Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: about how everyone might die in nuclear hell fire. This
Speaker 1: is part four of our series on the bastards who
Speaker 1: built the doomsday device that we all currently live under,
Speaker 1: the looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads,
Speaker 1: the several thousand nuclear weapons ready at a moment's notice
Speaker 1: to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or
Speaker 1: cared about. Back with me to really get into some shit,
Speaker 1: because I did not expect it to take this long
Speaker 1: to get to the mid fifties. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm good. I've come up with a strategy and the
Speaker 2: strategies I've decided. I believe you are telling me Warhammer
Speaker 2: forty k lore that.
Speaker 1: Would make this a lot more comforting.
Speaker 2: Huh. Yeah, this is just something that some space orcs
Speaker 2: have decided to do.
Speaker 1: There are orcs in space and Warhammer that's a very
Speaker 1: important part of the setting. So I'm going to start
Speaker 1: this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last
Speaker 1: couple of years that we've talked about in part three,
Speaker 1: right as you know, the kind of fallout from the
Speaker 1: Korean War is going on, and the US and the
Speaker 1: Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands.
Speaker 1: Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the
Speaker 1: idea of being able to land a first strike that
Speaker 1: would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back.
Speaker 1: In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss
Speaker 1: a US nuclear response in defensive terms, but in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, the Eisenhower Dulles Declaration announced that the US
Speaker 1: would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons
Speaker 1: quote at places and with means of our own choosing.
Speaker 1: The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's
Speaker 1: promise to the Soviet Union. Right, basically, if you provoke us,
Speaker 1: if you fuck with us, we'll kill everybody. Right, that's
Speaker 1: kind of the idea. You know, that's not exact, but
Speaker 1: it's we will retaliate massively. And that that that isn't
Speaker 1: that means nuclear, right.
Speaker 2: Trying to have a fist fight with someone who has
Speaker 2: like a suicide vest on and you're.
Speaker 1: Just in a room, which, by the way, is the
Speaker 1: best way to get into a fist fight, which is
Speaker 1: why if you want to buy one of our patented
Speaker 1: suicide vests today, you know, never get beat up again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or get beat up exactly one more time. It's probably
Speaker 1: a more accurate way to look at the way the
Speaker 1: suicide vest works.
Speaker 2: Well, we've actually we've workshopped it. They're called lifefests, now.
Speaker 1: Called life vest. Now we're currently suing the boat people
Speaker 1: over their life vest. But I think this is going
Speaker 1: to work out well for us.
Speaker 2: The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing
Speaker 2: our product.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we wore our product and we can't. We brought
Speaker 1: a life rate.
Speaker 3: To by stopping.
Speaker 1: Oh man. So this whole idea of the Eisenower Dolus declaration,
Speaker 1: it's not a promise that we actually keep, right Eisenhower,
Speaker 1: I think there's a degree to which I mean elements
Speaker 1: of this are things that the US will do at
Speaker 1: other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally
Speaker 1: a guy who he has some respect for human life. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's
Speaker 1: Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency
Speaker 1: to exploding into nuclear hostilities. Like we're seriously considering using
Speaker 1: nukes to like basically like clear Taiwan's flanks, right, because
Speaker 1: they're in a rough strategic situation for US to respond
Speaker 1: to with anything else. But Eisenower proves less willing to
Speaker 1: massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation,
Speaker 1: and the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: thank fucking God. Right, Yeah, So it is this situation
Speaker 1: where Eisenhower is he wants to, he wants that threat
Speaker 1: to be out there, but he really does not, and
Speaker 1: none of our presidents really do. After Truman, they don't
Speaker 1: want a nuke. People, they're really anti nuke because they're
Speaker 1: not insane as a general rule, like Nixon kind of is,
Speaker 1: but even he's not that crazy for the most part, Right,
Speaker 1: for the most part. The evolving nature of nuclear warfare
Speaker 1: it meant that units across the globe are now by
Speaker 1: the mid to late fifties armed with nukes meant for
Speaker 1: defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as
Speaker 1: a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons could be
Speaker 1: launched to air burst and destroy entire fleets of Soviet
Speaker 1: bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now by the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen fifties, every American was well aware of the
Speaker 1: horrors of nuclear war, and one of the few comforting
Speaker 1: thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only
Speaker 1: the president could order a nuclear attack. That was a lie.
Speaker 1: Turns out that was not true. In the book Fifteen Minutes, L.
Speaker 1: Douglas Keeney reveals, and I think this is the thing
Speaker 1: that was came to light while he was writing his
Speaker 1: book as a result of like information requests and stuff
Speaker 1: that he was filing. But in nineteen fifty seven, this
Speaker 1: was not known until very recently. In nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for
Speaker 1: field commanders to use nuclear weapons in specific defensive situations
Speaker 1: without any outside approval. A small number of authorizing commanders
Speaker 1: in chief even had the ability to launch and command
Speaker 1: a retalian nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a
Speaker 1: direct attack on the United States. Right, it was never
Speaker 1: really true during this period of time, like, at least
Speaker 1: not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only
Speaker 1: the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing,
Speaker 1: there's no governor on these so theoretically anybody who had
Speaker 1: one could have made the decision, but also Eisenhower gives
Speaker 1: field commanders the ability and this is mainly meant for
Speaker 1: with the exception of those guys who had that small
Speaker 1: number of guys who could do a retaliatory strike. Most
Speaker 1: of these are guys who if they see a fleet
Speaker 1: of bombers incoming, they can fire anti aircraft nuclear artillery, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's that sort of thing. So it's not as crazy
Speaker 1: as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right this.
Speaker 2: Like this does have Would that have brought on like
Speaker 2: if we had been like, oh, fuck these bombers and
Speaker 2: nuked them in the sky, would that have like brought
Speaker 2: on USSR's retaliation.
Speaker 1: I mean, at that point, they were already sending a
Speaker 1: bomber fleet over right, So I mean they probably would
Speaker 1: have continued to fight.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs,
Speaker 1: we still might have had a nuclear war that didn't
Speaker 1: kill everybody, right, because you could have theoretically had one
Speaker 1: that was devastating enough that the major powers are not
Speaker 1: able to keep fighting. But everything doesn't get expended because
Speaker 1: we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, Right,
Speaker 1: That's not really an option right now. What makes this dangerous, though,
Speaker 1: is that by the late nineteen fifties, there are nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons US nuclear weapons fucking everywhere all over the world
Speaker 1: at all times. Curtis LeMay had insisted from the beginning
Speaker 1: because he's really obsessed with the SAC's readiness, right, and
Speaker 1: so he from the jump is like, our bomber crews
Speaker 1: have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons on board. It's not a real test if
Speaker 1: they don't have an actual nuke on the plane, right.
Speaker 2: Okay, I don't understand why, but.
Speaker 1: Sure, well, because he's the craziest man who ever lived.
Speaker 1: Our second text to MacArthur, maybe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can only dry fire with bullets in.
Speaker 1: The right, right, it's fucking insane. And what this means
Speaker 1: practically is that from this point on, thousands of nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons are flying across the US and the world. Every year.
Speaker 1: There are always nukes flying around at all times, tons
Speaker 1: of them. It's so scary, it's fucking insane.
Speaker 2: That's okay, soviy, this is warhammer, yeah, warhammer lore.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen fifties, LeMay had developed the beginning
Speaker 1: of a strategy to keep what he called an air
Speaker 1: fleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in
Speaker 1: the air, with nukes ready to divert their course to
Speaker 1: attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice.
Speaker 1: The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men doing it.
Speaker 1: If the Soviets knew that they could get away with
Speaker 1: a first strike on the US, they might try. The
Speaker 1: best way to make sure they never did was by
Speaker 1: always having bombers in the air and ready to fight
Speaker 1: at all times, which meant at all times dozens to
Speaker 1: hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in
Speaker 1: the world, and this meant there would always be nukes
Speaker 1: going missing. Right, h If you are flying thousands of
Speaker 1: flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage
Speaker 1: of those bombers are going to crash or are going
Speaker 1: to need to drop their nukes in order to deal
Speaker 1: with some sort of like engine trouble that is going
Speaker 1: to happen. And it does, in fact happen, right, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess people are aware that this has happened once
Speaker 1: or twice, generally like a couple there was one off
Speaker 1: like the coast of Spain. The reality is it happened constantly.
Speaker 1: This happens so much more often than you would have
Speaker 1: gett It's fucking shocking how many nukes we just straight
Speaker 1: up lose. LeMay and his successor at the SAC General
Speaker 1: Power considered it a necessity that the US always have
Speaker 1: armed nuclear bombers in the air, and a consequence of
Speaker 1: that is, of course, all these things getting lost. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an
Speaker 1: ESSAC training mission to switch crews on ground alert every
Speaker 1: twenty one days. This is kind of the start of
Speaker 1: what allowed. Like, we always have a fleet of bombers
Speaker 1: that are like six to fifteen minutes away from being
Speaker 1: in the air. They have a nuke on them, they're
Speaker 1: loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac. They have
Speaker 1: a crew and a bunker nearby that can run onto
Speaker 1: the plane and take off at a moment's notice. Right,
Speaker 1: And we also have I think it's like ten or
Speaker 1: eleven percent of those planes are flying with a bomb
Speaker 1: in them at any given time. Right, That's what operates.
Speaker 1: It starts as a testing plan to see if this
Speaker 1: is feasible, and in July of nineteen fifty seven, we
Speaker 1: make this like the SAC standard Plan each B forty
Speaker 1: seven bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home
Speaker 1: carried a six thousand pound four megaton Mk thirty nine
Speaker 1: hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear depth machines. That same month,
Speaker 1: a B forty seven in Texas crashed, killing the four
Speaker 1: man crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of
Speaker 1: the emergency war plan load, but as Kini notes in
Speaker 1: the book fifteen minutes, as of this writing, No nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven bomber crash in Texas is included in any
Speaker 1: official document disclosing accents evolving nuclear weapons. And there are
Speaker 1: several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed,
Speaker 1: and based on how it was coded, we know it
Speaker 1: should have had a nuke on it, but they never
Speaker 1: reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So
Speaker 1: this new presumably just blew up in Texas and they
Speaker 1: kind of they covered it up.
Speaker 2: You know, how often are they just being like, oh, whoops,
Speaker 2: it fell off the back of the truck. All off
Speaker 2: the back of the truck.
Speaker 1: No, not off a truck. They're falling out a plane.
Speaker 2: Oh so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like
Speaker 2: are they ever like.
Speaker 1: Not that we know not that we know that there's
Speaker 1: not evidence of that. What's actually happening is much dumber
Speaker 1: than if they like someone stealing a nuke, and scarier,
Speaker 1: to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know,
Speaker 1: where a bomber that we know should have been loaded
Speaker 1: with a nuke crashed and no report was ever made
Speaker 1: of a nuke getting lost. But cover ups weren't always possible.
Speaker 1: The same month that General Power takes over sac command
Speaker 1: from LeMay, who goes on himself become the vice chief
Speaker 1: of Staff and then Chief of Staff or the Air Force,
Speaker 1: a C four cargo plane bound for an air base
Speaker 1: in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between
Speaker 1: Rehoboth Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected
Speaker 1: two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to
Speaker 1: lighten the load. These fall in the ocean, and the
Speaker 1: Navy searches for the bombs and doesn't find any of
Speaker 1: them ever, even though the ocean is just one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty feet deep at some parts of the potential
Speaker 1: drop zone. So at like New Treasure questus, yes this
Speaker 1: is dropped. There are folks listeners. If you live in
Speaker 1: the Jersey area. You could be the owner of an
Speaker 1: Mk five atom bomb if you just spend some time
Speaker 1: swimming around in the ocean.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: And once you've got a nuke for one thing, you're
Speaker 1: not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother.
Speaker 1: Can you got a lot of You got a lot
Speaker 1: of leverage if you get your if you become a
Speaker 1: nuclear armed state in and of yourself, it always goes well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so again, both three thousand pound Mk five bombs are missing.
Speaker 1: To this day, these are never found. The number of
Speaker 1: times this happens is fucking shocking. Nineteen fifty seven is
Speaker 1: a key year for our story because it is the
Speaker 1: year that we start being fifteen to thirty minutes away
Speaker 1: from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August twenty six,
Speaker 1: the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile,
Speaker 1: the SS six Sapwood, could travel six thousand miles carrying
Speaker 1: a warhead. Soviet premiere Nikita Krushchev bragged could make Europe
Speaker 1: or the United States quote a veritable cemetery. A couple
Speaker 1: of months later, in October, Spudnik entered orbit. If you're
Speaker 1: wondering why that freaked out Americans so much. This is
Speaker 1: one of those things I actually I have a little
Speaker 1: more under empathy for, like why so many people because Oh,
Speaker 1: because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a little scary, Okay, So they invented the ICBM,
Speaker 1: they get they have a functional ICBM before we do.
Speaker 1: They have a successful test before we do, not long before,
Speaker 1: because between those two events. In September of nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: the u SO, after the Soviets launched their ICBM before Spudnik,
Speaker 1: the US Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully.
Speaker 1: Now it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the
Speaker 1: idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on
Speaker 1: this thing, probably, So it doesn't really if you're off
Speaker 1: by a couple by a mile or two even, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you'll do some damage. Probably. In November of that year,
Speaker 1: General Power revealed to the public for the first time
Speaker 1: that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground
Speaker 1: alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. Eleven percent
Speaker 1: of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway,
Speaker 1: loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in
Speaker 1: less than fifteen minutes, and a certain number of bombers
Speaker 1: were kept up in the air at all times when
Speaker 1: they admitted they are bombed up and they don't carry
Speaker 1: bows and arrows.
Speaker 2: Bombed up, bombed up.
Speaker 1: Maybe, Yeah, it sounds like he's because like he's kind
Speaker 1: of horny for these things. Yeah, in this period after
Speaker 1: the ice So the ICBMs exist now, but they're not
Speaker 1: a viable weapons system yet. Right, We've had we have
Speaker 1: our proof of concept, but we don't We don't immediately
Speaker 1: go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right.
Speaker 1: It takes a little bit of time. You know, that's
Speaker 1: just science. Right, So during this kind of awkward inner
Speaker 1: still period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war
Speaker 1: are extremely low. For one reason. The only way to
Speaker 1: deliver an atom bomb is by air, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: you could drive it somewhere, set it off on the ground,
Speaker 1: but really, like realistically you're going to be using like
Speaker 1: a bomber or a tailler's you can't launch it across
Speaker 1: continents yet, right, unless you're flying it. That means that
Speaker 1: you could theoretically, if you send out a bomber fleet
Speaker 1: to start a nuclear war, you could because you're in
Speaker 1: contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber
Speaker 1: fleet right up to the last moment. You can't do
Speaker 1: that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you
Speaker 1: can do it with like the sub mounted nukes, we cannot.
Speaker 1: It is not possible once they're launched there heading for
Speaker 1: their targets, right, that's how these things work. But you
Speaker 1: can recall bombers if you can reach them up until
Speaker 1: the last minute, right now, if you can reach them
Speaker 1: is a key part of this, because that presents a
Speaker 1: conundrum to the SAC. This is the fucking late fifties.
Speaker 1: Coms aren't as good as they're going to be. That
Speaker 1: we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us
Speaker 1: to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts
Speaker 1: of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us
Speaker 1: to gamble the survival of the human race on right.
Speaker 1: And the SAC has another problem, which is that nobody
Speaker 1: outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet
Speaker 1: with the idea of nukes being sent off without a
Speaker 1: way to recall them. And while radio code, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just not there's not a great, perfect way to
Speaker 1: guarantee you can reach these bombers. And that's really important.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to one of the most interesting
Speaker 1: innovations in nuclear war and it's honestly the simplest. This
Speaker 1: doesn't require any technology whatsoever, and it's maybe it may
Speaker 1: have saved the world. Right, we may all exist because
Speaker 1: of this. It's called Project fail Safe now rather than
Speaker 1: relying on technology which could fail. The way failsafe worked
Speaker 1: is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to
Speaker 1: return without dropping their payloads, no matter what they were
Speaker 1: ordered to do, unless they were transmitted to GO code. Right.
Speaker 1: The innovation of fail safe isn't that a got This
Speaker 1: is important. The go code does not trigger the bombing, right. Instead,
Speaker 1: the default is in all instances, return home without bombing
Speaker 1: unless you're given the code. And that's a meaningful distinction, right.
Speaker 1: That means there's no room for a bomber public. Well,
Speaker 1: they didn't give us the go code, but right over
Speaker 1: the target, should we do it? No, you fly home
Speaker 1: unless you get the code, right, yeah, And that's tech proof.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if your coms are out right, and
Speaker 1: that means the default assumption is we should err on
Speaker 1: the side of not dropping the bombs.
Speaker 2: Right. No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it
Speaker 2: makes sense that that was like literally a technological development.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was an It was a development by a
Speaker 1: single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolstetter. He
Speaker 1: visualized failsafe, and again you could argue this guy might
Speaker 1: have saved all of humanity.
Speaker 2: Was doing so.
Speaker 1: Good idea. Thank you, Albert.
Speaker 2: The opposite of a dead man's switch, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a I guess, a live man switch.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Speaking of a dead man switched, I
Speaker 1: have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you
Speaker 1: spend money on the products and services advertise on the show.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, we're back. So we've just hit the point
Speaker 1: where failsafe has been implemented and.
Speaker 2: Which were fit on your knuckles. I'm just going to
Speaker 2: point out.
Speaker 1: Right, Oh actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been meaning to get a knuckle tattoo. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World
Speaker 1: War three because the radio goes out right, which is
Speaker 1: a good thing to do. Now, in February of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error,
Speaker 1: a bomber and a fighter wing in Florida. We're doing
Speaker 1: a training mission which for some reason required a trio
Speaker 1: of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B
Speaker 1: forty seven bombers armed with actual one point six megaton
Speaker 1: Mk fifteen nuclear bombs. One of these fighters fucked up
Speaker 1: and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines.
Speaker 1: The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing,
Speaker 1: but the nearest airfield was under construction, and to make
Speaker 1: a long story short, the pilot was worried that when
Speaker 1: landing they would crash into something that would send the
Speaker 1: nuke in their bombay launching forward like a bullet into
Speaker 1: the crew cabin. In order to protect the crew, the
Speaker 1: pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasauce Sound,
Speaker 1: east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs.
Speaker 1: It's a little unclear to me. These are never found.
Speaker 1: This bomb is never found. It is theoretically still some
Speaker 1: east east of Savannah to this day.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I'm gonna write terrible fiction about a
Speaker 2: crew of people who go and find these things.
Speaker 1: Go new Cutting, Let's go find up. Let's get us
Speaker 1: a nuke yeah, yeah, we could be the we could
Speaker 1: be at finally a nuclear armed podcast. This is this
Speaker 1: is what podcasting has been missing. So it's obviously big
Speaker 1: news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own Georgia,
Speaker 1: not even the one overseas, and the good people of
Speaker 1: that state expected the Air Force to recover the nuke.
Speaker 1: A study of the Air Force press releases around this
Speaker 1: matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of
Speaker 1: a portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no
Speaker 1: one knew quote whether the nuclear device landed in the
Speaker 1: sea or on land. Great, there's a chance some hillbilly
Speaker 1: has just been passing this nuke down to his kids
Speaker 1: for the last like, that's.
Speaker 2: What I want. Now they'll be like, you take some
Speaker 2: pride in our family. We are incular power. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, don't don't touch it too much. I don't really
Speaker 1: know how it works.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, when they dropped these this bomb or bombs, both
Speaker 1: pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were
Speaker 1: when they dropped it. But they both write down different
Speaker 1: sets of coordinates, which is a real watermark for the
Speaker 1: competency of our brave boys in the sac. After several
Speaker 1: days of searching with no luck. The Air Force issued
Speaker 1: another press release elaborating that the bomb had been carried
Speaker 1: in transportable condition. This means nothing. The Air Force defined
Speaker 1: that when asked what transportable condition means as a form
Speaker 1: carried for safety reasons, which again means nothing. If you're
Speaker 1: wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying,
Speaker 1: here's another excerpt from fifteen minutes. Those in Savannah made
Speaker 1: little sense of this warding, but they took it to
Speaker 1: mean that the weapon was perhaps disassembled or in crates,
Speaker 1: or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all.
Speaker 1: The second press release, however, vague, nonetheless seems to have
Speaker 1: had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the
Speaker 1: Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers, had arrived.
Speaker 1: The Bowers brought with it fourteen more divers and men
Speaker 1: from the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Cedar Keys, Florida.
Speaker 1: The Air Force explained the stepped up activity by saying
Speaker 1: that the ejective component was a very expensive piece of equipment.
Speaker 1: So the Air Force is like, ah, it's not even
Speaker 1: a real bomb. We are sending the bomb squad in
Speaker 1: though there the bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for
Speaker 1: this thing. Trust, this not a functional bomb. Definitely, we
Speaker 1: do fly exclusively with functional bombs permissions like this, but
Speaker 1: this one isn't. Right, You're good, Yeah, no, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean and they did sometimes they would have like
Speaker 1: the physile material outside of the bomb so that when
Speaker 1: they dropped it, they're just but that didn't happen in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases, and we don't know that it
Speaker 1: happened in this case.
Speaker 2: What is their argument for, Like, clearly a dummy that
Speaker 2: is exactly the same size, no weight, is the only
Speaker 2: thing that makes sense. I can't understand the argument.
Speaker 1: Lemayan powers want them to be training with real nukes,
Speaker 1: and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly
Speaker 1: to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice.
Speaker 1: That is very important to them.
Speaker 2: I'm going to invite him to a paintball game with
Speaker 2: AR fifteen, right, what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy, But this is like,
Speaker 1: there's this is super important to both LeMay and Power. Right,
Speaker 1: we're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at
Speaker 1: the SAC So by this point it should be clear
Speaker 1: to you we don't know and never will know how
Speaker 1: many nuclear bombs are government lost on US soil. But
Speaker 1: there's a couple at least just start of lying around.
Speaker 1: So again, folks, get your metal detectors out. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: have some fun with it. What could go wrong?
Speaker 2: That's what we call our scavenger.
Speaker 1: What could go wrong? No, you asked earlier about stealing
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, and I don't. I've seen no evidence that
Speaker 1: that happened. But it could have very easily. It was
Speaker 1: for a long time startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 1: The only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it
Speaker 1: was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever
Speaker 1: crazy enough to try. In her book Nuclear War, Annie
Speaker 1: Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos
Speaker 1: scientist named Harold Agnew paid to NATO base in Europe
Speaker 1: in December of nineteen fifty nine. This was one of
Speaker 1: the bases where US nukes were in NATO hands, as
Speaker 1: they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, during the
Speaker 1: trip to the NATO Bass, Agnew noticed something that made
Speaker 1: him wary. I observed four f eighty four f aircraft
Speaker 1: sitting on the end of a runway. Each was carrying
Speaker 1: two Mark seven nuclear gravity bombs. He wrote in a
Speaker 1: document declassified in twenty twenty three. What this meant was
Speaker 1: that custody of the Mark sevens was under the watchful
Speaker 1: eye of one very young US Army private armed with
Speaker 1: an M one rifle with eight rounds of ammunition. Agnew
Speaker 1: told his colleagues the only safeguard against unauthorized use of
Speaker 1: a nuclear bomb was this single gi surrounded by a
Speaker 1: large number of foreign troops on foreign territory, with thousands
Speaker 1: of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like I've got a decent chance of
Speaker 1: stealing a nuke from that guy, right, I one eighteen
Speaker 1: year old with a rifle like like those odds, And
Speaker 1: this is all part of the whole. All that matters
Speaker 1: is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right Because
Speaker 1: one of the things that guys like LeMay and Power
Speaker 1: are doing that the ESAC is doing is like, we
Speaker 1: don't need to be putting money in the infantry. We
Speaker 1: don't need to have like dudes on the ground doing
Speaker 1: stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste
Speaker 1: of resources. More nukes, more planes, less guards.
Speaker 2: This is like how they're treating AI like. It's just like, yes,
Speaker 2: we don't need anything else, Yes we just need this.
Speaker 1: No guardrails, no governors, make it illegal to put any
Speaker 1: safety measures in Fuck it now. After returning home, this
Speaker 1: is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes
Speaker 1: a while, but this is what starts that process because
Speaker 1: once he gets home, having this startling moment, Agnew pairs
Speaker 1: up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories and they try
Speaker 1: to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a
Speaker 1: bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a
Speaker 1: lock and coded switch, which required a three digit code
Speaker 1: to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take
Speaker 1: several years until the Kennedy administration for the President to
Speaker 1: actually order these locks placed on bombs. Right, But that's
Speaker 1: where this leads, right, that's why we get the nuclear
Speaker 1: football in the system we have now where you have
Speaker 1: to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That starts with Agnew realizing like, oh, fuck, someone can
Speaker 1: just take these There's like a kid standing in a
Speaker 1: field with a rifle and there's four nukes. Shit, eight
Speaker 1: fucking bullets. At least give him another couple of clips.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, totally send a unit of people you hate first,
Speaker 2: and then.
Speaker 1: Jesus, yes, send more guys. Fuck it, there had to
Speaker 1: be more eighteen year olds. My god, I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself here. Because we don't immediately put the it
Speaker 1: takes some time to figure out how to build these locks. Right,
Speaker 1: There are two key inventions from the late nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: that help set the doomsday device into motion. The first
Speaker 1: is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes,
Speaker 1: and it's the distributed system of radar stations in the
Speaker 1: middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first
Speaker 1: provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the Soviets are building their own versions of this too, right,
Speaker 1: but the early warning systems right, These aren't a major
Speaker 1: topic of these episodes, because just wanting to know if
Speaker 1: someone's about to murder you isn't really fucked up in
Speaker 1: the same way as, for example, building twelve thousand nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: But all of these early warning systems are flawed and
Speaker 1: capable of generating false positives, and in fact, we have
Speaker 1: both us and the USSR have several near nuclear catastrophes
Speaker 1: because we get false positives, like one of these radar
Speaker 1: installations thinks it sees missiles coming in or thinks it
Speaker 1: sees bombers coming in, and its problems.
Speaker 2: Right, and it's like geese or some shit, right right, right.
Speaker 1: All these early warning systems are flawed, you know that,
Speaker 1: And that's still the case to this day, right, And
Speaker 1: so it's both understandable that you'd want to have these,
Speaker 1: but also the fact that these are flawed, and the
Speaker 1: fact that our strategy increasingly becomes launch on warn moves
Speaker 1: us a lot closer to midnight right. So, by far,
Speaker 1: the most influential move from an approaching the apocalypse point
Speaker 1: of view was the deployment of ICBMs. These made it
Speaker 1: possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could
Speaker 1: not be recalled. There was and is no fail safe
Speaker 1: for ICBMs. The idea that we can cancel them is
Speaker 1: just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM,
Speaker 1: they are almost impossible to stop. You can only really
Speaker 1: stop them by shooting them down, and we're terrible at it.
Speaker 1: Right there, we have this thing, the bullet basically that
Speaker 1: we use to shoot them down and it works about
Speaker 1: half the time in tests, and we have like forty
Speaker 1: four of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, i'd want more magazines than like, i'd probably want
Speaker 2: to bullets is enough if it's that's not a lot
Speaker 2: you have to stop the end of the world. Here's
Speaker 2: a magazine and a half of bullets.
Speaker 1: The enemy it has three thousand missiles or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so good luck private.
Speaker 1: Now our first ICBM is kind of a piece of shit.
Speaker 1: The only good thing about the Atlas C, which is
Speaker 1: declared operational in September of nineteen fifty nine, is that
Speaker 1: it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time.
Speaker 1: It has to be fueled right before launch, something to
Speaker 1: do with the kind of fuel that they're using right,
Speaker 1: which means that you can't have these things ready to
Speaker 1: go in a matter of minutes, you know, like you
Speaker 1: need more lead time to do that. Atlases are stored
Speaker 1: above ground. Also, we're starting to build hardened silos, that
Speaker 1: is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. US
Speaker 1: war planners were worried that the USSR would be able
Speaker 1: to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just
Speaker 1: parked out like on bases and stuff, and they are
Speaker 1: the Soviets are a They have you know, survey lens
Speaker 1: and stuff. They are able to see them. But this
Speaker 1: also causes another near calamity because the Soviets don't assume
Speaker 1: that we just have these things parked in the open
Speaker 1: because we're not finished building silos. They assume we had
Speaker 1: them in the open because we plan to use them
Speaker 1: as a first strike weapon, right right, So this is
Speaker 1: another thing that like ramps up the paranoia between everybody
Speaker 1: because the Atlas was such a shit weapon system and
Speaker 1: it is a bad ICBM. By the nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: the US was already hard at work at its replacement,
Speaker 1: the Minuteman. This was a missile with a stable fuel
Speaker 1: mixture that could be stored for long periods of time
Speaker 1: and launch ready conditions, so you can have a minute
Speaker 1: man ready to fire. And in fact, it's called a
Speaker 1: minute man because you can literally from the moment you
Speaker 1: get the order, you can have it in the air
Speaker 1: in a minute or less. Right again, they're just starting
Speaker 1: to explore this technology. This is very new and they
Speaker 1: don't have the kinks out right, which is a problem
Speaker 1: because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these
Speaker 1: things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect
Speaker 1: of they have to figure out. None of this is
Speaker 1: immediately obvious, right, how this is going to work, how
Speaker 1: nuclear silos are going to work, how our warning system
Speaker 1: will work, how these things will be triggered to fire
Speaker 1: under what conditions? Right, It is important to remember there's
Speaker 1: no locks on these missiles yet, right, So every minute
Speaker 1: man is stored launch ready and every minute on silo
Speaker 1: no locks at all. Right, Well, there's a lock in
Speaker 1: that in order to fire it. So you have you
Speaker 1: have like these two man teams and like a command bunker,
Speaker 1: and each of these two man teams can launch ten missiles, right,
Speaker 1: that are each held in separate silos that are like
Speaker 1: a decent distance from each other. So you can't stop
Speaker 1: them all if you nuke them, right, if you nuke
Speaker 1: the silos, that's one of the reasons. So each two
Speaker 1: man team, if they if both men turn a key
Speaker 1: at the same time, it will fire the missile. Right,
Speaker 1: And then as we'll talk about the it will start
Speaker 1: a process of firing all of the other missiles. So
Speaker 1: that means two guys have the ability if they both
Speaker 1: decide to turn a key to fire ten nuclear missiles
Speaker 1: across the world into Russia.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, or one guy who like, are they in
Speaker 2: the same place? Or the keys next week show the
Speaker 2: like in movies because in which guys it's like that's
Speaker 2: or one guy beats up his front.
Speaker 1: That's a great that's a great point you brought up,
Speaker 1: because the Air Force did consider this, right that this
Speaker 1: is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this.
Speaker 1: What if a crazy person winds up in a silo,
Speaker 1: would he just be able to start World War three
Speaker 1: on his own? And the answer is no, because the
Speaker 1: Air Force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that
Speaker 1: kind of behavior.
Speaker 3: Margaret.
Speaker 1: Both guys in the silo have guns and they're separated
Speaker 1: from bulletproof glass, so they're just ready to go and say, yeah,
Speaker 1: this way, one guy can't threaten to shoot the other
Speaker 1: guy if he doesn't launch a missng right, Like, that's
Speaker 1: literally the plan is like we'll give both guns and
Speaker 1: put them behind bulletprook glass. It's fine.
Speaker 2: Also, it's like people can hot wire cars, right, this
Speaker 2: is an electrical system on some level.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so much worse than that, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Okay, I feel like you could probably figure out a
Speaker 2: way to give the positives signal over this electrical wire.
Speaker 1: It's good that you bring that up. That's what we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about a lot of the rest
Speaker 1: of this episode, because this is so much worse than
Speaker 1: you're guessing. So another issue with the Minuteman program is
Speaker 1: that because of some errors and how they construct this thing,
Speaker 1: they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsdate device.
Speaker 1: This is not known by Air Force planners when they
Speaker 1: start putting this stuff out and constructing these silos and
Speaker 1: putting out the plans of how they're going to use it,
Speaker 1: because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing.
Speaker 1: We only know about the immediate, the initial problems with
Speaker 1: the Minuteman system because of a confessional that was written
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight by one of the architects
Speaker 1: of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel, and Rubel
Speaker 1: is he's both a hero and a victim in this story.
Speaker 1: He's one of these guys who may have saved all
Speaker 1: of our lives because of the story about to tell,
Speaker 1: but he also is an integral part of building this system.
Speaker 1: Born in nineteen twenty to a wealthy Jewish German family
Speaker 1: in Chicago. Rubelle moved to Los Angeles as a kid
Speaker 1: after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty two, his older brother died in action
Speaker 1: fighting the Nazis, and Rebel was inspired to do his
Speaker 1: bit for the war by moving to Schenectady with his
Speaker 1: wife and becoming a junior engineer at GOE. After the war,
Speaker 1: he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin.
Speaker 1: By nineteen fifty six, Rubel was a successful executives at
Speaker 1: Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company right.
Speaker 1: He was featured in an ad by his employer which
Speaker 1: described him as America's new kind of man. This meant
Speaker 1: he was an expert and a successful professional in a
Speaker 1: field that had not existed just a couple years earlier,
Speaker 1: defense electronics. And from that ad at Hughes, we have
Speaker 1: twenty seven hundred of these men in our research and
Speaker 1: development laboratories, men like John H. Rubell, brought together from
Speaker 1: all over the country to solve urgent new problems of
Speaker 1: national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that
Speaker 1: rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time,
Speaker 1: and the work they have done is so basic, it
Speaker 1: is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics.
Speaker 1: And Soviey's going to show you the ad just because
Speaker 1: I want everyone watching the video to see what a
Speaker 1: thirty six year old man looked like in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. Look at those crows feet. That's what you
Speaker 1: get when you're just consuming led every day, just puffing
Speaker 1: it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, three years after this photo was taken, in
Speaker 1: early nineteen fifty nine, Rubel left Hughes Aircraft to become
Speaker 1: the Assistant Director of Research and Engineering for Strategic Weapons
Speaker 1: over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over
Speaker 1: the next four years, becoming the sole Deputy and Assistant
Speaker 1: Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: He is a very highly placed civilian within our military
Speaker 1: research and defense infrastructure. Right This rapid advance was because
Speaker 1: he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was
Speaker 1: at all concerned about whether or not we might be
Speaker 1: about to kill the whole planet accidentally. In nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force,
Speaker 1: because the Air Force, as they're getting ready to deploy
Speaker 1: the Minute Man, they have this missile designed, and they
Speaker 1: have these silos under construction, but they're not operational yet.
Speaker 1: And so the Air Force is sitting down with high
Speaker 1: ranking civilian DoD employees and explaining all their different nuclear
Speaker 1: retaliation systems, including Minuteman. According to Rubel, he has conversations
Speaker 1: with a number of military officers and he comes to
Speaker 1: realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack,
Speaker 1: right and if an adversary again. The logic the military
Speaker 1: has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive
Speaker 1: launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it.
Speaker 1: So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is
Speaker 1: to have quote first strike capability and the way to
Speaker 1: use it aka launch on warning quote from Rubel's piece. Consider, however,
Speaker 1: launch on warning almost necessitates an automated response. The electronic
Speaker 1: warning signal itself in the scenario would trigger our first
Speaker 1: strike missiles, many of them ready to go in a
Speaker 1: minute or so. The will to use the strategy would
Speaker 1: require no high level decision making or intervaent. Now, fuck,
Speaker 1: this is extremely dangerous. And this is the thing that
Speaker 1: leads to the minute Man. Right, And when Rubel talks
Speaker 1: about the minute Man, he's referring to both a single
Speaker 1: missile and quote to the aggregate of more than a
Speaker 1: thousand of them, comprising a system of missiles and control
Speaker 1: centers spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in
Speaker 1: states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Right, that's what
Speaker 1: the Minuteman system is. It's about a thousand of these
Speaker 1: missiles split up into groups of like ten and fifty
Speaker 1: and spread out all over these kind of plane states.
Speaker 2: Right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, minute Man was not yet an effect. Right, that
Speaker 1: doesn't happen until sixty one. But two aspects of the program,
Speaker 1: the wide dispersal of missile silos and the fact that
Speaker 1: each silo is hardened to withstand anything but a direct
Speaker 1: nuclear hit, came from suggestions made by RAND thinkers. Rubel
Speaker 1: makes the important point that all these defense nerds and
Speaker 1: all the high ranking Air Force officers behind these plans
Speaker 1: are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we
Speaker 1: would be able to fire our nukes if the government
Speaker 1: was to he writes, quote equally important considerations such as
Speaker 1: flexibility of command and control of these weapons, provisions to
Speaker 1: prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the
Speaker 1: malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result
Speaker 1: in a missile launch or some comparably dreadful catastrophe were
Speaker 1: treated little or not at all.
Speaker 2: Right, I was expecting this sense to end very differently.
Speaker 1: It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay this
Speaker 1: system and make it safer, because anything that you do
Speaker 1: to like make the Minuteman system less dangerous is reducing
Speaker 1: its automation, right, which is increasing the odds that we
Speaker 1: don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable, right,
Speaker 1: partly because the game theory thing is that they need
Speaker 1: to know that even if they kill a president and
Speaker 1: whoever comes after that, yeah, they still lose too. As
Speaker 1: a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people
Speaker 1: are like, well, but like, are you not worried about
Speaker 1: maybe something going wrong and the missiles all launching accidentally,
Speaker 1: And they're like, well, that's not nearly as scary as
Speaker 1: the missile's not launching, you know, that really is how
Speaker 1: all these guys are thinking and you know who else
Speaker 1: thinks that way?
Speaker 2: Margaret, Well, is it the life Fest?
Speaker 1: Yes? Yes, the makers of the new Life Fest get
Speaker 1: one today, you know, get two, get three, get one
Speaker 1: for the whole family. You know, everyone should have one
Speaker 1: of these vests. A society where everyone's wearing a suicide
Speaker 1: vest at all times is a polite society.
Speaker 2: Probably, That's what everyone says.
Speaker 1: We'll see what happens, you know, We'll see what happens
Speaker 1: and we're back. Yeah, Margaret, how you take in this revelation?
Speaker 2: I you know, okay, so I can't remember we talked
Speaker 2: about on mic or not, but we talked about the
Speaker 2: dark forest theory and the yeah, the books I can't
Speaker 2: remember the name of.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, by the that Chinese sci fi
Speaker 1: author about yeah yeah yeah. The dark forest theory. Folks,
Speaker 1: if you're not aware, is this basically this idea that
Speaker 1: if there's life out there, the chance that it's hostile
Speaker 1: is so high that everyone would be basically be trying
Speaker 1: to either hide or fuck up other life first, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest.
Speaker 1: Is kind of where the name comes from, but it's
Speaker 1: it's more game theory stuff, right, but trying to imagine
Speaker 1: how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it.
Speaker 2: But whatever, No, I don't either, And it's not shocking
Speaker 2: that it's a right wing author, but like, yeah, it
Speaker 2: doesn't make the opinion in it wrong necessarily, But I'm
Speaker 2: just like not surprised.
Speaker 1: No, No, people speak very highly of the books. I
Speaker 1: thought the show was good, Like, I don't have to
Speaker 1: agree with someone's politics to be interested in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I find it so interesting because it is
Speaker 2: so much of it is around this idea of like,
Speaker 2: whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button, we need
Speaker 2: to make sure that they're reliable, and by reliable we
Speaker 2: mean not think, not thinking about the consequences of their actions.
Speaker 2: And it's like, because to me, I clearly shouldn't be
Speaker 2: in charge of mutually a shared destruction because I'm like,
Speaker 2: I would rather I die and everyone I know die
Speaker 2: than all humanity die. Like it just yeah, it just
Speaker 2: seems so obvious to me, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I don't. I don't, And this, I guess
Speaker 1: is just the difference between different kind of value systems.
Speaker 1: I don't think American lives are worth more than any
Speaker 1: other kind of life.
Speaker 2: Nope, right, yep.
Speaker 1: I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives or
Speaker 1: Chinese lives or Latvian lives and nope, I guess I
Speaker 1: don't want to get nuked. But my preference would be
Speaker 1: if someone's going to get nuked, that not everyone gets nuked. Right,
Speaker 1: That's better to me than anyway. That is not how
Speaker 1: these people think.
Speaker 2: Right. Even if the leaders of another country are my enemy,
Speaker 2: that doesn't make every single person who whatever anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the leaders of every country are my enemy.
Speaker 1: They're all assholes. But I still don't want nukes firing.
Speaker 2: Off, I know, get them in a room anyway, yep, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I think is valuable
Speaker 1: here to get into is Rubelle talks about when he
Speaker 1: starts realizing how this system works. He has this realization,
Speaker 1: which is that our whole nuclear deterrence system is what
Speaker 1: he describes as dangerously unstable. Right, And this is valuable
Speaker 1: just in terms of understanding how like military planners think
Speaker 1: and kind of the logic that this guy's going through
Speaker 1: as he's trying to deal with this problem.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Quote from Rebel Instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary
Speaker 1: world when fast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up
Speaker 1: ready to go in minutes. If one side does go
Speaker 1: for any reason, or even for none, the other is
Speaker 1: set to respond and must respond. Strategic weapons, I soon realized,
Speaker 1: could often determine policy by their very design. Military instability
Speaker 1: arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered
Speaker 1: in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage.
Speaker 1: It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner
Speaker 1: shrinks to almost nothing, as it does in the missile age. Right,
Speaker 1: he's describing this doomsday device that's being built. Right, it's
Speaker 1: an unstable system, right, because of how fast everything works
Speaker 1: and how destructive these weapons are. Rubell, in no uncertain
Speaker 1: terms described the ideology behind launch on warning as quote
Speaker 1: flawed and terrifying, and quoted Herman Khan.
Speaker 3: Shit guy, yeah, my guy, yeah.
Speaker 1: He quoted Herman khn and calling this arrangement a doomsday machine.
Speaker 1: And he discussed he wrote about something that happened in
Speaker 1: World War One as an example for like why he
Speaker 1: considered all this so frightening. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: an extended piece here. On a visit to France in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, I came across the remains of a
Speaker 1: World War One catastrophe and you're a small village along
Speaker 1: the Canal de Nord northeast of Paris. There one discovers
Speaker 1: a crater about fifty feet deep and a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred feet in diameter. Postcards on sale in the village
Speaker 1: identify it as Le tournaire, a melancholy reminder of what
Speaker 1: happened in a pre war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants.
Speaker 1: Before World War One, a small hill stood were only
Speaker 1: the crater room. The little hill was a formidable obstacle
Speaker 1: in the path of the French on one side and
Speaker 1: the Germans on the other, each hold up in extensive trenches,
Speaker 1: unable to see the enemy on the other side of
Speaker 1: the hill, and likely to get blown away if they
Speaker 1: dared peer over the top. An obvious solution occurred to
Speaker 1: each side mine the other side and blow it up.
Speaker 1: Each side began mining the hill. The process went on
Speaker 1: for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form
Speaker 1: tunnels extending under the German side, dug by the French,
Speaker 1: and under the French side dug by the Germans. Eventually
Speaker 1: the tunnels were filled with t and t by each
Speaker 1: side under the part of the hill occupied by the other.
Speaker 1: Then one day somebody on one side or the other.
Speaker 1: Nobody will ever know which side or who it was,
Speaker 1: detonated a charge that ignited all the French in all
Speaker 1: the German explosives. Who knows. Maybe it was an accident
Speaker 1: either way, accident or on purpose. This little mountain with
Speaker 1: hundreds of luckless humans and trenches on it or still
Speaker 1: tunneling beneath it, was blown to Kingdom come, leaving only
Speaker 1: an impressive crater to remind an occasional visitor forever what
Speaker 1: military instability can mean. It was not too early in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine to envision a ghastly replay of this
Speaker 1: little known drama on a global scale.
Speaker 2: That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like a It took a lot of people dying
Speaker 2: to give us that metaphor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I mean he's right here now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Rubel first sits down with the Minuteman project manager, who's
Speaker 1: a former Hughes Aircraft guy named Bob Bennett. In the
Speaker 1: spring of nineteen fifty nine, he noticed it. Despite their
Speaker 1: friendly relationship, Bob was squirrely and didn't like to give
Speaker 1: out information when asked basic questions like how do these
Speaker 1: missiles actually fire? And how many missiles fire at once? Right?
Speaker 1: At this point, the Minuteman system was being built as
Speaker 1: a second strike system, but there was no reason you'd
Speaker 1: need a weapon like the Minuteman for a second strike.
Speaker 1: It was clearly meant for a first strike in a
Speaker 1: launch on warn scenario. The Air Force was just lying
Speaker 1: to everybody, right. In order to make this seem less dangerous,
Speaker 1: each Minuteman was to be aimed at all times at
Speaker 1: a different city in the USSR or China. We don't
Speaker 1: have good computers back then, right, So the way these
Speaker 1: things are targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside
Speaker 1: each of these missiles, rotating on frictionless ball bearings at
Speaker 1: all times, which will guide the missiles win launched towards
Speaker 1: a specific set of coordinates. Missiles cannot be retargeted on
Speaker 1: the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're
Speaker 1: launching them at, no matter who starts the war. If
Speaker 1: the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are
Speaker 1: you seeing a problem potentially?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring out
Speaker 2: how to aim things.
Speaker 1: So it's incredibly impressive.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, these people are very smart and very stupid at
Speaker 1: the same time.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep, twentieth century engineering.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, there's a very high chance with this that
Speaker 1: we wind up nuking a country that has not fired
Speaker 1: at us, because we're just launching all of our shit
Speaker 1: and some of it's targeted towards them. Right, we'll talk
Speaker 1: more about that in the last episode. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a problem because each squadron of fifty missiles is divided
Speaker 1: into five groups of ten, and each squadron of ten
Speaker 1: would be fired by just two guys. If two men
Speaker 1: chose to insert their keys at the same time, the
Speaker 1: launch control center they were in would be considered to
Speaker 1: have voted to launch, and all ten missile would fire.
Speaker 1: If two or more centers voted yes within a short
Speaker 1: period of time, all fifty missiles in the squadron would fire.
Speaker 1: Each missile was targeted to a city, we have no
Speaker 1: way of knowing who might provocus, which means, by default,
Speaker 1: our automated response was to nuke both the USSR and China,
Speaker 1: even if one of those nations did nothing to piss
Speaker 1: us off or threaten us.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, when did China get nukes?
Speaker 1: China detonates their first nuke in October of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: so they don't have it yet. But you know, military
Speaker 1: planners at this period of time before China has nukes
Speaker 1: are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as one
Speaker 1: unified communist block. They are not. As Nixon will make
Speaker 1: very clear, those countries don't like each other, really like
Speaker 1: they have a fraught history. But our assumption is we
Speaker 1: got to start by nuke in them both. Right, So
Speaker 1: it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about in the last episode. But I think this is
Speaker 1: a good point to end here, just with the dread
Speaker 1: of how fucking danger risk this system is.
Speaker 2: My god, God, I'm so glad that this is just
Speaker 2: in this weird nerd game that you play and called Warhammer.
Speaker 1: Certainly not real, this was Yeah, this was real. This
Speaker 1: would be like big Dude verifying what a nightmare?
Speaker 2: Yeah? How does anyone sleep?
Speaker 1: Yeah? If this was all real and people actually tried
Speaker 1: to build it, built a system like this, we would
Speaker 1: have to throw them all in prison, right, I assume
Speaker 1: so we wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: That would be crazy. No, all right, well, Margaret Pluggables.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a substack. I write about the things
Speaker 2: that I talk about on my show, and my substack
Speaker 2: Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on all of the
Speaker 2: various Internet things that I'm on and not the ones
Speaker 2: that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any
Speaker 2: other Margaret Kiljoy except apparently a Disney character where she
Speaker 2: from the second Plantasia movie or something, or she's a
Speaker 2: nag like a massogynist character that oh boom, I actually
Speaker 2: could have these characters. It might be I might have
Speaker 2: the movie wrong. I don't know. Someone just pointed out
Speaker 2: to me recently, but I'm not a missogyny stereotype from Disney.
Speaker 2: I am instead everyone's nightmare of if you're transphobed, I'm
Speaker 2: your nightmare and you can find me by googly me.
Speaker 2: That's what I got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually am a missogyous nightmare from a Disney movie.
Speaker 1: I was the inspiration for guests on a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't know that.
Speaker 2: Comment. I don't have a counter argument. I've met you
Speaker 2: in real life.
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