29:01,640 --> 00:29:04,560
Speaker 2: nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a

598
00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:07,600
Speaker 2: shit job. In this period of time, it is not

599
00:29:07,840 --> 00:29:10,080
Speaker 2: seen as a shit job. These are seen as this

600
00:29:10,200 --> 00:29:12,240
Speaker 2: is the best part of the military to be in.

601
00:29:12,280 --> 00:29:15,360
Speaker 2: This is the most elite force in the military. It's

602
00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:16,959
Speaker 2: certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind

603
00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:19,160
Speaker 2: of pilot, right, and these are the best pilots and

604
00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:22,000
Speaker 2: engineers that our entire military can put together, right, and

605
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:26,400
Speaker 2: they're tasked with a singular purpose, so it's different. At

606
00:29:26,400 --> 00:29:29,400
Speaker 2: this point, that is probably what you want. Now, that's

607
00:29:29,760 --> 00:29:33,400
Speaker 2: the idea. It's debatable are they ever really that good?

608
00:29:33,680 --> 00:29:36,840
Speaker 2: We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the

609
00:29:36,920 --> 00:29:39,200
Speaker 2: SAC in nineteen forty eight. He's not the first guy

610
00:29:39,240 --> 00:29:40,920
Speaker 2: in charge of it, but he takes command and he

611
00:29:41,000 --> 00:29:44,280
Speaker 2: really he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year,

612
00:29:44,400 --> 00:29:48,920
Speaker 2: nineteen forty nine, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead,

613
00:29:49,560 --> 00:29:52,280
Speaker 2: terrifying members of the US defense establishment. There had been

614
00:29:52,320 --> 00:29:54,640
Speaker 2: a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and well,

615
00:29:54,680 --> 00:29:57,600
Speaker 2: of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program.

616
00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:01,880
Speaker 2: They have resources, They've got spies, are gonna get a bomb, right,

617
00:30:02,080 --> 00:30:04,880
Speaker 2: they have the ability to get uranium or platonia, all

618
00:30:04,880 --> 00:30:08,400
Speaker 2: this whatever shit they need. It's it's there's like a

619
00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:10,520
Speaker 2: fifth of the world's land masks. They have the ability

620
00:30:10,560 --> 00:30:11,000
Speaker 2: to do this.

621
00:30:11,480 --> 00:30:13,560
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we invented the wheel. No one else has

622
00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:15,680
Speaker 3: the wheel. No one figure out the wheel.

623
00:30:15,800 --> 00:30:19,320
Speaker 2: They figured out machine guns too, goddamn it. No, of

624
00:30:19,360 --> 00:30:21,320
Speaker 2: course they were going to do this, but there were,

625
00:30:21,520 --> 00:30:23,720
Speaker 2: and it's a mix. There were plenty of people. Obviously,

626
00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:25,680
Speaker 2: there were a number of people in our military who

627
00:30:25,760 --> 00:30:27,640
Speaker 2: knew that this was going to happen at some point.

628
00:30:27,920 --> 00:30:29,600
Speaker 2: But there are a lot of people who are shocked,

629
00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:31,920
Speaker 2: right and are terrifying, like, oh my god, I can't

630
00:30:31,920 --> 00:30:34,240
Speaker 2: believe the Communists figured out this bomb? Right?

631
00:30:34,960 --> 00:30:37,200
Speaker 3: Is this because that like spy couple or is that.

632
00:30:37,680 --> 00:30:40,880
Speaker 2: They there are several spies who play a role, And honestly,

633
00:30:41,040 --> 00:30:45,200
Speaker 2: I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear

634
00:30:45,200 --> 00:30:48,240
Speaker 2: weapons from being used again in war than anything else.

635
00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:51,040
Speaker 2: I think once the US has them, if the Soviets

636
00:30:51,120 --> 00:30:53,800
Speaker 2: didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up

637
00:30:53,880 --> 00:30:56,240
Speaker 2: nuking the USSR at some point. Right, Yeah, that seems

638
00:30:56,360 --> 00:30:58,800
Speaker 2: very like that's unprovable, but that that's kind of where

639
00:30:58,840 --> 00:31:02,040
Speaker 2: I come in, right, Like, well, it's kind of the gun.

640
00:31:02,720 --> 00:31:05,200
Speaker 2: It's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were

641
00:31:05,400 --> 00:31:09,280
Speaker 2: no semi automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in

642
00:31:09,400 --> 00:31:12,280
Speaker 2: the country? That would probably be more pleasant? Am I

643
00:31:12,400 --> 00:31:15,600
Speaker 2: not gonna have one? When the crazy ass motherfuckers I

644
00:31:15,680 --> 00:31:16,360
Speaker 2: know have them?

645
00:31:16,360 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 3: Like, ah, the people who want to kill me have it?

646
00:31:20,080 --> 00:31:21,920
Speaker 3: Ye have read enough history to know what happens after

647
00:31:21,960 --> 00:31:22,680
Speaker 3: you disarm.

648
00:31:23,120 --> 00:31:25,520
Speaker 2: And here's the problem. That's there's a logic to that,

649
00:31:25,600 --> 00:31:27,760
Speaker 2: and also that leads us both to having four hundred

650
00:31:27,800 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 2: million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes.

651
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:30,400
Speaker 4: Right.

652
00:31:30,480 --> 00:31:33,760
Speaker 2: So it's like, I understand the thought process, but it

653
00:31:33,840 --> 00:31:36,480
Speaker 2: might fundamentally be what's doomed? What will do us?

654
00:31:36,560 --> 00:31:36,800
Speaker 1: Right?

655
00:31:39,280 --> 00:31:41,680
Speaker 2: So there's a degree to which, like I have to

656
00:31:41,720 --> 00:31:44,240
Speaker 2: put myself in the in where these guys are. And

657
00:31:44,560 --> 00:31:46,600
Speaker 2: keep in mind, this is not a period of time

658
00:31:46,640 --> 00:31:48,400
Speaker 2: in which all of our generals are most or many

659
00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:50,360
Speaker 2: of them are dudes who just came up and have

660
00:31:50,440 --> 00:31:53,280
Speaker 2: done this as like a desk job. Right. All of

661
00:31:53,320 --> 00:31:56,480
Speaker 2: these Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these

662
00:31:56,480 --> 00:31:59,160
Speaker 2: guys did, right. So these dudes are fucked up and

663
00:31:59,320 --> 00:32:03,640
Speaker 2: crazy at this point. These people live incinerated cities from

664
00:32:03,680 --> 00:32:08,840
Speaker 2: the sky. They're not thinking the way normal people think anymore. Yeah,

665
00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:10,760
Speaker 2: and the same is true of the Soviets. By the way,

666
00:32:10,760 --> 00:32:13,120
Speaker 2: they lost twenty million people in this war. The Soviets

667
00:32:13,120 --> 00:32:15,200
Speaker 2: were not getting into it because I have less detail

668
00:32:15,280 --> 00:32:18,400
Speaker 2: on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to

669
00:32:18,440 --> 00:32:21,160
Speaker 2: the US, right, sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a

670
00:32:21,160 --> 00:32:25,240
Speaker 2: little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged

671
00:32:25,240 --> 00:32:28,280
Speaker 2: by this hideous war, Right, so I do have a

672
00:32:28,320 --> 00:32:30,240
Speaker 2: little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not

673
00:32:30,360 --> 00:32:31,800
Speaker 2: have gone bad? Right?

674
00:32:32,640 --> 00:32:33,040
Speaker 3: Yeah?

675
00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:38,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for quite a while after the Soviets detonate

676
00:32:38,160 --> 00:32:40,880
Speaker 2: their first Adam Baum, the US will retain a massive

677
00:32:40,880 --> 00:32:43,720
Speaker 2: advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right, That will

678
00:32:43,720 --> 00:32:46,400
Speaker 2: not last forever. Eventually we reach parity. I think they

679
00:32:46,400 --> 00:32:48,360
Speaker 2: do actually beat us at one point in total number

680
00:32:48,360 --> 00:32:50,240
Speaker 2: of news. So it's a little hard to know. But

681
00:32:50,480 --> 00:32:53,440
Speaker 2: from this point forward there was no denying that nuclear

682
00:32:53,480 --> 00:32:56,880
Speaker 2: deterrence would eventually be a thing, right, And so you

683
00:32:56,920 --> 00:32:59,440
Speaker 2: wind up in this there's the nineteen like fifty to

684
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:03,080
Speaker 2: like fifty two to fifty three. Is this insanely dangerous,

685
00:33:03,160 --> 00:33:05,920
Speaker 2: dangerous period really up until like the early sixties, where

686
00:33:06,360 --> 00:33:09,160
Speaker 2: the Soviets have some nukes but not all that many,

687
00:33:09,440 --> 00:33:11,960
Speaker 2: and the US has a lot, and we could have

688
00:33:12,040 --> 00:33:14,440
Speaker 2: started and won a nuclear war. It would have been

689
00:33:14,520 --> 00:33:17,000
Speaker 2: really pretty easy for US. Right. There would have been

690
00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:19,480
Speaker 2: casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would

691
00:33:19,520 --> 00:33:22,320
Speaker 2: have mostly been over in Europe, right, because the Soviet

692
00:33:22,400 --> 00:33:24,120
Speaker 2: Union just didn't have a lot of bombs. And they

693
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:26,440
Speaker 2: didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs

694
00:33:26,480 --> 00:33:29,840
Speaker 2: over here. There's no ycbms. You're flying fucking bombers, right,

695
00:33:31,480 --> 00:33:35,320
Speaker 2: so we would have lost Alaska maybe, right, Like their

696
00:33:35,360 --> 00:33:37,880
Speaker 2: long range bombing capacity, especially in like nineteen forty nine

697
00:33:37,880 --> 00:33:40,360
Speaker 2: to fifty is it probably could have accomplished that, but

698
00:33:40,400 --> 00:33:45,000
Speaker 2: it wasn't great. Right. In nineteen fifty, a year after

699
00:33:45,040 --> 00:33:47,680
Speaker 2: the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly

700
00:33:47,720 --> 00:33:51,720
Speaker 2: three hundred nuclear weapons, The USSR had five. The newly

701
00:33:51,760 --> 00:33:54,400
Speaker 2: founded Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Department of Defense,

702
00:33:54,560 --> 00:33:57,520
Speaker 2: which that'll get started in this post war period, right,

703
00:33:57,520 --> 00:33:59,640
Speaker 2: we don't have the Joint Chiefs or like you know

704
00:33:59,720 --> 00:34:02,600
Speaker 2: in World War two. Right, this is a post war innovation,

705
00:34:02,760 --> 00:34:04,760
Speaker 2: you know, if you want to call it that. But

706
00:34:04,800 --> 00:34:07,200
Speaker 2: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DoD had concluded,

707
00:34:07,240 --> 00:34:09,640
Speaker 2: after a study that some two hundred nuclear bombs would

708
00:34:09,640 --> 00:34:13,480
Speaker 2: be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth, quote, leaving

709
00:34:13,520 --> 00:34:18,200
Speaker 2: only the stigial remnants of man's material works, that is,

710
00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:21,200
Speaker 2: the Joint Chiefs. They say two hundred nukes will do that,

711
00:34:21,560 --> 00:34:28,839
Speaker 2: and so we build three hundred. Yeah, cool, Well we'll

712
00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:31,120
Speaker 2: get a lot more. By nineteen fifty one will have

713
00:34:31,160 --> 00:34:32,720
Speaker 2: more than four hundred such weapons.

714
00:34:32,840 --> 00:34:33,040
Speaker 4: Right.

715
00:34:33,360 --> 00:34:35,720
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power,

716
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:38,680
Speaker 2: the USSR goes from one to fifty atomic weapons of

717
00:34:38,760 --> 00:34:43,560
Speaker 2: varying power. Shortly after taking over the ESSAC, LeMay decided

718
00:34:43,600 --> 00:34:46,480
Speaker 2: that the new post war air force had gotten sloppy,

719
00:34:46,600 --> 00:34:49,520
Speaker 2: and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio

720
00:34:49,600 --> 00:34:53,080
Speaker 2: to prove it a massive bomber. I love that. He's like, well,

721
00:34:53,160 --> 00:34:55,279
Speaker 2: let's have them pretend to blow up Dayton. See how

722
00:34:55,320 --> 00:34:59,319
Speaker 2: good the Ohio Yeah, fuck it. So he has this

723
00:34:59,440 --> 00:35:02,160
Speaker 2: massive raid over the city. That's like, it's a fake.

724
00:35:02,200 --> 00:35:04,880
Speaker 2: They're not dropping real bombs obviously, but all of the

725
00:35:04,880 --> 00:35:07,799
Speaker 2: fake bombs are horribly off target. Like every they fuck

726
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:11,320
Speaker 2: up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs

727
00:35:11,320 --> 00:35:15,040
Speaker 2: to save their goddamn lives. Right, This is probably less

728
00:35:15,080 --> 00:35:17,080
Speaker 2: on training. I mean there's some degree of training. It's

729
00:35:17,120 --> 00:35:19,640
Speaker 2: more than just like, bombers aren't great at hitting things

730
00:35:19,680 --> 00:35:24,000
Speaker 2: precisely at this point. Yeah, yeah, And nukes.

731
00:35:23,719 --> 00:35:27,320
Speaker 3: Are not TV guided I remembering that TV.

732
00:35:27,880 --> 00:35:30,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, not quite yet. And it's the kind of thing,

733
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:33,400
Speaker 2: you know, one of the benefits of nukes. It's horrible

734
00:35:33,400 --> 00:35:34,799
Speaker 2: to say this, but it is a benefit from a

735
00:35:34,800 --> 00:35:36,560
Speaker 2: military standpoint is that you don't have to be very

736
00:35:36,600 --> 00:35:38,680
Speaker 2: accurate because it's a fucking nuke, right.

737
00:35:38,640 --> 00:35:41,800
Speaker 3: Yeah, but people say the shotguns but real.

738
00:35:41,880 --> 00:35:44,799
Speaker 2: Right, But but accurate, yes, accurate, Like you really can

739
00:35:44,920 --> 00:35:46,799
Speaker 2: be pretty far off with the nuke, can still hit

740
00:35:46,800 --> 00:35:49,840
Speaker 2: your target. But these guys do so badly that even

741
00:35:49,920 --> 00:35:51,960
Speaker 2: with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their

742
00:35:51,960 --> 00:35:55,520
Speaker 2: intended targets. This is not an effective raid, and the

743
00:35:55,640 --> 00:35:58,279
Speaker 2: May calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton quote the

744
00:35:58,360 --> 00:36:02,120
Speaker 2: darkest night in American military aviation history, because not one

745
00:36:02,160 --> 00:36:04,840
Speaker 2: airplane finished. That mission is briefed and like, man, you

746
00:36:04,880 --> 00:36:07,520
Speaker 2: were part of raids where guys die, I think that's darker,

747
00:36:08,120 --> 00:36:10,759
Speaker 2: like where guides died and the mission wasn't really that successful.

748
00:36:10,960 --> 00:36:13,640
Speaker 2: I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs

749
00:36:13,719 --> 00:36:18,919
Speaker 2: just don't hit very well. I don't know, babies, like, yeah,

750
00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:23,680
Speaker 2: that might be darker, horotia monig oh, it might be darker. Arguably. Yeah,

751
00:36:23,880 --> 00:36:26,880
Speaker 2: Now this means that when the Korean War kind of

752
00:36:27,360 --> 00:36:30,480
Speaker 2: starts up, it's gonna be not quite the last point.

753
00:36:30,520 --> 00:36:32,480
Speaker 2: Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's this

754
00:36:32,640 --> 00:36:37,120
Speaker 2: some shit in the JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's

755
00:36:37,160 --> 00:36:41,479
Speaker 2: some shit in during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan where

756
00:36:41,480 --> 00:36:44,920
Speaker 2: we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary

757
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:48,319
Speaker 2: annihilation or getting nuked into the Stone Age ourselves. Right,

758
00:36:49,080 --> 00:36:52,040
Speaker 2: But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict

759
00:36:52,360 --> 00:36:55,279
Speaker 2: where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a

760
00:36:55,320 --> 00:36:58,480
Speaker 2: tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things

761
00:36:58,480 --> 00:37:01,080
Speaker 2: would have like spiraled into globally annihilation at least at

762
00:37:01,080 --> 00:37:04,319
Speaker 2: that point. Right, And given that fact, given that we

763
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:08,280
Speaker 2: could have nuked North Korea and even China and guys

764
00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:11,200
Speaker 2: wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't.

765
00:37:11,280 --> 00:37:13,120
Speaker 2: It's like shocking to me when I get into the

766
00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:18,240
Speaker 2: history that like we that it didn't happen, right, Yeah,

767
00:37:18,280 --> 00:37:20,239
Speaker 2: And going into the war, some powerful men in the

768
00:37:20,239 --> 00:37:23,759
Speaker 2: Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was

769
00:37:23,800 --> 00:37:26,360
Speaker 2: the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered

770
00:37:26,360 --> 00:37:28,480
Speaker 2: our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it, was

771
00:37:28,520 --> 00:37:32,400
Speaker 2: a wasting asset in other words, because we know the

772
00:37:32,440 --> 00:37:34,960
Speaker 2: Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and

773
00:37:35,040 --> 00:37:37,200
Speaker 2: starting to get long range bombers and the other things

774
00:37:37,200 --> 00:37:39,719
Speaker 2: they need to be able to strike us. Every day

775
00:37:39,760 --> 00:37:44,160
Speaker 2: we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically,

776
00:37:44,239 --> 00:37:46,200
Speaker 2: he's saying, we got to use him or lose him. Right.

777
00:37:46,520 --> 00:37:49,120
Speaker 2: If we don't use them now, we'll never be able

778
00:37:49,160 --> 00:37:50,560
Speaker 2: to use them, right, right.

779
00:37:50,680 --> 00:37:52,640
Speaker 3: And if you're playing the world like a video game,

780
00:37:52,719 --> 00:37:55,760
Speaker 3: this is true. Right. If I'm a video game general,

781
00:37:56,000 --> 00:37:57,040
Speaker 3: I would I will.

782
00:37:56,920 --> 00:37:59,799
Speaker 2: Start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game

783
00:37:59,840 --> 00:38:04,080
Speaker 2: that gives me a nuke, right yeah, yeah, uh yeah,

784
00:38:04,120 --> 00:38:05,960
Speaker 2: which is why gamers should not be allowed in the

785
00:38:06,000 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 2: Department of Defense. No oops, turns out.

786
00:38:10,880 --> 00:38:14,200
Speaker 3: Yeah, under strict control by non gamers. Right.

787
00:38:15,800 --> 00:38:20,720
Speaker 2: So, at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing

788
00:38:20,760 --> 00:38:24,160
Speaker 2: advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic

789
00:38:24,239 --> 00:38:27,480
Speaker 2: targets in North Korea, and they succeeded in these bombing

790
00:38:27,560 --> 00:38:32,240
Speaker 2: raids on paper, right, the sac destroys the targets assigned

791
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:34,879
Speaker 2: to them. But North Korea, if you know much about

792
00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:38,560
Speaker 2: North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot

793
00:38:38,600 --> 00:38:41,240
Speaker 2: of exposure. There wasn't a lot that we could really

794
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:44,239
Speaker 2: do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right,

795
00:38:44,360 --> 00:38:46,880
Speaker 2: like we do some damage, but that's just kind of

796
00:38:46,880 --> 00:38:49,919
Speaker 2: not how their military is wired at this point in time.

797
00:38:50,520 --> 00:38:52,480
Speaker 2: And to make matters worse for the United States, we

798
00:38:52,560 --> 00:38:56,120
Speaker 2: start this war using very new high tech guided bombs

799
00:38:56,160 --> 00:39:00,120
Speaker 2: like the Asma one Tarzan, but those run out immediately,

800
00:39:00,200 --> 00:39:01,880
Speaker 2: which is a thing in modern warfare too. If you

801
00:39:01,880 --> 00:39:04,960
Speaker 2: look at what's happened in Ukraine, right, like, you have

802
00:39:05,040 --> 00:39:08,440
Speaker 2: these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things,

803
00:39:08,440 --> 00:39:10,759
Speaker 2: but also it's really hard to make them, and you

804
00:39:11,480 --> 00:39:13,719
Speaker 2: instead of them all and it turns out you go

805
00:39:13,760 --> 00:39:17,239
Speaker 2: through that shit real fast in a war. So, as

806
00:39:17,239 --> 00:39:19,080
Speaker 2: I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the

807
00:39:19,160 --> 00:39:21,440
Speaker 2: SAC in nineteen forty eight and he was the architect

808
00:39:21,520 --> 00:39:24,279
Speaker 2: of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the

809
00:39:24,320 --> 00:39:25,880
Speaker 2: fact that we had run through all of our most

810
00:39:25,920 --> 00:39:28,640
Speaker 2: advanced munitions without ending the war as another l for

811
00:39:28,719 --> 00:39:33,160
Speaker 2: team precision bombing. Basically, LeMay is like, well, look, clearly,

812
00:39:33,239 --> 00:39:36,839
Speaker 2: just striking strategic targets doesn't work, so he orders US

813
00:39:36,880 --> 00:39:40,160
Speaker 2: bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rossioni, in that

814
00:39:40,320 --> 00:39:43,920
Speaker 2: article that he wrote, describes SAC's plan as to quote

815
00:39:43,920 --> 00:39:46,880
Speaker 2: increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing

816
00:39:46,920 --> 00:39:50,680
Speaker 2: civilian targets. LeMay and the sac used US air power

817
00:39:50,680 --> 00:39:53,239
Speaker 2: to kill around two million North Korean citizens over the

818
00:39:53,280 --> 00:39:54,520
Speaker 2: next two years. In change.

819
00:39:55,360 --> 00:39:58,759
Speaker 3: Jesus fuck, I straight up didn't know that. I know

820
00:39:58,880 --> 00:39:59,960
Speaker 3: so little about the Korean War.

821
00:40:00,560 --> 00:40:02,600
Speaker 2: It's a between a fifth and a sixth of the

822
00:40:02,640 --> 00:40:06,280
Speaker 2: population of North Korea we kill through primarily aerial bombing.

823
00:40:06,760 --> 00:40:07,520
Speaker 3: Oh my god.

824
00:40:07,920 --> 00:40:11,359
Speaker 2: But it's also still a hideous war crime, like we

825
00:40:11,480 --> 00:40:16,439
Speaker 2: murder two million people and it doesn't win. Like again, Yeah,

826
00:40:16,600 --> 00:40:19,600
Speaker 2: the thing that keeps happening, that has always happened every

827
00:40:19,640 --> 00:40:21,879
Speaker 2: time someone like LeMay is like, well, we just got

828
00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:24,480
Speaker 2: to cause them enough pain that their morale breaks. And

829
00:40:24,520 --> 00:40:28,120
Speaker 2: what happens is their morale doesn't break, right, and.

830
00:40:30,560 --> 00:40:33,360
Speaker 3: They're always like forever and ever. I've been just in

831
00:40:33,440 --> 00:40:36,000
Speaker 3: a bunch of stuff about people defending against the Roman

832
00:40:36,040 --> 00:40:38,680
Speaker 3: Empire and Gaul and things like that, right, and you

833
00:40:38,719 --> 00:40:41,400
Speaker 3: start saying like, oh, well, these people, like these people,

834
00:40:41,520 --> 00:40:44,440
Speaker 3: you know, the horrible druids, they sacrifice children or whatever, right,

835
00:40:44,719 --> 00:40:48,400
Speaker 3: and who wasn't, Like, I don't one who wasn't. Yeah,

836
00:40:48,440 --> 00:40:50,520
Speaker 3: And even if they were, you know how many you know,

837
00:40:50,560 --> 00:40:53,640
Speaker 3: how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere

838
00:40:53,680 --> 00:40:56,000
Speaker 3: near the evil of what Rome did in terms of

839
00:40:56,040 --> 00:40:56,560
Speaker 3: killing them.

840
00:40:56,719 --> 00:40:59,600
Speaker 2: Julius Caesar does a genocide in Gaul.

841
00:41:00,640 --> 00:41:04,680
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so like communism is whatever.

842
00:41:05,080 --> 00:41:07,400
Speaker 2: It's the same thing as the people who are like, well,

843
00:41:07,440 --> 00:41:12,280
Speaker 2: the conquista or stopped the child sacrifice and the American children.

844
00:41:12,600 --> 00:41:16,360
Speaker 2: You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve any fucking kids dying?

845
00:41:16,480 --> 00:41:16,680
Speaker 1: Man?

846
00:41:16,960 --> 00:41:20,279
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, okay, Brotally, Yeah.

847
00:41:19,960 --> 00:41:22,160
Speaker 2: Look, I'm not saying I'm not saying any of these

848
00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:26,280
Speaker 2: any society, any organized empire anywhere in the Americans or elsewhere,

849
00:41:26,320 --> 00:41:28,640
Speaker 2: has been a nice empire. None of them are. But

850
00:41:28,680 --> 00:41:30,239
Speaker 2: if you're just being like, well, look at the bad

851
00:41:30,280 --> 00:41:32,280
Speaker 2: things they did, uh huh, what were you guys getting

852
00:41:32,320 --> 00:41:32,520
Speaker 2: up to?

853
00:41:32,760 --> 00:41:33,080
Speaker 1: Huh?

854
00:41:33,160 --> 00:41:37,239
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is that justify you killing two million people? Yeah? Yeah,

855
00:41:37,280 --> 00:41:39,400
Speaker 3: come on, bro, Was North Korea so bad that they

856
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:40,359
Speaker 3: all just need to die?

857
00:41:40,640 --> 00:41:42,400
Speaker 2: It's it's the same thing as like, we'll look at

858
00:41:42,400 --> 00:41:44,400
Speaker 2: all these fucked up things, and plenty of fucked up

859
00:41:44,400 --> 00:41:46,520
Speaker 2: things the Soviet ni and the People's Republic of China

860
00:41:46,520 --> 00:41:49,080
Speaker 2: did a lot of, but like we murder millions of

861
00:41:49,120 --> 00:41:54,080
Speaker 2: people from the sky repeatedly all over like the world yeah,

862
00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 2: so you know, I don't know. Don't don't get up

863
00:41:57,440 --> 00:42:02,439
Speaker 2: your own ass about your side being particularly nice. Angels, right,

864
00:42:02,840 --> 00:42:08,280
Speaker 2: the angels as you incinerate cities, villages largely. But yeah,

865
00:42:08,520 --> 00:42:12,600
Speaker 2: once again, though this is really important. Actual war disproves

866
00:42:12,680 --> 00:42:16,279
Speaker 2: all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off,

867
00:42:16,520 --> 00:42:19,640
Speaker 2: North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has

868
00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:22,200
Speaker 2: troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge

869
00:42:22,200 --> 00:42:25,239
Speaker 2: and strategic bombing per the theories that LeMay and do

870
00:42:25,360 --> 00:42:28,680
Speaker 2: Hey both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic

871
00:42:28,719 --> 00:42:32,480
Speaker 2: bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right, that's the point.

872
00:42:32,840 --> 00:42:37,759
Speaker 2: It just doesn't work. It's never true. That Also are

873
00:42:37,840 --> 00:42:41,320
Speaker 2: the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop

874
00:42:41,560 --> 00:42:44,520
Speaker 2: North Korea from fighting effectively, and none of the bombing

875
00:42:44,600 --> 00:42:47,400
Speaker 2: we do it doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a

876
00:42:47,440 --> 00:42:49,719
Speaker 2: strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes

877
00:42:49,760 --> 00:42:52,920
Speaker 2: as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had

878
00:42:52,960 --> 00:42:55,840
Speaker 2: gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier,

879
00:42:56,440 --> 00:42:59,000
Speaker 2: we really cut back on the military after World War Two,

880
00:42:59,040 --> 00:43:01,759
Speaker 2: and in fact, all military development outside of making the

881
00:43:01,880 --> 00:43:04,400
Speaker 2: SAC stronger took a back seat. And as a result,

882
00:43:04,400 --> 00:43:07,000
Speaker 2: when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South

883
00:43:07,080 --> 00:43:10,520
Speaker 2: Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained.

884
00:43:10,520 --> 00:43:12,200
Speaker 2: I've talked to my grandpa about because he was there

885
00:43:12,239 --> 00:43:14,000
Speaker 2: the whole war, and he was like, yeah, we were

886
00:43:14,040 --> 00:43:16,200
Speaker 2: in shit shape when the war started, and it was

887
00:43:16,239 --> 00:43:19,040
Speaker 2: because they had let like we had, like fucking our

888
00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:21,799
Speaker 2: bazukas wouldn't fire and shit like we had, Like there

889
00:43:21,800 --> 00:43:24,680
Speaker 2: were serious issues with like the maintenance of basic equipment

890
00:43:24,960 --> 00:43:26,920
Speaker 2: because guys like the LeMay were like, all we need

891
00:43:26,920 --> 00:43:29,800
Speaker 2: are bombers, bro, trust ye, all we need o bombers,

892
00:43:29,960 --> 00:43:30,239
Speaker 2: you know.

893
00:43:30,320 --> 00:43:32,840
Speaker 3: Yeah, whereas they actually needed the life ray.

894
00:43:33,160 --> 00:43:35,200
Speaker 2: Right, we needed the life A couple of life rays

895
00:43:35,239 --> 00:43:37,760
Speaker 2: would have really solved this w old problem. They wouldn't

896
00:43:37,760 --> 00:43:39,680
Speaker 2: have even tried if we had a life ray. That's

897
00:43:39,719 --> 00:43:42,840
Speaker 2: what I'm saying now. After North Korea invades, they pushed

898
00:43:42,840 --> 00:43:45,439
Speaker 2: the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down

899
00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:48,600
Speaker 2: the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur, at the head of

900
00:43:48,600 --> 00:43:52,080
Speaker 2: a un amphibious landing force, came aground at Incheon and

901
00:43:52,120 --> 00:43:55,520
Speaker 2: pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with China.

902
00:43:55,640 --> 00:43:58,600
Speaker 2: Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes,

903
00:43:58,800 --> 00:44:01,000
Speaker 2: and suddenly the un forced are in full retreat and

904
00:44:01,040 --> 00:44:04,040
Speaker 2: they get pushed backs. It's really it's a it doesn't

905
00:44:04,480 --> 00:44:07,840
Speaker 2: not enough study of not enough people. Americans know anything

906
00:44:07,880 --> 00:44:10,440
Speaker 2: about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time.

907
00:44:10,880 --> 00:44:13,239
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War

908
00:44:13,280 --> 00:44:15,319
Speaker 3: two and then Vietnam. That's what I know, right, it's

909
00:44:15,320 --> 00:44:15,600
Speaker 3: a little.

910
00:44:15,800 --> 00:44:19,120
Speaker 2: It's it's in Korea is kind of halfway between World

911
00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:21,880
Speaker 2: War Two and Vietnam in terms of like fighting tactics

912
00:44:21,880 --> 00:44:23,200
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. You know, you do have a

913
00:44:23,239 --> 00:44:25,160
Speaker 2: lot of these big armored clashes, you have dog fights

914
00:44:25,160 --> 00:44:26,880
Speaker 2: and stuff, but you also have more advanced these you know,

915
00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:29,080
Speaker 2: you have these guided missiles and stuff right early ones.

916
00:44:30,640 --> 00:44:34,080
Speaker 2: So Douglas MacArthur, as he's getting the shit hammered out

917
00:44:34,080 --> 00:44:37,440
Speaker 2: of him, requests ten atomic bombers with live nukes be

918
00:44:37,480 --> 00:44:40,239
Speaker 2: put on standby in Guam, right, because he wants to

919
00:44:40,239 --> 00:44:43,680
Speaker 2: have the option to use them if in an emergency situation. Right,

920
00:44:43,800 --> 00:44:47,840
Speaker 2: Uh huh. Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants

921
00:44:47,840 --> 00:44:50,640
Speaker 2: these planes in their nukes placed under his direct control.

922
00:44:51,080 --> 00:44:53,640
Speaker 2: And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may

923
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:55,560
Speaker 2: have saved a lot of people's lives, and I don't

924
00:44:55,560 --> 00:44:57,239
Speaker 2: think it's for a good reason. But he steps in

925
00:44:57,320 --> 00:44:59,600
Speaker 2: and he sent begs Truman to say no and keep

926
00:44:59,600 --> 00:45:02,000
Speaker 2: the bomb under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay

927
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:04,759
Speaker 2: with the SAC right, he wants to have control over them.

928
00:45:05,200 --> 00:45:08,640
Speaker 2: But I do think he is less I don't think

929
00:45:08,680 --> 00:45:10,200
Speaker 2: he would have I don't think he certainly was not

930
00:45:10,320 --> 00:45:13,960
Speaker 2: unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested

931
00:45:14,000 --> 00:45:16,800
Speaker 2: in doing it than MacArthur. Right, he was not convinced

932
00:45:16,800 --> 00:45:19,480
Speaker 2: it was the only path forward, and MacArthur was really

933
00:45:19,480 --> 00:45:23,160
Speaker 2: convinced it was the only way to win right now

934
00:45:23,440 --> 00:45:26,759
Speaker 2: for decades because the fact that we sent nukes to

935
00:45:26,800 --> 00:45:29,840
Speaker 2: Guam during the Korean War has been well known. But

936
00:45:30,080 --> 00:45:32,760
Speaker 2: if you look up any histories that are like older

937
00:45:33,280 --> 00:45:35,680
Speaker 2: prior to the twenty first century, it will say the

938
00:45:35,800 --> 00:45:39,360
Speaker 2: SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam.

939
00:45:39,719 --> 00:45:42,120
Speaker 2: We now know that this was inaccurate, and I'm going

940
00:45:42,160 --> 00:45:44,799
Speaker 2: to quote from the book fifteen Minutes here. The first

941
00:45:44,880 --> 00:45:47,399
Speaker 2: nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last

942
00:45:47,440 --> 00:45:50,200
Speaker 2: B twenty nine accelerated down the runway. Two propellers ran

943
00:45:50,239 --> 00:45:52,640
Speaker 2: away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to

944
00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:55,480
Speaker 2: shut down two engines, and what would later be described

945
00:45:55,480 --> 00:45:58,600
Speaker 2: as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel laden

946
00:45:58,680 --> 00:46:01,040
Speaker 2: bomb ladd bomber into the air and managed to turn

947
00:46:01,080 --> 00:46:03,399
Speaker 2: back towards the runway, but as he did, he lost

948
00:46:03,440 --> 00:46:06,360
Speaker 2: altitude and the bombers simply went into the ground. The

949
00:46:06,440 --> 00:46:09,200
Speaker 2: crash was not hard, reported an aid to General le May,

950
00:46:09,360 --> 00:46:11,440
Speaker 2: but twelve men were dead and eight were trapped in

951
00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:13,480
Speaker 2: the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge

952
00:46:13,520 --> 00:46:17,720
Speaker 2: of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke.

953
00:46:18,280 --> 00:46:23,400
Speaker 2: We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And

954
00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:25,800
Speaker 2: that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes,

955
00:46:25,840 --> 00:46:28,240
Speaker 2: because they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about

956
00:46:28,239 --> 00:46:30,799
Speaker 2: they cover this the fuck up, right, So this is

957
00:46:30,840 --> 00:46:34,600
Speaker 2: like this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe. Kind

958
00:46:34,640 --> 00:46:37,640
Speaker 2: of The good news is that because of how nukes work,

959
00:46:37,800 --> 00:46:40,319
Speaker 2: they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set

960
00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:43,320
Speaker 2: up for. In order to get the big, the explosion

961
00:46:43,320 --> 00:46:45,440
Speaker 2: that we all recognize as a nuclear blast, you have

962
00:46:45,520 --> 00:46:47,799
Speaker 2: to set off a nuke in a specific way. The

963
00:46:47,840 --> 00:46:50,440
Speaker 2: bad news is that even if it's not set off

964
00:46:50,480 --> 00:46:52,839
Speaker 2: in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're

965
00:46:52,840 --> 00:46:55,640
Speaker 2: still talking about five thousand pounds of conventional explosives in

966
00:46:55,680 --> 00:46:58,360
Speaker 2: the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it

967
00:46:58,760 --> 00:47:01,280
Speaker 2: can still make from what I've seen, because this happens

968
00:47:01,320 --> 00:47:04,040
Speaker 2: a few times. It doesn't always make a dirty bomb,

969
00:47:04,040 --> 00:47:06,960
Speaker 2: but it can. You can get radiation contamination when one

970
00:47:06,960 --> 00:47:09,000
Speaker 2: of these things explodes in a plane crash, right. That

971
00:47:09,040 --> 00:47:12,799
Speaker 2: does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does

972
00:47:12,800 --> 00:47:14,719
Speaker 2: in this case because of how much was covered up.

973
00:47:14,760 --> 00:47:16,759
Speaker 2: I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians

974
00:47:16,960 --> 00:47:20,120
Speaker 2: and the base house got radsick. But the blast of

975
00:47:20,200 --> 00:47:23,120
Speaker 2: this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt

976
00:47:23,160 --> 00:47:26,319
Speaker 2: thirty miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel, and it

977
00:47:26,320 --> 00:47:29,400
Speaker 2: injures one hundred and eighty one civilians. The Air Force

978
00:47:29,520 --> 00:47:32,000
Speaker 2: immediately lies and says, oh, that was just loaded with

979
00:47:32,040 --> 00:47:35,680
Speaker 2: normal bombs. It was a training mission, sorry, guys, not

980
00:47:35,760 --> 00:47:37,400
Speaker 2: a nuke though. Don't worry.

981
00:47:37,760 --> 00:47:39,839
Speaker 3: Yeah, unlike the nine planes next to it.

982
00:47:40,040 --> 00:47:43,040
Speaker 2: Right. It was forty four years before the fact that

983
00:47:43,080 --> 00:47:48,000
Speaker 2: a fucking nuke exploded was declassified and Margaret that's not

984
00:47:48,320 --> 00:47:50,920
Speaker 2: close to the only nuke we lost. This is the

985
00:47:50,960 --> 00:47:54,880
Speaker 2: thing I did not know. We fucking lose so many nukes,

986
00:47:55,280 --> 00:47:59,880
Speaker 2: it's crazy. On November tenth of nineteen fifty, an essays

987
00:48:00,239 --> 00:48:02,719
Speaker 2: bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an

988
00:48:02,880 --> 00:48:06,440
Speaker 2: Mk four atom bomb set to self destruct, one hundred

989
00:48:06,440 --> 00:48:13,200
Speaker 2: miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That

990
00:48:13,400 --> 00:48:16,480
Speaker 2: was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from

991
00:48:16,480 --> 00:48:18,560
Speaker 2: the end of World War two to November of nineteen

992
00:48:18,600 --> 00:48:21,040
Speaker 2: fifty five lost nukes in five years.

993
00:48:22,880 --> 00:48:23,720
Speaker 3: Oh my god.

994
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:27,600
Speaker 2: And that counts as a success because we self destruct

995
00:48:27,600 --> 00:48:30,919
Speaker 2: the nuke, so it doesn't just land. Right. We'll get

996
00:48:30,960 --> 00:48:34,680
Speaker 2: to that. Back to the Korean War, because this is

997
00:48:34,719 --> 00:48:36,920
Speaker 2: all going right. As this is all going on, you know,

998
00:48:37,040 --> 00:48:40,600
Speaker 2: MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear warfare as the

999
00:48:40,600 --> 00:48:43,439
Speaker 2: situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan

1000
00:48:43,480 --> 00:48:46,520
Speaker 2: that would have involved dropping between thirty and fifty tactical

1001
00:48:46,560 --> 00:48:49,319
Speaker 2: atom bombs on enemy air bases and depots, and then

1002
00:48:49,320 --> 00:48:51,560
Speaker 2: he would have followed up by a massive invasion of

1003
00:48:51,600 --> 00:48:55,640
Speaker 2: Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from

1004
00:48:55,680 --> 00:48:57,879
Speaker 2: China were to be blocked. This army that he's going

1005
00:48:57,880 --> 00:49:01,439
Speaker 2: to have basically cut Korea off from China. They're going

1006
00:49:01,520 --> 00:49:05,520
Speaker 2: to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in

1007
00:49:05,640 --> 00:49:08,840
Speaker 2: order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross

1008
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:11,759
Speaker 2: into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is to

1009
00:49:11,880 --> 00:49:15,800
Speaker 2: radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people.

1010
00:49:16,400 --> 00:49:19,879
Speaker 3: That's like salty in the earth behind you. But another level.

1011
00:49:19,840 --> 00:49:23,319
Speaker 2: I cannot exaggerate how fucking insane Douglas MacArthur is at

1012
00:49:23,320 --> 00:49:27,520
Speaker 2: this point, Like he is completely dangerously unhinged, one of

1013
00:49:27,520 --> 00:49:30,640
Speaker 2: the craziest men to ever command a US military force.

1014
00:49:31,320 --> 00:49:35,359
Speaker 2: Truman refused this insane plan, thank fucking god, and as

1015
00:49:35,360 --> 00:49:38,520
Speaker 2: a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to

1016
00:49:38,600 --> 00:49:41,520
Speaker 2: him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with

1017
00:49:41,560 --> 00:49:44,680
Speaker 2: a shitload of dead people and without a real peace,

1018
00:49:44,719 --> 00:49:49,960
Speaker 2: but also without additional nuclear explosions. So you know, that's good.

1019
00:49:50,040 --> 00:49:52,160
Speaker 2: It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying.

1020
00:49:52,440 --> 00:49:56,080
Speaker 3: You know, so civilian control of government is better than

1021
00:49:56,160 --> 00:49:56,680
Speaker 3: the military.

1022
00:49:57,000 --> 00:50:02,640
Speaker 2: Yeah, government, Yeah, because again, these people lose their fucking minds,

1023
00:50:03,040 --> 00:50:06,440
Speaker 2: and MacArthur, like Curtis LeMay is a voice of reason here.

1024
00:50:06,480 --> 00:50:09,160
Speaker 2: That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice

1025
00:50:09,200 --> 00:50:11,800
Speaker 2: of reason, but a little bit of one, because MacArthur

1026
00:50:11,960 --> 00:50:14,359
Speaker 2: is batshit crazy.

1027
00:50:14,920 --> 00:50:15,200
Speaker 3: Uh huh.

1028
00:50:16,120 --> 00:50:18,399
Speaker 2: At the start of the Korean War, the US moved

1029
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:21,680
Speaker 2: almost ninety nuclear weapons into Europe how to fears that

1030
00:50:21,719 --> 00:50:24,440
Speaker 2: a wider Communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now,

1031
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:27,280
Speaker 2: the Soviet arsenal's really small at this stage, and again

1032
00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:32,040
Speaker 2: there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good, so time

1033
00:50:32,120 --> 00:50:33,839
Speaker 2: is not as much of a factor. Right, We don't

1034
00:50:33,880 --> 00:50:35,799
Speaker 2: have to have these things ready to detonate at five

1035
00:50:35,800 --> 00:50:39,239
Speaker 2: minutes notice, right, And so for safety's sake, again, this

1036
00:50:39,280 --> 00:50:41,680
Speaker 2: is one of these the Atomic Energy Commission kind of

1037
00:50:41,840 --> 00:50:44,839
Speaker 2: comes in and is, like Wilson, the bombs over, but

1038
00:50:44,960 --> 00:50:48,160
Speaker 2: not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores

1039
00:50:48,200 --> 00:50:50,839
Speaker 2: in the US so that we can airlift them over

1040
00:50:50,880 --> 00:50:52,520
Speaker 2: to Europe on a moment's notice.

1041
00:50:52,760 --> 00:50:55,800
Speaker 3: But because they're smaller than the bombs themselves.

1042
00:50:55,400 --> 00:50:58,600
Speaker 2: Right, right, And it's safer than just having a live

1043
00:50:58,719 --> 00:51:01,879
Speaker 2: nuke where someone could deal it set it off. Right.

1044
00:51:02,440 --> 00:51:05,160
Speaker 3: You store the AMMO and the gun in a different place,

1045
00:51:05,280 --> 00:51:06,480
Speaker 3: and there's children around.

1046
00:51:06,640 --> 00:51:09,560
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is The moments like this of just minimal

1047
00:51:09,600 --> 00:51:12,480
Speaker 2: sanity are so rare in the nuke story that it's

1048
00:51:12,640 --> 00:51:15,280
Speaker 2: just like a breath of fresh air, like, oh, somebody

1049
00:51:15,320 --> 00:51:17,920
Speaker 2: who wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind, but you

1050
00:51:17,920 --> 00:51:20,799
Speaker 2: know who is out of their goddamn mind, Margaret, Is.

1051
00:51:20,760 --> 00:51:22,160
Speaker 3: It our sponsor Life Ray?

1052
00:51:22,239 --> 00:51:26,000
Speaker 2: That's right, Life Ray. Because it turns out Life ray

1053
00:51:26,040 --> 00:51:29,160
Speaker 2: is incredibly radioactive. They will fry your brain. Even being

1054
00:51:29,200 --> 00:51:32,319
Speaker 2: in the same state as one is very dangerous by

1055
00:51:32,360 --> 00:51:44,520
Speaker 2: one today, I think it's worth it, uh huh for safety. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

1056
00:51:45,040 --> 00:51:49,839
Speaker 2: and we're back. So at this point, the Atomic Energy

1057
00:51:49,840 --> 00:51:52,520
Speaker 2: Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were

1058
00:51:52,520 --> 00:51:56,239
Speaker 2: not actively in use. The DoD never likes this, and

1059
00:51:56,280 --> 00:51:59,160
Speaker 2: they use the opportunity to argue that the military should

1060
00:51:59,160 --> 00:52:02,920
Speaker 2: have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed

1061
00:52:02,960 --> 00:52:06,239
Speaker 2: to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Gwam. Right,

1062
00:52:06,239 --> 00:52:07,760
Speaker 2: this is kind of the first time that the military

1063
00:52:07,800 --> 00:52:10,200
Speaker 2: gets direct custody for a long period of time. Is

1064
00:52:10,239 --> 00:52:13,279
Speaker 2: in Guam. During the Korean War in nineteen fifty one,

1065
00:52:13,320 --> 00:52:15,640
Speaker 2: the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from

1066
00:52:15,640 --> 00:52:17,759
Speaker 2: two hundred ninety nine to four hundred and thirty eight,

1067
00:52:17,840 --> 00:52:19,600
Speaker 2: twice the number of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had

1068
00:52:19,600 --> 00:52:22,520
Speaker 2: been told in an internal report, could destroy civilization. As

1069
00:52:22,520 --> 00:52:25,839
Speaker 2: I noted, the USSR has around fifty bombs. Their stockpile

1070
00:52:25,920 --> 00:52:28,719
Speaker 2: will go rapidly after this point. But to deal with

1071
00:52:28,760 --> 00:52:31,000
Speaker 2: the fact that the gap is starting to close, we

1072
00:52:31,080 --> 00:52:33,040
Speaker 2: start working on a bigger bomb.

1073
00:52:33,280 --> 00:52:33,480
Speaker 4: Right.

1074
00:52:34,640 --> 00:52:37,560
Speaker 2: It's first known by its nickname the super and this

1075
00:52:37,760 --> 00:52:42,520
Speaker 2: is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. And

1076
00:52:42,600 --> 00:52:47,839
Speaker 2: as a brief aside, most post apocalyptic post atomic apocalypse

1077
00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:51,319
Speaker 2: movies and fictions imagine a bunch of bombs, kind of

1078
00:52:51,360 --> 00:52:54,319
Speaker 2: like the Horotima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does,

1079
00:52:54,360 --> 00:52:57,640
Speaker 2: really because like you look at DC in Fallout, what

1080
00:52:57,719 --> 00:53:00,200
Speaker 2: is it three or four? I forget what DC is an.

1081
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:01,640
Speaker 3: I've played some of them, but I don't remember them.

1082
00:53:01,680 --> 00:53:03,399
Speaker 2: If you look at DC and like a lot most

1083
00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:07,680
Speaker 2: of the buildings are still relatively intact, right, that doesn't

1084
00:53:07,760 --> 00:53:11,520
Speaker 2: happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over,

1085
00:53:11,640 --> 00:53:14,440
Speaker 2: like like if one of the standard hydrogen bombs were

1086
00:53:14,480 --> 00:53:18,080
Speaker 2: dropped on DC, like and these are actively aimed at

1087
00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:20,400
Speaker 2: DC at all times. Right, the Russians always have some

1088
00:53:20,440 --> 00:53:22,480
Speaker 2: aim at DC, you know, just like we've got shit

1089
00:53:22,560 --> 00:53:24,759
Speaker 2: aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them, Yeah, like we're

1090
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:28,880
Speaker 2: both doing this crazy shit. Everyone within a mile of

1091
00:53:28,880 --> 00:53:31,760
Speaker 2: the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles

1092
00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:34,120
Speaker 2: of the blast is incinerated over the course of a

1093
00:53:34,160 --> 00:53:37,319
Speaker 2: few seconds. Right, You're talking millions of deaths in the

1094
00:53:37,360 --> 00:53:39,960
Speaker 2: space of a minute or two. Like, yeah, these these

1095
00:53:39,960 --> 00:53:44,720
Speaker 2: are not survivable. Everything is there's no buildings left, everything

1096
00:53:44,800 --> 00:53:48,560
Speaker 2: is combusted. You'ar like, like the power of these bombs

1097
00:53:49,040 --> 00:53:53,000
Speaker 2: cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not

1098
00:53:53,080 --> 00:53:54,680
Speaker 2: an after thermonuclear war.

1099
00:53:55,360 --> 00:53:59,640
Speaker 3: Is it a different It's like a fundamentally different technology.

1100
00:53:58,880 --> 00:54:02,040
Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's the craziest thing you can imagine.

1101
00:54:02,160 --> 00:54:06,520
Speaker 2: Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, right, Like thermonuclear weapons work on

1102
00:54:06,560 --> 00:54:08,920
Speaker 2: the premise, what if you set off a nuke with

1103
00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:12,879
Speaker 2: a nuke? Right, here's Andy Jacobson describing how these work.

1104
00:54:13,280 --> 00:54:16,080
Speaker 2: The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of

1105
00:54:16,120 --> 00:54:20,320
Speaker 2: an uncontrolled, self sustaining chain reaction which hydrogen isotopes fuse

1106
00:54:20,400 --> 00:54:23,360
Speaker 2: under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.

1107
00:54:23,680 --> 00:54:25,960
Speaker 2: An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people,

1108
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:28,480
Speaker 2: as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A

1109
00:54:28,520 --> 00:54:31,319
Speaker 2: thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York

1110
00:54:31,400 --> 00:54:34,680
Speaker 2: or Soul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash.

1111
00:54:35,040 --> 00:54:36,200
Speaker 2: These are so I think.

1112
00:54:36,080 --> 00:54:38,080
Speaker 3: It's fission versus fusion maybe or something.

1113
00:54:38,360 --> 00:54:41,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's basically what's going on here. But

1114
00:54:41,560 --> 00:54:44,160
Speaker 2: you're setting instead of using conventional explosives to start the

1115
00:54:44,239 --> 00:54:46,880
Speaker 2: nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a

1116
00:54:46,960 --> 00:54:48,400
Speaker 2: nuke basically, right.

1117
00:54:48,800 --> 00:54:50,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, dog, uh huh.

1118
00:54:51,200 --> 00:54:54,640
Speaker 2: It's just the craziest thing. The prototype thermonuclear weapon was

1119
00:54:54,680 --> 00:54:56,960
Speaker 2: designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a

1120
00:54:57,120 --> 00:55:00,880
Speaker 2: ten point four megaton explosive capacity, made it equivalent to

1121
00:55:00,920 --> 00:55:02,320
Speaker 2: a thousand Hiroshima bombs.

1122
00:55:03,560 --> 00:55:04,160
Speaker 3: Oh my god.

1123
00:55:04,239 --> 00:55:06,239
Speaker 2: Or an idea of what that's the first one of

1124
00:55:06,280 --> 00:55:09,879
Speaker 2: these we make? Right, these things when we start detonating them,

1125
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:14,440
Speaker 2: we'll talk about it. But like we repeatedly horribly irradiate

1126
00:55:14,560 --> 00:55:17,600
Speaker 2: and like permanently injure huge numbers of US troops because

1127
00:55:17,640 --> 00:55:19,640
Speaker 2: we don't get nearly far away enough, Because we don't

1128
00:55:19,640 --> 00:55:21,880
Speaker 2: realize how big they're going to be. Like one of

1129
00:55:21,920 --> 00:55:24,480
Speaker 2: these is like fifty percent larger than we'd expected it

1130
00:55:24,480 --> 00:55:29,800
Speaker 2: to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist,

1131
00:55:30,000 --> 00:55:32,640
Speaker 2: actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not

1132
00:55:32,719 --> 00:55:35,640
Speaker 2: to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb. Quote.

1133
00:55:35,840 --> 00:55:38,480
Speaker 2: The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of

1134
00:55:38,520 --> 00:55:41,000
Speaker 2: this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of

1135
00:55:41,040 --> 00:55:44,400
Speaker 2: its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It

1136
00:55:44,480 --> 00:55:48,640
Speaker 2: is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. Don't

1137
00:55:48,640 --> 00:55:50,080
Speaker 2: build the torment nexus.

1138
00:55:50,760 --> 00:55:53,120
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, but what if a torment nexus is

1139
00:55:53,120 --> 00:55:54,799
Speaker 3: built by the torment nexus? Right?

1140
00:55:54,920 --> 00:55:55,439
Speaker 2: Right, right?

1141
00:55:55,800 --> 00:55:58,640
Speaker 3: But Garvin wants to solve this fun problem. I love

1142
00:55:58,640 --> 00:56:01,000
Speaker 3: that They're like, we built the altar weapon. It can

1143
00:56:01,120 --> 00:56:04,000
Speaker 3: kill God, and people are like, not enough.

1144
00:56:03,760 --> 00:56:05,600
Speaker 2: Not enough. What if we use one of those to

1145
00:56:05,640 --> 00:56:09,520
Speaker 2: make a bigger one of those. Truman ignores this letter

1146
00:56:09,560 --> 00:56:12,160
Speaker 2: from Fermi. The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the

1147
00:56:12,160 --> 00:56:15,279
Speaker 2: Marshall Islands in November of nineteen fifty two. It left

1148
00:56:15,320 --> 00:56:19,040
Speaker 2: behind a crater large enough to hold fifteen pentagons. In

1149
00:56:19,080 --> 00:56:21,759
Speaker 2: her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after

1150
00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:23,960
Speaker 2: image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power

1151
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:25,799
Speaker 2: of this device. Sophie is going to put it up.

1152
00:56:25,800 --> 00:56:27,560
Speaker 2: But you can see the bomb was detonated on an

1153
00:56:27,560 --> 00:56:31,279
Speaker 2: island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before there's

1154
00:56:31,280 --> 00:56:33,560
Speaker 2: a Luge Lab, it's an island, and then in the

1155
00:56:33,640 --> 00:56:35,560
Speaker 2: after there's just no island.

1156
00:56:36,080 --> 00:56:37,760
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's just a black spot on the mappen.

1157
00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:42,640
Speaker 2: It's gone. The island is gone. Yeah, year or two ago,

1158
00:56:42,840 --> 00:56:45,319
Speaker 2: James Stout over it. It could happen here, went to the

1159
00:56:45,320 --> 00:56:48,840
Speaker 2: Marshall Islands to report on I mean, there's still ongoing fallout,

1160
00:56:48,920 --> 00:56:51,080
Speaker 2: both in the literal and figurative sense for the people

1161
00:56:51,120 --> 00:56:53,640
Speaker 2: of the Marshall Islands because of how many fucking nukes

1162
00:56:53,719 --> 00:56:56,600
Speaker 2: we set off there. Right, Like, there's tremendous suffering in

1163
00:56:56,640 --> 00:57:00,560
Speaker 2: the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this onquote unquote,

1164
00:57:00,560 --> 00:57:03,479
Speaker 2: I mean they're to this extent that they're uninhabitants because

1165
00:57:03,480 --> 00:57:06,719
Speaker 2: we forced people off, right Like, this is a crime

1166
00:57:06,719 --> 00:57:10,120
Speaker 2: against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall

1167
00:57:10,160 --> 00:57:12,440
Speaker 2: Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out

1168
00:57:12,520 --> 00:57:14,400
Speaker 2: James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that.

1169
00:57:14,440 --> 00:57:16,520
Speaker 2: After this series right, I'm not going to be getting

1170
00:57:16,520 --> 00:57:18,680
Speaker 2: into it because he did that series. But no, I

1171
00:57:18,680 --> 00:57:22,160
Speaker 2: can see that. Yeah, yeah, you can see just in

1172
00:57:22,240 --> 00:57:24,880
Speaker 2: the picture how catastrophic these weapons are.

1173
00:57:25,440 --> 00:57:26,000
Speaker 3: Yeah.

1174
00:57:26,040 --> 00:57:28,600
Speaker 2: In the immediate wake of the IVY mic test, President

1175
00:57:28,640 --> 00:57:31,600
Speaker 2: Truman gave his farewell address. He mourned that quote, the

1176
00:57:31,640 --> 00:57:33,439
Speaker 2: war of the future would be one in which man

1177
00:57:33,440 --> 00:57:36,480
Speaker 2: could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the

1178
00:57:36,480 --> 00:57:39,000
Speaker 2: great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements

1179
00:57:39,040 --> 00:57:41,320
Speaker 2: of the past. Such a war is not a possible

1180
00:57:41,360 --> 00:57:45,600
Speaker 2: policy for rational men. Now that's not wrong. But you're

1181
00:57:45,640 --> 00:57:48,080
Speaker 2: one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like

1182
00:57:48,440 --> 00:57:52,439
Speaker 2: you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman, Like, come on, man,

1183
00:57:53,680 --> 00:57:55,800
Speaker 2: you gave the call to use the first of these

1184
00:57:55,840 --> 00:58:01,280
Speaker 2: fucking things. Yeah. Jacobsen goes into more detail about how

1185
00:58:01,520 --> 00:58:05,600
Speaker 2: military planners respond despite what Truman says to the existence

1186
00:58:05,640 --> 00:58:09,280
Speaker 2: now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, what happened after US war

1187
00:58:09,320 --> 00:58:12,280
Speaker 2: planners saw what ten point four megatons could instantly destroy

1188
00:58:12,400 --> 00:58:15,240
Speaker 2: simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad,

1189
00:58:15,480 --> 00:58:19,280
Speaker 2: mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds

1190
00:58:19,280 --> 00:58:23,000
Speaker 2: and then by the thousands. In nineteen fifty two, the

1191
00:58:23,120 --> 00:58:25,920
Speaker 2: United States had eight hundred and forty one nuclear weapons.

1192
00:58:27,360 --> 00:58:30,120
Speaker 2: A year before Truman left office. In nineteen fifty one,

1193
00:58:30,200 --> 00:58:33,000
Speaker 2: a group of scientists and researchers that included doctor Robert

1194
00:58:33,040 --> 00:58:36,800
Speaker 2: Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze

1195
00:58:36,800 --> 00:58:39,440
Speaker 2: if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy

1196
00:58:39,440 --> 00:58:42,680
Speaker 2: for responding to a Soviet invasion. They concluded that having

1197
00:58:42,760 --> 00:58:45,680
Speaker 2: the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their

1198
00:58:45,680 --> 00:58:49,680
Speaker 2: one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead,

1199
00:58:49,800 --> 00:58:54,560
Speaker 2: who yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO

1200
00:58:54,600 --> 00:58:58,880
Speaker 2: should replace manpower with low yield, tactical nuclear weapons that

1201
00:58:58,920 --> 00:59:02,280
Speaker 2: would evaporated vance Soviet forces and that could be deployed

1202
00:59:02,320 --> 00:59:06,320
Speaker 2: by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree

1203
00:59:06,320 --> 00:59:09,040
Speaker 2: to which they're trying to do a kind of noble

1204
00:59:09,080 --> 00:59:11,800
Speaker 2: thing here, Right. The stated goal here is bring the

1205
00:59:11,880 --> 00:59:15,280
Speaker 2: battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on

1206
00:59:15,440 --> 00:59:19,520
Speaker 2: soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every

1207
00:59:19,520 --> 00:59:22,520
Speaker 2: city in Europe with atomic hell fire. Right, That's what

1208
00:59:22,600 --> 00:59:25,920
Speaker 2: Project Vista's kind of trying to argue for, and their

1209
00:59:25,960 --> 00:59:28,800
Speaker 2: conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the

1210
00:59:28,960 --> 00:59:32,520
Speaker 2: Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces

1211
00:59:32,560 --> 00:59:36,000
Speaker 2: the influence of the SAC. Right, the SAC has the nukes.

1212
00:59:36,000 --> 00:59:39,480
Speaker 2: Now the army wants some nukes of its own. Right, right, A.

1213
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:42,160
Speaker 2: Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would

1214
00:59:42,200 --> 00:59:44,880
Speaker 2: be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low yield

1215
00:59:44,920 --> 00:59:47,240
Speaker 2: tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of

1216
00:59:47,240 --> 00:59:50,560
Speaker 2: physile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult

1217
00:59:50,600 --> 00:59:53,200
Speaker 2: to keep under centralized control. The only way to win

1218
00:59:53,240 --> 00:59:55,800
Speaker 2: a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first

1219
00:59:55,880 --> 00:59:59,800
Speaker 2: and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can

1220
00:59:59,800 --> 01:00:03,160
Speaker 2: now no only lesson defeat, LeMay told his commanders. Moreover,

1221
01:00:03,200 --> 01:00:05,880
Speaker 2: an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer

1222
01:00:05,920 --> 01:00:08,560
Speaker 2: the SAC's top priority. La May now thought it would

1223
01:00:08,560 --> 01:00:11,320
Speaker 2: be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability

1224
01:00:11,320 --> 01:00:14,720
Speaker 2: to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers,

1225
01:00:14,720 --> 01:00:18,440
Speaker 2: and nuclear facilities became SAC's primary targets. Lamay did not

1226
01:00:18,520 --> 01:00:22,040
Speaker 2: make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's not completely off base here.

1227
01:00:22,320 --> 01:00:25,480
Speaker 2: LeMay did not advocate preventative war. An American surprise attack

1228
01:00:25,520 --> 01:00:27,640
Speaker 2: on the Soviet Union out of a blue, but the

1229
01:00:27,720 --> 01:00:30,680
Speaker 2: counter force strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war,

1230
01:00:31,000 --> 01:00:33,640
Speaker 2: sac planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to

1231
01:00:33,640 --> 01:00:37,520
Speaker 2: be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable,

1232
01:00:37,560 --> 01:00:40,400
Speaker 2: were no longer the goal. Offensive airpower must now be

1233
01:00:40,440 --> 01:00:43,000
Speaker 2: aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction

1234
01:00:43,040 --> 01:00:45,840
Speaker 2: against the United States or its allies. LeMay argued. This

1235
01:00:45,880 --> 01:00:49,360
Speaker 2: transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might

1236
01:00:49,400 --> 01:00:50,840
Speaker 2: be paid with national survival.

1237
01:00:51,440 --> 01:00:51,640
Speaker 4: Right.

1238
01:00:52,320 --> 01:00:56,880
Speaker 2: This is the origin of what becomes launch on warn. Right,

1239
01:00:57,640 --> 01:01:00,480
Speaker 2: So you don't wait to get a bloody no, you

1240
01:01:00,480 --> 01:01:02,640
Speaker 2: don't wait for them to hit you. You wait until

1241
01:01:02,680 --> 01:01:04,800
Speaker 2: you're pretty sure they're about to hit you, and you

1242
01:01:04,920 --> 01:01:10,040
Speaker 2: hit them. That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right. You

1243
01:01:10,080 --> 01:01:12,360
Speaker 2: can understand Kina how he gets there, but that that

1244
01:01:12,560 --> 01:01:17,240
Speaker 2: ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly once you're

1245
01:01:17,280 --> 01:01:20,600
Speaker 2: now saying we won't wait to get hit. Right.

1246
01:01:20,680 --> 01:01:23,920
Speaker 3: It's so interesting too, because it's it's all predicated on

1247
01:01:23,960 --> 01:01:25,320
Speaker 3: this idea that national survival.

1248
01:01:25,400 --> 01:01:25,520
Speaker 2: Right.

1249
01:01:25,520 --> 01:01:28,240
Speaker 3: He's very concerned about national survival, like I'm much more

1250
01:01:28,240 --> 01:01:31,680
Speaker 3: concerned about humanity is survival. Not even because I'm a humanitarian,

1251
01:01:31,760 --> 01:01:35,400
Speaker 3: people think, but because I'm a human right, like all,

1252
01:01:35,760 --> 01:01:38,440
Speaker 3: if you destroy all life on earth, the nation's gone.

1253
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:41,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's well, And that's that's part of the craziness.

1254
01:01:41,920 --> 01:01:44,480
Speaker 2: Like the understated crazin in that paragraph is that LeMay

1255
01:01:44,600 --> 01:01:48,000
Speaker 2: thinks tactical nukes are a waste of physile material. Broyeh,

1256
01:01:48,160 --> 01:01:50,800
Speaker 2: you have four times as many nukes by nineteen fifty

1257
01:01:50,800 --> 01:01:53,000
Speaker 2: one as it would take to end civilization and just

1258
01:01:53,080 --> 01:01:58,800
Speaker 2: your country. What's wasted? Bro, You're gonna have enough of

1259
01:01:58,840 --> 01:01:59,520
Speaker 2: these fuckers.

1260
01:02:00,360 --> 01:02:03,240
Speaker 3: That's by before they made them, the god killing machine

1261
01:02:03,240 --> 01:02:04,720
Speaker 3: that kills by God.

1262
01:02:04,920 --> 01:02:07,760
Speaker 2: Right, we need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in

1263
01:02:07,760 --> 01:02:11,240
Speaker 2: the fucking yes now. One of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's

1264
01:02:11,240 --> 01:02:13,600
Speaker 2: first concerns when he took office would be to bring

1265
01:02:13,640 --> 01:02:16,040
Speaker 2: a resolution to this conflict, right, this conflict between the

1266
01:02:16,160 --> 01:02:19,480
Speaker 2: Army and the Air Force via the SAC Right. After

1267
01:02:19,520 --> 01:02:21,880
Speaker 2: having his National security team take a new look at

1268
01:02:22,000 --> 01:02:26,000
Speaker 2: US defense policies, Iike decided both sides were right. The

1269
01:02:26,080 --> 01:02:28,600
Speaker 2: US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe,

1270
01:02:28,600 --> 01:02:31,280
Speaker 2: but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that

1271
01:02:31,320 --> 01:02:34,440
Speaker 2: could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all,

1272
01:02:34,560 --> 01:02:37,880
Speaker 2: in late nineteen fifty three, the USSR detonated its first

1273
01:02:37,880 --> 01:02:41,680
Speaker 2: thermo nuclear device. By nineteen fifty four, the United States

1274
01:02:41,680 --> 01:02:45,120
Speaker 2: had more than seventeen hundred nuclear weapons. By nineteen fifty five,

1275
01:02:45,200 --> 01:02:47,520
Speaker 2: that number had climbed to nearly twenty five hundred. We

1276
01:02:47,560 --> 01:02:51,400
Speaker 2: were building roughly two bombs a day. By nineteen fifty nine,

1277
01:02:51,520 --> 01:02:54,120
Speaker 2: the United States had an arsenal of more than twelve

1278
01:02:54,240 --> 01:02:57,680
Speaker 2: thousand nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five

1279
01:02:57,800 --> 01:03:01,840
Speaker 2: per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You

1280
01:03:01,880 --> 01:03:07,120
Speaker 2: see just how quickly like there's not any conceivable use

1281
01:03:07,200 --> 01:03:10,920
Speaker 2: for twelve thousand nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand,

1282
01:03:10,960 --> 01:03:17,680
Speaker 2: at least, you know, maybe less right Like surprisingly, it

1283
01:03:17,720 --> 01:03:20,320
Speaker 2: was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant

1284
01:03:20,320 --> 01:03:23,040
Speaker 2: budget cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has

1285
01:03:23,120 --> 01:03:26,200
Speaker 2: kind of been forgotten, but Ike does you know, people

1286
01:03:26,240 --> 01:03:29,440
Speaker 2: are generally aware of like the military industrial complex speech.

1287
01:03:29,720 --> 01:03:32,040
Speaker 2: But at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes

1288
01:03:32,080 --> 01:03:34,600
Speaker 2: the military budget and actually causes like kind of an

1289
01:03:34,720 --> 01:03:38,320
Speaker 2: eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower,

1290
01:03:38,320 --> 01:03:41,400
Speaker 2: because he's cutting back so much. The Army, in order

1291
01:03:41,440 --> 01:03:43,720
Speaker 2: to deal with this loss of ban power, starts lobbying

1292
01:03:43,720 --> 01:03:46,120
Speaker 2: for more nukes of its own, because that's the only

1293
01:03:46,240 --> 01:03:48,760
Speaker 2: thing you can get funded for now, right, that's all

1294
01:03:48,800 --> 01:03:52,000
Speaker 2: they're giving out. You know. General James R. Gavin, during

1295
01:03:52,040 --> 01:03:55,360
Speaker 2: secret testimony before Congress laid out the number of atomic shells,

1296
01:03:55,400 --> 01:03:58,160
Speaker 2: anti aircraft missiles, and land mines the Army needed. These

1297
01:03:58,160 --> 01:04:02,680
Speaker 2: are all nuclear artillery, nuclear anti aircraft missiles, and nuclear

1298
01:04:02,760 --> 01:04:03,320
Speaker 2: land mines.

1299
01:04:03,560 --> 01:04:05,720
Speaker 3: Nuclear landmine's a great plan. I can't come up with

1300
01:04:06,120 --> 01:04:11,120
Speaker 3: negative sounds good sounds safe. Yeah, what's crazy is how

1301
01:04:11,160 --> 01:04:15,320
Speaker 3: many Gavin wanted. One hundred and six thousand for battlefield use,

1302
01:04:15,600 --> 01:04:18,560
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand for air defense, and twenty thousand to

1303
01:04:18,560 --> 01:04:22,760
Speaker 3: hand out to the rest of NATO. Jesus Christ, bro,

1304
01:04:23,280 --> 01:04:28,040
Speaker 3: these people aren't so crazy.

1305
01:04:25,520 --> 01:04:29,560
Speaker 2: And I will say there is some Maybe the only

1306
01:04:29,720 --> 01:04:32,760
Speaker 2: arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are

1307
01:04:32,760 --> 01:04:35,120
Speaker 2: the air defense nuclear weapons, because the plan of this

1308
01:04:35,240 --> 01:04:37,280
Speaker 2: is if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in,

1309
01:04:37,920 --> 01:04:40,680
Speaker 2: the only way you can stop them maybe and ensure

1310
01:04:40,680 --> 01:04:42,320
Speaker 2: that none of them drop a nuke on a city,

1311
01:04:42,760 --> 01:04:46,320
Speaker 2: is you nuke them in the air, because nuke's fuck

1312
01:04:46,360 --> 01:04:49,000
Speaker 2: up planes really bad. And that's actually kind of reasonable

1313
01:04:49,040 --> 01:04:52,280
Speaker 2: if there's this many of these things like he's shooting

1314
01:04:52,480 --> 01:04:54,600
Speaker 2: also is only going to kill soldiers, right, I mean

1315
01:04:54,640 --> 01:04:57,640
Speaker 2: the fallout and write there will be consequences to that too,

1316
01:04:57,680 --> 01:05:01,280
Speaker 2: But it's a defensible position as compared to everything else

1317
01:05:01,320 --> 01:05:03,800
Speaker 2: that they're doing, right, Like, I can see how you

1318
01:05:03,880 --> 01:05:05,440
Speaker 2: might want to be able to just like try to

1319
01:05:05,480 --> 01:05:07,320
Speaker 2: blow up five hundred planes in the air with a

1320
01:05:07,360 --> 01:05:10,120
Speaker 2: big nuke, right, that kind of makes sense. Like this

1321
01:05:10,240 --> 01:05:11,840
Speaker 2: is all crazy, but I get it.

1322
01:05:11,920 --> 01:05:14,840
Speaker 3: You know what, It's so interesting because I'm under the

1323
01:05:14,840 --> 01:05:16,880
Speaker 3: impression of our current system, is that like shooting a

1324
01:05:16,880 --> 01:05:18,120
Speaker 3: bullet with a bullet approach?

1325
01:05:18,200 --> 01:05:19,240
Speaker 2: Yes, yep, yep.

1326
01:05:19,680 --> 01:05:21,560
Speaker 3: Did we move away from skeet shooting?

1327
01:05:22,040 --> 01:05:22,160
Speaker 1: Uh?

1328
01:05:22,840 --> 01:05:26,480
Speaker 2: We definitely have moved away from nuclear anti aircraft artillery.

1329
01:05:26,480 --> 01:05:29,479
Speaker 2: We have the ability to use that. But also we've

1330
01:05:29,520 --> 01:05:31,920
Speaker 2: gotten a lot better and so have our quote unquote

1331
01:05:31,920 --> 01:05:34,600
Speaker 2: adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from

1332
01:05:34,600 --> 01:05:37,840
Speaker 2: EMP and the like. It's I don't think it's as much.

1333
01:05:38,280 --> 01:05:42,040
Speaker 2: There's just not much point in defenses. The other reason

1334
01:05:42,080 --> 01:05:44,720
Speaker 2: is that, like sure, you could stop some bombers, but

1335
01:05:44,800 --> 01:05:47,080
Speaker 2: it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and

1336
01:05:47,120 --> 01:05:50,680
Speaker 2: the sub launched nukes. And you can kind of again,

1337
01:05:51,880 --> 01:05:54,520
Speaker 2: we have these things called like fad batteries that could

1338
01:05:54,520 --> 01:05:56,680
Speaker 2: be if we actually had any place in the US,

1339
01:05:57,240 --> 01:05:59,840
Speaker 2: could be useful against like a sub attack. Right. You

1340
01:06:00,080 --> 01:06:03,040
Speaker 2: could actually stop a good number of sub based nuclear weapons,

1341
01:06:03,120 --> 01:06:06,080
Speaker 2: right with these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas, protecting

1342
01:06:06,120 --> 01:06:08,080
Speaker 2: like Israel and the like. Right, we don't have any

1343
01:06:08,400 --> 01:06:10,480
Speaker 2: One of the scenarios Jacobsen talks about is like a

1344
01:06:11,040 --> 01:06:15,920
Speaker 2: North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant

1345
01:06:15,920 --> 01:06:19,000
Speaker 2: on the coast of California, which would cause this app

1346
01:06:19,600 --> 01:06:23,000
Speaker 2: titanic environmental catastrophe. And she points out, like there are

1347
01:06:23,040 --> 01:06:25,560
Speaker 2: plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing,

1348
01:06:25,640 --> 01:06:28,120
Speaker 2: but we just we're using them all overseas, so we

1349
01:06:28,160 --> 01:06:29,120
Speaker 2: don't have any set.

1350
01:06:29,000 --> 01:06:30,000
Speaker 3: Up, huh.

1351
01:06:30,200 --> 01:06:32,280
Speaker 2: And that's one of those things where I'm like, well,

1352
01:06:32,400 --> 01:06:34,479
Speaker 2: I guess I'm if we're going to be spending money

1353
01:06:34,520 --> 01:06:36,640
Speaker 2: on something, I would like to spend money on more

1354
01:06:36,680 --> 01:06:39,360
Speaker 2: of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet

1355
01:06:39,360 --> 01:06:41,720
Speaker 2: in the air or more nookes. I don't know. Yeah,

1356
01:06:42,240 --> 01:06:44,240
Speaker 2: but none of this really is gonna be enough if

1357
01:06:44,240 --> 01:06:46,520
Speaker 2: there's a full scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best

1358
01:06:46,560 --> 01:06:48,720
Speaker 2: hope is that maybe someone it's just one or two nukes,

1359
01:06:48,760 --> 01:06:51,360
Speaker 2: they get fires, and maybe we're able to stop them,

1360
01:06:51,480 --> 01:06:51,600
Speaker 2: you know.

1361
01:06:51,960 --> 01:06:52,160
Speaker 3: Yeah.

1362
01:06:52,280 --> 01:06:57,640
Speaker 2: Anyway, that's part three, Margaret Yay, got any pluggables to plug?

1363
01:06:58,600 --> 01:07:01,640
Speaker 3: Well, if you like hiss, Cool People Who Did Cool

1364
01:07:01,640 --> 01:07:04,960
Speaker 3: Stuff is the opposite of the show, although I still

1365
01:07:04,960 --> 01:07:06,960
Speaker 3: have to end up talking about terrible things all the time.

1366
01:07:07,480 --> 01:07:10,360
Speaker 3: And you can go listen to that Cool People Who

1367
01:07:10,360 --> 01:07:12,600
Speaker 3: Did Cool Stuff, And you can also listen to Robert

1368
01:07:12,600 --> 01:07:16,400
Speaker 3: and I Plane Pathfinder's right on the it could happen

1369
01:07:16,400 --> 01:07:18,720
Speaker 3: here feed or the Cool Zone Media book Club feed.

1370
01:07:19,000 --> 01:07:21,680
Speaker 2: That's right. You can check all that out, and you

1371
01:07:21,720 --> 01:07:25,720
Speaker 2: can check me out in the II coad day when

1372
01:07:25,720 --> 01:07:27,600
Speaker 2: we do the next episode, because you're getting a bonus

1373
01:07:27,600 --> 01:07:31,440
Speaker 2: one this week, you lucky gus. Anyway, assuming that you know,

1374
01:07:31,640 --> 01:07:34,480
Speaker 2: we don't all die in newbout Fire, which is entirely possible,

1375
01:07:34,880 --> 01:07:38,520
Speaker 2: it could happen right now. Oh nope, We're good, all right,

1376
01:07:38,560 --> 01:07:39,280
Speaker 2: Oh okay.

1377
01:07:42,400 --> 01:07:45,120
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media

1378
01:07:45,480 --> 01:07:48,080
Speaker 4: for more from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool

1379
01:07:48,160 --> 01:07:52,120
Speaker 4: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

1380
01:07:52,200 --> 01:07:55,360
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the

1381
01:07:55,400 --> 01:07:59,440
Speaker 4: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday

1382
01:07:59,520 --> 01:08:03,200
Speaker 4: and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

1383
01:08:03,400 --> 01:08:04,880
Speaker 4: at Behind the Bastards