Nukes

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Speaker 6 So hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Storm Wheeler filling in today for Lotif because he has a nasty, nasty cold and lost his voice.
And a voice is a key part of making radio.

Speaker 6 But this week, here in the U.S., we just inaugurated a president, a new, but also not so new president.

Speaker 6 And so we, like maybe many of you, have been thinking about this big and important political moment, transfer of powers and whatnot. So we wanted to re-air an episode today.

Speaker 6 It's actually one we made in the first Trump presidency. all about one particular and maybe the most consequential presidential power.

Speaker 6 Now, sometimes with these rewinds, we have a little update for you at the end, but I'm just going to give you that update now because the update is that despite numerous efforts by numerous people, the story you are about to hear, and I think this is important to know, is basically still the deal today.

Speaker 6 Anyway, here, originally aired in 2017, is our episode called Nukes.

Speaker 1 You are listening

Speaker 2 to Radiolab.

Speaker 1 Radio Lab. From

Speaker 1 W-N-Y-C.

Speaker 1 Re-wine.

Speaker 2 Your name again is... Cedric.
Cedric. I'm going to write that down.

Speaker 1 And they're on the line now, so you'll be able to talk to them.

Speaker 7 So, Harold, can you hear me?

Speaker 1 Yeah, hello? Hi, okay.

Speaker 8 I'm Robert Krillowich.

Speaker 9 I'm Jad Abum Raj.

Speaker 7 This is Radiolab.

Speaker 9 And a little while ago, our producer Lattef Nasser brought us a story about a guy.

Speaker 1 My name is Harold Herring.

Speaker 2 I used the middle initial L for Lewis in honor of my father.

Speaker 1 Who asked a question?

Speaker 7 It was a pretty simple question.

Speaker 1 Maybe a dangerous question.

Speaker 7 Maybe a dangerous question. Certainly, just the mere asking of it pretty much ruined the man's life.

Speaker 9 And he never got an answer.

Speaker 7 No, but today on Radio Lab, we are going to re-ask Harold's question, and this time we get an answer. And Latif Nasser takes it from here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so our main guy, Harold, he's former military, and and he's 81 years old.

Speaker 2 I'm staying pretty active. I'm competing at the national and the world level at Duathlon competition.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And right off the bat, this is the kind of guy you could tell. He just does not give up.

Speaker 2 I really am not supposed to be competing because I've had both knees replaced. But anyway.

Speaker 1 So Harold grew up in this tiny town called Browns, Illinois from a poor family. He was the eldest of 11 kids.

Speaker 1 When he was growing up, he would always hear Air Force planes flying overhead. And that's why from when he was very young, he always wanted to be an Air Force pilot.

Speaker 7 So why don't you just tell us a little bit about your military background?

Speaker 2 Well, generators,

Speaker 2 most of my career was with the Air Rescue Service.

Speaker 1 This was in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. And if an Air Force pilot went down, got shot down, whatever, Harold and his team would jump into their helicopters.

Speaker 2 Two Jolly Green heavy lift helicopters.

Speaker 1 They'd fly them in, hover over the survivors on the ground, lowering the hoist cable.

Speaker 1 And then a para-rescue man would climb down to the forest floor, find the injured soldier, and attach the cable to him.

Speaker 1 And while that was happening, Harold had to hold the helicopter steady.

Speaker 1 He had to hold his hover.

Speaker 2 And a lot of times, the enemy would wait until that process started before they opened fire.

Speaker 2 I had some wonderful experiences. Probably chief among them was Mike Crew and I.
We picked up a pilot that ejected into the North Sea at night in the wintertime. Wow.

Speaker 2 200 miles out to sea. We picked him up and brought him back.

Speaker 1 So it was a super high-risk, high-adrenaline kind of job.

Speaker 2 And I had an outstanding record.

Speaker 1 And then, well,

Speaker 1 he got old. How old were you around this time?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 about 30.

Speaker 1 I was old.

Speaker 2 Pilots my age and with my experience were put into desk jobs. And

Speaker 2 I wanted to be on the front line if I could.

Speaker 1 This was 1973, middle of the Cold War.

Speaker 1 So Harold decided that the way for him to be on the front lines without actually having to be on the front lines, you know, because he couldn't anymore, was to go into training to become a missileer.

Speaker 2 A missile launch officer.

Speaker 1 Those are the people who sit in an underground bunker and just wait to get an order to turn their key and unleash a nuclear attack.

Speaker 2 In training, I mean, just the information I can remember just virtually verbatim is that each missile launch officer has

Speaker 2 under his direct control more firepower than all generals in all wars in the history of warfare.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 Harold started his training at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Speaker 1 Nixon was president at the time. And at the time, the prospect of nuclear war felt very real.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of responsibility there, and there's no room for error.

Speaker 1 And so in Harold's training, we were a very small class. And he learned all about the technical stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, all the mechanical stuff and the emergency procedures that were involved.

Speaker 1 All the nitty-gritty details of how a missile actually launched.

Speaker 2 And then, part of the time, we had classroom instruction.

Speaker 1 Where he learned about the chain of command and all the different safeguards and checks. Right.
So, imagine that he gets an order to launch. That order has to be decoded.

Speaker 1 So, he would decode the order and then his partner would decode the order, and then they would verify it with one another. So, one guy would be like, Okay, I got the order, Alpha Bravo 124.

Speaker 1 And then his partner would say, I confirm Alpha Bravo 124.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 they launch.

Speaker 1 So neither of them has the power to launch on his or her own.

Speaker 2 And both of you were armed.

Speaker 2 You carried a sidearm with you.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 2 Well, you know, it's serious business. And if you had someone that was, you know, if they threatened your life.

Speaker 1 If one of the officers wanted to just go rogue.

Speaker 2 You had a sidearm, too.

Speaker 7 Well, if I took my gun and pointed at you and said, turn the key, Harold, what would you do?

Speaker 2 I wouldn't do it. I may go down, but I'd be drawing my weapon.

Speaker 7 And these keys have to be turned simultaneously. So if I shoot you, turn my key, then run over, get your key, and turn your key.
That's too late, right? It has to be a simultaneous... Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 So the whole point is the system is designed so that no one person can launch a nuclear attack.

Speaker 2 I was very pleased, very satisfied with the checks and balances at the crew member level.

Speaker 1 You know, the bottom where they're turning the the keys.

Speaker 2 I was not concerned about that at all.

Speaker 1 But then a few weeks into training, there was

Speaker 2 some discussion about preemptive strike.

Speaker 1 Real quick, obviously, if someone launched a nuclear attack against the U.S., we would be able to strike back, you know, in response.

Speaker 1 But a preemptive strike would be where we, for whatever reason, decided to strike first.

Speaker 2 And that raised the hair on the back of my neck a little bit.

Speaker 2 You know, it's just, I thought, we're receiving all of this information about all these elaborate checks and balances within the system,

Speaker 1 but... They never got any information about how things worked at the presidential level.

Speaker 2 There is a complete void or blackout at the level that the order is initiated.

Speaker 7 When you had this thought, did you say to the other classmates?

Speaker 2 No, I didn't. It wasn't my intent to try to create a scene by involving other people, students, whatever.
So.

Speaker 1 Harold waits until the end of class, walks up to the front of the room, and asks the instructor a question.

Speaker 2 A very reasonable question.

Speaker 1 He's like, just checking. There's a safety net in place if the president is making a crazy decision, right?

Speaker 2 I wanted to find out more about checks and balances at the top level.

Speaker 1 And the instructor pauses, looks at him, and says,

Speaker 1 can you put that in writing, please?

Speaker 1 Okay. And so he did.

Speaker 2 Let me find it first.

Speaker 2 You do your best to have everything ready to go. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Take your time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, here it is.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 There is presently a degree of doubt in my mind as to whether I might someday be called upon to launch nuclear weapons as a result of an invalid, unlawful order.

Speaker 1 This is part of the letter that Harold wrote explaining his question.

Speaker 2 I asked myself, how will I know or can I be sure I'm participating in a justifiable act?

Speaker 1 In his letter, he says that if he were ordered to turn his key, he would absolutely do so.

Speaker 1 But because he had not been told what the checks and balances are for the president, he would be doing so with a conflict of conscience.

Speaker 2 Which I've underlined.

Speaker 2 I would be required to assign blind faith faith values to my judgment of one man, the president, values which could ultimately include health, personality, and political considerations.

Speaker 2 This just should not be.

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Speaker 7 So we've got a guy training to be the person who pulls the trigger and he's sitting there wondering, okay, there's a lot of checks on me, but who's checking the president?

Speaker 9 And this struck us as a really

Speaker 9 kind of serious question.

Speaker 9 Because right now we have a president, President Trump, who

Speaker 9 is clearly interested in nuclear weapons.

Speaker 9 He talks about it constantly.

Speaker 7 And you got the thing with North Korea?

Speaker 9 Yeah, escalating tensions with North Korea, Syria, for Christ's sakes. Sort of makes you stop and think, like, okay, if and when these decisions get made, how are they made?

Speaker 7 made is there someone else in the room and who if the president is is determined if he if he's ready to go is there somebody there who can turn to the president and say

Speaker 1 stop

Speaker 11 that is a great question

Speaker 1 this is historian alex wellerstein he's the one who introduced us to herald he uh wrote an article in the washington post about this very topic am i at the right place yeah you you tend to want to be just like a fist's length away yeah yeah

Speaker 1 and he has spent so much time in just archives behind microfilm readers and foyering documents and doing all kinds of different things to figure out the history of our relationship to this uniquely destructive weapon.

Speaker 1 And what he found was a kind of tug-of-war between the military and the president that has gone back more than 70 years.

Speaker 13 As the nation is plunged into mourning by President Roosevelt's death, Harry S. Truman becomes president the 7th of May.

Speaker 11 Truman learned he had a bomb the day that Roosevelt died.

Speaker 1 This is April 1945. At this point, America has been at war with Japan for over three years.

Speaker 11 It was impressed upon Truman that this was not just another weapon, that this was something that could be bigger and better than any other weapon before.

Speaker 11 But there's no point at which somebody says, hey, Mr. President, should we bomb Japan with this bomb? It's assumed that, of course, you're going to do it.
You have the bomb, you have the enemy.

Speaker 11 And in fact, nobody ever goes to Truman and says, should we do this?

Speaker 7 Really?

Speaker 11 They go to him and they say, we are doing this. So Truman writes in his journal, we're going to use the atomic bomb, but we will not use it on a civilian target.

Speaker 11 We will use it on a purely military target. That's the term.
Purely military. Purely.

Speaker 1 Now, we can't get into his head to know exactly what he was thinking, but that is what he wrote in his journal at the time.

Speaker 11 And then he says, we will not be killing women and children.

Speaker 7 So the first atomic bomb is going to be dropped by a president who thinks that he's dropping it on soldiers only.

Speaker 11 He's somewhat congratulating himself on that no women and children will be killed in this attack.

Speaker 1 The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That's part of Truman's announcement after they dropped the bomb.

Speaker 11 The day after they get casualty estimates from the Japanese. And he realizes this is not purely a military base.

Speaker 1 There is reason to believe that the Japanese city of Hiroshima, approximately the size of Memphis or Seattle or Rochester, New York, no longer exists.

Speaker 1 The total death toll was almost 200,000.

Speaker 11 So there's a real switch that happens between Truman talking about the bomb and also everything he says about the bomb before he hears about the casualties. It's held about the greatest thing ever.

Speaker 11 And this is the greatest day in history. And he's so proud and so happy.
And then he hears about the casualties and he hears about the women and children and suddenly it becomes a burden.

Speaker 7 Now what happens?

Speaker 11 So on August 10th, he gets a message from General Groves

Speaker 11 that says, we've dropped two bombs. We're going to have a third one in a week, just FYI.
And it's not clear that Truman knew that two bombs were going to be dropped so soon.

Speaker 11 So he has just learned that Hiroshima is a city when he just learns that another city gets destroyed. He is not in control.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 11 And he has immediately written back to them and says, just stop. Knock it off.
You are not going to drop another bomb without express permission of the President of the United States.

Speaker 11 So the major theme of Truman's approach to nuclear weapons is to keep them out of the hands of the military.

Speaker 1 Hmm. Why?

Speaker 11 He believes that the military, if you give them a new weapon, they will use it. It's not a crazy idea.

Speaker 1 So they actually start to design and build these bombs to make sure the military can't launch them on its own.

Speaker 11 The nuclear parts of the bomb have to be in the possession of the civilians.

Speaker 7 The nuclear parts. So the plutonium.

Speaker 8 The plutonium.

Speaker 11 The core. Right.
And the early bombs allow you to do that. The fronts of them actually open up and allow you to stick the core in and close it back up.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 7 So the civilians walk into the room with the explosive part. The soldiers open the lid.
Yes. The civilians put the explosive part in, close the door, and now you have an active bomb.

Speaker 1 So it's like putting in a battery or something almost, like into your Walkman. Why do I have that analogy? Am I like an 80-year-old?

Speaker 7 Where does the president put the nuclear part?

Speaker 11 They have their own vaults with their own guys with their own guns, and their job is to shoot anybody who tries to take a core without presidential authorization.

Speaker 1 Wow. So for the rest of his presidential term, Truman doesn't budge.
The nuclear power is his and his alone.

Speaker 11 But the technology starts to make it trickier to do this. If you want a very small atomic bomb, you can't separate the pit out from that.
It's just not going to happen.

Speaker 11 It's physically like glued to the explosives and things like that.

Speaker 1 So it's 1953, just a few years before Harold entered the military.

Speaker 1 President Eisenhower comes to power and he's a former general. Right, exactly.
And so he's a little bit less concerned about who has control over these nuclear weapons. So he eases up a little bit.

Speaker 11 And he says, in his administration, atomic weapons, small ones, are to be treated as basically any other kind of weapon.

Speaker 15 A nuclear age arsenal of awesome proportions.

Speaker 1 This is archival footage from 1960 when President Eisenhower is getting a first look at some of the newest additions to the nuclear arsenal.

Speaker 15 He pulls out his binoculars to watch helicopters and foot soldiers in the field.

Speaker 1 At that time, they were getting really creative with their new nuclear weapon.

Speaker 15 That bazooka-like weapon is the Red Eye, a one-man operated missile launcher.

Speaker 7 Does he continue to maintain authority over the bigger bombs?

Speaker 11 He allows them to be transferred to the military, but he says, don't drop them without my permission.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 11 But there are some cases in which he says, under really bad circumstances, you can use some of these weapons without my permission.

Speaker 1 So compared to Truman, he's really shifting that power back to the military. Yes.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 17 by the time Kennedy is the president, it is an ironic but accurate fact.

Speaker 1 1961, Harold is 24. He's a pilot in the Air Force.

Speaker 17 That the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation.

Speaker 11 The Soviet capabilities are greatly increased.

Speaker 1 So that signal means to stop whatever you are doing and get to the nearest safe place fast.

Speaker 11 You get real anxieties, and some of these anxieties bubble up and popular.

Speaker 11 These are kind of out there.

Speaker 1 So long, mom. I'm off to drop the bomb.
So don't wait up for me. At this point, popular culture is saturated in nuclear fear.

Speaker 1 First thing will be a white light that'll blind us, then a hot flame that'll burn out. Take it easy.
I don't want to die. People are building bomb shelters.

Speaker 1 Kids in classrooms are practicing hiding under their desks.

Speaker 1 And then you'll covered. At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball.

Speaker 11 You have bombers flying from the United States and on these routes that take them near the Soviet borders. And the problem is, you put up a lot of bombers.

Speaker 1 It's only a matter of time before

Speaker 11 you'll expect one to crash or have a malfunction.

Speaker 1 A SAC B-52 carrying hydrogen munition.

Speaker 11 And so indeed, there are a bunch of accidents where bombers crash with hydrogen bombs on board. They crash in Spain and drop hydrogen bombs.
One of them gets dropped in Greenland.

Speaker 11 They crash in the United States numerous times. There's one in the south where a bomb basically lands on somebody's house.
An atomic bomb.

Speaker 1 Atomic bomb. An atomic bomb landed on someone's house?

Speaker 13 An atomic bomb breaks loose from a mounting shackle in a B-47 jet over Florence, South Carolina.

Speaker 13 It didn't detonate. Six were injured.
The home of Walter Gregg was turned into a sham.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, that would be the most terrifying thing. Imagine you're just brushing your teeth and then

Speaker 1 atomic bomb.

Speaker 7 And there's a knock on the door and say, excuse me, we're going to remove this.

Speaker 11 So there's all these accidents.

Speaker 1 And on top of that, America is keeping a bunch of its bombs in bases all over the world.

Speaker 11 And they start to worry that some of these bases are not American bases and there aren't that many Americans on them.

Speaker 1 So for instance, some nukes are kept at a base in Turkey. Turkey's our friend, right? Not a problem.
But there are like two American guys guarding these things.

Speaker 11 They have the keys to turn these missiles on. What do you need to do if Turkey wants to become a nuclear power? They need to hit these guys over the head with a hammer and take the keys.

Speaker 11 Now Turkey is a nuclear power.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 11 Yeah, this is more or less what Kennedy says. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Kennedy actually has the exact same instinct that Truman did.

Speaker 11 He issues a directive which says no weapons can be kept overseas unless they have locks on them.

Speaker 11 And the first versions of these are very crude. They're like literally combination locks.
Really? Like bike locks? Yeah. They're pretty simple.

Speaker 11 So you're doing this technological enabling of this this kind of vast political metaphor that the president is in control of these nuclear weapons at all times.

Speaker 1 So it's like Truman wanted it close to the chest and then Eisenhower wanted it out there and then Kennedy now is pulling it back in. Right, exactly.

Speaker 1 At the time, this felt safe. Who better to trust than the president with something so powerful it could end the world? And even after Kennedy, the laws around this solidify.

Speaker 1 The power stays with the president. Yes.
But then you get this guy. People have got to know whether or not their president's a crook.
Richard Milhouse Nixon. Well, I'm not a crook.

Speaker 1 And this feeling of safety and really all trust in the presidency just starts to erode.

Speaker 11 So in the last days of his presidency, there's the Watergate break-in. There are all the investigations.

Speaker 11 Nixon was drinking more than the president perhaps ought to. He was under an intense amount of stress.
He did a few things that made people uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 The most infamous moment like this happened in the summer of 1974. Yes.
When all the Watergate stuff was really coming to a head.

Speaker 11 He was talking with two congressmen, and he was trying to impress upon them what a waste of time this, quote, little burglary was.

Speaker 11 And to give an example of how minor this was, he explained that his responsibilities were huge.

Speaker 11 If he wanted to, he could go into the other room, pick up a telephone, and in 20 minutes, 60 million people would be dead. Whoa.
He said this. He said this.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly the kind of situation Harold was thinking about when he asked his question.

Speaker 1 Like, since I'm the guy with my hand on the key, just kind of curious here, is there a system for making sure a president doesn't just walk into the other room, pick up the phone, and order me to kill 60 million people?

Speaker 2 There's presently a degree of doubt in my mind.

Speaker 1 So he asks this question first out loud, then he does it in writing.

Speaker 2 And then I was pulled out of training, I think it was about six days before graduation.

Speaker 1 That leads to a series of meetings with superior officers where they basically tell him that I need to have more faith in our leaders, you know, not to question them.

Speaker 2 And I was told that I didn't have a need to know.

Speaker 1 That leads to a trial where he has this one meeting with this military judge who basically says, here I have your question in my hand. I will tear it up and we can all forget this ever happened.

Speaker 2 But I still wanted the question answered.

Speaker 1 And then that leads to appeals and he's writing letters. I would spend days and nights virtually continuously writing to congressmen and writing and writing to the president.

Speaker 1 But it really didn't matter at all what I had to say. At that point, he's basically like, okay, fine.
I don't want to be a launch officer anymore.

Speaker 1 I asked to be, you know, reassigned if they weren't going to give the information. But instead of reassigning him,

Speaker 2 my promotion to lieutenant colonel was withheld. I was removed from flight status, so I no longer would get flight pay.
I was then permanently disqualified from the human reliability program.

Speaker 2 And along with that, my top secret security clearance was taken away from me. And once you have a security clearance removed and you're permanently disqualified, there's no hope for your career.

Speaker 2 I pursued every avenue available to me to have my military record corrected and to have the findings reversed and to remain in the Air Force.

Speaker 2 Only after I exhausted all of my appeals was I ordered to be

Speaker 2 retired.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Why? Why?

Speaker 10 I mean, I know that like

Speaker 9 the whole military thing, you got got to stay in your lane. You don't question your superiors, but why would they,

Speaker 1 what's

Speaker 1 the problem? Just ask the question.

Speaker 10 Why, why would they, why, what's wrong with him asking the question?

Speaker 9 Why is it such a threat?

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you right after we take a break.

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Speaker 8 Hey, I'm Chad Abun Rod. I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 9 This is Radio Lab.

Speaker 10 And so Latif, why was Harold's question such a threat?

Speaker 1 Well, here's how it was put to me.

Speaker 18 You know, the other side has to know. The only reason, the only way that, let me phrase it this way.
Sure.

Speaker 18 The whole premise is deterrence. And that has been our founding philosophy since we developed these things.

Speaker 1 This is Dr. Sonia McMullen.

Speaker 18 And I'm a former Air Force missileer.

Speaker 1 She had her hand on the nuclear keys from 1997 to 2001. And by deterrence, she means...
There is only world peace where there is power to preserve order among nations.

Speaker 1 We keep other countries from nuking us. B-52s represent a shield.
By making clear that if they do, the missiles are ready.

Speaker 2 We'll nuke them

Speaker 1 right back.

Speaker 18 But if the other side doesn't believe that you will respond in kind, then it doesn't work.

Speaker 11 You have to believe my threat is legit. I have to be credible.

Speaker 1 So if you're the guy whose hand is on the key, when the order comes down to launch, there can't be any doubt that you will do what you are ordered to do. Exactly.

Speaker 11 So the problem with somebody like Harold is that you're in, if you start allowing people to, at the bottom, to start making up their mind, then it's not a credible threat.

Speaker 7 So do you understand in your own mind why they had to have a committee to sit in judgment on him and review some sort of facts? I don't know what I'm saying.

Speaker 11 It's hard to know. I haven't seen their side of it.
I'm filing to get access to that side. We'll see how that goes.

Speaker 1 Great. So I found this.
I actually just, we got this this morning. So we actually ended up finding a statement by the commander-in-chief of Strategic Air Command, General Russ Doherty.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you have seen it, Harold, but it's... And to be fair, we thought we should let Harold respond to it.
Do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 No, but he was the Sing Sack, Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right. And so let me just read to you what he said.
Sure.

Speaker 1 The major's hesitation initiated extensive hearings and administrative procedures. Later, he professed that he really would turn keys and that his hesitation had been misunderstood.

Speaker 1 I examined the record thoroughly and discovered that, for a fact, he had repeated several times in the record that he would readily turn keys.

Speaker 1 Then, in each instance, his affirmative assertion was followed followed immediately by a personal subjective qualification.

Speaker 1 Yes, he would turn keys upon receipt of an authentic order from proper authority if he thought the order was legal, if he thought the circumstances necessitated an ICBM launch, if he was convinced that it was a rational moral necessity, and so on.

Speaker 1 Every affirmative answer was qualified by a subjective condition. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 I did not say that anywhere. Nowhere did I say that.
Nowhere did I use those words.

Speaker 2 And I'm sorry, but

Speaker 2 that's just false. That doesn't surprise me.

Speaker 1 According to Harold, he never wanted to doubt an order coming from the president.

Speaker 2 I assumed that there had to be some sort of check and balance so that one man couldn't just... on a whim order the launch of nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 He just wanted to be told that something like that existed so that he and his fellow launch officers would not have to have a conflict of conscience.

Speaker 2 And that we not put anybody in a position where they're just following orders

Speaker 2 and throwing their conscience to the four winds. I think it's an affront to play the game of you don't have the need to know

Speaker 2 of someone that's doing one of the most serious,

Speaker 2 grave jobs that there is in the armed forces.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 since Harold never got an answer to his question, we decided to make it our question.

Speaker 11 Where do you get somebody who's allowed to question the president? Because we know that by the time you get to the bottom, there's no way that that's possible. So, what about the guy above them?

Speaker 11 Let's say there's an officer who's one more up the tier. Is he going to question the order? Well, I don't know.
He's getting it from the generals who coordinate all of the nuclear attacks.

Speaker 11 If it got to him, it must be a legitimate order, right? Maybe those top-level major heads of the military branches, maybe they get too. I don't know.

Speaker 11 And so my question is, where, if anywhere, if the president issues an order, can they, will they say no?

Speaker 1 After a lot of digging around, Alex says that he thinks.

Speaker 11 My guess is you're not allowed to question the president more than a couple steps down from the very top. If you're allowed to question the president at all, maybe the Secretary of Defense can do it.

Speaker 1 And when we talked to Sonia McMullen, our missileer, she also thought that the Secretary of Defense could probably provide a check.

Speaker 18 The Secretary of Defense is the first person to say, hey, let's think about this. Let's think about this in detail.

Speaker 14 All right.

Speaker 1 We're ready. Okay.

Speaker 14 This is Bill Perry, formerly Secretary of Defense, 19th Secretary of Defense of the United States.

Speaker 1 So we decided to ask an actual Secretary of Defense. William Perry served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Let's just pretend for a moment that the President issues you an order that you disagree with because you don't think the President is of right mind or sober or whatever.

Speaker 7 What authority do you have as Secretary of Defense, if any?

Speaker 14 Well, the system is set up so that only the President has the authority to order a nuclear war. Nobody has the right to countermand that decision.

Speaker 14 He might choose to call the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get his advice or his counsel.

Speaker 14 But even if he does that,

Speaker 14 he may or may not accept that counsel.

Speaker 7 If you as Secretary of Defense say to the President, he says, let's go, and you say, let's not.

Speaker 14 First of all, if he calls me, and then if I say,

Speaker 14 Mr. President, that would be a very serious mistake.
Don't do that. He might or might not accept my advice.

Speaker 7 Are you necessary to to launch?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 7 Suppose everybody in the room thought that it was a bad idea. Would he still be able to do it?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 14 He has the

Speaker 14 call directly to the Strategic Air Command to do the launching, and they will respond to his orders. They don't call the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman and say, Should I do this? They do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so in our training, we were conditioned almost like a Pavlovian talk. This is Dr.
Bruce Blair. He was a missile launch officer at the exact time that Harold was training to become one.

Speaker 1 And ever since then, he basically spent the whole rest of his career studying nuclear command and control.

Speaker 1 I wrote studies so classified that the Pentagon demanded that I not be allowed to read them anymore.

Speaker 1 And we asked him, like, why does it work like this? Why would we give one person that much power?

Speaker 1 It's always been set up that way. Why would that be? What's the reason? Why is that? It came out of the Cold War from, you know, in the 1960s.
I don't know. By the 1960s, the U.S.

Speaker 1 and the Soviet Union were building ICBMs, which are these nuclear missiles that could go from a silo in one country to a target in the other in the matter of minutes.

Speaker 1 So if the Soviets ever launched their missiles at us. If we're under a missile attack, there's very little time to assess the attack, to brief the president on his options.

Speaker 1 Because the assumption was that the Soviets would target our missiles.

Speaker 14 Our ICBMs. And they would be the first to go.
And so therefore the president has to decide whether to launch our ICBMs before the other missiles land.

Speaker 1 For any incoming missiles could destroy the command and control system. And that forces.

Speaker 1 the president to make a decision on how to respond immediately because missiles are flying in at four miles per second.

Speaker 14 He has about six or seven minutes to make that decision.

Speaker 1 Six minutes off. The decision process just is too short.
For any kind of thoughtful or serious deliberation. And the pressure is intense.

Speaker 1 And there, I think you would find that different presidents would respond differently. And their character, their temperament, are they thinking people, or are they intuitive people

Speaker 1 who respond instinctively? And so, you know, you would see a lot of variation in the way presidents react to a nuclear emergency.

Speaker 16 The President of the United States, now for 50 years, is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football.

Speaker 1 This is then-Vice President Dick Cheney, also a former Secretary of Defense, talking on Fox News Sunday back in 2008.

Speaker 16 He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody.
He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts.

Speaker 16 He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

Speaker 2 It bothers me immensely that the only area that there is not a check and balance is the one that can literally result in the end of the world. That seems strange to me.

Speaker 7 Trevor Burrus: Have you thought about this at all and wondered whether there's a better way to do this?

Speaker 14 Yes, I have.

Speaker 7 What would you suggest?

Speaker 14 I have specifically proposed and continue to propose unsuccessfully

Speaker 14 that we phase out our ICBMs and to the extent we have to have a nuclear deterrence, we limit it to submarines and airplanes because they don't have to launch in five minutes or six minutes or seven minutes.

Speaker 1 And when it comes to preemptive strikes, he says.

Speaker 14 We have before the Congress now a bill making a modification.

Speaker 14 which says that unless unless the United States has been verifiably attacked, then the President has, before he launches his nuclear weapons, has to go to Congress for permission.

Speaker 4 So our bill is very simple.

Speaker 1 This is Congressman Ted Liu, and he and Senator Ed Markey are the guys who authored the bill.

Speaker 4 It basically says,

Speaker 4 before the president can launch a nuclear-first strike, the president must first get a declaration of war from Congress.

Speaker 1 I believe that you introduced this bill before the election. Is that right?

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 4 Senator Markey, I believe we need a structural fix.

Speaker 4 We believe actually Hillary Clinton was going to be president, so this bill would have applied to her.

Speaker 4 And that's because the fate of humanity in our world should not rest on one person.

Speaker 1 And wait, so are you seeing this, just as you're sizing this up, is this a systemic problem or is this a problem with one person who just happens to have the office right now?

Speaker 4 It's absolutely a systemic problem, and it's also a problem with the current person in the office of the president.

Speaker 4 But you could see future presidents, right, that could be elected with judgment or temperament issues, or maybe they simply go to advanced age and get Alzheimer's, right, or some other sort of issue.

Speaker 4 That's why we can't have a system where there's so little checks and balances.

Speaker 1 Do you know about this bill? Or have you heard of that? No, actually, I don't.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 that's interesting. That is a very interesting bill.

Speaker 18 That,

Speaker 18 let me say it this way. Yeah.

Speaker 18 On one hand, I agree

Speaker 18 because, again, I always like to have checks and balances.

Speaker 18 On the other hand,

Speaker 18 I also think that it...

Speaker 18 It says to a potential adversary,

Speaker 18 you know,

Speaker 18 now there's doubt.

Speaker 7 So there are two sort of values here. One is

Speaker 7 your humane interest in making sure that the end of the world, if it comes to that, is happening for a good reason and a just reason, as best you can define it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 7 the ongoing hope that by making this our system credible, that we will never have an end of the world.

Speaker 7 So my question to you is: how do you weigh those together?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, and

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 18 that's a dilemma.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 18 You know, that's a dilemma.

Speaker 1 So after the military forced Harold to retire, he became a truck driver.

Speaker 2 And once I got that job, I made up my mind that I was going to devote my time to making a living for my family and to that company, and I wasn't going to be off dealing with this subject anymore.

Speaker 1 And eventually he started doing addiction counseling at the Salvation Army, mostly with homeless people.

Speaker 1 What's your sort of emotional state around all this right now? Like, how often is this something you still think about?

Speaker 1 How do you feel right now?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I'm just,

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 that common sense, I think

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 goodness in human beings

Speaker 2 begs

Speaker 2 for a resolution of this. I just think that the need

Speaker 2 for that

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 at least as great now as it's ever been in the history of our republic. And I might add on a personal level that

Speaker 2 I had, I mean, I was really committed to the military, to the Air Force,

Speaker 2 volunteered several times, you know, to do my duty with respect to the Vietnam War. And I just felt that I had asked a very reasonable question that deserved an answer, and it was not

Speaker 2 for me alone,

Speaker 2 it was for all of us.

Speaker 9 I keep thinking about those six minutes.

Speaker 1 Not a long time.

Speaker 9 Big props to reporter Lattef Nasser. This story was produced by Annie McEwen with production help from Simon Adler.

Speaker 7 And a big thank you to historian and reporter Ron Rosenbaum, whose research we relied on in some part for this story.

Speaker 9 And to our special consulting researcher, Alex Wellerstein, who is by day a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

Speaker 7 And to the U.S. Air Force, to Captain Chris Meznard, and to Carla Pampey, and to Lieutenant Esther Willette and to Lieutenant Veronica Perez.

Speaker 9 Also, thanks to Elaine Scary, Ryan Pettigrew at the Nixon Presidential Library, Ryan Furtkamp, Robin Berry and Lisa Berry, Tom Woodruff, Doreen DeBruome, and Ray Peter.

Speaker 6 Soren here again, just with a quick note. Since we first aired this episode, Bruce Blair, the missile launch officer who wrote those classified studies, has actually passed away.
And also,

Speaker 6 we should mention the passing of Tony DeBrum, who, if you are a patient or maybe just meditative listener, you'll hear from in a little bit.

Speaker 8 I'm Jad Abumrod. I'm Robert Quilbich.

Speaker 9 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 19 Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latz of Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 19 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Speaker 19 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brestler, W.

Speaker 19 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yanan-Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 19 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 20 I'll be happy to share whatever I may remember. Remember, this took place early in the morning of March 1st, 1954.
So it's been a while.

Speaker 9 So a couple weeks back, the writer Sam Keene put us in touch with this guy.

Speaker 20 But it was quite traumatic and hard to forget.

Speaker 7 How old were you on that day?

Speaker 20 In 1954, I was nine years old.

Speaker 7 Nine years old. Okay, good.
All right.

Speaker 9 His name is Tony DeBrum. He is an ambassador for the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific.

Speaker 9 And he tells this story about a particular moment that happened when he was nine on a day very early in the morning.

Speaker 20 At that moment, in that early morning hours, I was out fishing with my grandfather.

Speaker 20 It was customary,

Speaker 20 the village that we lived in, to go net fishing, pro-net fishing for scads.

Speaker 9 Tony says he and his grandpa were out on the beach before the sun had risen,

Speaker 9 and they waded through the water, tossing their net, pulling it back,

Speaker 9 tossing it out, pulling it back. And after they'd done that for a while.

Speaker 20 The sun was beginning to

Speaker 20 rise from the east, and I was carrying the basket. He was throwing the net

Speaker 20 when the flash went off.

Speaker 20 We were temporarily blinded by the flash.

Speaker 20 It was as if someone had walked up to you with a flash camera

Speaker 20 and took a shot right inches from your eyes.

Speaker 20 I cannot

Speaker 20 with any certainty tell you how many seconds passed,

Speaker 20 but

Speaker 20 we felt the shock.

Speaker 20 It was like the real heavy bursts of wind going through the land.

Speaker 9 He says he turned away from the light. back towards the shore.

Speaker 20 And you can see the vegetation move.

Speaker 20 It's indescribable.

Speaker 20 I thought it was the end of the world.

Speaker 9 What Tony didn't know

Speaker 9 is that 300 miles away, the U.S. had just tested a bomb they called Castle Bravo.

Speaker 9 It was a hydrogen bomb, about a thousand times as strong as the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima.

Speaker 20 And then the

Speaker 20 rumble and the roar and the thunder of

Speaker 20 sound of the explosion.

Speaker 20 Because it was not one big explosion that goes just boom and that's it. The chain reaction caused it to

Speaker 20 roll like thunder.

Speaker 9 And then

Speaker 9 he says the sky erupted.

Speaker 20 Everything turned red. The sky turned red.

Speaker 20 The ocean was red.

Speaker 20 The sand was red. My grandfather was red and the fish we caught were red.

Speaker 20 The whole atmosphere, the whole hemisphere, the

Speaker 20 effect was like you're standing under a glass bowl and somebody poured blood over it.

Speaker 11 We were terrified.

Speaker 9 That explosion, and the many others like it, would poison the Marshall Islands, poison its people.

Speaker 9 But in that moment, Tony says, he and his grandpa just stood there, listening to the explosions and staring at the blood-red sky.

Speaker 20 It seemed to have lasted for

Speaker 20 what seemed like hours.

Speaker 20 I am now 72 years old.

Speaker 20 And every time I speak about this, my skin still crawls, and I still get goosebumps.

Speaker 21 Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK.

Speaker 21 Leadership support for Radiolab Science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Samantha Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 21 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Loan Foundation.

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