Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special
Speaker 1: episodes on how We're all possibly going to die in
Speaker 1: nuclear hell fire.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing
Speaker 2: over the course of two weeks, five episodes. We're in
Speaker 2: our second week, so we'll be getting a bonus episode
Speaker 2: this week about the sons of bitches who created the
Speaker 2: doomsday device that again could kill every single person you've
Speaker 2: ever known and loved in every animal and on earth
Speaker 2: except for you know, cockroaches and the like fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: from now or right now. You know, we'd have no
Speaker 2: way of knowing unless you're I don't know, in the
Speaker 2: White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, Welcome to
Speaker 2: the show. How are you doing. You're thinking about nukes?
Speaker 3: Well, I got promise this is about Warhammer forty k
Speaker 3: but no, I suppose we're learning about the nuclear of Poculus.
Speaker 2: I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show.
Speaker 2: That'll oh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of genocide in
Speaker 2: that too.
Speaker 3: I could be the podcast today for that because I
Speaker 3: actually don't know anything about Warhammer.
Speaker 2: It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation, poisoning,
Speaker 2: which is what we ended our last episode talking about
Speaker 2: our friend Lewis Sloton, who was the partial father of
Speaker 2: the first atomic bomb, had his inards dissolved due to
Speaker 2: a horrible nuclear error.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's like kind of like leave a record
Speaker 3: for science because he was a pretty cool guy. Like
Speaker 3: that's that's badass, Like when you know that, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: well I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation.
Speaker 2: I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time
Speaker 2: to take notes like fucking that's cool. That's cool, Like
Speaker 2: and I guess so acting.
Speaker 3: With agency is like a really good way to not stress, right, yes,
Speaker 3: you know, and like I have a job. I'm just
Speaker 3: doing my job.
Speaker 2: And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrate, like
Speaker 2: he did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed,
Speaker 2: there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, has come up AND's happened.
Speaker 2: I'm taking them off the list of guys I'm pissed at. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so before we move on past World War Two, we
Speaker 2: should at least linger on what guys like LeMay and
Speaker 2: General Power would have argued was the most important question
Speaker 2: of the whole war, Right, which is still a question
Speaker 2: that people debate today. Did the use of atomic weapons
Speaker 2: against the Empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender,
Speaker 2: thus sparing both Japan and the allies, primarily the US,
Speaker 2: a hideously bloody ground invasion. Right, this is a question
Speaker 2: people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here.
Speaker 2: I think you'll it'll be pretty clear where I tend
Speaker 2: to land once we get through this. Right, But this
Speaker 2: isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to come in and just give one
Speaker 2: side of this. Again, I have my my take on
Speaker 2: the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing even if you
Speaker 2: argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan
Speaker 2: to surrender, that the military Japan never independently agreed to
Speaker 2: call it quits, and if the Emperor of Japan had
Speaker 2: not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations,
Speaker 2: we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued
Speaker 2: supporting the war effort, no matter how many fire bombs
Speaker 2: or even additional nukes fell. Right, We actually don't know
Speaker 2: that there's a that's a valid point. There's also an
Speaker 2: argument that the view pushed after the war, which is
Speaker 2: that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding
Speaker 2: a greater slaughter in Japan. That like, if we had
Speaker 2: invaded the main islands, so many more people would have died.
Speaker 2: That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as
Speaker 2: a single weapons system. In an article for outrider dot
Speaker 2: org Jasmine Power Rights, there is general agreement that the
Speaker 2: bombing of Nagasaki did little in the way of changing
Speaker 2: the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming
Speaker 2: their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union having a hand in the post war reconstruction process.
Speaker 2: Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to
Speaker 2: push a communist regime onto the country. It was also
Speaker 2: very convenient for the US that the attributed their surrender
Speaker 2: to the atomic bombings, and.
Speaker 3: Oh shit, so it was a way to stay capitalist,
Speaker 3: was to be like, oh, it was the nukes, the
Speaker 3: nukes to us.
Speaker 2: In more than that, it was a way to avoid
Speaker 2: whatch happened to Germany? Right, they're watching Germany get split up? Right,
Speaker 2: that's obvious at this point, and they don't want that,
Speaker 2: you know, and surrendering now before the Soviets are in,
Speaker 2: you know, in the mix, so to speak, means that
Speaker 2: the country doesn't get split up. Right, You're not gonna
Speaker 2: have Tokyo divided or whatever. Right, that's one argument people
Speaker 2: will make, you know, And in this view, pretty simply,
Speaker 2: Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's
Speaker 2: not a non factor, but they were defeated because they
Speaker 2: were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor.
Speaker 2: It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we
Speaker 2: beat the shit of them all across the Pacific, right, yeah, like,
Speaker 2: which is probably, i mean, certainly a more accurate view
Speaker 2: than just saying it was the nukes, right Like, there
Speaker 2: was a whole war. A lot of guys had to
Speaker 2: die to finish that thing, right And Yeah, Harry Truman,
Speaker 2: the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on
Speaker 2: record basically saying that military planners had told him that
Speaker 2: when they were looking into like what how many people
Speaker 2: would die in an invasion of the Japanese Home islands,
Speaker 2: American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of
Speaker 2: five hundred thousand to a million, and if you're talking
Speaker 2: about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on
Speaker 2: these other island hopping campaigns, and that would have meant
Speaker 2: both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have
Speaker 2: been higher than that. Right Now, that said, this is
Speaker 2: not a real estimate, as best as I can tell,
Speaker 2: you will encounter it often. It comes up constantly, but
Speaker 2: it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers that five
Speaker 2: hundred to a million American casualties estimate have any basis
Speaker 2: in reality. Lose in Europe we lost in the whole war,
Speaker 2: the United States lost about half a million people, Okay,
Speaker 2: Like so this this would be basically doing World War
Speaker 2: Two all over again for US more or less. Right,
Speaker 2: It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I
Speaker 2: want to quote from an article by Alfi Khne on
Speaker 2: kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein
Speaker 2: writes that military planners at the time put the number
Speaker 2: of American casualties between twenty thousand and forty six thousand.
Speaker 2: But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong
Speaker 2: possibility that neither an invasion nor in nuclear attack was
Speaker 2: actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is
Speaker 2: an interesting point because if you're saying, oh, five hundred
Speaker 2: thousand to do a million Americans killed and injured, millions
Speaker 2: of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes save lives.
Speaker 2: But if you're looking at well twenty to forty six,
Speaker 2: forty or fifty thousand American casualties, probably twice that many
Speaker 2: Japanese casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuke the islands. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: What, could they have just laid siege the whole because
Speaker 3: they were already they weren't.
Speaker 2: In fact doing Yeah, and that's another point, as we'll
Speaker 2: get to. That's another point people will make, is that
Speaker 2: Japan would have broken on its own right. In a
Speaker 2: good essay on the subject for his book You Know
Speaker 2: What They Say, The Truth About Popular Belief, Alfie Cone
Speaker 2: gives a succinct version of what we might call this
Speaker 2: skeptic's case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker 2: He notes that the US fire bombs had already incinerated
Speaker 2: Japan's six largest cities and are basically the siege that
Speaker 2: we put on the Home Islands had blocked all oil
Speaker 2: from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was
Speaker 2: in part a desire for the Emperor to retain his title,
Speaker 2: con sites in nineteen forty six report from the War
Speaker 2: Department Strategic Bombing Surveys Study Group, which concluded the Hiroshima
Speaker 2: and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by
Speaker 2: the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war,
Speaker 2: did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor,
Speaker 2: the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister,
Speaker 2: and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty five that the war should be ended,
Speaker 2: even if it meant acceptance of defeat on Allied terms.
Speaker 2: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, supported
Speaker 2: by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, is
Speaker 2: the survey's opinion that, certainly prior to his thirty first
Speaker 2: of December nineteen forty five, and in all probability prior
Speaker 2: to first November nineteen forty five, pan would have surrendered
Speaker 2: even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, Even
Speaker 2: if Russia had not entered the war, and even if
Speaker 2: no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the
Speaker 2: US War Department.
Speaker 3: So that's the They were already beat theory.
Speaker 2: They were beat. They were beat. And I would say
Speaker 2: that's by far the strongest argument if you're going with
Speaker 2: the fact based argument. Not that it's the only one,
Speaker 2: but I think it's the strongest. You know, your feelings
Speaker 2: may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm
Speaker 2: convinced pretty well now. There was at least one other
Speaker 2: secret intelligence assessment from the same time, done by the
Speaker 2: US Armies planning an operations group, which reached a similar conclusion,
Speaker 2: and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Lahey, the
Speaker 2: president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision
Speaker 2: to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time adopting
Speaker 2: quote an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the
Speaker 2: dark Ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's
Speaker 2: chief of staff to say about. Like Dwight Eisenhower reached
Speaker 2: a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to
Speaker 2: hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I
Speaker 2: go with Ike on this. One. Not a perfect man,
Speaker 2: but he pretty much he knew World War two pretty well.
Speaker 3: That's why he had the I'm with Ike button.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm with Ike. It wasn't necessary to hit them
Speaker 2: with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: now I've allowed that. There's still some room for argument
Speaker 2: here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's
Speaker 2: decision to surrender, because the bombing campaign in general influenced
Speaker 2: their decision to surrender, and the nukes were part of that. Right,
Speaker 2: But what isn't arguable is this President Truman and men
Speaker 2: in high positions within the US Army like Curtis LeMay
Speaker 2: never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew
Speaker 2: they had a bomb. Right, there was never any possibility
Speaker 2: in their minds but that they would use it. Percne's article,
Speaker 2: the fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option
Speaker 2: of last resort. It would be easier to accept the
Speaker 2: argument that he Truman had no choice but to drop
Speaker 2: the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power
Speaker 2: to Japan the leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender,
Speaker 2: had been carefully considered. They were not there was never
Speaker 2: a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of
Speaker 2: obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist
Speaker 2: Kai Eriksson put it, using nuclear weapons was not, by
Speaker 2: any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration.
Speaker 2: We have it on the authority of virtually all the
Speaker 2: principal players that no one in a position to do
Speaker 2: anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the
Speaker 2: bombs on Japan.
Speaker 3: So that's pretty much we have a new toy. Weird,
Speaker 3: We're gonna see what this thing does. Yeah, this sphenometer
Speaker 3: goes up to two hundred, I'm going to two hundred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're already planning for the next war. Like they
Speaker 2: handed Lameya list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right,
Speaker 2: Like they wanted to use this thing in part to
Speaker 2: scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that
Speaker 2: was part of their logic, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped
Speaker 2: in Japan killed between one hundred and fifty thousand and
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand people. The initial death toll
Speaker 2: was horrific enough, but it was what came after. It
Speaker 2: really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor
Speaker 2: and she described the site of thousands of blinded, burnt
Speaker 2: people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to
Speaker 2: quench their burning bodies, and all of these, like a
Speaker 2: huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were
Speaker 2: just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had
Speaker 2: tossed themselves, burnt and singing and like melting basically into
Speaker 2: the water. It was horrible, And in the days and
Speaker 2: weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood,
Speaker 2: pulling their hair out, and clumps from radiation poisoning. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that
Speaker 2: not only does the bomb kill a shitload of people
Speaker 2: when it goes off, but there are knock on effects
Speaker 2: that continue killing people. Right even though we didn't have
Speaker 2: a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good
Speaker 2: understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people
Speaker 2: with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best
Speaker 2: to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of
Speaker 2: nineteen forty five, General Leslie Groves, who again the military
Speaker 2: head of the Manhattan Project, that before the US Senate
Speaker 2: Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read
Speaker 2: you a selected Q and A from that meeting, Senator Milligan. General,
Speaker 2: is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves.
Speaker 2: I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway.
Speaker 2: I always love it when people say that the radio
Speaker 2: act of casualty can be of several classes. He can
Speaker 2: have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He
Speaker 2: can have a smaller amount which will cause him to
Speaker 2: die rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors,
Speaker 2: without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a
Speaker 2: very pleasant way to die. Oh yeah, that's what people
Speaker 2: say about people say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied, pleasant, chill.
Speaker 3: All the parts of you that tell you that you're
Speaker 3: in trouble are also destroyed.
Speaker 2: So yeah, exactly, you're fine.
Speaker 3: You're chillin now happens to everyone.
Speaker 2: That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing.
Speaker 2: That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more
Speaker 2: palatable for Americans when he said that the average citizen,
Speaker 2: and indeed the average senator, would not have had to
Speaker 2: dig very deep to find at least a little countervailing
Speaker 2: evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had
Speaker 2: happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not
Speaker 2: yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of
Speaker 2: horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast sight
Speaker 2: were available. More to the point, you've heard about the
Speaker 2: radium girls in the like. People had been exposing themselves
Speaker 2: to different kinds of radiation for decades and they died horribly.
Speaker 2: We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever
Speaker 2: dropped an atomic bomb. Right now. Again, the point here
Speaker 2: is that Groves was he was not just lying, He
Speaker 2: was engaged in a cover up. This is a conspiracy,
Speaker 2: and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of
Speaker 2: the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, the campaign
Speaker 2: to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that
Speaker 2: campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors
Speaker 2: of atomic weapons for a little while, longer we knew
Speaker 2: eventually it would get out. Right. These generals all knew
Speaker 2: you can't lie about this forever, right, But the longer
Speaker 2: we lie about it, the more money we get into
Speaker 2: these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the
Speaker 2: more we can centralize the US military and defense apparatus
Speaker 2: around nukes, which was their goal right Their goal was
Speaker 2: replaced as many humans as possible with atomic weapons, and
Speaker 2: they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as
Speaker 2: for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems
Speaker 2: to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark,
Speaker 2: animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after
Speaker 2: the war's end, they set to work launching a new
Speaker 2: kind of campaign, a media blitz targeted at convincing decision
Speaker 2: makers in the US that nukes were the only future
Speaker 2: for the military that was worth caring. About three months
Speaker 2: after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society
Speaker 2: in New York City to give a speech. He warned
Speaker 2: slash promise the men a symbol that the next war,
Speaker 2: understood to be the next World War, would be fought
Speaker 2: with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that
Speaker 2: all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster
Speaker 2: than sound and involve atomic power. So he's he's got
Speaker 2: a pretty clear vision of the future. Our friend Curtis Lamay,
Speaker 2: and he is now trying to sell.
Speaker 3: It and like, are there other because Okay, we have
Speaker 3: this like thing where apparently people who build bombs are
Speaker 3: obsessed with how bombs are the only thing?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Right? Are there other character classes who feel like similar
Speaker 3: about like, like are like the fighter jets being like, no,
Speaker 3: all that matters is fighter jets?
Speaker 2: Yeah, go ahead, yes there are, and what we will
Speaker 2: talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree
Speaker 2: with le may just want nukes to be used differently.
Speaker 2: But there are some people, there's a couple of decent
Speaker 2: human beings still in the military establishment in this period
Speaker 2: who are like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Speaker 2: Are you at our minds?
Speaker 3: Yeah? You know what this thing does? Yeah, I'm able
Speaker 3: to figure out this means to destroy the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems bad. Why are we building the world
Speaker 2: killing machine? Why are we doing this?
Speaker 3: We live here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the one planet that we've got.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen twenty one, do Hay had argued that
Speaker 2: the invention of the bomber craft basically rendered all all
Speaker 2: other types of weaponry obsolete, and LeMay was making a
Speaker 2: similar argument, but with the nuclear weapon at the heart
Speaker 2: of this fabled air force that could finally do the
Speaker 2: whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote,
Speaker 2: the air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained.
Speaker 2: There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to
Speaker 2: our air power development. That doesn't sound at all like
Speaker 2: a crazy man, No, and it's you know, this is
Speaker 2: a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say. One
Speaker 2: thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis Lemy tried
Speaker 2: harder than any single human ever has to end the
Speaker 2: human race and he didn't do it. And I don't
Speaker 2: quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived. Curtis Lamay,
Speaker 2: he would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace
Speaker 2: just to like tweak them, Like he was such a
Speaker 2: piece of shit, And they always had.
Speaker 3: Nukes, right, quantum immortality as a species. That that's all
Speaker 3: I got.
Speaker 2: It's nuts, Like no one has ever tried harder to
Speaker 2: wipe out the human race than Curtis fucking went with
Speaker 2: his fucking dead face. Oh man, it's nuts. I wonder
Speaker 2: if like.
Speaker 3: The villains and pulp stuff from like two hundred years
Speaker 3: ago didn't even claim that they're going to destroy the world,
Speaker 3: whereas like now we have villains who are like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to destroy the world, like yeah, yeah, because people
Speaker 3: can now.
Speaker 2: People can now, and we have examples of people who
Speaker 2: really worked hard to try to do that, you know.
Speaker 2: And this is ultimately kind of why we are now
Speaker 2: at the point where the whole human race is, you know,
Speaker 2: fifteen to thirty minutes away from annihilation at any given
Speaker 2: moment in time, which is Curtis LeMay and a bunch
Speaker 2: of guys that followed him felt the air force, and
Speaker 2: to them this means the nuclear air force must be
Speaker 2: allowed to develop, unhindered and unschained. I cannot emphasize enough
Speaker 2: how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio Society was
Speaker 2: just warmed up do Hay. He insisted no air attack,
Speaker 2: once it is launched, can be completely stopped. This was
Speaker 2: an echo of du Hay's argument that the sky was
Speaker 2: too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right, And
Speaker 2: this hadn't proved true in World War Two, But when
Speaker 2: you got nukes, it kind of is true. Right. If
Speaker 2: you send five hundred bombers and they each have a nuke,
Speaker 2: one of them is going to drop that fucker, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes, yeah,
Speaker 3: this feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure.
Speaker 3: Do May and lou Hay, Yeah, do Hay and le May?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It is weird how history literally rhyme.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I hadn't even got that fuck no, because I
Speaker 3: was trying to remember which one was which.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Dueyes, the old Italian guy who was like in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty one Bombers of the Future all, we need
Speaker 2: no use in having anything else.
Speaker 3: Yeah. A couple decades later, the man who rhymes says
Speaker 3: the same thing, right, nuke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you get if anyone gets into the military
Speaker 2: whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we
Speaker 2: need to redact it immediately. So, as Richard, I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote now from a piece in The New Yorker
Speaker 2: by Richard Rhodes in which he lays out le May's
Speaker 2: thinking in the rest of this speech, and it all
Speaker 2: kind of follows from the bay that you can't stop
Speaker 2: an aerial nuclear attack. Quote. This meant to le May
Speaker 2: that the United States would have to have an air
Speaker 2: force in being that could immediately move immediately to retaliate
Speaker 2: if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the
Speaker 2: thread of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in
Speaker 2: the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come.
Speaker 2: It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare
Speaker 2: to attack us if we are prepared. So in November
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty five, l May was already thinking in
Speaker 2: terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein
Speaker 2: lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped,
Speaker 2: then retaliation would not protect the country, It would only
Speaker 2: destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right, And what he
Speaker 2: means by an air force in being is you always
Speaker 2: have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs ready to fly
Speaker 2: minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean
Speaker 2: you always have planes in the air with nukes. And
Speaker 2: that's going to mean for a period of like a
Speaker 2: couple decades, there are never not nukes flying around in
Speaker 2: the air always. And this is before there's no governor
Speaker 2: on these. This is not a thing today. Every nuke
Speaker 2: that we have you have to get like codes and
Speaker 2: shit from the nuclear football. This is some guys in
Speaker 2: a plane have the ability to activate these things.
Speaker 3: Right, You're like, oh, my wife left me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the
Speaker 2: Cold War. Yeah yeah, so yeah. What we see in
Speaker 2: this period as early as nineteen forty five as men
Speaker 2: in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in
Speaker 2: minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians.
Speaker 2: People were tired after World War Two, soldiers long deployed
Speaker 2: wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed
Speaker 2: to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military.
Speaker 2: Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the
Speaker 2: US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments.
Speaker 2: Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an
Speaker 2: impossible problem. I'm gonna quote from Rhodes again. In the
Speaker 2: four years that the United States held a monopoly on
Speaker 2: nuclear weapons, it reduced its mild terry forces to bare bones,
Speaker 2: shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly
Speaker 2: ninety billion dollars to less than fifteen billion dollars, and
Speaker 2: counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter
Speaker 2: as Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war ravaged
Speaker 2: Western Europe right. And this is kind of the first
Speaker 2: use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Speaker 2: which is, we can't keep all these soldiers in the field,
Speaker 2: but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the
Speaker 2: scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes
Speaker 2: all over the place. That way, we don't need as
Speaker 2: many guys. We can just set off a shitload of
Speaker 2: nukes and we can slow these these Russians down while
Speaker 2: we get our shit in gear, you know. And this
Speaker 2: works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have
Speaker 2: a bomb, right, because they don't have anything to counter
Speaker 2: this with. Hap Arnold sent a letter in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: five laying out he's an air force general laying out
Speaker 2: some of the first principles. While the air force doesn't
Speaker 2: exist yet, he's an army air thing general laying out
Speaker 2: some of the first principles for what would become the
Speaker 2: theory of deterrence. Quote. We must thereforece it cure our
Speaker 2: nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques
Speaker 2: required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to
Speaker 2: deter them from launching. A modern devastating war. In order
Speaker 2: to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific
Speaker 2: projects the Air Force should support over the next twenty
Speaker 2: to thirty years. This resulted in nineteen forty six and
Speaker 2: the Air Force setting up the RAND Corporation. You've heard
Speaker 2: of the RAND Corporation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did not know that they were Air Force.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's how they start. And RAND just means R
Speaker 2: and D like literally, that's why it's brand. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh shit, Okay, I assume to someone's name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the RAND Corporation that They're set up in
Speaker 2: Santa Monica, right on the coast, beautiful area, and a
Speaker 2: former defense engineer named James Rubell later wrote of this
Speaker 2: is the first RAND project. Rand quickly proposed a death
Speaker 2: ray project, which the Air Force approved. So top man, guys,
Speaker 2: everyone's super sane. Not a bunch of dudes whose brains
Speaker 2: have been melted by lead and war trauma just trying
Speaker 2: to come up with apocalypse weapons. I don't know, guys,
Speaker 2: death ray feels like a good idea. Let's get one
Speaker 2: of those fuckers. I watched War of the World's to
Speaker 2: hell with it now, And to be honest, if we've
Speaker 2: made a death ray. That would be pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, would it be a second amendment? You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm ready for a death ray. I think I think
Speaker 2: certain people should know it.
Speaker 3: Death ray is a one on one It's not really
Speaker 3: a major step up from bullets, you know.
Speaker 2: No, it's probably faster and less painless to get shot with. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, and I bet it's I don't know, good
Speaker 2: at killing martians, which we might need to do if
Speaker 2: Elon Musk ever sets up a colony on Mars anyway.
Speaker 3: So I think we're both pro death rays.
Speaker 2: I actually I've come around on the Rand Corporation, Margaret,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be honest with you. Yeah, speaking of the
Speaker 2: Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast. Not the
Speaker 2: Rand Corporation, because we're primarily talking about how they nearly
Speaker 2: killed everyone like a million times.
Speaker 3: It's the we're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why
Speaker 3: we were coming out so strong on deathrays right now.
Speaker 2: That's right. And actually, our the company, the death ray
Speaker 2: company that sponsors us, is called life Ray, you know,
Speaker 2: because it'll it's it's a it's a it's a death
Speaker 2: Ray for personal defense. You know, yeah, keep say lives,
Speaker 2: It saves lives. That's that's the life Ray. And we're
Speaker 2: back having a good time. So right around the time
Speaker 2: the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war
Speaker 2: is over, because the normal normal life is starting to
Speaker 2: reassert itself, for at least the new normal, some people
Speaker 2: have begun to question the logic with which men like
Speaker 2: bomber Harris Curtis LeMay in General Power. I still can't
Speaker 2: believe his literal name was General fucking Power approached a
Speaker 2: real warfare. Was it really possible to break in? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing? Right?
Speaker 2: This was a question that people. You know, there are
Speaker 2: guys like LeMay that like, obviously it is, look at
Speaker 2: what we did, And there are more thoughtful men who
Speaker 2: are like, actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out.
Speaker 2: And I want to read a quote here about members
Speaker 2: of the Strategic Bombing Survey from Kinney's book Fifteen Minutes,
Speaker 2: How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective
Speaker 2: were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants,
Speaker 2: the loss of which ravaged the Germans war, making capabilities
Speaker 2: and destroyed their economy. This led to post war air
Speaker 2: atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike,
Speaker 2: key targets that, if destroyed, would have a large and
Speaker 2: effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction. These plants
Speaker 2: were often located in major urban areas, said one Air
Speaker 2: Force general of this conundrum. I think it was sort
Speaker 2: of a shock to people when a few began to
Speaker 2: talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital, and particularly
Speaker 2: when they began to ask, what was a city but
Speaker 2: a collection of industry and that's an important Yeah, it's hideous.
Speaker 3: Fuck do they live? It must be these are suburbanites.
Speaker 3: This is because suburbanites have entered the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and are out running the army share.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But that term bonus effects is used a lot in
Speaker 2: nuclear war planning, and a bonus effect is the added
Speaker 2: destruction that you get while destroying the targets you're actually
Speaker 2: aiming at. In atomic war, so.
Speaker 3: You're trying to take out of collateral damage. But it's
Speaker 3: the same concept, but.
Speaker 2: It's collateral damage but good, right, Like, yeah, we needed
Speaker 2: to take out this tank factory and we killed a
Speaker 2: million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And there's other bonus effects. Radiation, poisoning causes bonus effects.
Speaker 2: Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they
Speaker 2: cause fire storms, massive firestorms, some theoretically some like the
Speaker 2: size of states, right, And that's a bonus effect, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, as they've been trying to do that since
Speaker 3: the beginning, based on what you've told me last week.
Speaker 2: And they have been you know, a firestorm really fucks
Speaker 2: people up. People don't like firestorms.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: The argument military leaders were making about the future for
Speaker 2: the first four years after World War Two can best
Speaker 2: be summarized by a memo General Loris Norstad, Assistant Chief
Speaker 2: Staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five. He laid out the need for a ready
Speaker 2: force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere
Speaker 2: in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives,
Speaker 2: he argued the existence of this ready force would act
Speaker 2: as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2: So first, we need a ready force so that no
Speaker 2: one else will get nukes. If we always have planes
Speaker 2: ready to nuke people, no one else will even try
Speaker 2: to get them, right, this is this is their first argument,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not as strong as the argument that I think
Speaker 3: this coming based on what you told me last week.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah. Now, this Ready Force is established in March
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty six as part of what becomes known
Speaker 2: as the Strategic Air Command. The ESSAC is responsible not
Speaker 2: just for nukes, but for the Air force's long range
Speaker 2: bombing operations. Right when we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam,
Speaker 2: the SACS, especially in Korea, going to be heavily involved.
Speaker 2: And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars, but
Speaker 2: they come to control a lot of our nukes, and
Speaker 2: they come to control our long range missile assets. I
Speaker 2: say control. Technically all of our nuclear weapons at this
Speaker 2: point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right,
Speaker 2: and they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that
Speaker 2: we're starting to build in the post war period.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: But what you're going to see happen during these first
Speaker 2: four or five years after the war is we're increasingly
Speaker 2: deploying nuclear weapons around the world to have this this
Speaker 2: air force in readiness, right, this ready Force, and so Basically,
Speaker 2: they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and SAC is
Speaker 2: maintaining control of them. Right, but you know, the SAC
Speaker 2: gets them from the Atomic Energy Commission and the.
Speaker 3: SC surprise that none of them got stolen.
Speaker 2: Oh they oh, Margaret, just wait, none of them got stolen. Maybe,
Speaker 2: but we lose a lot of these fucking bombs, okadh huh,
Speaker 2: We'll get to that. But the SAC today. One of
Speaker 2: the things that scares me about our current nuclear force
Speaker 2: is that it is the shittiest job in the Air Force,
Speaker 2: maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this,
Speaker 2: but I've talked to a couple of nukes and they
Speaker 2: did not like it. It is not a prestigious job.
Speaker 2: It is not a fun job. It is boring that
Speaker 2: people cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in
Speaker 2: nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a
Speaker 2: shit job. In this period of time, it is not
Speaker 2: seen as a shit job. These are seen as this
Speaker 2: is the best part of the military to be in.
Speaker 2: This is the most elite force in the military. It's
Speaker 2: certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind
Speaker 2: of pilot, right, and these are the best pilots and
Speaker 2: engineers that our entire military can put together, right, and
Speaker 2: they're tasked with a singular purpose, so it's different. At
Speaker 2: this point, that is probably what you want. Now, that's
Speaker 2: the idea. It's debatable are they ever really that good?
Speaker 2: We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the
Speaker 2: SAC in nineteen forty eight. He's not the first guy
Speaker 2: in charge of it, but he takes command and he
Speaker 2: really he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty nine, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead,
Speaker 2: terrifying members of the US defense establishment. There had been
Speaker 2: a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and well,
Speaker 2: of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program.
Speaker 2: They have resources, They've got spies, are gonna get a bomb, right,
Speaker 2: they have the ability to get uranium or platonia, all
Speaker 2: this whatever shit they need. It's it's there's like a
Speaker 2: fifth of the world's land masks. They have the ability
Speaker 2: to do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we invented the wheel. No one else has
Speaker 3: the wheel. No one figure out the wheel.
Speaker 2: They figured out machine guns too, goddamn it. No, of
Speaker 2: course they were going to do this, but there were,
Speaker 2: and it's a mix. There were plenty of people. Obviously,
Speaker 2: there were a number of people in our military who
Speaker 2: knew that this was going to happen at some point.
Speaker 2: But there are a lot of people who are shocked,
Speaker 2: right and are terrifying, like, oh my god, I can't
Speaker 2: believe the Communists figured out this bomb? Right?
Speaker 3: Is this because that like spy couple or is that.
Speaker 2: They there are several spies who play a role, And honestly,
Speaker 2: I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear
Speaker 2: weapons from being used again in war than anything else.
Speaker 2: I think once the US has them, if the Soviets
Speaker 2: didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up
Speaker 2: nuking the USSR at some point. Right, Yeah, that seems
Speaker 2: very like that's unprovable, but that that's kind of where
Speaker 2: I come in, right, Like, well, it's kind of the gun.
Speaker 2: It's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were
Speaker 2: no semi automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in
Speaker 2: the country? That would probably be more pleasant? Am I
Speaker 2: not gonna have one? When the crazy ass motherfuckers I
Speaker 2: know have them?
Speaker 3: Like, ah, the people who want to kill me have it?
Speaker 3: Ye have read enough history to know what happens after
Speaker 3: you disarm.
Speaker 2: And here's the problem. That's there's a logic to that,
Speaker 2: and also that leads us both to having four hundred
Speaker 2: million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's like, I understand the thought process, but it
Speaker 2: might fundamentally be what's doomed? What will do us?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So there's a degree to which, like I have to
Speaker 2: put myself in the in where these guys are. And
Speaker 2: keep in mind, this is not a period of time
Speaker 2: in which all of our generals are most or many
Speaker 2: of them are dudes who just came up and have
Speaker 2: done this as like a desk job. Right. All of
Speaker 2: these Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these
Speaker 2: guys did, right. So these dudes are fucked up and
Speaker 2: crazy at this point. These people live incinerated cities from
Speaker 2: the sky. They're not thinking the way normal people think anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the same is true of the Soviets. By the way,
Speaker 2: they lost twenty million people in this war. The Soviets
Speaker 2: were not getting into it because I have less detail
Speaker 2: on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to
Speaker 2: the US, right, sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a
Speaker 2: little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged
Speaker 2: by this hideous war, Right, so I do have a
Speaker 2: little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not
Speaker 2: have gone bad? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for quite a while after the Soviets detonate
Speaker 2: their first Adam Baum, the US will retain a massive
Speaker 2: advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right, That will
Speaker 2: not last forever. Eventually we reach parity. I think they
Speaker 2: do actually beat us at one point in total number
Speaker 2: of news. So it's a little hard to know. But
Speaker 2: from this point forward there was no denying that nuclear
Speaker 2: deterrence would eventually be a thing, right, And so you
Speaker 2: wind up in this there's the nineteen like fifty to
Speaker 2: like fifty two to fifty three. Is this insanely dangerous,
Speaker 2: dangerous period really up until like the early sixties, where
Speaker 2: the Soviets have some nukes but not all that many,
Speaker 2: and the US has a lot, and we could have
Speaker 2: started and won a nuclear war. It would have been
Speaker 2: really pretty easy for US. Right. There would have been
Speaker 2: casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would
Speaker 2: have mostly been over in Europe, right, because the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union just didn't have a lot of bombs. And they
Speaker 2: didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs
Speaker 2: over here. There's no ycbms. You're flying fucking bombers, right,
Speaker 2: so we would have lost Alaska maybe, right, Like their
Speaker 2: long range bombing capacity, especially in like nineteen forty nine
Speaker 2: to fifty is it probably could have accomplished that, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't great. Right. In nineteen fifty, a year after
Speaker 2: the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly
Speaker 2: three hundred nuclear weapons, The USSR had five. The newly
Speaker 2: founded Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Department of Defense,
Speaker 2: which that'll get started in this post war period, right,
Speaker 2: we don't have the Joint Chiefs or like you know
Speaker 2: in World War two. Right, this is a post war innovation,
Speaker 2: you know, if you want to call it that. But
Speaker 2: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DoD had concluded,
Speaker 2: after a study that some two hundred nuclear bombs would
Speaker 2: be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth, quote, leaving
Speaker 2: only the stigial remnants of man's material works, that is,
Speaker 2: the Joint Chiefs. They say two hundred nukes will do that,
Speaker 2: and so we build three hundred. Yeah, cool, Well we'll
Speaker 2: get a lot more. By nineteen fifty one will have
Speaker 2: more than four hundred such weapons.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power,
Speaker 2: the USSR goes from one to fifty atomic weapons of
Speaker 2: varying power. Shortly after taking over the ESSAC, LeMay decided
Speaker 2: that the new post war air force had gotten sloppy,
Speaker 2: and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio
Speaker 2: to prove it a massive bomber. I love that. He's like, well,
Speaker 2: let's have them pretend to blow up Dayton. See how
Speaker 2: good the Ohio Yeah, fuck it. So he has this
Speaker 2: massive raid over the city. That's like, it's a fake.
Speaker 2: They're not dropping real bombs obviously, but all of the
Speaker 2: fake bombs are horribly off target. Like every they fuck
Speaker 2: up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs
Speaker 2: to save their goddamn lives. Right, This is probably less
Speaker 2: on training. I mean there's some degree of training. It's
Speaker 2: more than just like, bombers aren't great at hitting things
Speaker 2: precisely at this point. Yeah, yeah, And nukes.
Speaker 3: Are not TV guided I remembering that TV.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not quite yet. And it's the kind of thing,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the benefits of nukes. It's horrible
Speaker 2: to say this, but it is a benefit from a
Speaker 2: military standpoint is that you don't have to be very
Speaker 2: accurate because it's a fucking nuke, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but people say the shotguns but real.
Speaker 2: Right, But but accurate, yes, accurate, Like you really can
Speaker 2: be pretty far off with the nuke, can still hit
Speaker 2: your target. But these guys do so badly that even
Speaker 2: with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their
Speaker 2: intended targets. This is not an effective raid, and the
Speaker 2: May calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton quote the
Speaker 2: darkest night in American military aviation history, because not one
Speaker 2: airplane finished. That mission is briefed and like, man, you
Speaker 2: were part of raids where guys die, I think that's darker,
Speaker 2: like where guides died and the mission wasn't really that successful.
Speaker 2: I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs
Speaker 2: just don't hit very well. I don't know, babies, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that might be darker, horotia monig oh, it might be darker. Arguably. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Now this means that when the Korean War kind of
Speaker 2: starts up, it's gonna be not quite the last point.
Speaker 2: Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's this
Speaker 2: some shit in the JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's
Speaker 2: some shit in during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan where
Speaker 2: we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary
Speaker 2: annihilation or getting nuked into the Stone Age ourselves. Right,
Speaker 2: But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict
Speaker 2: where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a
Speaker 2: tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things
Speaker 2: would have like spiraled into globally annihilation at least at
Speaker 2: that point. Right, And given that fact, given that we
Speaker 2: could have nuked North Korea and even China and guys
Speaker 2: wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't.
Speaker 2: It's like shocking to me when I get into the
Speaker 2: history that like we that it didn't happen, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And going into the war, some powerful men in the
Speaker 2: Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was
Speaker 2: the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered
Speaker 2: our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it, was
Speaker 2: a wasting asset in other words, because we know the
Speaker 2: Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and
Speaker 2: starting to get long range bombers and the other things
Speaker 2: they need to be able to strike us. Every day
Speaker 2: we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically,
Speaker 2: he's saying, we got to use him or lose him. Right.
Speaker 2: If we don't use them now, we'll never be able
Speaker 2: to use them, right, right.
Speaker 3: And if you're playing the world like a video game,
Speaker 3: this is true. Right. If I'm a video game general,
Speaker 3: I would I will.
Speaker 2: Start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game
Speaker 2: that gives me a nuke, right yeah, yeah, uh yeah,
Speaker 2: which is why gamers should not be allowed in the
Speaker 2: Department of Defense. No oops, turns out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, under strict control by non gamers. Right.
Speaker 2: So, at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing
Speaker 2: advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic
Speaker 2: targets in North Korea, and they succeeded in these bombing
Speaker 2: raids on paper, right, the sac destroys the targets assigned
Speaker 2: to them. But North Korea, if you know much about
Speaker 2: North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of exposure. There wasn't a lot that we could really
Speaker 2: do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right,
Speaker 2: like we do some damage, but that's just kind of
Speaker 2: not how their military is wired at this point in time.
Speaker 2: And to make matters worse for the United States, we
Speaker 2: start this war using very new high tech guided bombs
Speaker 2: like the Asma one Tarzan, but those run out immediately,
Speaker 2: which is a thing in modern warfare too. If you
Speaker 2: look at what's happened in Ukraine, right, like, you have
Speaker 2: these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things,
Speaker 2: but also it's really hard to make them, and you
Speaker 2: instead of them all and it turns out you go
Speaker 2: through that shit real fast in a war. So, as
Speaker 2: I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the
Speaker 2: SAC in nineteen forty eight and he was the architect
Speaker 2: of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the
Speaker 2: fact that we had run through all of our most
Speaker 2: advanced munitions without ending the war as another l for
Speaker 2: team precision bombing. Basically, LeMay is like, well, look, clearly,
Speaker 2: just striking strategic targets doesn't work, so he orders US
Speaker 2: bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rossioni, in that
Speaker 2: article that he wrote, describes SAC's plan as to quote
Speaker 2: increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing
Speaker 2: civilian targets. LeMay and the sac used US air power
Speaker 2: to kill around two million North Korean citizens over the
Speaker 2: next two years. In change.
Speaker 3: Jesus fuck, I straight up didn't know that. I know
Speaker 3: so little about the Korean War.
Speaker 2: It's a between a fifth and a sixth of the
Speaker 2: population of North Korea we kill through primarily aerial bombing.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: But it's also still a hideous war crime, like we
Speaker 2: murder two million people and it doesn't win. Like again, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the thing that keeps happening, that has always happened every
Speaker 2: time someone like LeMay is like, well, we just got
Speaker 2: to cause them enough pain that their morale breaks. And
Speaker 2: what happens is their morale doesn't break, right, and.
Speaker 3: They're always like forever and ever. I've been just in
Speaker 3: a bunch of stuff about people defending against the Roman
Speaker 3: Empire and Gaul and things like that, right, and you
Speaker 3: start saying like, oh, well, these people, like these people,
Speaker 3: you know, the horrible druids, they sacrifice children or whatever, right,
Speaker 3: and who wasn't, Like, I don't one who wasn't. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And even if they were, you know how many you know,
Speaker 3: how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere
Speaker 3: near the evil of what Rome did in terms of
Speaker 3: killing them.
Speaker 2: Julius Caesar does a genocide in Gaul.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so like communism is whatever.
Speaker 2: It's the same thing as the people who are like, well,
Speaker 2: the conquista or stopped the child sacrifice and the American children.
Speaker 2: You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve any fucking kids dying?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, okay, Brotally, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, I'm not saying I'm not saying any of these
Speaker 2: any society, any organized empire anywhere in the Americans or elsewhere,
Speaker 2: has been a nice empire. None of them are. But
Speaker 2: if you're just being like, well, look at the bad
Speaker 2: things they did, uh huh, what were you guys getting
Speaker 2: up to?
Speaker 1: Huh?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Is that justify you killing two million people? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: come on, bro, Was North Korea so bad that they
Speaker 3: all just need to die?
Speaker 2: It's it's the same thing as like, we'll look at
Speaker 2: all these fucked up things, and plenty of fucked up
Speaker 2: things the Soviet ni and the People's Republic of China
Speaker 2: did a lot of, but like we murder millions of
Speaker 2: people from the sky repeatedly all over like the world yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know, I don't know. Don't don't get up
Speaker 2: your own ass about your side being particularly nice. Angels, right,
Speaker 2: the angels as you incinerate cities, villages largely. But yeah,
Speaker 2: once again, though this is really important. Actual war disproves
Speaker 2: all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off,
Speaker 2: North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has
Speaker 2: troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge
Speaker 2: and strategic bombing per the theories that LeMay and do
Speaker 2: Hey both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic
Speaker 2: bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right, that's the point.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't work. It's never true. That Also are
Speaker 2: the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop
Speaker 2: North Korea from fighting effectively, and none of the bombing
Speaker 2: we do it doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a
Speaker 2: strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes
Speaker 2: as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had
Speaker 2: gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier,
Speaker 2: we really cut back on the military after World War Two,
Speaker 2: and in fact, all military development outside of making the
Speaker 2: SAC stronger took a back seat. And as a result,
Speaker 2: when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South
Speaker 2: Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained.
Speaker 2: I've talked to my grandpa about because he was there
Speaker 2: the whole war, and he was like, yeah, we were
Speaker 2: in shit shape when the war started, and it was
Speaker 2: because they had let like we had, like fucking our
Speaker 2: bazukas wouldn't fire and shit like we had, Like there
Speaker 2: were serious issues with like the maintenance of basic equipment
Speaker 2: because guys like the LeMay were like, all we need
Speaker 2: are bombers, bro, trust ye, all we need o bombers,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, whereas they actually needed the life ray.
Speaker 2: Right, we needed the life A couple of life rays
Speaker 2: would have really solved this w old problem. They wouldn't
Speaker 2: have even tried if we had a life ray. That's
Speaker 2: what I'm saying now. After North Korea invades, they pushed
Speaker 2: the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down
Speaker 2: the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur, at the head of
Speaker 2: a un amphibious landing force, came aground at Incheon and
Speaker 2: pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with China.
Speaker 2: Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes,
Speaker 2: and suddenly the un forced are in full retreat and
Speaker 2: they get pushed backs. It's really it's a it doesn't
Speaker 2: not enough study of not enough people. Americans know anything
Speaker 2: about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War
Speaker 3: two and then Vietnam. That's what I know, right, it's
Speaker 3: a little.
Speaker 2: It's it's in Korea is kind of halfway between World
Speaker 2: War Two and Vietnam in terms of like fighting tactics
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. You know, you do have a
Speaker 2: lot of these big armored clashes, you have dog fights
Speaker 2: and stuff, but you also have more advanced these you know,
Speaker 2: you have these guided missiles and stuff right early ones.
Speaker 2: So Douglas MacArthur, as he's getting the shit hammered out
Speaker 2: of him, requests ten atomic bombers with live nukes be
Speaker 2: put on standby in Guam, right, because he wants to
Speaker 2: have the option to use them if in an emergency situation. Right,
Speaker 2: Uh huh. Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants
Speaker 2: these planes in their nukes placed under his direct control.
Speaker 2: And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may
Speaker 2: have saved a lot of people's lives, and I don't
Speaker 2: think it's for a good reason. But he steps in
Speaker 2: and he sent begs Truman to say no and keep
Speaker 2: the bomb under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay
Speaker 2: with the SAC right, he wants to have control over them.
Speaker 2: But I do think he is less I don't think
Speaker 2: he would have I don't think he certainly was not
Speaker 2: unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested
Speaker 2: in doing it than MacArthur. Right, he was not convinced
Speaker 2: it was the only path forward, and MacArthur was really
Speaker 2: convinced it was the only way to win right now
Speaker 2: for decades because the fact that we sent nukes to
Speaker 2: Guam during the Korean War has been well known. But
Speaker 2: if you look up any histories that are like older
Speaker 2: prior to the twenty first century, it will say the
Speaker 2: SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam.
Speaker 2: We now know that this was inaccurate, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from the book fifteen Minutes here. The first
Speaker 2: nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last
Speaker 2: B twenty nine accelerated down the runway. Two propellers ran
Speaker 2: away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to
Speaker 2: shut down two engines, and what would later be described
Speaker 2: as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel laden
Speaker 2: bomb ladd bomber into the air and managed to turn
Speaker 2: back towards the runway, but as he did, he lost
Speaker 2: altitude and the bombers simply went into the ground. The
Speaker 2: crash was not hard, reported an aid to General le May,
Speaker 2: but twelve men were dead and eight were trapped in
Speaker 2: the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge
Speaker 2: of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke.
Speaker 2: We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And
Speaker 2: that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes,
Speaker 2: because they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about
Speaker 2: they cover this the fuck up, right, So this is
Speaker 2: like this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe. Kind
Speaker 2: of The good news is that because of how nukes work,
Speaker 2: they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set
Speaker 2: up for. In order to get the big, the explosion
Speaker 2: that we all recognize as a nuclear blast, you have
Speaker 2: to set off a nuke in a specific way. The
Speaker 2: bad news is that even if it's not set off
Speaker 2: in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're
Speaker 2: still talking about five thousand pounds of conventional explosives in
Speaker 2: the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it
Speaker 2: can still make from what I've seen, because this happens
Speaker 2: a few times. It doesn't always make a dirty bomb,
Speaker 2: but it can. You can get radiation contamination when one
Speaker 2: of these things explodes in a plane crash, right. That
Speaker 2: does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does
Speaker 2: in this case because of how much was covered up.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians
Speaker 2: and the base house got radsick. But the blast of
Speaker 2: this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt
Speaker 2: thirty miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel, and it
Speaker 2: injures one hundred and eighty one civilians. The Air Force
Speaker 2: immediately lies and says, oh, that was just loaded with
Speaker 2: normal bombs. It was a training mission, sorry, guys, not
Speaker 2: a nuke though. Don't worry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unlike the nine planes next to it.
Speaker 2: Right. It was forty four years before the fact that
Speaker 2: a fucking nuke exploded was declassified and Margaret that's not
Speaker 2: close to the only nuke we lost. This is the
Speaker 2: thing I did not know. We fucking lose so many nukes,
Speaker 2: it's crazy. On November tenth of nineteen fifty, an essays
Speaker 2: bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an
Speaker 2: Mk four atom bomb set to self destruct, one hundred
Speaker 2: miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That
Speaker 2: was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from
Speaker 2: the end of World War two to November of nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty five lost nukes in five years.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And that counts as a success because we self destruct
Speaker 2: the nuke, so it doesn't just land. Right. We'll get
Speaker 2: to that. Back to the Korean War, because this is
Speaker 2: all going right. As this is all going on, you know,
Speaker 2: MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear warfare as the
Speaker 2: situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan
Speaker 2: that would have involved dropping between thirty and fifty tactical
Speaker 2: atom bombs on enemy air bases and depots, and then
Speaker 2: he would have followed up by a massive invasion of
Speaker 2: Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from
Speaker 2: China were to be blocked. This army that he's going
Speaker 2: to have basically cut Korea off from China. They're going
Speaker 2: to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in
Speaker 2: order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross
Speaker 2: into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is to
Speaker 2: radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people.
Speaker 3: That's like salty in the earth behind you. But another level.
Speaker 2: I cannot exaggerate how fucking insane Douglas MacArthur is at
Speaker 2: this point, Like he is completely dangerously unhinged, one of
Speaker 2: the craziest men to ever command a US military force.
Speaker 2: Truman refused this insane plan, thank fucking god, and as
Speaker 2: a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to
Speaker 2: him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with
Speaker 2: a shitload of dead people and without a real peace,
Speaker 2: but also without additional nuclear explosions. So you know, that's good.
Speaker 2: It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: You know, so civilian control of government is better than
Speaker 3: the military.
Speaker 2: Yeah, government, Yeah, because again, these people lose their fucking minds,
Speaker 2: and MacArthur, like Curtis LeMay is a voice of reason here.
Speaker 2: That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice
Speaker 2: of reason, but a little bit of one, because MacArthur
Speaker 2: is batshit crazy.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: At the start of the Korean War, the US moved
Speaker 2: almost ninety nuclear weapons into Europe how to fears that
Speaker 2: a wider Communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now,
Speaker 2: the Soviet arsenal's really small at this stage, and again
Speaker 2: there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good, so time
Speaker 2: is not as much of a factor. Right, We don't
Speaker 2: have to have these things ready to detonate at five
Speaker 2: minutes notice, right, And so for safety's sake, again, this
Speaker 2: is one of these the Atomic Energy Commission kind of
Speaker 2: comes in and is, like Wilson, the bombs over, but
Speaker 2: not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores
Speaker 2: in the US so that we can airlift them over
Speaker 2: to Europe on a moment's notice.
Speaker 3: But because they're smaller than the bombs themselves.
Speaker 2: Right, right, And it's safer than just having a live
Speaker 2: nuke where someone could deal it set it off. Right.
Speaker 3: You store the AMMO and the gun in a different place,
Speaker 3: and there's children around.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is The moments like this of just minimal
Speaker 2: sanity are so rare in the nuke story that it's
Speaker 2: just like a breath of fresh air, like, oh, somebody
Speaker 2: who wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind, but you
Speaker 2: know who is out of their goddamn mind, Margaret, Is.
Speaker 3: It our sponsor Life Ray?
Speaker 2: That's right, Life Ray. Because it turns out Life ray
Speaker 2: is incredibly radioactive. They will fry your brain. Even being
Speaker 2: in the same state as one is very dangerous by
Speaker 2: one today, I think it's worth it, uh huh for safety. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and we're back. So at this point, the Atomic Energy
Speaker 2: Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were
Speaker 2: not actively in use. The DoD never likes this, and
Speaker 2: they use the opportunity to argue that the military should
Speaker 2: have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed
Speaker 2: to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Gwam. Right,
Speaker 2: this is kind of the first time that the military
Speaker 2: gets direct custody for a long period of time. Is
Speaker 2: in Guam. During the Korean War in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 2: the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from
Speaker 2: two hundred ninety nine to four hundred and thirty eight,
Speaker 2: twice the number of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had
Speaker 2: been told in an internal report, could destroy civilization. As
Speaker 2: I noted, the USSR has around fifty bombs. Their stockpile
Speaker 2: will go rapidly after this point. But to deal with
Speaker 2: the fact that the gap is starting to close, we
Speaker 2: start working on a bigger bomb.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It's first known by its nickname the super and this
Speaker 2: is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. And
Speaker 2: as a brief aside, most post apocalyptic post atomic apocalypse
Speaker 2: movies and fictions imagine a bunch of bombs, kind of
Speaker 2: like the Horotima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does,
Speaker 2: really because like you look at DC in Fallout, what
Speaker 2: is it three or four? I forget what DC is an.
Speaker 3: I've played some of them, but I don't remember them.
Speaker 2: If you look at DC and like a lot most
Speaker 2: of the buildings are still relatively intact, right, that doesn't
Speaker 2: happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over,
Speaker 2: like like if one of the standard hydrogen bombs were
Speaker 2: dropped on DC, like and these are actively aimed at
Speaker 2: DC at all times. Right, the Russians always have some
Speaker 2: aim at DC, you know, just like we've got shit
Speaker 2: aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them, Yeah, like we're
Speaker 2: both doing this crazy shit. Everyone within a mile of
Speaker 2: the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles
Speaker 2: of the blast is incinerated over the course of a
Speaker 2: few seconds. Right, You're talking millions of deaths in the
Speaker 2: space of a minute or two. Like, yeah, these these
Speaker 2: are not survivable. Everything is there's no buildings left, everything
Speaker 2: is combusted. You'ar like, like the power of these bombs
Speaker 2: cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not
Speaker 2: an after thermonuclear war.
Speaker 3: Is it a different It's like a fundamentally different technology.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's the craziest thing you can imagine.
Speaker 2: Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, right, Like thermonuclear weapons work on
Speaker 2: the premise, what if you set off a nuke with
Speaker 2: a nuke? Right, here's Andy Jacobson describing how these work.
Speaker 2: The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of
Speaker 2: an uncontrolled, self sustaining chain reaction which hydrogen isotopes fuse
Speaker 2: under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2: An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 2: as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A
Speaker 2: thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York
Speaker 2: or Soul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash.
Speaker 2: These are so I think.
Speaker 3: It's fission versus fusion maybe or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's basically what's going on here. But
Speaker 2: you're setting instead of using conventional explosives to start the
Speaker 2: nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a
Speaker 2: nuke basically, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, dog, uh huh.
Speaker 2: It's just the craziest thing. The prototype thermonuclear weapon was
Speaker 2: designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a
Speaker 2: ten point four megaton explosive capacity, made it equivalent to
Speaker 2: a thousand Hiroshima bombs.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Or an idea of what that's the first one of
Speaker 2: these we make? Right, these things when we start detonating them,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about it. But like we repeatedly horribly irradiate
Speaker 2: and like permanently injure huge numbers of US troops because
Speaker 2: we don't get nearly far away enough, Because we don't
Speaker 2: realize how big they're going to be. Like one of
Speaker 2: these is like fifty percent larger than we'd expected it
Speaker 2: to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist,
Speaker 2: actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not
Speaker 2: to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb. Quote.
Speaker 2: The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of
Speaker 2: this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of
Speaker 2: its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It
Speaker 2: is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. Don't
Speaker 2: build the torment nexus.
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, but what if a torment nexus is
Speaker 3: built by the torment nexus? Right?
Speaker 2: Right, right?
Speaker 3: But Garvin wants to solve this fun problem. I love
Speaker 3: that They're like, we built the altar weapon. It can
Speaker 3: kill God, and people are like, not enough.
Speaker 2: Not enough. What if we use one of those to
Speaker 2: make a bigger one of those. Truman ignores this letter
Speaker 2: from Fermi. The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the
Speaker 2: Marshall Islands in November of nineteen fifty two. It left
Speaker 2: behind a crater large enough to hold fifteen pentagons. In
Speaker 2: her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after
Speaker 2: image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power
Speaker 2: of this device. Sophie is going to put it up.
Speaker 2: But you can see the bomb was detonated on an
Speaker 2: island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before there's
Speaker 2: a Luge Lab, it's an island, and then in the
Speaker 2: after there's just no island.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's just a black spot on the mappen.
Speaker 2: It's gone. The island is gone. Yeah, year or two ago,
Speaker 2: James Stout over it. It could happen here, went to the
Speaker 2: Marshall Islands to report on I mean, there's still ongoing fallout,
Speaker 2: both in the literal and figurative sense for the people
Speaker 2: of the Marshall Islands because of how many fucking nukes
Speaker 2: we set off there. Right, Like, there's tremendous suffering in
Speaker 2: the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this onquote unquote,
Speaker 2: I mean they're to this extent that they're uninhabitants because
Speaker 2: we forced people off, right Like, this is a crime
Speaker 2: against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall
Speaker 2: Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out
Speaker 2: James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that.
Speaker 2: After this series right, I'm not going to be getting
Speaker 2: into it because he did that series. But no, I
Speaker 2: can see that. Yeah, yeah, you can see just in
Speaker 2: the picture how catastrophic these weapons are.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In the immediate wake of the IVY mic test, President
Speaker 2: Truman gave his farewell address. He mourned that quote, the
Speaker 2: war of the future would be one in which man
Speaker 2: could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the
Speaker 2: great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements
Speaker 2: of the past. Such a war is not a possible
Speaker 2: policy for rational men. Now that's not wrong. But you're
Speaker 2: one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like
Speaker 2: you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman, Like, come on, man,
Speaker 2: you gave the call to use the first of these
Speaker 2: fucking things. Yeah. Jacobsen goes into more detail about how
Speaker 2: military planners respond despite what Truman says to the existence
Speaker 2: now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, what happened after US war
Speaker 2: planners saw what ten point four megatons could instantly destroy
Speaker 2: simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad,
Speaker 2: mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds
Speaker 2: and then by the thousands. In nineteen fifty two, the
Speaker 2: United States had eight hundred and forty one nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2: A year before Truman left office. In nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 2: a group of scientists and researchers that included doctor Robert
Speaker 2: Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze
Speaker 2: if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy
Speaker 2: for responding to a Soviet invasion. They concluded that having
Speaker 2: the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their
Speaker 2: one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead,
Speaker 2: who yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO
Speaker 2: should replace manpower with low yield, tactical nuclear weapons that
Speaker 2: would evaporated vance Soviet forces and that could be deployed
Speaker 2: by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree
Speaker 2: to which they're trying to do a kind of noble
Speaker 2: thing here, Right. The stated goal here is bring the
Speaker 2: battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on
Speaker 2: soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every
Speaker 2: city in Europe with atomic hell fire. Right, That's what
Speaker 2: Project Vista's kind of trying to argue for, and their
Speaker 2: conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the
Speaker 2: Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces
Speaker 2: the influence of the SAC. Right, the SAC has the nukes.
Speaker 2: Now the army wants some nukes of its own. Right, right, A.
Speaker 2: Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would
Speaker 2: be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low yield
Speaker 2: tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of
Speaker 2: physile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult
Speaker 2: to keep under centralized control. The only way to win
Speaker 2: a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first
Speaker 2: and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can
Speaker 2: now no only lesson defeat, LeMay told his commanders. Moreover,
Speaker 2: an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer
Speaker 2: the SAC's top priority. La May now thought it would
Speaker 2: be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability
Speaker 2: to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers,
Speaker 2: and nuclear facilities became SAC's primary targets. Lamay did not
Speaker 2: make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's not completely off base here.
Speaker 2: LeMay did not advocate preventative war. An American surprise attack
Speaker 2: on the Soviet Union out of a blue, but the
Speaker 2: counter force strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war,
Speaker 2: sac planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to
Speaker 2: be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable,
Speaker 2: were no longer the goal. Offensive airpower must now be
Speaker 2: aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction
Speaker 2: against the United States or its allies. LeMay argued. This
Speaker 2: transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might
Speaker 2: be paid with national survival.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This is the origin of what becomes launch on warn. Right,
Speaker 2: So you don't wait to get a bloody no, you
Speaker 2: don't wait for them to hit you. You wait until
Speaker 2: you're pretty sure they're about to hit you, and you
Speaker 2: hit them. That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right. You
Speaker 2: can understand Kina how he gets there, but that that
Speaker 2: ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly once you're
Speaker 2: now saying we won't wait to get hit. Right.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting too, because it's it's all predicated on
Speaker 3: this idea that national survival.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: He's very concerned about national survival, like I'm much more
Speaker 3: concerned about humanity is survival. Not even because I'm a humanitarian,
Speaker 3: people think, but because I'm a human right, like all,
Speaker 3: if you destroy all life on earth, the nation's gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's well, And that's that's part of the craziness.
Speaker 2: Like the understated crazin in that paragraph is that LeMay
Speaker 2: thinks tactical nukes are a waste of physile material. Broyeh,
Speaker 2: you have four times as many nukes by nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: one as it would take to end civilization and just
Speaker 2: your country. What's wasted? Bro, You're gonna have enough of
Speaker 2: these fuckers.
Speaker 3: That's by before they made them, the god killing machine
Speaker 3: that kills by God.
Speaker 2: Right, we need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in
Speaker 2: the fucking yes now. One of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
Speaker 2: first concerns when he took office would be to bring
Speaker 2: a resolution to this conflict, right, this conflict between the
Speaker 2: Army and the Air Force via the SAC Right. After
Speaker 2: having his National security team take a new look at
Speaker 2: US defense policies, Iike decided both sides were right. The
Speaker 2: US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe,
Speaker 2: but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that
Speaker 2: could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all,
Speaker 2: in late nineteen fifty three, the USSR detonated its first
Speaker 2: thermo nuclear device. By nineteen fifty four, the United States
Speaker 2: had more than seventeen hundred nuclear weapons. By nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 2: that number had climbed to nearly twenty five hundred. We
Speaker 2: were building roughly two bombs a day. By nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: the United States had an arsenal of more than twelve
Speaker 2: thousand nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five
Speaker 2: per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You
Speaker 2: see just how quickly like there's not any conceivable use
Speaker 2: for twelve thousand nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand,
Speaker 2: at least, you know, maybe less right Like surprisingly, it
Speaker 2: was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant
Speaker 2: budget cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has
Speaker 2: kind of been forgotten, but Ike does you know, people
Speaker 2: are generally aware of like the military industrial complex speech.
Speaker 2: But at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes
Speaker 2: the military budget and actually causes like kind of an
Speaker 2: eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower,
Speaker 2: because he's cutting back so much. The Army, in order
Speaker 2: to deal with this loss of ban power, starts lobbying
Speaker 2: for more nukes of its own, because that's the only
Speaker 2: thing you can get funded for now, right, that's all
Speaker 2: they're giving out. You know. General James R. Gavin, during
Speaker 2: secret testimony before Congress laid out the number of atomic shells,
Speaker 2: anti aircraft missiles, and land mines the Army needed. These
Speaker 2: are all nuclear artillery, nuclear anti aircraft missiles, and nuclear
Speaker 2: land mines.
Speaker 3: Nuclear landmine's a great plan. I can't come up with
Speaker 3: negative sounds good sounds safe. Yeah, what's crazy is how
Speaker 3: many Gavin wanted. One hundred and six thousand for battlefield use,
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand for air defense, and twenty thousand to
Speaker 3: hand out to the rest of NATO. Jesus Christ, bro,
Speaker 3: these people aren't so crazy.
Speaker 2: And I will say there is some Maybe the only
Speaker 2: arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are
Speaker 2: the air defense nuclear weapons, because the plan of this
Speaker 2: is if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in,
Speaker 2: the only way you can stop them maybe and ensure
Speaker 2: that none of them drop a nuke on a city,
Speaker 2: is you nuke them in the air, because nuke's fuck
Speaker 2: up planes really bad. And that's actually kind of reasonable
Speaker 2: if there's this many of these things like he's shooting
Speaker 2: also is only going to kill soldiers, right, I mean
Speaker 2: the fallout and write there will be consequences to that too,
Speaker 2: But it's a defensible position as compared to everything else
Speaker 2: that they're doing, right, Like, I can see how you
Speaker 2: might want to be able to just like try to
Speaker 2: blow up five hundred planes in the air with a
Speaker 2: big nuke, right, that kind of makes sense. Like this
Speaker 2: is all crazy, but I get it.
Speaker 3: You know what, It's so interesting because I'm under the
Speaker 3: impression of our current system, is that like shooting a
Speaker 3: bullet with a bullet approach?
Speaker 2: Yes, yep, yep.
Speaker 3: Did we move away from skeet shooting?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: We definitely have moved away from nuclear anti aircraft artillery.
Speaker 2: We have the ability to use that. But also we've
Speaker 2: gotten a lot better and so have our quote unquote
Speaker 2: adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from
Speaker 2: EMP and the like. It's I don't think it's as much.
Speaker 2: There's just not much point in defenses. The other reason
Speaker 2: is that, like sure, you could stop some bombers, but
Speaker 2: it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and
Speaker 2: the sub launched nukes. And you can kind of again,
Speaker 2: we have these things called like fad batteries that could
Speaker 2: be if we actually had any place in the US,
Speaker 2: could be useful against like a sub attack. Right. You
Speaker 2: could actually stop a good number of sub based nuclear weapons,
Speaker 2: right with these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas, protecting
Speaker 2: like Israel and the like. Right, we don't have any
Speaker 2: One of the scenarios Jacobsen talks about is like a
Speaker 2: North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant
Speaker 2: on the coast of California, which would cause this app
Speaker 2: titanic environmental catastrophe. And she points out, like there are
Speaker 2: plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing,
Speaker 2: but we just we're using them all overseas, so we
Speaker 2: don't have any set.
Speaker 3: Up, huh.
Speaker 2: And that's one of those things where I'm like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess I'm if we're going to be spending money
Speaker 2: on something, I would like to spend money on more
Speaker 2: of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet
Speaker 2: in the air or more nookes. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but none of this really is gonna be enough if
Speaker 2: there's a full scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best
Speaker 2: hope is that maybe someone it's just one or two nukes,
Speaker 2: they get fires, and maybe we're able to stop them,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, that's part three, Margaret Yay, got any pluggables to plug?
Speaker 3: Well, if you like hiss, Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 3: Stuff is the opposite of the show, although I still
Speaker 3: have to end up talking about terrible things all the time.
Speaker 3: And you can go listen to that Cool People Who
Speaker 3: Did Cool Stuff, And you can also listen to Robert
Speaker 3: and I Plane Pathfinder's right on the it could happen
Speaker 3: here feed or the Cool Zone Media book Club feed.
Speaker 2: That's right. You can check all that out, and you
Speaker 2: can check me out in the II coad day when
Speaker 2: we do the next episode, because you're getting a bonus
Speaker 2: one this week, you lucky gus. Anyway, assuming that you know,
Speaker 2: we don't all die in newbout Fire, which is entirely possible,
Speaker 2: it could happen right now. Oh nope, We're good, all right,
Speaker 2: Oh okay.
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media
Speaker 4: for more from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool
Speaker 4: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Speaker 4: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
Speaker 4: and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 4: at Behind the Bastards