Part Two: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Transcript

Cool zone media.

Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, Robert Got of Actomy edition.

This is part two, and to celebrate me getting a vasectomy, we're talking about mutually assured nuclear destruction.

The bastards who ensured that it was, in fact, mutually assured global destruction. If one of two countries ever got too pissed at each other, is this your no skin in the game episode?

That's right, baby. Oh, wow.

Okay, girlfriend. Yeah, that's why you should give me control of the nukes.
No. Because I'm going to use them, but just on the Great Lakes.

We just had the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's tragic sinking. You know, there's no better time than to remind people that this doesn't have to continue.

We could stop the Great Lakes tomorrow. The Pearl Harbor of the Midwest.
That's right. That's right.

I have heard people comparing it to 9-11 and then wondering why there's not like a really good 9-11 song. And I think that is a good question.

Wow. We just got a bunch of Lee Greenwood shit.
You know, where's the Edmund Fitzgerald of 9-11? All right, I will tell you a terrible, embarrassing fact. I lived in New York City on 9-11.

You didn't know that? Yeah, no, I happened to be inside while the towers fell. I'm sure you had something more important than it did.
I sure went from some towers to some smoke. But

the goth band I was in, I wasn't the songwriter. I did a lot of the synthesizers and programming.

We wrote a song about 9-11, and I didn't realize it until months later that our song, Gone from the Sky,

was about 9-11. That could be anything.
And

the hook at the end was, Dear God, our Lord, where are you now? Just over and over again in this super bass voice that the singer had. Sick.
Yeah.

It's, I don't know. You know,

we should have a good song. There is a good song about mutually assured nuclear destruction, and maybe we'll play it at the end of these episodes.

It's Tom Lair's We will all go together when we go yeah it's like a joyous song about like look yeah you know yeah

like on the beach but like a beach party yeah exactly um

yes uh there will be no ati diem when you see that icbm we will all go together when we go

read the script

uh

okay sam missiles in the sky that's it now that's a great song margaret that's a great

that's a happier song that's about one side getting destroyed.

Good song. Good IRA song.
About the time Gaddafi gave them Sam missiles, I think.

Oh, man. I will say that the thing you're saying about how bombing doesn't really work, I think this is true for terrorism, too.
Yeah. I mean, people have done a lot of it.

And I don't know that it's done. It's working.
I think it works actually really well. I mean, Osama bin Laden got what he wanted, pretty much, which is the continuing collapse of the United States.

You can trace that to 9-11. The IRA largely got a lot of their, I mean, Northern Ireland's still part of the British Commonwealth, but they got a lot of stuff.

I think, as Data said in Star Trek The Next Generation, terrorism can be a very effective strategy.

Look, that's not my conclusion. That's data from Star Trek's conclusion.
He's an android. Take it up with him.
You know? Yeah.

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So, talking of terrorists, and look, there's, I don't want this to come out as, and this is sometimes the way it sounds, saying that like strategic bombing did nothing in World War II and that it was no part of the German defeat, right?

That's not accurate, but as we'll discuss, what DuHey is claiming, what a lot of people believe, is that strategic bombers and a powerful enough air force render everything else unnecessary.

And that's only true in the context of nuclear war. And even then it's not really true because subs are pretty important

and ground-based missile launches. So it's not really true with that, right?

Anyway, there's this group called the Bomber Mafia that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on that had some terrible takes.

But these are the guys who are like advocating for the massive and expanded use of like saturation bombing on civilian targets, you know?

And Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris, and Curtis LeMay on the American side are two very prominent members of this group. Like many American officers, Curtis LeMay came from humble origins.

He is not a sir, very different from his counterpart in the RAF. He was born in 1906 in Columbus, Ohio.
His father was a handyman who, I'm going to guess, had some sort of, maybe he was drinking.

He's not stably employed. He is not able to keep the family fed, right? It's one of those kinds of situations.
And as a result, LeMay grows up poor.

His first job was, in Eric Schlosser's words, shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed a neighbor's cat.

There's so much backstory in that sentence. That's the most Midwest shit I've ever heard.
To feed his cat. Yeah.

His mother, Curtis LeMay's mother, was a servant and the most stable earner during his childhood.

Wasn't shooting sparrows? I'm really shocked by this. Yeah.
Yeah, that didn't keep the family going. LeMay had to change schools and state several times.

He was always the new kid and he was seldom fit in. Schlosser describes him as shy, awkward, and bullied.

And as a way of fighting back against both kind of the bullies and just the life he was born into, I think having this father figure who doesn't have his shit together, LeMay becomes incredibly self-disciplined, right?

This is sort of his like defense mechanism. He is an excellent student.
He works constantly when he's not at school.

And this leads him to feel, quote, cut off from normal life because he never has time for a childhood.

He's just kind of like working constantly and very concerned from an early period with serious things, right? He does not get to be a kid.

Too many kids have this experience during the fucking Great Depression and today,

it's a bummer and it's not going to make him a better person.

He does save enough money to pay his way through Ohio State where he studies civil engineering.

He goes to school every day and works at a steel mill at night, usually until two or three in the morning, at which point he will sleep for a couple of hours and then go back to school.

That's his college experience.

Fuck. Yeah.
So

lots of people only sleep a couple hours a night at college, but for very different reasons. Different reasons.

This kid's life is relentless. Yeah.
He graduates. He joins the Air Corps in 1929.
By this point, he has developed a love of high adrenaline activities.

He likes to drive race cars, you know, as a hobby, and he becomes a skilled pilot. But he differentiates himself from many young officers because everyone wants to be a fucking pilot.

It is, it's still the cool job in the Air Force. But by this point, planes are really new.
You know, it's really cool.

And most young officers want to be fighter pilots because because that's the sexiest job then and now. There's not really any sexier job than fighter pilot.
I'm sorry. Yeah, you get to be an ace.

Yeah, exactly. Who else gets to be an ace?

One of the things that differentiates LeMay from his colleagues is that he wants to be a bomber pilot. He is from the beginning, not interested in fighter aircraft.

And this is partly because he knows that bombing is where the future is at. Now, I don't know precisely when Curtis encountered General DuHay's theories.

I don't know if he read his 1921 book or if he was, it was just kind of like cultural osmosis.

Everyone is talking about DuHe and strategic bombing, you know, when you're in like the Air Force cadet school, right? And so he just encounters a lot of it that way. Yeah.

Everyone I know is always talking about Dumay and strategic bombing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
In a non-legally actionable way. Yeah.
I mean, we all love strategic bombing.

It's, it's become like the popular, all the cool kids are talking about how many tons of bombs you need per square acre in an urban environment to really, you know, clean out the civvies. Yeah.

Now, the late general's thinking, i can say this about duhei's impact on lemay it's influential enough that during vietnam and for an idea of how long this guy is in the field lemay is running the u.s air force in asia from world war ii to the start of vietnam um he will name his strategy for bombing north vietnam the genteel duhai plan that's like the nickname everyone refers to it as like so this is like the polite version of duhei's plan we're not going to kill quite as many civilians as duhei would have that's yeah i only know a little bit about bombing in Vietnam, and it didn't matter.

That's not how I describe it.

He's not in charge the whole time, but he does get us started on a specific foot, as we'll talk about. So LeMay becomes a bomber pilot in 1937.

By this point, he had already decided he believed long-range bombing was the future of air power.

He became one of the best navigators in the country and was stationed in Hawaii, where his career moved quickly. Curtis became a relentless advocate of constant training and preparation.

He earned the nickname Old Iron Pants as a result.

Yeah, Yeah,

that's what is like, kind of lovingly, his crews call him.

He could have gotten that tattooed on his knuckles.

Or his pants. I don't know Iron Pants.
Never mind. That doesn't work.
Nah, unfortunately.

He needs an extra finger. You consider knuckles when they give nicknames out.
Yeah.

When World War II started, he was a major in command of a B-17 Flying Fortress unit. Curtis was quickly transferred into the 8th Air Force, and he served under General Eker.

This is the guy who was wrong to Churchill about B-17s not needing fighter escorts. Yeah.
Being able to hit a peak barrel. Eker.
E-A-K-E-R. Yeah.
Okay, like getting a little bit out, not

like Eker without the B. Yeah.

When he arrived in Europe, this, you, when LeMay arrived in Europe, the U.S. strategy, different from the British strategy, was daylight bombing raids.

LeMay's first big move was to point out that the way the pilots were flying was getting them killed. Not the daylight part.
He couldn't do anything about that. But the standard strategy among U.S.

bomber pilots was to zigzag to avoid anti-aircraft fire. This caused your bombs to be really off target because you're zigzagging.

And the attitude was that like, well, if you're just flying straight, there's only a limited period of time in which you're really low that you're super vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.

And if you're just going straight, it's a death sentence. You're just marching directly into the enemy guns.
And LeMay argued, no, no, no, flying straight is way safer because it's faster.

You're out in half the time. Zigzagging doesn't do all that much to protect you, but getting out of there faster does.

So just going straight and then getting out of the fucking death zone as quickly as you can is the best way for us to do this.

And he created a new type of formation for bomber aircraft based on this that was optimal, that was supposed to basically keep them at the optimal distance to defend each other with their guns.

Now, everything about this new tactic was controversial among his pilots.

And the way that LeMay stifled any disagreement was promising to fly in the lead plane, which was the one that would be in the most danger if his theory was wrong, right? So he was like.

I kind of like this guy. I mean, no,

there's a lot about him that's likable, especially here. Yeah.
Heinlein would love this man. Heinlein probably did love this man.

I believe Heinlein was very much felt positively towards LeMay. And his men love him because he's this kind of guy.
He'll have these ideas that are sometimes really dangerous.

And but he'll be like, I'll be in the first plane. Like you can't say, I'm not just telling you guys to do something.

Like he is, he is leading from the front, which is a thing you can do in the Air Force that's not really possible in most other branches at this point. Not to the extent that LeMay is doing it, right?

You know, another guy who's doing basically the same thing as LeMay around this period of time, actor James Stewart.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Jimmy Stewart.
Yeah.

Actually becomes a general and is like deeply involved in our air strategy in Korea, too.

He's arguably one of the highest body count like actors that has ever existed, like A-list actors. He's not the only one in contention, by the way.

Yeah, there's that spec ops guy who's in Lord of the Rings. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'm talking about like bomber pilots. And talking in terms of bodies,

you have a whole crop of these guys in World War II who are like big-time actors and then like quit to fly B-17s or whatever. It's a crazy thing to have happened.

Just imagine that. If like we had like a five-year period where everyone had to go to war and you're like, yeah, Timothy Chalamet killed 6,000 people.
Yeah. Yeah.

Just the most body stacked by any of them. Billie Eilish would lead from the front.
That's all I'm saying.

Absolutely. I don't think The Rock serves, but Billy Eilish for sure does.
Yeah. I think he does a John Wayne.
I mean, he's like 60. He's in his 50s.
He shouldn't be going to war.

Yeah. Anyway, LeMay's ideas work, and they work well enough that they become SOP for all-American bomber crews in the theater.

LeMay, I talked about that Regensburg mission in the first episode to destroy that ball-bearing plant. LeMay is in charge.
He is the guy flying in lead for the Regensburg mission, right?

Okay, the one that 60 out of 360 got.

Right, yes. Yeah.

Which leads us to something that we'll discuss.

But like, yeah, in that mission, there's so many people die that the eighth has to curtail all their missions for five months until they get fighter escorts.

And this brings about LeMay's second big success. Because of how many crews are dying, leadership noticed that flights are starting to have a high abort rate.

Pilots are pulling back and aborting the mission before they get into the kill zone.

Robert McNamara, future Secretary of Defense for most of the Vietnam War, came to believe that this abort rate was caused by cowardice, which he defined as pilots not wanting to die because their CO had fucked up.

McNamara credits LeMay with ending the abort problem. Quote, he was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war, but he was extraordinarily belligerent.
Many thought brutal.

He got the report. He issued an order.
He said, I will be in the lead plane on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target or the crew will be court-martialed.

The abort rate dropped overnight. Now, that's the kind of commander he was.

So, seeing like the upsides and the downsides of this man, he's

like, not a lot of sympathy for crews not wanting to die because somebody decided they don't need fighter escorts. Right?

No, I read that other really good book about this by Joseph Heller. Yeah.
Yeah.

So you can both see, I can see why so many people admired him and why he was so beloved, especially by the people directly above him and why he was popular with his crews.

And also, this is a man who's... got a dangerous brain.
This is a man who is really okay with people dying for principles, right?

And this is a man who has no trouble baking human death into his operation plans, which is necessary in the military at some level. But he's maybe better at it than you want someone to be, maybe.

Right.

Oh, okay. I can see where this might go further based on the subject of these weeks.
Yep. Uh-huh.
Yeah. And it's one of those things.
U.S.

bomber crews suffered like a 50% killed in action rate during this period of time. It's a very dangerous job.

And LeMay also has a reputation for being really dedicated to his men's safety within like the degree that was possible, which it doesn't say as much objectively about how his plans made men safer and more how he made men feel, right?

Like, right.

This, this, and there's a degree of like personal skill here, you know?

Of all the officers in these episodes, had you been in the military at the time, LeMay is probably the guy you would have wanted to serve under, not for logical reasons, but because that seems to have been how his men felt about him, right?

Yeah.

Now, at the same time, his instincts made him perhaps the worst possible guy to to wind up with the job that he gets because he is the dude who directs the formation of our grand nuclear strategy.

He winds up in charge of the Strategic Air Command.

50% to a large degree. Right.
Yeah, 50-50. Sounds good.
Yeah. LeMaya is a guy.
who from the start of his career wants to reduce war to long-range bombing.

And this is a guy who has shattered by the time he's in charge of the Strategic Air Command, his sanity is shattered because of what he's seen in World War II.

You talked about the mission where everybody died. This is a guy who has watched cities burn from the position of setting them on fire.

And he is a guy who has repeatedly walked headfirst into a situation where 30 to 50% of us are going to die, maybe. You know? Yeah.
Like, he's done that so much that he has,

during, like, as a result of what happens to him in Europe.

His face gets paralyzed. It's Bell's palsy.
He gets an attack of Bell's palsy, and his face is completely paralyzed after this point. So he, like, can't smile or show emotion.

Two of his least favorite things before that anyway. His face is frozen forever.
So he chews a cigar constantly to hide the effects to like animate his face so it doesn't creep people out.

Like that's some like, that's some like the world is better fiction than fiction. Exactly.
If you wrote this guy, people would be like, this is not really a believable character.

I personally love it much.

But no, he was a, he was, he's a real ass dude.

So he was not the kind of man who could have read an analysis of the Regensburg attack on that ball-bearing plant that said, well, this didn't work. And like, maybe some of our assumptions are wrong.

And a lot of guys died for no good reason because like we didn't execute this as well as we could have.

This was a guy who was going to go to his grave believing that area bombing not only worked, but it was the only way to win a war, right? He is. basically always convinced that DuHay was mostly right.

And the problem with this is that he hadn't been, as we discussed.

And this is not just Robert, you know, old left-wing radical Robert saying that the strategic bombing guy was, that Regensburg was a failure.

Bernard Brody of the Rand Corporation would later conclude in a study of DuHay's theories in World War II, if one disregards for a moment the overall visions and considers only specific assertions and theses, one has to conclude in World War II that DuHay proved wrong on almost every salient point he made.

To assert the reverse, as is often done, is to engage in propaganda, not analysis.

And that's just impossible to argue against. Bombing alone did not destroy the Third Reich.

Its capacity to wage war was degraded, not just through bombing, but through a mix of air, ground, and naval warfare. Like there's a lot of, well,

after 1944, while we were strategically bombing German cities, their war production finally collapsed. It's like, well, we were also taking a lot of territory from them.

Like they were losing ground too. Other things were happening.

And the air power played a role in us being able to take ground, but it's a much more complicated picture than DuHay and his advocates are making. It was not just strategic long-range bombing.

And that's what DuHay was saying, right? You can't just say, well, bombing was a useful part of the overall. No, no, no, that's not what DuHey was claiming.

And all of these Air Force guys are going to be arguing for the rest of their careers. All we need is an Air Force, right? That's a big part of this.
Is this the bomber mafia? They're just like,

yeah, this is like, and their descendants, this is a big thing for the next half a century and longer.

And like Air Force arguing that we don't really need as much of the other stuff because Air Force, it can handle,

it can fix every problem, right? And in war through war, we don't get what we want through just bombing people, right?

Well, what you and I learned is that you could throw bombs at most problems and that would help alleviate the problems, but you also need someone with a spiked stick.

Yes, we did learn that in our Pathfinder game that we played on the It Could Happen Here book club

special weekend episodes that you can listen to right now, folks. Yeah.

So it's also kind of worth noting that a lot of these strategies to like, well, all we need to do is bomb these cities and that'll destroy X amount of factories and that will destroy German military production.

It assumes an enemy and this will later be a problem with our plans for nuclear war. They're always built assuming an enemy who doesn't adapt or change as we do things to them.

Because like Germans, yeah, we knock out some factories.

So they decentralize their factories and they make them less vulnerable to bombing so that they're assembling things in pieces and each individual target is less important to the whole, right?

There's a, there's a bunch of, they do that with like manufacture of a bunch of different material and German air defenses remain pretty good until late in the war.

Like DuHey is just really wrong on all of this stuff. Now, by 1945, over in the Pacific theater, similar lessons had been learned vis-a-vis the wisdom of DuHey's theories.

Japan's bold air attack at Pearl Harbor had been a tactical success, but number one, it was not long-range strategic bombing.

These were planes that got there on aircraft carriers as part of a naval attack. It was pretty important to the overall thing.
And it didn't knock the U.S. out famously as a combatant.

It really, really just kind of pissed us off, you know? Yeah.

Were we going to join the war anyway, do you think? I mean,

FDR really wanted to.

For one thing, Germany getting involved wasn't a necessity. Hitler declared war on us once Japan, we declared war on Japan, right? And he didn't really need to go all out on Japan's behalf.

I'd say that was probably a mistake, but he was pretty arrogant at that point in time.

Maybe we would have gotten involved with, like, again, FDR really wanted to. So I guess that's probably the smart money is he would have figured some way out.

But this is the way Harbor did figure out. Yeah.
Japan didn't need to do a Pearl Harbor and it didn't help them, right?

Now, they did a Pearl Harbor.

This is, again, to get back to how the same logic that could really fuck us in terms of a global nuclear war that kills everybody is part of why I think it's reasonable to fear that is the same logic has repeatedly gotten humans in trouble in the past.

The logic behind the attack at Pearl Harbor is the U.S. is already fucking with us, right? By throttling our access to stuff like fuel.
They're going, we're going to wind up fighting them anyway.

It's inevitable. And so we need to launch a first strike to stop their capacity to hurt us, you know?

Like it's the, it's the same logic, right? That, well, we have the fight, some sort of conflict is inevitable. So we might as well hit them first.
It's our only chance to survive.

And I like, as a weird comparison to this, like I spent a while kind of hanging out more on the streets when I was younger. And

the idea that like the way to survive this sort of like rough and tumble life of living under bridges or whatever is to like strike first is entirely incorrect.

That is like absolutely how everyone would

like instead.

Like I think about this time, you know, like because like, you know, sometimes when you're outside, people like randomly drunkenly try to fight you or something. Right.

And it's like literally learning. I'm not advocating pacifism here, but literally learning if someone just is looking for a fight and they punch you and you ignore them, that ends it.

At least in my experience. Right.

But if someone's actually trying to destroy you, you have to do something. So that's just like the whole concept.

Sorry, I'm just like thinking a lot about this as it scales up next into guns and then into nukes or wars or whatever.

The part of the problem with this kind of logic is that it's logic that's true sometimes. We've seen it be true sometimes, right? Yeah.

Like the sometimes being from the Cold War up to the present moment, the strategy of deterrence has worked. Right.
But that doesn't mean it always will, right?

Because nothing, no, there's no one strategy that fits every scenario. And the problem is with nukes, you don't really have, you don't have room to do the less fucked up apocalyptic scenario.

That's not really an option.

Yeah, and then you just take part of the problem.

If you take one nuke on the nose as a country, you can survive that. But then it's like, it just, what is it, just destroys the deterrence effect.

And so then everyone's like, all right, well, it's like free game on nuking you or whatever.

Well, I mean, you know, that's what the country would say would be political suicide, probably, for whatever party didn't respond with a nuke. You know, if you're talking from the U.S.

standpoint, if they got nuked, but also being willing to take a hit is the only way to stop the doom nuke that kills everybody. Yeah, exactly.
Because

that also predisposes you just having one nuke shot shot at you, right?

Which in most, like, and I think one of the things that does scare me most is not, and this is something that could easily turn into the apocalyptic scenario, but something that starts as like, and this is kind of what the book Nuclear War, Jacobson Theory, like, talks about, but like, essentially, you get like a nuclear January 6th, right?

One nuke goes out, gets launched at or goes off in one country because of some sort of like weird, stupid fuck up

that isn't going to be repeatable necessarily. Like it's easy to learn from.
You could stop subsequent ones.

But in the immediate wake of the fuck up, this precedent is set that number one, there's a really high chance that it just immediately leads to everyone shooting everything because like nobody has perfect data on what's happening.

They just know that like a nuke has gone off and everyone gets so

like if the country that gets nuked is becomes convinced at any point they're under attack, they have about six minutes to choose to launch all of the missiles missiles or not, right?

That's how it works for a U.S. president.

It's no different, as far as we know, really, for Russia's president, right? Right.

If that nuke goes off anywhere, you're going to have like six minutes to figure out, do I end the world over this or not? Right.

And that's probably bad for us. Yeah, I think it's a bad system.
I'm just going to go ahead and say that. Probably one person in any country shouldn't get to make that call.

Probably no one should have to make that call in six minutes. But that's the reality of the, of the, the technical reality of the systems we built.
They don't have a lot of wiggle room,

which is a problem. Yeah.

I'm glad I'm not the one in charge of designing the system, to be clear.

No,

Sophie is.

And that's why

Behind the Bastards has the most powerful nuclear deterrent of any podcast in the game.

Damn straight, motherfuckers.

If the pod save guys launch an ICBM, we can have 1,100 missiles in the air in under six minutes. This is why there's that new coolzone media podcast, The Bastards Behind Behind the Bastards.
Wow.

How did Robert assemble the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the podcasting game?

Sophie. The answer is Sophie.
We all know. Yeah, the answer is Sophie bribed a guy at Fort Leonardwood.
Yeah.

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We're back and we're talking about where we are in 1945, right?

We've been fighting the Japanese military for several years now. There's been this like really brutal island hopping campaign, several massive naval engagements, and it's led to a situation.

My granddad was in it. Oh, yeah.
Which part of it? He was a submariner in the

South Pacific. Yeah, that sounds like it sucked.
Oh, yeah. He was a torpedo man.

And literally the fact that I exist is an accident of he stepped on a college application while repairing torpedoes on an island and he filled it out and he sent it out.

And then they were like, yeah, all right, we're going to send you to go be an engineer. And then his submarine didn't come back after he left.
So

he.

It fell to the bottom of the sea. It's never been recovered.
No one ever knows what happened to it.

Probably fine then. I'm sure they're all over.
Actually, They're on a farm upstate. Yeah.

All of his old buddies. Yeah.
Anyway,

yeah, South Pacific. South Pacific.
So

by 1945, you know, we've gone through a version of the same lessons that all of these guys learn in Europe, which is that a lot of what Duhe had said doesn't really work out, right?

We can't just bomb our way out of this. Naval power is important.
And in fact, the aviation that's most influential in the early stages of the Pacific campaign are not long-range bombers.

It's Navy tactical aircraft, right? Because that's a lot of these naval engagements come down to our carrier group finds their carrier group and we fucking kill the shit out of them with planes.

But they're not doing like long-range strategic bombing, you know? This is like really close combat

in aeronautical terms. And it's pretty fucked up.

And there's still a lot of work for infantry, right?

No matter how much, because we are bombing these islands like Okinawa and we're shelling them before we send in ground troops but no amount of bombing and shelling is sufficient to clear all of the infantry out soldiers are able to you know they've got these bunker networks that the japanese army has built these are sufficient enough that like we're not able to bomb them out right tunnels is the future and past of war right tunnels always work really well yeah um and this is again it's it's more refutation of this all we need are bombers like no you keep needing to send in infantry with fucking knives to clear guys out right yeah we haven't made the fucking knife obsolete by 1945.

Like, we're not doing everything with bombers.

Duhe and his advocates had been irrationally optimistic.

So that's it. By like early 1945, we've isolated the Japanese home islands.
And Colonel Russione in his piece summarizes the success of strategic bombing prior to 1945 of Japan's heartland.

Quote, General Hansel, commanding and directing bombing attacks on Japan and still unaware, despite his extensive European experience, that precision bombing was a myth, attempted to use it to destroy Japan's military industrial capacity.

After three months of intensive precision operations, his B-29 bomber force had destroyed none of the designated high-priority targets, a failure that brought about his dismissal, right?

Three months of precision bombing. The Air Force is not able to destroy any of their high-value industrial targets, right? It just doesn't work.
So they bring in Curtis LeMay.

And again, LeMay is, neither of these guys, both these guys are, both Hansel and LeMay are advocates of strategic bombing. Hansel is just saying it has to be tactical.

It has to be like, you know, precision bombing, sorry. And LeMay is saying, nah, you just got to fuck up everything, right?

And his job is basically direct this air war to break the back of the Japanese without us needing to actually send in ground troops to invade the home islands.

And he embarks on the most terrible bombing campaign of World War II, as Rossioni describes. It was General Curtis LeMay who put Duhe's theories to the ultimate test.

All of Japan's major cities, except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were burned out with conventional weapons. LeMay starts his job commanding the air war against Japan.
He is the youngest general in U.S.

history. He gets the rank at age 36 after his work in Europe.

The firebombing of Tokyo is his idea. Like, that is his plan entirely.
And when he takes the job, he tells his deputies, Japan will burn if I can get fire on it.

In the book Command and Control, Schlosser writes, LeMay was involved in almost every aspect of the plan, from selecting the mix of bombs, magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter, to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm.

He is very nuts and bolts as a commander.

He is the personal architect. This is his great work, is the firebombing of Tokyo.
And he plans it to like the most

intimate degree.

Periscione's article, LeMay studied the mission reports and reconnaissance photographs, realized that the Japanese had almost no air defense left, and sent 325 pilots loaded with jellied gasoline firebomb clusters over Tokyo Tokyo in the early hours of March 10, 1945.

You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen, he told his crews.

As he waited impatiently for the bombers to return, he confided to Mikelway, who's like his adjutant basically, in a war you've got to keep at least one punch ahead of the other guy all the time.

A war is a tough kind of proposition. If you don't get the enemy, he gets you.
I think we've figured out a punch he's not expecting this time.

And the mission was a success. The U.S.

Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that, quote, probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.

More than 90,000 civilians are killed, and roughly a million are made homeless in one night of bombing.

Hell yeah, America. Wait a second.

LeMay continues to order more fire bombings after this, consuming hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children with flames.

And the fact that we need to keep doing this maybe is a sign that, like, some of your attitudes about bombing aren't as accurate as you'd want.

Certainly, DuHey has been proven wrong by a pretty grand factor, but like German will didn't break until Hitler shot himself.

And the Japanese are still, we just incinerated their entire capital from the sky. We killed more human beings in an hour than have ever been killed in history in a similar period of time, probably.

And they're still swinging?

Maybe we've got some assumptions here that aren't entirely correct. Now, that is not how anyone thinks.

One of the men planning these raids with LeMay was a close subordinate of his, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, is literally General Power. Yes, he has a G.I.
Joe ass name.

And General Power is going to help to build the nuclear doomsday machine we all sleep alongside today, right? Like he is one of the architects of this alongside LeMay.

And the fact that he has the name of a G.I. Joe character belies the fact that his backstory is pretty tame.

His parents are Irish immigrants from branches of wealthier families started by second or third sons who left the home country to find their fortune because of how inheritance worked at the time.

Thomas Power grew up working class in New York City. As a young adult, he entered the U.S.
Army Air Corps in 1928 when it was still a baby. Since this was a comparatively dull time for the U.S.

military, his career was pretty dull, until World War II.

Power was a gifted officer and hardworking, and so once the military starts expanding massively to meet the demands of the war, officers like him are promoted rapidly.

Power sees combat for the first time flying B-24 missions over Italy. He starts the war a major, and he ends it a brigadier general and deputy chief of operations for all U.S.

strategic air forces in the Pacific. Now, Power is not briefed immediately about the existence of nuclear weapons.

LeMay is one of the first generals who learns about the Manhattan Project, who learns that we have a nuke.

Now,

he's not allowed to command the raid in person. He wants to.
He tries to, but he's at this point too high-ranking to be given that job. So, the one or the Tokyo one? The nuke one.

Yeah. I mean, he's not allowed to command raids in person in general, right? Power, I think, is his guy doing a lot of that.
And power is the guy. Yeah.

Power is the guy who is commanding the raid on Tokyo in person. Yeah.

So

I do think it's kind of worth noting in terms of how these guys are both thinking. They're still patterning their options.

They've moved away from like the shit Iker was doing, but they're patterning their operations largely off of how Bomber Harris had planned operations, right?

In Tokyo, as in Cologne, the military insisted its primary objective was the destruction of industrial buildings, but the Air Force planners working for LeMay and Power picked targets based not on industrial density, but how well they thought given neighborhoods would burn.

The B-29 crews were informed that the purpose of the attack was to destroy small factories, but LeMayan Power both knew that was not the real target.

And these guys have their way with the Army Air Corps in Japan for months, but final victory still proves elusive. We dropped more than 1,600 tons of explosives on Tokyo on March 10th.

And again, remember, Duhe had theorized 300 was enough to wipe out any city on the earth. But the Empire refused to surrender.

LeMay's entire philosophy of war was that victory could be achieved through the application of long-range bombing and the application of long-range bombing alone.

His only response when confronted with inconvenient facts like this isn't working was to escalate. In the book 15 Minutes, L.
Douglas Keeney describes the general's escalating mania.

LeMay bombed with an increasing sense of urgency. He bombed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama.
He attacked when and where he was ordered to.

But when he was finished, he pulled names out of almanacs or off maps and bombed some more.

In his view, the only reason runways had been built on Tinian and the only reason that B-29s were fueled up and loaded with bombs, the only reason he was in the Marianas, was to bomb Japan.

500 bombers against one city, 800 against another, 900 bombers today, 1,000 bombers tomorrow. The only point was to end the war, one factory, one city at a time.

So intense were his operations that by the end of May, LeMay eventually exceeded the supply of bombs the United States Navy could deliver to him and was forced to take a break.

I feel that the destruction of Japan's ability to wage war lies within the capacity of this command. LeMay wrote of the bomber forces he commanded.

I mean, just a when you have a hammer, everything needs to get exploded. Yeah, and when you have a thousand bombers, you can't really have any ideas that aren't dropping bombs on people.

You know, that's what else matters. The only other,

I'm not trying to defend this, but the only other like primary option would be like getting a beachhead and then like trying to take this.

I mean, that, and we'll talk more about that, right? Like that this is not, there's not any clear good options here. It's a war.
There rarely are. Yeah.

But it's important to note that like through conventional methods, his plan doesn't seem to be working. Allied war planners find themselves preparing for an invasion, right?

We're still preparing to send ground troops into Japan. Yeah.
Now, this is where you get a lot of debate, right?

In his book, Keeney describes the plans for an invasion of Japan by the Allies as unnecessary. And I think he expresses what I'd call significant faith that Japan was on the brink of collapse.

This is not a conclusion shared by everyone, but I think there's a strong argument here. One of the issues that's already developing, as you can see, though, is that a lot of guys

Even at this point, had already forgotten what had made bombing Japan possible, right? Like we're kind of narrowing it down to like, okay, and we bombed like both sides of the nuke issue.

One side is like, we didn't need to nuke Japan because we had already destroyed so much of them through bombing the islands that like they were going to surrender anyway.

And the other side is Japan never would have surrendered unless nuked. And so we had to nuke them to avoid an even costlier invasion, right? That's the basic argument.

And both of these, if you're thinking in the grand strategic sense, ignore the fact that we only got to the point where we could bomb the home islands the way we were after defeating Japan in a series of more conventional engagements, right?

Just in terms of the whole strategic bombing is all we need thing was never correct, right? Right. Because they had to defeat them on the sea and on all the islands.
And

by the point the home islands were isolated, it was possible to defeat Japan just through bombing, right?

But there was a lot prior to that, right? Yeah.

And so when LeMay learns that we have an atom bomb and he hears how powerful this thing is, I think it kind of strikes him as salvation to his theory of warfare, right? Yeah.

And yeah, it's kind of, this is kind of the prehistory of the modern argument that nukes are the only way to end Japan's willingness to fight, right? And so bombs save lives.

Part of why that gets started is it's really convenient for guys like Curtis LeMay, right?

It really helps a lot with the bets that they've been making in their careers if this is the only way to end the war.

That's not the only thing going on here, but they find it's very helpful. It's not a non-factor here.

How helpful this is to a lot of people's beliefs about how war already works that have kind of been proven wrong is that nukes kind of retroactively make them right.

Yeah, I mean, they're just such a different order of magnitude. It's just going from a club to an AR-15.
Yeah.

And it's, and it's like, look, if someone's like, all I could, the only way to stop kids from like fucking with the plants in my yard is to hit him with a stick.

And he hits kids with a stick and they keep fucking with his yard. So he like, well, I have to shoot them.
And that stopped it. Yeah, totally.
I don't know, man.

Were there other things you weren't considering?

Could they have laid, just to go back and pretend like I'm in charge of World War II? Could they just lay siege to Japan and like be like, we already beat you everywhere?

They were. Yeah.
I mean, that's what happened, right? We cut off Japan. 90% of their merchant shipping had ended, right? Like, like we had cut them off pretty conclusively.

And that's one side of this argument: we never needed to nuke them. There were other reasons.
Largely, we wanted to scare the shit out of the USSR, right?

Yeah,

that's always what I assumed is it was basically like we have a new toy. We need to prove that we're man enough to use it.

And part of why that gets so much support among military leaders is that getting access to these weapons allows them to continue fighting wars the way they've been arguing is the only way we need to fight a war, right?

Like, oh, all that does matter is bombers now. Right.

Now, I don't really think it's productive to like try to make an argument about whose view of the use of nuclear weapons was correct, you know, because there's not a, there's not a perfect answer to that.

And a lot of it comes down to what you believe about ethics.

And totally, like, like, I would argue, even if it would cost the lives of a million soldiers, that's better than mass killing civilians for the human race. Like, it's just bad.
It opens us up.

Like, right now, we're all 15 minutes away from the end of humanity in part because decisions like this kept being made. And each one leads to a bigger decision that kills more people.

And we probably shouldn't have started going down that road, right? That would be like my answer. But LeMay felt very differently.

He himself laid out his theory of warfare pretty succinctly. And this is a direct quote from the man.
I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people.

And when you've killed enough, they stop fighting.

And this is like how the animating theory that the U.S. brings into basically basically every war.
You know, we dress it up differently.

Very few of our general staff will say straight up, that's what I believe. But this is what we thought in Afghanistan and it didn't work.
This is what we thought in Vietnam. This is what, like,

well, you just got to kill enough of the bad guys. Eventually, they run out of bad guys.
And that's just not how things work, really.

It's the like the that meme that's like, it's the everyone is 12 theory. Right.
Yes. But yes, yes.
Yeah. But the thing is, though, that's frustrating because it's like,

you know, people are always like, oh, you can't kill an ideology. And you're like, you know what? If you kill enough people who have an ideology, the ideology goes away for a very long time.
Yeah.

Like you actually kind of can.

You can. Humans are squishy and soft and easily killed.
Defense is always harder than offense.

I don't know.

Well, I'm not defending this. I'm just kidding.

Sometimes you do have to kill people. And there are problems that you can kill your way out of, right? That we have as a species.

It's just not all you need to do ever.

And it doesn't work.

A lot of the, most of the kill people to solve problems advocates are saying things like, well, if we bomb these people who are doing suicide bombings because they're angry about their living conditions enough, they'll stop bombing us.

And like, well, but. No, the only thing.

That's not really how it works in the long run. Yeah.
Yeah.

Or this insurgency that is being supported by the local populace, if we make life miserable enough for the populace, they'll stop supporting the insurgents. Got to be a no-dog.

Unfortunately, history is repeatedly shown. It doesn't work the way you think it does, right?

Isn't the whole modern theory of warfare is that basically people support whoever feeds them? And

you actually just feed people.

It helps sometimes.

Again, there's no one-size-fits-all theory of like, this is how you win wars.

But when you're thinking of one size, right when you limit it to the all we need to do is bomb them well you're not going to win the war unless you're using the bomb that kills all of the people everywhere and that's where this leads is them all being like well the only way to to effectively plan for war is to destroy the whole species and then we don't have a war yeah

until we have the like planetary destructo button like that yeah explodes the inside of the planet we've hit the top there's no more kill everyone button we found the kill everyone button i feel like, Margaret, the way we should govern is we should have a kill everyone button.

And everyone has a...

No, no, no. And everyone has a lot of people.
Everyone has a plot of Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger. I don't know.
I haven't read that. Oh, there's this old science fiction book.

It might be called Tiger Tiger. I might be getting it wrong.

The spoiler at the end of this, just to say what I think you were about to say, is that he basically gives everyone in the world the plants of how to make nukes.

And then we get world peace because everyone has mutually insured destruction on an individual level. Oh, see, no, I it's entirely incorrect.

That was, that was a, I mean, yeah, I don't think that would really work very well. It's a fun idea for a story.

No, my theory is you give everyone a chip that lets them all vote whenever like a vote is called about like whether or not they want to destroy the world or not.

And if 51% of humanity votes to destroy the world, then a device goes off and it kills everybody, right? So you have to keep life pleasant enough for at least 51%.

I feel like it's better than the system we have. All right.
What if that is actually always a ballot option on every elect, every vote? Kill everyone, yes or no?

So it's like give me a vote, Democrat, Republican, or kill everybody. Kill everybody? I didn't kill everybody, might have won last year.
Yeah, wait, no, I've changed my mind about this.

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Real warfare had proven that strategic bombing and precision bombing were both more difficult and less effective in practice than their advocates hoped. And nukes were an answer to these prayers.

They were a weapon system that seemed to justify all of their Duhe-inspired theories of how aerial warfare ought to work.

As soon as we use a nuke for the first time, there's this immediate, loud and growing chorus of voices within the Army Air Corps that, like, maybe this is the only weapon we ever need in the future.

And I want to read another quote from the book, 15 Minutes.

The fact that Japan, while still in possession of a formidable and intact land army, surrendered without having her homeland invaded by enemy land forces, represents a unique and significant event in military history, LeMay would later say.

General James H. Jimmy Doolittle agreed.
The Navy had the transport to make the invasion of Japan possible. The ground forces had the power to make it successful.
The B-29 made it unnecessary.

Said General Hap Arnold, the influence of atomic energy on air power can be stated very simply. It has made air power all-important, right?

So this is immediately a lot of the most influential guys in the Air Corps are saying, this is kind of all that matters in war going forward, right?

Like, yeah, we finally figured it out. We were wrong last time, but like, we weren't ready yet.
But now we're ready to make bombers be the only thing that you need. Yeah.

If you're wrong long enough, you become right. Right.
Yes. That is how things work sometimes.

And it may seem odd that I am not going into detail about the Manhattan Project and the guys who like developed and built the first nuclear bomb.

Because you'd think if we're talking about the global nuclear doomsday device, the guys who made the first nuke are somewhat culpable for that. Right.
And they are.

I don't think their role is as worth me covering here for a couple of reasons. For one, there's been a pretty big budget movie recently about those guys.

So I think there's a pretty high background level of understanding about like the Manhattan Project right now.

And more to the point, I don't place most of the moral blame on a potential global nuclear war on the Manhattan Project, guys.

I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of guys like Sillard, who we started the series talking about, right?

These people who are watching the worst war ever happen and all of tens of millions die. And they're being told, hey, if we build a bomb big enough, maybe we can stop this war, right?

Given the knowledge a lot of these guys would have had at the time, and these guys are not all high-level state actors with access to complete information about this, the strategic scenario, right?

Given the level of knowledge they would have had to understand, I think participation in the Manhattan Project is understandable, right? Yeah. Yeah.
At that stage.

And I, to make that point, let's talk about a guy named Louis Slotkin. I'm going to have to go back and get his name right.
I corrected myself. I spelled it wrong at the start.
I had a K in there.

I fucked up. I'm sorry.
I'll correct it later. Lewis was Canadian by birth, but his parents were Yiddish-speaking Jewish refugees from Russia's many pogroms.

So he grows up in Canada and he does well enough as an undergrad that he's accepted to a PhD program at King's College in London. He excels there as well.

The nature of his work is beyond me, but he won prizes for his continuous contributions to physics, right? I don't understand what he was smart about, but it was physics and he was good at it.

He earns a reputation, a rare one for an engineering nerd, as being an adrenaline junkie.

In the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Robert Youngt says that Slotkin's colleagues at the time described him regularly going off, quote, in search of fighting, excitement, and adventure.

He had volunteered for service in the Spanish Civil War, more for the sake of the thrill of it than on political grounds.

He's that kind of dude, right? He's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. He gets hired by the University of Chicago.

In 1942, he is invited to the Manhattan Project and he works directly with uranium and plutonium. Slotkin's particular expertise is in assembling the cores of atomic devices.

This is very dangerous, high-stakes work, and he seems to thrive on the thrill of it. I found one account of him by Martin Zelig, quoting a colleague who worked closely with Slotkin.

It was Friday afternoon, and Lewis wanted to shut down the reactor to make adjustments to an experiment at the bottom of the tank of water, which was used to absorb radiation.

We said that was impossible, and we planned to shut down the reactor that weekend.

When we came back on Monday morning, I found that Lewis had stripped down to his shorts, dived into the tank, and made the adjustments underwater. I was appalled that anyone would take such risks.

It shows what kind of a person he was. He was like a cowboy, but a good experimental scientist.
So you've got like your cowboy and nuclear engineer here, right?

Yeah, who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Well, he wanted to, yeah.
Oh, I thought he was. He doesn't quite make it.
Yeah, I don't think he makes it over.

And Lewis is...

He's literally the guy who builds the core of Trinity, our first nuke. He's like with his hands.
He's made Chief Armor of the United States as an honor for this after the bomb goes off.

Like that's his job title.

But the honors fail to make up for the downsides of his job.

Like the fact that in August of 1945, he watched his good friend Harry Dalain, Daglan, D-A-G-H-L-A-I-N, die a horrific death after there's this

thing you have to do sometimes where you're like switching out the core of a bomb.

And I think this is basically at the time how you have it. like armed or disarmed pretty much.
But you've got this thing known as the demon core, which is this like plutonium

alloy bomb core. And these are insanely dangerous.

The process of like moving them is called tickling the dragon's tail for a reason because it's this insanely like if this thing falls or breaks in any way, you're dying a horrific death.

Like, this is one of those rare things about nukes that's as dangerous as like the movie version would be. Like, if anyone drops this thing, it's a fucking like hell is unleashed in the room.
Yeah.

And his, so Slotkin's friend Harry dies this way, this nightmarish death from radiation exposure, just a few weeks after Hiroshima.

And at this point in time, we don't know much about radiation sickness as it involves nuclear weapons, right? We've had very little experience medically with this.

Dallane's agonizing death provides Los Alamos researchers with some of their first hard data on acute radiation poisoning. Slotkin was shaken by the incident.
And as the months

after the bombing flew by, he grew disillusioned with the U.S. military as an institution.
You know, the sheer carnage of the first atom bombs may have influenced this.

He helps build these with his bear, his not bear, but with his hands. And the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people is a general estimate, right?

Yeah, you're trying to stop the Nazis and then you were like, whoops, I helped. Oh, God.
Yeah. I built the bomb that killed.
100, 200,000 people. 150,000, 250,000 people.
Yeah. Like,

that's got a wear on your soul, even if you think it was necessary, right? Yeah. And it does look that way to a lot of these guys.

Japan surrenders unconditionally less than a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, right? And that probably balms some of their souls to an extent.

But after victory in Japan, it becomes harder and harder for Slotkin to justify what he's doing because the U.S. is now a nation at peace and they're continuing to build nuclear weapons.

And he is forced to grapple with a new reality, which is that the U.S. does not have an enemy and we are building a massive nuclear stockpile, right?

And military leaders, it's generals who have direct control over those weapons, you know, they theoretically have to follow the president's orders, but there's nothing stopping them physically from utilizing those nukes, right?

Yeah.

And he also is aware, being reasonably well read, because these guys are just talking about this, that a lot of these military leaders believe overwhelmingly that the use of nukes is to break the will of an enemy population through mass destruction of the civilian populace, right?

Like that, he knows that

we're using them. Yes.

It's not hard to imagine why he may have felt compelled to change his career. He committed to that course of action in 1946, and we'll discuss what happened to him in a little bit.
Become a podcaster.

He became a podcaster, the very first. Yes.

The only thing worse. Yes.
Yeah. The only thing worse than a nuclear weapons engineer.
He now works on Pod Save America. Yeah.

Really, the only place to go, the only downward trend you can take. Is that the only podcast name you can remember today? I don't know a lot of podcasts, Sophie.
I don't know a lot of podcasts.

What else is there? Last podcast on the left? Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff by Margaret Killjoy. Well, those are all.

I'm not going to

say that a nuclear engineer joined one of our podcasts, Sophie. That man has so much blood on his hands.
We don't need that kind of heat.

Fair enough. I'm not going to start a war here.
Yeah. Well, you don't have to start a war if you have enough nukes.

That's why we can feel confident that the Chapo guys are never going to nuke us first is

because we always keep a fleet of cool zone media nuclear subs off the coast of wherever those guys live. Sophie is just trying to wash her hands of work that she did all the work for.

Yeah, getting all those nukes in our hands.

So tired, everyone.

Anyway, I'm just making the point that I'm not really going into detail on all the Manhattan Project guys because I don't think that they deserve nearly as much blame as the guys who consciously built the global nuclear doomsday device, right?

Now,

there is overlap. There are some people who were on both teams, and one of the guys who was on both teams was General Leslie Groves.
He is the military minder for the Manhattan Project scientists.

He is their producer, for lack of a better word, Sophie. You know, one of the great producers in all of history, Leslie Groves.
There's a play about it called The Producers. Yeah,

that is largely about him and his time in Manhattan. Why'd you gotta say it like that? Why'd you gotta put my name in there? It's kind of accurate, Sophie.

In 1942, a lot of people call Leslie Groves the Sophie Lichterman of the Manhattan Project. Robert.
You know? Robert.

In 1942, General Groves gives a lecture to a group of civilian scientists. This is when we're kind of trying to get people on board the Manhattan Project.

He gives a lecture, and he's basically trying to convince, he's talking about why we should build a nuke.

And part of the lecture is he has to convince these scientists why if we get a nuke, other countries won't immediately start trying to develop nukes, leading to like a nuclear nuclear arms race.

And he says, no, no, no. Once we've got a nuke, everyone will be too scared to try to get a nuke.
And he described his reasoning as fear of counter employment, right?

This is why, and this will evolve into they won't use a nuke if we've got enough nukes because they know that we'll use them in return, right?

But it starts with no one will even try to get one, you know, because they'll be so scared of our nuke.

You just move the logic when it proves ineffective. That's how logic works.
So

yeah, promises like this have been key to weapons development since the creation of the machine gun and dynamite. And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the logic shifted.

We now had to assume our adversaries would develop a nuclear arsenal. So we'd have to expand ours until it was sufficient to destroy the enemy, right?

Before we have a nuke, we're like, no one will even try to get these after we have them. And then as soon as we set one off.
So obviously everyone's going to have one of these.

We got to get enough of them to stop them.

General Omar Bradley summed up the general thinking among the brass after World War II. And this is Bradley talking in 1945.

Our greatest strength lies in the threat of quick retaliation in the event we are attacked. And the only retaliation, Bradley believed, would be atomic.

Quote, the A-bomb is the most powerfully destructive device known today. As a believer in humanity, I deplore its use.
And as a soldier, I respect it.

And as an American citizen, I believe we should be prepared to use its full psychological and military effect towards preventing war. And if we are attacked, towards winning it.
Right?

And a pillar of Bradley's, and this is how all these guys talk to this day in a lot of ways, which is like, look, the only job of a, you know, a president should not have any, any actual like role in how we operate as a military.

His job is to decide when we're at war. The civilians decide when we go to war, and then we should be the ones who decide how to win it, right?

Like that's a very common school of thought among military people, especially in this period of time.

And you get part of the danger is that like, well, then when war is on the table, the guy whose job is to advise the president on war has only been thinking of nuking everybody. Right.
Yeah.

Like, and maybe that's bad.

Well, what's funny is that, okay, so in this, you know, as an American citizen, that's why I care about nukes. Right.

And it, it gets back to what Wells, I think I have an inverse conclusion as Wells, but you look at this and you're like, well, the end of national borders, seems like the only way out of this mess.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but but it's just interesting that Wells used it as, like, therefore, we're gonna have world government, you know? And since he's like that type of socialist, that's like

his hope for it. But it's just like, I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm being too utopian of like, well, it's the national borders.
It's the idea that like there's this us versus them. Anyway, whatever.

I'm just no, no, no. I, yeah, I, I, I, I get it.
I agree. Um,

yeah. Uh,

so a pillar of Bradley's logic here is the understanding, which for him is reflexive, that the U.S. would not attack first, right? And you do have to understand that.

A lot of these, because this is... Even though the only country that ever has.
Right. Yes.

I'm not trying to argue for this from a logical standpoint. No, no, yeah.

But his understanding for why we need to be ready to kill everything everywhere if we get nuked is that we will be nuked first, right? He's only ever thinking in terms of defense.

And this is not where the logic is now. So this is important.
Initially, the argument by guys like Bradley is that if we are nuked, hundreds of thousands of Americans or millions will be dead, right?

We might nearly all be dead. And so, the only response we can prepare for is an overwhelming nuclear one that will wipe out the enemy in a similar level, right? Um, that's not where things are today.

We, no one waits, no one's policy among the two primary nuclear powers. Neither policy is wait until we have a bloody nose to calculate our strike back, right?

That is important, you understand, but it's important to understand that's where a guy like Bradley is starting from.

And what became our current nuclear strategy diverged from Bradley's purely defensive strategy when guys like General Leslie Groves started pondering what the future had to bring.

Groves described a theoretical nuclear war as unendurable and believed that the existence of nuclear weapons made such a war unthinkable. But that wasn't just a statement of recognition.

It was a strategic plan. In order to protect itself, Groves thought, the U.S.
had to make the concept of nuclear war unthinkable to its enemies.

And this is going to end, this is going to start with, well, we need to have some nukes of our own. Well, we need to have bombers that are spread out and always ready to take off.

And those planes need to always have bombs in them so that it could cut down the amount of time it would take them to get into the air so that we can guarantee we'll have a response.

And if we can guarantee that we'll have a response, no matter how quickly the enemy bombs us first, then they'll never bomb us because they know that they're going to get nuked back into the Stone Age in return, right?

Right. But then where we go from here is that, well, actually with ICBMs and shit, it's not enough to just have planes on the runway.

You need to always have some planes in the air and some subs at sea that are nuclear armed and ready to strike, which means you always have planes with live nuclear bombs flying, right?

You see how the logic starts in this. With Bradley, there's a reason, there's some rationality in if an enemy kills millions of us, we need to be ready to strike back.

And the only possible strike back is going to be cataclysmic because we've been nuked, right? Right.

And it goes to, we always have to have planes in the air and submarines in the ground with live nuclear missiles 100% of the time, right? That

you get there very quickly. That escalation chain hits that point as soon as the technology becomes available, right? To an extent, it drives the technology.
In 1945, military leaders in the U.S.

started putting forward variations of a battle plan that called for simultaneous nuclear attacks on multiple cities. Dale O.

Smith, an Air Force colonel, wrote an article for Air Force Quarterly Review where he he described this sort of strike, simultaneously hitting a bunch of enemy cities, as a bullet to the heart.

Smith wrote, The most effective air siege will result by concurrently attacking every critical element of an enemy's economy at the same time.

If all critical systems could be destroyed at one blow so that recuperation were impossible within any foreseeable time, there seems to be little question that a nation would die, just as surely as a man will die if a bullet pierces his heart and his circulating system has stopped.

Another military planner wrote that his primary concern was, quote, the bomb's potential potential to break the will of nations and peoples by the stimulation of man's primordial fears, those of the unknown, the invisible, the mysterious.

I mean, so it's just the same shit that they've been saying, but at a bigger scale. Yeah.

Well, and it's, it's interesting how you, this, that last guy is almost writing as like, we need to create the supernatural figure of death and make it real in order to like

ensure that no one will ever fuck with us. Yeah.
Basically.

But yeah, it is.

We've gone from you have to destroy enough of an enemy's civilian population that they lose the morale to fight. That doesn't work.
It doesn't really work anywhere.

Maybe it works in Japan at the very end, right? Highly debatable.

But it hasn't really turned out. So, no, we just have to kill all of their civilians, right? And we have to be always ready to kill all of their civilians.

Otherwise, someone might kill all of our civilians.

We get there very quickly.

And in terms of how quickly we get there, after the bombing of Hiroshima, but before Nagasaki, World War II is not over yet. General Groves receives a list from U.S.

Army Air Forces of potential targets for subsequent nuclear strikes. In the book 15 Minutes, Keeney writes, highlighted were 40 key or leading cities, each assigned a priority for destruction.

A map accompanied the chart, and on it were drawn lines that showed the likely penetration routes for the A-bomb carriers. The 40 cities were in the Soviet Union.

We're still allied with them, and we're putting forward plans for the strategic annihilation of Soviet cities in 1945 before we bombed Nagasaki. They're talking about the possibility, right?

If you want to wonder how much of this was to scare the Soviets also,

that's on the table in 1945. We're still fighting with them.
Like allied. I mean, that guy's like, we're always fighting the last war, but they're also always fighting the next war.
It's the death.

I mean, just in other,

because I don't, I'm not a Soviet Union stan, but the amount of bad faith the U.S. is engaging in from the beginning and our relationship with them is fucking nuts.

Yeah, like I understand why they wanted the nuke. Yeah, I get why they were paranoid about us nuking them.
We really wanted to nuke them. Yeah.

So all of what's happening comes as a nightmare to the man who'd helped set everything into motion, Leo Zillard. He seems to have seen what was coming before the first bomb was dropped.

After LeMay began his firebombing campaign, I think maybe this is just a situation. He saw what a bombing on that scale would do, right? And he decides he had been wrong, really.

Like maybe not wrong about trying to get a nuke before the Nazis got it, but that it shouldn't be used under any circumstances.

And he starts protesting the slaughter of Japanese civilians by U.S. air power.

In June of 1945, Leo leads a group of scientists from the University of Chicago to send a report to the Manhattan Project leadership.

In it, he requests that they demonstrate their nuclear weapon for the first time in an uninhabited area, right?

So, before we bomb Hiroshima, he has a letter, a report sent to the Manhattan Project being like,

please don't set this off for the first time in a city full of people. Like, set it off in the middle of nowhere to scare Japan into surrendering, right? Yeah.
Now, we don't do this.

There's a few reasons for one. We're not sure the bomb's going to work.
And it would be really bad if we promised Japan the biggest bomb ever and then nothing happens, right?

So there's a worry of that.

Now, Sillard, his justification for why we need to not murder a city with a nuke is that it'll harm the U.S.'s reputation going forward and it'll set off a deadly chain reaction, right?

If the first use of a nuclear weapon is in war, destroying a civilian city, Sillard believes, quote, this new means of indiscriminate destruction will spark an arms race.

And soon every powerful country will want a nuclear arsenal of their own and the entire survival of humanity will be imperiled. Like if we start by nuking a city,

we have no sort of moral standing to be like, don't, but none of you use these, right? You guys stay away from them.

We'll keep ours, but you guys don't build them. You can trust us not to use them, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Fuck.
This is less than 100 years ago. It's like the other

thing. Like I've met people who, you know,

are older than this. Yep.
You know? Yep. Some of you listening are older than this.
Yeah. Yeah.
There must be a couple, right?

It's good stuff. So, you know, Sillard starts off being the guy who sends Roosevelt a letter saying we need to build this thing.

And he ends out being like, under no circumstances can we use these things.

Please, please don't embark down this road to madness. That poor man.
Yeah, it's fucked up. And another poor man is Louis Slutton.
So Louis Slutton finds himself increasingly horrified.

In March of 1946, he writes to a friend, I have become involved in in the Navy tests, much to my disgust.

The reason for this is that I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb-putter-togetherers.

He's already disgusted at being with the Navy.

He doesn't like what he's doing.

In an article for The Beaver, a Canadian publication of record, Zelig writes, Despite his seeming zeal, there are hints that Slotin might not have been enamored with atom bombs per se.

In a 1982 Winnipeg Free Press story, journalist Val Wearer writes that Slotin's father was astonished to hear after Hiroshima that his son had been working on the atomic bomb.

The response was, we had to get it before the Germans. Winnipey Israel Ludwig, Slotin's nephew, recalls his mother saying that Uncle Lou was troubled by what he was doing in Los Alamos.

In November of 1989, Philip Morrison, in a terse note to me scribbled at the bottom of my letter of inquiry to him, wrote that he and Slotin talked a good deal about war and peace.

So he is, he is starting to, he's become pretty quickly after the war, decided that like this is not a good path to be going down.

And he puts his notice in at Los Alamos in 1946, upset at the future that he sees looming for his troubled part child.

Tragically, just days before he would have quit, Slotin performs a demonstration of the same basic tickling the dragon's tail technique that had so recently killed his friend.

He's teaching a new guy how to do it. History repeated itself.
Slotin drops the core and he throws himself in front of the new guy to take the brunt of the radiation.

And he, like, within hours, he's vomiting and like like his body is starting to turn into soup. They keep him alive for nine days in the hospital, but there's never any hope.

It would have been kinder to just shoot him in the head.

I knew a kid who survived Chernobyl and was living in the U.S. and was like a kid and was like going to die of Chernobyl.
Oh, God.

Yeah.

Cool stuff. Yeah.

And

one of the, I mean, Slotin's an amazing guy. As soon as he realizes what's happening, everybody else evacuates.
He knows that he's been exposed to too much to evacuate.

He immediately draws a map of where everyone had been in the room so that when they're researching what had happened to him, they can gain a better understanding of how nuclear radiation kills people.

That's his like immediate action is to like sketch out where everyone was when the device went off. Yeah.

Live by the science, die by the science. Yeah, like that he's, he's consciously being studied.
He like knows that he's trying to be a better, at least get something out of his death. Yeah.

Annie Jacobson describes it in a, like the aftermath of this in a harrowing way in her book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. Quote: The mess inside Slotin's dead body was like a sea of rotten soup.

His blood was uncoagulable at autopsy. One of the doctors wrote in a classified post-modem report.

The radiation poisoning had caused the near-complete loss of tissue that once separated one of Slotin's organs from the next. Without this lining, his organs had merged into one.

So,

bad. Don't build the torment, Nexus.
Don't build the torment, Nexus. You might wind up up soup.

Fuck.

Cool. Anyway, Margaret, how are you feeling about nukes? Jesus, Rob.
I, you know, I'm pretty excited that if

you're a monster from now, fuck it.

Be completely gone. I thought it happened this second.
Yeah.

Well,

you know,

quantum immortality says that I'm going to continue to live in a... timeline where I don't die this way.
Yeah. It'll probably be fine.
It'll probably be fine. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. It's, it's so interesting because, you know, fear of nuclear annihilation was like such a important part of, you know, my parents' generations' lives.

And it's watching it creep back in is not fun. No.

But it,

I don't know.

I don't know where I'm going with this. It's just, it's a, it's a nightmarish thing.
But it's so frustrating because you look at this.

It's that game theory shit that all of the worst people you you know are excited about. Yeah.

Like, it's like, if you take any lethal weapon self-defense class, they're like, the best way to win a gunfight is don't get into a gunfight. Avoid a gunfight at all.

It's the same way to win a knife fight, really. Yeah.
Yeah. Best way to win a knife fight is to run before the knives touch anybody.
Yeah. It's to be nowhere near a knife fight.
Yeah.

You're a winner of a knife fight every day. Yeah,

exactly.

And it's just so frustrating because it's, I don't know, I've been, I've been, you know,

with my podcast, Cool People Did Cool Stuff,

talked a lot about the, you know, early punk and the stuff that led into a lot of modern protest movement stuff. And a lot of it is from the anti-nuke movement.
Yeah.

And it, it's confusing to look at from the modern perspective. But if you put yourselves in the shoes of like the kids who grew up in this,

you're like, yeah, no, that actually just makes a lot of sense.

Well, yeah, I mean, we could talk about, because a lot of the fear of nuclear power is because of how prominent the fear of annihilation from nukes.

And if they never start out being a weapon for killing civilians, maybe there's not the kind of resistance to nuclear power, which could have avoided a lot of problems vis-a-vis climate change.

You know, maybe that's maybe not, but I do think that a lot of our fears, which are not fully rational, there are some rational fears regarding nuclear power, but a lot of it is just people are scared of nukes for other reasons.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know, Margaret.
Like, I, it, the,

we probably shouldn't always have a doomsday device.

I will say where I differ from a lot of people right now, and I, this has become increasingly the case the more I've studied it, I'm not really more worried about Trump being the president than anybody else in regards to that.

Okay. Um, I think maybe, I guess maybe there's an argument.
Maybe he'd be dumb enough to try and use, uh, make a limited nuclear strike, right?

Or maybe his policies in terms of like the military are degrading readiness to a degree that might make it likelier for one of these missiles to wind up in the wind or something.

Certainly the fact that we are now like both the U.S. and Russia are talking about resuming nuclear tests is bad.
But in terms of

how would Trump behave if he was put in that, you got six minutes to destride whether or not to kill everyone on earth scenario, I'm not sure anyone's more competent than anyone else.

in that scenario. Yeah, fair.
Right?

Like it's, it's fundamentally, and this is something Jacobson points out in her book, is is that when you talk to, because a lot of guys whose job was in the nuclear weapons end of thing for the Department of Defense or for the like the Strategic Air Command,

like a lot of those guys have versions of the same thing, which is that like the president didn't, the president at my time, they've said this about multiple presidents, the presidents that I dealt with never seemed very interested in it.

They didn't ask questions. They didn't want to know much.
They didn't like thinking about it. Right.
That's, that's what I would do if I was the president, as I would not want to think about it.

And like, and

well, we haven't told anyone about your run for president yet, but we'll talk about that later. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that later.

I'm going to use them.

Yeah, we know. Defensively, we're going to go and dry up the lakes ahead of time.
Yeah. But it's a defensive first strike on the lakes.
The thing that

maybe I shouldn't be worried about. The thing I worry about, people always talk about AI destroying humanity because it will take control of the weapons.
That's not what I'm worried about.

But people have been worried about that for decades, right? I'm worried about AI taking control of the military systems that track things and do stuff

and hallucinate an ICBM.

Yeah. Cause we've had that happen the analog way, right?

Someone's put in the wrong tape and they've accidentally started a training mission that it looks like ICBMs are headed towards our, like variants of that have happened to the U.S.

and the Soviet Union, right? Yeah.

And human decision-making is largely what stopped a catastrophe from happening. And the impulse to remove humans from it is really bad.
Like, I don't believe in Skynet.

I think it's silly to believe that, like, oh, this AI will automatically seek to destroy humanity.

I think it's very reasonable to be like, well, if we connect AI to any of this at all, it's just going to amplify the chances that somebody fucks up in a way that ends with the nukes all going off.

Right. Yeah.
You've just, you're making the, you're making it more complicated. And that increases the odds that we kill everybody every time.
Yeah.

It, it makes more mistakes than people, which is embarrassing. Yeah.
Because we make a lot of mistakes.

And this is, you know, you've had both Obama and Biden promised during their runs to basically take us a little bit back from where we always stand on the escalation ladder to like change our policies so that we would not,

basically our policy would not be launch the nukes as soon as we get scared.

And neither of them did anything. You know, there's the, and this is, there's a couple of stories like that.

One of the things Jacobson talks about is that like like once North Korea started using ICBMs and it became clear that because you can't really stop an ICBM.

We have these we have like 40 something of these intercept missiles that are supposed to be able to shoot down an ICBM, but they don't.

They have like a 50% success rate in like tests, but that's even overstating it because the way they work, they're not even bombs. They're dumb.
They're bullets. They have to hit the missile.

directly while it's in flight. And if they don't, you miss by an inch, you miss by a mile, right? Like, yeah, and we have very few of them.

So the odds of us, and we would have very little time to actually deploy any or have them ready. Yeah.
And that new movie is actually pretty well researched about it.

I can't remember what it's called, but I watched it a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, I've heard it's good.
But the fear in me.

We should be scared.

We should not be doing anything the way that we're doing it in regards to nuclear weapons.

If history is a guide, we're going to keep doing it.

So anyway, people should check out your podcast, cool people who did cool stuff. Yeah, while they can.

Yeah, while they can, they should check out our Pathfinder tabletop gaming episodes of It Could Happen Here on our book club weekend show. That's fun.

That'll distract you briefly at the looming apocalypse that awaits us all. Yeah.

And for other distractions from the apocalypse, keep listening to podcasts. Don't think about how bad things are.
Don't think about the fact that

literally nothing can save you if the nukes all fall. There's no defense.
There's no prepping for for it. There's just death on a scale almost uncomprehensible.
Don't think about that.

Think about podcasts. Just remember that you were going to die anyway.
Sure. Yeah.
Tell your friends you love them.

Tell your friends you love them and tell them to listen to behind the bastards and cool people who did cool stuff. That's what's most important.
That's right.

Even if you can't tell them you love them, tell them about the podcast that you love. Yeah.
That's actually a way to tell people you love them.

If you can't struggle to say I love you, just say, listen to cool people who did cool stuff and behind the bastards.

Or take their phone, like when they're asleep, use their face face to unlock it and subscribe automatically to all of our podcasts on their phone jesus christ yes sophie that's like a third of our listeners robert we we we got we gotta end the podcast yeah we're done bye all right bye everyone

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