Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Minute Man system, General Curtis Lame, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, John F. Kennedy Library
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Minute Man system
3. 20:00 – 30:00: General Thomas Sarsfield Power, SCOP 62, General David M. Shupe, Minute Man system
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Kennedy administration, nuclear football, Annie Jacobson, General David M. Shupe
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Alfred Starbird, Annie Jacobson, Blind Man's Bluff, General Curtis Lame
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: William Perry, Annie Jacobson, John Rubel, John Wolfthal
7. 1:00:00 – 1:05:52: Annie Jacobson, House of Dynamite, nuclear football

Notable quotes from "Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

• Oh, let's get back to talking about this insane Minute Man system cuz we've we've talked about some of the [ __ ] that's crazy about this, but we still have not gotten to the craziest thing about this, right? Oh, good. So when we left off,.

  about Minute Man system · at 0:59

• General Power, in fact, advocated for 200 squadrons, a total of 10,000 missiles, all set up the same way.

  about General Thomas Sarsfield Power · at 7:09

• Civilian defense officials for the first time. The single integrated operational plan, or SCOP 62, was, in Rubel's words, deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions…

  about SCOP 62 · at 21:11

• So, everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment except for one guy, General David M. Shupe, commandant of the Marine Corps. And the Marines, the Marines are an…

  about General David M. Shupe · at 28:17

• Story who gives us anything we can be truly proud of as Americans. And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's book nuclear war here. No one's, and this is after they're going over the plan again to kill 600 million people.

  about Annie Jacobson · at 30:50

• Kill everybody. Right? The good news is that in the early 1960s at the very start of the Kennedy administration is probably the high water mark for at least the danger of an…

  about Kennedy administration · at 34:11

• President and that process continues over the years. This is what leads to the nuclear football, right?

  about nuclear football · at 39:15

• Former pres former secretary of defense for Reagan, William Perry, added, Many presidents come into the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not to want to know.

  about William Perry · at 54:08

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• General Thomas Sarsfield Power — Person · 5 mentions · first at 7:09
• Annie Jacobson — Person · 4 mentions · first at 30:55
• John Rubel — Person · 3 mentions · first at 1:11
  Gotten to the craziest thing about this, right? Oh, good. So when we left off, John Rubel has been having in 1959 and start of 60, he's having conversations with all these Air…
• General Curtis Lame — Person · 2 mentions · first at 7:28
  Career to stopping the system as it existed from being implemented. He sat down first with General Curtis Lame, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Rubel expressed to Lame that…
• General David M. Shupe — Person · 2 mentions · first at 28:22
• William Perry — Person · 2 mentions · first at 54:10
• Margaret Killjoy — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:17
  Margaret Killjoy, welcome back to the program. How you doing? I'm doing great.
• Alfred Starbird — Person · 1 mention · first at 40:31
  THEY'RE BETTER TO LOCK OUR BOMBS UP. THE FEARS of one general, Alfred Starbird, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows. How is a pilot, US or foreign, somewhere around the world going to get a code from the president of the United.
• Robert Pape — Person · 1 mention · first at 44:17
  What if we just [ __ ] kill everybody? I'm going to quote from the book bombing to win by Robert Pape.
• John Wolfthal — Person · 1 mention · first at 53:55
  Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson makes one very important point several times. She quotes John Wolfthal, the former national security adviser to President Obama, who said, No one…

Books & papers

• Blind Man's Bluff — Book · 1 mention · first at 48:15
  Naval Academy, and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the the8s. there's a book called Blind Man's Bluff that's about like all the stuff that he used to do. And all of his…
• House of Dynamite — Book · 1 mention · first at 1:00:33
  I the movie House of Dynamite that just came out recently is the one that the way specifically the drama is just around it's around the nuclear football. around.

Concepts & topics

• Minute Man system — Concept · 7 mentions · first at 1:01
• SCOP 62 — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 21:15
• Kennedy administration — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 34:16
• nuclear football — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 39:18
• Operation Rolling Thunder — Concept · 1 mention · first at 44:40
  This led to Operation Rolling Thunder, a Rolling Thunder is LA's baby.

Places & events

• John F. Kennedy Library — Place · 1 mention · first at 2:21
  Decide to launch without authority? Here I cite from a transcript of my discussion of this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library. A moment arrived in this briefing in the June…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 And we're back. It's Behind the Bastards. Uh, this is our special episodes on the guys who built the nuclear doomsday machine that could kill us all at any moment. Episode five, the end is finally in sight. That could be literal. Margaret Killjoy, welcome back to the program. How you doing? I'm doing great. I've gone full circle. I've accepted that this is reality and I am just uh

0:27 very happy to get to live in these times. It's it's great that you got to that point because actually the next 10 pages are all Warhammer. Um I I just stopped writing about nukes at a certain point, but you can just assume that that's real.

0:40 Yeah, because that's that's what your brain does when presented with this much disaster is you're like, "Man, I really like fantasy books."

0:47 Yeah. I'm just going to I'm just going to relax to the comfort of a game where every single person is worse than Hitler. like like where Hitler would be a moderate bleeding heart.

0:59 Oh, let's get back to talking about this insane Minute Man system cuz we've we've talked about some of the [ __ ] that's crazy about this, but we still have not gotten to the craziest thing about this, right? Oh, good. So when we left off, John Rubel has been having in 1959 and and start of 60, he's having conversations with all these Air Force guys about the Minute Man system, and he's he's come up with some serious concerns about, well, how do we decide when these things are fired? When you choose to shoot one, how do the other nine get launched? Is it really just four guys who have to turn their keys in order to launch 50 missiles? Are there ways they could ask at 50 random cities. Are there ways they could accidentally get launched due to, you know, an electrical error, right?

1:46 These are all concerns and the Air Force is like, "What the [ __ ] are you asking questions for, you [ __ ] nerd? Get the hell out of here. Let us build our machine."

1:54 Yeah, you a commie. So, here's Rubel. If you are, you got to tell me. Yeah, you got to tell me if you're a communist.

2:02 Here's Reubel discussing his concerns. I was curious about the procedures for launching. How are the decisions to be made? And what happens when the launch commands are given? What if you decide you really didn't want to launch the rest after you've already launched some? Can you launch missiles one at a time selectively? What if some operators decide to launch without authority? Here I cite from a transcript of my discussion of this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library. A moment arrived in this briefing in the June of 195 in June of 1959 when I could ask the question I wanted to ask, one I had asked Bennett in private before, but without getting a satisfactory response. I had the feeling that if I asked the question surrounded as I was by members of the president's science advisory committee panel that I might elicit a better answer. So I said something like Bob can you describe how the missiles are launched. Now I began

2:45 to think he was made uncomfortable by the question. He seemed reluctant to grasp its simple meaning. And Bob gives the explanation I gave you earlier about how well these guys are all behind bulletproof glass and they have guns so they you know one guy can't threaten the other and they turn their keys at the same time or close to it and that'll count as a vote to launch the missile right the first miss. And so Reubel's immediate question is when you say the missiles are launched do you mean all 50? And Bob said well that depends on whether or not the missiles are ready but yeah all 50 will launch. Now, this upsets everybody on the president's science advisory panel. These people are not these are like normal people, right?

3:24 These are not maniacs. These are like science guys who are, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust, right? And they're like "What?

3:34 Four guys launch 50 missiles with no one getting in the way?" Really? And there's no way to stop all 50 from launching once you start the process of launching one? Are you serious? He was. So everybody gets upset. So Bob Bob is like now in damage control mode. And Bob Bennett goes like, "Now look, you have to understand this isn't as crazy as it sounds. There are two modes that we can fire these in." Right? One of these modes is salvo and the other is ripple launch. Right. One of them launches all the missiles as close to simultaneously as possible and the other staggers them. Right. Does that make it better? There's two modes, Margaret. THERE'S TWO MODES. IT'S FINE.

4:16 The hose has shower and jet. Yeah. Make it not a hose. You just know Bob has not sat down with anyone who is not constantly spending every second of their life like touching themselves to the thought of ending humanity, right? And he's just like, "Wait, these people don't they don't know there's two modes. That'll fix it. I'll tell them about the modes." Right?

4:40 See, I think theory and its consequences have been a disaster for the human. It's it's a [ __ ] catastrophe. Yeah. Once people start thinking about game again, that needs to be a bricking. If you ever encounter somebody who starts talking game theory [ __ ] just brick them, you know, give them a good heart.

4:55 Game theory says you have to brick them. That's the You have to brick them. It's the only way to stop these people.

5:00 Yeah. All right. Reubel continues, quote, "It turned out in pursuing the matter further that if you had preset the system for a ripple launch, there was no way to interrupt it after the launch command was transmitted to the silos. If the first missile went then six seconds later let us say the second and after another six seconds the third and if after the 20th missile you decide that was really enough missiles you couldn't stop the system from launching the remaining 30 according to what Bennith told us at the time.

5:26 Rubel describes the committee as pretty shook by this revelation. I don't think anybody had ever realized before that there would be four men buried in the ground somewhere in North Dakota who might someday stick their keys into four little slots, turn them, and irrevocably launch 50 Minutemen missiles.

5:44 Yeah, that's life on Earth. Yeah, that's insane. The next question this inspired was, under what circumstances would these men get the order to turn their keys? Everyone outside the Air Force assumed they'd have to be a verified command from the president or a designated military authority, but that wasn't physically required. And as Rubel notes, the whole system was designed to remove choices from civilian leadership. Quote, "By design, the president could not decide to launch one missile or two or a few against specific targets. This was intentional. The Air Force built it this way to remove choice from the president." So the president, if he was asked to make that decision in 10 or 15 minutes, do we start a nuclear war? So he would not have any option but to do it. That's why they built it this way.

6:34 That was conscious. That was intentional. [ __ ] So now I should note here, and this is something Reubel points out, 50 of these Minute Man missiles with the standard explosive loads they had would have meant more explosive power than all of the bombs used in all of the wars in human history put together up to that point. Four guys could do that.

7:03 Yeah. And again, the whole Minute Man system was invent was meant to eventually have at least 1,000 missiles. General Power, in fact, advocated for 200 squadrons, a total of 10,000 missiles, all set up the same way. Every state gets four. Every state gets four. Yeah. So, Reubel was so frightened by all of this that he dedicated his career to stopping the system as it existed from being implemented. He sat down first with General Curtis Lame, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Rubel expressed to Lame that he believed the Minute Man system represented a crucial loss of civilian command and control.

7:37 Here's Lame's response. COMMAND AND CONTROL. COMMAND AND CONTROL? WHAT'S THAT? It's telling the fighting man what to do. That's what it is. And that's a job for the professional soldier. They talk about the president exercising command and control. What is the president? Rebel notes that Lame spit out the P in president. A politician. What does the politician know about war? Who needs a president if there's a war? Nobody. All we need him for is to tell us that there is a war. We are professional soldiers. We'll take care of the rest.

8:05 Just the craziest [ __ ] Just out of his mind. Hell yeah. I'm impressed that you got this is like almost the worst b This is Schrodinger's worst bastard in all history.

8:18 Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Like this man's dedication to ending all life on Earth is really unique in history. I mean, I assume he had a Soviet counterpart, but like

8:29 I'm not as familiar with them. Um, do you think that they get like lonely, the American one and the Russian one, and they have only each other to talk to when they talk about their doomsday machine? That they're the only people who really understand?

8:41 Yeah, man. They won't give me 10,000 missiles. Bro, I know it's so hard to get enough missiles to kill the whole world a thousand times over. Like, don't worry. We got a bunch, too, though, homie. Like, it'll be fine.

8:52 No one's going to live through this. We'll do our part, too. All right. As long as you do your part.

8:58 Mhm. So, it's here that Reubel points out every detail of the Minute Man system discussed so far was designed per the specifications of the Air Force. This was true right down to the mechanics of how turning the keys led to firing the missiles, which is the scariest part of the whole system. To make a complicated story kind of simpler, the keys send out these electronic pulse generators which travel to electronic gates. And once the g the signal p the pulse passes through the gate, it advances one notch for each pulse that passes through the gate, right? And if enough pulses pass through the gates, it starts launching the missiles automatically,

9:36 right? Oh my god. So I start you can hack one position and get all four. Sorry. Yeah.

9:42 Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't even have to be that cuz I I explained this to a friend of mine who has never read a book about nukes, but who has done amateur unlicensed electrician work and she immediately asked, "Hey, wait. Does that mean that like if the power goes out and then comes back on, it might send a pulse and advance one notch closer to firing the missiles?

10:01 Now, God, you wouldn't think so, right? Clearly, anyone putting the effort of putting missiles in hardened bunkers meant to withstand an atom bomb would have made sure that something as simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in the 60s wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust. Only no, they did not. They never considered it for a second. Oh my god.

10:24 This thing could have started launching 50 missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages.

10:31 Yeah, cuz once once Reubel starts saying this to other engineers, they bring this up and they start looking into how the system's designed and realize that's totally possible. Like it absolutely could have happened if they had built the system the way it was originally designed. And no one in the Air Force even thought to look into that. Like that's how reckless these pieces of [ __ ] are. Now the reason why the Air Force doesn't care about this sort of thing is that they are more concerned that just two guys can launch a whole squadron of ICBMs if everyone else in the country is killed first. So they built an automated clock system. The other thing they add into this is they have this automatic clock system that that counts down from between 6 hour. You can set it to like 1 hour or 6 hours. You can set it to a variety of times. But depending on how you set it, if one command center votes

11:15 to launch the missiles after a limit after whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining 40 missiles in a in a right. Yeah. Now, when this is impressed, this is worse than I expected.

11:32 It's so bad. I came in here with so [ __ ] Yeah. Okay. It's so bad. Like it's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles. It's nuts. Like totally

11:46 when Keltech or it's at least interesting. No, not even Keltech. Yeah. They they they built a nuclear SIG P320 to go off in a cop's pocket.

11:57 Oh man. So when all this was explained to Rubel, the the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that like, well, the minimum setting is 58 minutes, right? And we want to have at least that much time to allow the military to disable the system if two men vote to launch without warning and we decide we don't want to launch the rest of the squadron right?

12:14 That seems like maybe it's a safety feature right? 58 minutes totally enough time.

12:18 That's Yeah. Yeah. Many of these silos are hours away from anything else. That's kind of the point. Even to this day, you can't reach a lot of these in 58 minutes, you know. But the other problem is that the Air Force colonel who described the way this clock system worked to Rubel lied to him. The minimum count you could set it to wasn't 58 minutes. It was 0 minutes.

12:45 So you really genuinely could just automate all the minute men? Yeah, we damn near did. We damn near did. Uh here's Reubel again. Zero could mean that only two men, or perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing of 50 Minuteman missiles by accident or effectively by designing the system this way in the event of a series of power interruptions. So, Reubel is like, "Oh god, I have to do something. This system, these missiles are not active yet. These silos aren't active yet, and I have to stop them from being made active, at least until this is fixed." Right? So he's he sets to work trying to get someone at the Air Force to give a [ __ ] about these problems. Right. He sits down with the head of missile development, General Shrivever, who he described as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject. Eventually, in late 1960, he manages to have lunch with the deputy secretary of defense. And

13:42 while they're arguing about this system, he's like, "Look, man, tell me, would you feel safe knowing the Soviets had a system that worked the way the Minute Man does?" And yeah, he thought I had a point there. But my concerns again dropped into another organizational black hole. Everyone's just trying to push this guy on. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to think about it. Why are you try Why are you causing problems? Just let us build this thing and forget about it, man. No one else has a problem with this. That's literally how he's being treated.

14:11 It's like, so it's not even the Torment Nexus. It's like one guy's trying to stop the torment nexus from being built by a bunch of people who also don't think that the torment nexus needs to be they're just doing their part of the

14:22 tormented. Come on, man. Don't [ __ ] with us. A lot of people's jobs are on the line building the torment nexus. Come on.

14:30 So, as I noted, Rubel, because he's good at his job, he gets promoted regularly, right? And in 61, I think 60 or 61, he passes his job at the Strategic Warfare office, I think it's 60, onto a guy named Martin Stern. He tells Stern that his top priority is to change the Minute Man launch control system and warns him, "You will not get this done unless you get a presidential directive ordering the Air Force to do something." And Marvin has a good relationship with some of these generals. And so he starts up being like, "That's not how you get things done in the Air Force, right? You just got to let me talk to these guys."

15:01 But then he starts talking to these guys and all of these generals lie to him and he realizes like, "Oh [ __ ] no. really are refusing to fix these problems, these apocalyptic problems, and they're trying to fasttrack these missiles to being activated. To make a long story short, Rubel and several of his friends spend the next two years of their lives shouting at everyone who will listen about this. This culminates in another guy at the DoD named Jim Fletcher heading a committee that issues a report on the Minute Man system. Their research found a very real chance that simple power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal to fire.

15:36 the ultimate bill for and and this is it's because of this commission report that we retrofit the whole Minute Man system, right? And the ultimate bill for retrofitting the system is hundreds of millions of dollars, right? It's very expensive to fix these problems, which is why the Air Force hadn't wanted to fix them. But Rubel does win the most dangerous

15:55 bad for the economy. Yeah. Nuclear cost. Yeah. Real bad. [ __ ] the stock market does not do well when everyone's dead. Um

16:04 Nope. Nope. Doesn't do much at all. Now, Rubel does win. The most dangerous features are removed by the time the first Minute Man silo goes active at the end of 1961. But a big part of why I I noted all of this stuff, none of this comes out until 2008 when Reubel at the end of his life publishes a confession talking about all this, right, as a way to try to warn people. Essentially, he's warning people nothing's really all that much better today, right? Like that's why he writes this to try to try to get people to understand how much danger we're all in.

16:34 And a big part of like the point of that confession is he's talking about all of the gaps in the system of civilian control of the military that allowed all of this to happen in the first place because those gaps weren't entirely eradicated by fixing this one system. He documented a conversation one of his allies had with another Air Force general around the same time. Quote, "General CQ cutter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS ballistic missile early warning system as soon as possible, and he urged that we expand it in order to create a highly redundant capability at each site. We must have an absolutely reliable early warning of a missile attack." Basically, I agreed.

17:11 All would have been well if he had stopped there, but he didn't. In words I can't precisely recall, he went on to say that we had to have this redundancy and the resulting high level of reliability so that when we finally connected the warning system directly to the launch button of our own ICBMs, there would be no false alarms. I was astonished. I told him flatly we would not automate our response and we would not connect the warning system directly to the launch button. We would not in some go to a launch on warning strategy.

17:39 We would especially not go to one that did not have the president in the decision-making loop. Cutter coldly replied, "In that case, we might as well surrender now."

17:49 I love it. It's like no one who's ever done plumbing or hacking. No. Air gap. You need a [ __ ] air gap for a gap. Never trust a computer. Don't trust people and don't trust computers.

18:04 Yeah. Every hacker is like, "This is my computer that matters." So, it doesn't have the internet,

18:09 right? Like it it's just it's [ __ ] insane. Like the whole, "Well, we might as well surrender now. If we're not just going to have an automatic doomsday device that goes off if a radar has an elucination, why don't WE JUST QUIT? [ __ ] IT. LET'S BE COMMUNISTS." LIKE, it's [ __ ] crazy. And I should note that, and this happens later, but the Soviet Union does devise a similar automated system called the dead hand in some aspect. It's kind of unclear exactly how put together this is, but they do a version of the same thing, right? This is not

18:42 It's a cooler name, right? It's it's it is a really cool name. Um, but it's basically a way to guarantee that if the US wiped out their command and control first that there would be an automatic launch system in order to retaliate, right? Um,

18:54 right. Yep. It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but they this is these same conversions of all of these same conversations happen in the USSR too

19:04 cuz they if nothing else they need the Americans to believe they do that. Yeah.

19:07 Right. Right. Exactly. And like everyone is worried about what the other guy is doing and everybody's out of their [ __ ] minds.

19:14 Yeah. Now the good news is Margaret, it's time for ads. Oh, good. It is a nice thing. It makes the ads seem like a nice refreshment.

19:24 Yeah. Yeah, probably not going to get ads for nukes. And we're back. So, the good news is this. This is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern military advisers and officers today. But General Cutter's type of thinking is not extinct at the Pentagon, and it is still very common. I don't know if I'd say it's completely dominant, but there are a lot of guys who think this way who are still part of our nuclear defense architecture, right? This in fact getting that job kind of requires that you're at least a little bit like these people, right? It fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with some of this to wind up in those positions. Rubel points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized for examining the technical status of launch controls for any of our nuclear weapons systems and there is none today. Right? And that's a real problem. There's no one checking other

20:21 than guys like Rubel to make sure we don't build another really flawed, suicidally flawed missile system,

20:27 which the Minute Man initially was. Now, while Rubel was fighting to reform the Minute Man system, he was part of the problem in a different way. Right? Right. We've just talked about how maybe he saved everybody's lives. Here's him being kind of a bastard. In late 19 Yeah. In late 1960, which is right in the middle of when he's having this fight, President Eisenhower issued an order for all three military departments to formulate a single operational plan or SCOP for nuclear war, like SiOp, not like a SCOP, but it is pronounced the same way, right? And this will this will get finalized in ' 62, but they start working on it and they present it initially in 1960. So in late 1960, the DoD, the Department of Defense, shares a cohesive plan for nuclear war to a mix of military personnel and selected civilian defense officials for the first time. The single integrated operational plan, or SCOP 62, was, in Rubel's words,

21:19 deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on innocent civilians in the USSR and China. This plan was presented at an underground meeting at the SACE headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. General Power stage managed a deliberately theatrical display in which at his command, aids would simultaneously set up easels and start flipping maps over that like each new map would show different detonations from different waves of planned strikes. You know, 5 minutes in, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, right? This is like it's an analog PowerPoint, right? He has like guys being his PowerPoint presentation basically.

21:54 Yeah. Um, and I'm going to quote from Reubel, cuz Rubel is at this meeting, right? I'm going to quote from his description of of what he sees here. At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying, "Just a minute. Just a minute." He turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, "I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path." And we take it out.

22:22 With that, to which the response was utter silence, Power turned to the speaker and with another wave of his hand told him to go ahead. Just casually was like, "By the way, we're killing everyone in Albania immediately."

22:34 Yeah. Famously our enemy. Uhhuh. Hope you don't got family there cuz again, we nuke them right away because of a radar station. We're just going to kill everyone in the country because of a radar station. Everyone in the country. We're wiping the whole country out.

22:48 Yeah. So, Rubel, I think we've established, is a thinking man and a man who cares about ethics. He's not a monster. He's a part of this terrible system, but he has a soul. And he's upset. He's upset at this at General Cash being like, "So, we start by killing Albania just for shits, right?

23:07 He's upset, but he doesn't say shit." Right? He writes about this decades later. He writes about his discomfort in this meeting. And that specifically he writes about his discomfort at the fact that SCOP 62 quote deliberately removed effective operational control from the president or any other civilian or even military commander in the event of a nuclear conflict. Now none of this is public knowledge for decades right

23:30 it takes a long time. We only know what we know because in 2008 Rob Rubel published his experiences as a warning to the rest of the country and he noted that during this meeting General Power and the other authors of SCOP 62 gave an anticipated death count of 500 to 600 million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR in China. That gets into the like that's like combined death count of every war that's ever happened levels probably.

24:00 Yeah. I like, right? It's got to be up there right? Um, quote, "No accounting was presented of reciprocal effects in the United States or collateral deaths and damage in many other parts of the globe where global clouds of radioactive dust would eventually descend. They just don't bother with that. We're not interested in what the fallout might do. We're not interested in the knock-on effects. We're just interested in killing half of all of the people or more in the USSR in China." Right.

24:25 Yeah. and the way in which power and the other briefers talk about civilian death on an unimaginable scale struck Rubel as ghoulish. Quote, "There are about 600 million Chinese in China." He said his chart went up to half that number, 300 million on the vertical axis. It showed that deaths from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number, 300 million, half the population of China.

24:48 Yeah. They they don't care. They they don't give a [ __ ] Yeah. Now, I say they don't give a [ __ ] Someone in this meeting does give a [ __ ] right? Mhm.

24:58 And I'm going to I'm going to continue with Reubel's reminiscence. A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying, "May I ask a question?" General Power turned again in his front row seat stared into the darkness and said, "Yeah, what is it?" in a tone not likely to encourage the timid. "What if this isn't China's war?" the voice asked. "What if this is just a war with the Soviets? Can you change the plan?" "Well, yeah," General Power said resignedly. We can, but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan.

25:31 Hey, what if we don't need to kill 300 million people in China? Can we like nyx that part? Well, I hope not. That really [ __ ] up my plan. If we're not killing 300 million people in China, that really [ __ ] things up for me.

25:41 We already have the banner printed, you know. Yeah, we've got the banner printed and everything. We got a mission accomplished board here. Come on.

25:48 Yeah. You don't want to kill 300 million people in China. What's wrong with you? Yeah. But what was it? Bonus effects.

25:55 Yeah. Yeah. Bonus effects. Now, it says something about Rubel that it was not until this moment that he found himself thinking about the Von conference in January of 1942 in which a group of top Nazis planned the Holocaust. For some reason, this is one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War to me. A man who truly cared about protecting his country and stopping a dangerous system from going live finds himself stuck in a room where something many times worse than the Holocaust is being casually planned and he realizes, "Oh [ __ ] Oh [ __ ] I'm like some junior SS guy sitting in the back of the Vonce conference, too scared to speak up and ruin my career. [ __ ] [ __ ] I'M A FUCK."

26:34 LIKE that's literally how he describes his recollection is like this is the [ __ ] This is so much worse than the They're talking about killing 600 million people. like we might not even he doesn't say [ __ ]

26:46 He does not He is not that kind of brave right? Um he is a work within the bureaucracy. That's like a telling human condition thing, right? Cuz we all imagine ourselves saying something,

26:58 right? You know, you you want to hope you would. And I I I get the feeling from his writing that Rubel never quite forgave himself for not right.

27:07 Good. He shouldn't have, but yeah, he shouldn't have. This should haunt you to the end of your days.

27:13 But he's still the most deeply human person in that room. Yeah, I I'll say the second most because we're about to talk about someone who does speak up. There is one guy who has

27:22 who who actually has some courage here. Okay. So, the day after this first meeting at the SACE headquarters, Rubel takes part in a smaller meeting about the meeting they just had. Right? Even in the military, you can't escape meetings about meetings, you know? Like that's just that's just that's just bureaucracy, baby. So this smaller meeting includes the secretary of defense, all of the joint chiefs of staff and the secretaries of each major branch of the military plus the commonant of the Marine Corps. The chairman of the joint chiefs speaking on the harrowing meeting they just had quote told everyone that they'd done a very fine job, a very difficult job.

27:58 Right? So and that sentiment is echoed by everyone. Everyone just goes around congratulating each other at the start of this meeting being it was a great meeting. was really tough, but you guys really pulled together and came up with a plan to kill 600 million people, and I'm proud of you. You know, it's not easy to figure out how to kill half a billion people or more, but you guys really

28:16 Yeah. Yeah. So, everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment except for one guy, General David M. Shupe, commandant of the Marine Corps. And you know, the Marines, the Marines are an interesting branch because both the the chuddiest maniacs in the military and the absolute like coolest like best soldiers in American history like Smmedley Butler were Marines, right?

28:40 Like they have a history of producing occasionally these like really weirdly like woke generals and stuff like Smmedley Butler is a committed anti- capitalist and anti-imperialist who gets very angry about being used as a gangster for capitalism. And David and Shupe, who's the comedant of the core at this point, is cut from the same cloth. He's the same kind of guy.

29:02 You probably say like more like honor, like more like whatever you believe in, you're still like you're like, "No, I'm willing to risk my life to go do this thing."

29:10 Why I joined the Marines? Yeah. Like my dad was a Marine. It doesn't have entirely positive things to say about the people in in it with it, but like

29:17 that's what I'm saying is there's they they they run the gamut, you know. Yeah. Um, but Shupe is a really interesting guy. In the long history of Marine Corps commandants, he is one of the men who earned that job title the most. He had been born in Indiana in 1904 to a poor family and he was raised politically progressive and grew into a staunch anti-imperialist with a very strong anti- business outlook. He is not super sold on capitalism and he hates imperialism. As a starving young man, he joins the military to survive. He proves very good at the job and is deployed twice to China during their civil war.

29:54 He serves as a staff officer in the Pacific during World War II until he was given a combat command to lead the invasion of an island called Tarawa. His forces encountered immediate and fierce resistance. His transport was disabled before landing and he had to wait ashore where he was struck by shrapnel and shot in the neck. Despite this, he continued to organize and lead his men from the front with a gunshot wound to the neck. On the afternoon of the second day of the attack, he sent a message to his divisional headquarters. Combat efficiency colon, we are winning.

30:25 Just just a badass. Like one what one what one what one what one what one what one what one what one what one what one what one what are these one of our one of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war.

30:34 Sh receives a congressional medal of honor for his efforts. Right? If you want to know like how like what kind of a badass this dude was, like he is a general leading from the front in such a way that he gets a medal of honor for his service in combat.

30:48 And he is the only man in this entire story who gives us anything we can be truly proud of as Americans. And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's book nuclear war here. No one's, and this is after they're going over the plan again to kill 600 million people. No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a US government-ledd preemptive first strike nuclear attack, Rubel wrote. Not any of the joint chiefs, not the secretary of defense, not John Rubel. Then finally, one man did. General David M. Shupe, the commandant of the US Marine Corps, a Marine awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II. Shupe was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a school teacher from a rural mid-American community, recalled Rubel. He remembered how Shupe spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole opposing view on the plan for nuclear war. That Shupe said, "All I can

31:38 say is any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way." The room fell silent, Rubel wrote. Nobody moved a muscle. Nobody seconded Shup's descent. No one else said anything. According to Reubel, everyone just looked the other way.

31:59 Yeah. [ __ ] Yeah. Yeah. At least there was one. I know. At least there was one guy being like, "Are you Do you guys realize how [ __ ] evil this is?

32:11 Are you out of your minds?" Yeah. You know what you're TALKING ABOUT? KILLING 300 million people who might not have done [ __ ] all to us. They don't even have nukes yet. Like,

32:19 yeah, we we killed Japan for trying to kill all the Chinese people. Yeah. DO YOU NOT SEE A PROBLEM HERE?

32:28 YEAH. YEAH. UM, YEAH, that's not the American way. Unfortunately, it is, but I can't blame Shup for trying to make it not be.

32:35 Yeah, exactly. Shupe is goes on to be a cool guy the rest of his life. He spoke vocally against nuclear escalation during the Cuban missile crisis. Like, he was a major voice trying to be like, "No, no, no. We need to take a step back." And he was also he advised against entering South Vietnam during the opening stages of the Vietnam war. He was one of the few generals who was like this is a terrible idea and we should not get involved at all. This is a really bad plan. Right?

33:01 In general, he was the one sane man not afraid to speak his mind in the entire defense establishment during some of the maddest years of the Cold War. Right. So thank you shot in the neck. I'm good. I know what this is involved. We shouldn't do this. Yeah.

33:16 Yeah. And he clearly like not afraid of confrontation is willing to say like you people are [ __ ] maniacs.

33:23 Yeah. But unfortunately he uh he's the only one. So Rubel, who is not a fighter, not great at confrontation, one gets the idea, does continue to push bureaucratically for a ser nuclear posture, but he does so from within the bureaucracy in which he was comfortable. In his 2008 report, he accused defense planners of building both SCOP 62 and the Minute Man system deliberately to deny quote any but a go no-go option to civilian leadership. As Henry Kissinger put it in 1961, and this is the only time I'll quote Kissinger approvingly, these plans offered the president just one choice. Quote, suicide or surrender, holocaust or humiliation. In other words, the military has set it up that the only choice the president gets to make is let the country get nuked or kill everybody. Right? The good news is that in the early 1960s at the very start of the Kennedy administration is probably the high water mark for at

34:20 least the danger of an atomic holocaust during the cold war. Part of why we stepped a tiny

34:25 to point out that part so far. Yeah. Part of what got us to step back from the brink a little bit is that after the Berlin crisis, which is, you know, the Soviet Union tries to cut off supplies into the chunk of Berlin that NATO is occupying and we have to like drop drop a bunch of [ __ ] in by plane. Right after that, and then the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy comes to realize what Rubel had known for a while, which is that the men running the strategic air command in particular and the air force in general are out of their goddamn minds, right? like that, he starts to become Kennedy starts to become very aware that like these people are crazy and they're going to get us all killed. I have to do something about the way this system works, right? And this is arguably the best thing he did in his presidency.

35:13 One of the first moments where this was made clear to him was on September 5th during Kennedy's first year in office in which several Air Forcemen submitted a first strike study that suggested killing 54% of the USSR's population. An alternate plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy named Kasein, the study author, estimated would kill only around a million civilians. However, US casualties from a Soviet response ranged from basically none to 75% of the US population.

35:42 Uh-huh. Right. Reubel includes a note about the reactions of people in the Kennedy administration to this horror show. Ted Sorenson, the chief White House counsel and speech writer who had been with Kennedy since his earliest Senate days, was outraged when Kasein told him about the study, shouting, "You're crazy. We shouldn't let guys like you around here." Even more appalled was a friend of Kasins on the NSE staff named Marcus Rascin. Rascin had served as foreign policy adviser to a few liberal Democratic senators and had been hired as a token leftist.

36:11 Rascin was horrified by the very existence of such a study. How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany? He hollered at one point. Rascin never spoke to Kasein again.

36:25 Good question. Yeah, really good question. Yeah. Kennedy himself was briefed on the likely death toll of a nuclear war basically on the result like he's briefed on this case and study and his response is characteristically eloquent. He says, "And we call ourselves the human race." Yeah.

36:45 Oh, [ __ ] Yeah. The Cuban missile crisis unfolded across 13 days in 1962, and it seems to have inspired Kennedy to take action to reduce the ability of his insane generals to destroy the world. When he implo imposed a blockade of Cuba to force the USSR to remove their nukes, General Lmé insisted on direct military intervention as the only path forward, claiming that any attempt to solve the problem without violence would lead to war. Look, WE MIGHT HAVE A WAR IF WE DON'T get violent with these guys. You don't want a war, don't you? Do you? Uh, quote, Lame indirectly threatened to make his descent public. I think that a blockade in the political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this, and I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time. Lame's words angered Kennedy, who asked, "What did

37:36 you say?" Lame responded, "You're in a pretty bad fix." Kenneth O'Donnell recalled in his memoirs that after the meeting, Kennedy asked him, "Can you imagine Lame saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong. I I better understand the like second half of the 20th century was a big push for pacifism on the left

38:04 and like and it's one of those things you like look back at and you're like, "Oh, that seems kind of silly." And you're like,

38:09 "Some parts worked, some didn't." But oh, yeah, I get why people lean towards that.

38:15 Yeah. Yeah. And this is arguably the best thing Kennedy does is it's during the Kennedy administration that we take trigger control mostly and eventually entirely away from the military. Right. The scenario now, and this is I don't I think it's better, but it's also differently bad. Now, some general or some colonel or some kid in a silo couldn't launch our arsenal, right? You can't have four kids launching 50 missiles on their own because you have to have like codes transmitted and stuff right?

38:48 But one guy can decide to launch everything and it's the president. Now, that does mean we have civilian control, and I think that's a positive step away from a bunch of insane generals potentially having that command or four kids in a corn field having that ability, right? Um, but and that this is that is a major thing that happens under Kennedy, right? Is that

39:11 command and control of our nuclear arsenal gets shifted much further to the president and that that process continues over the years. This is what leads to the nuclear football, right? Um, which I I think people are generally aware of, right? because it's under Kennedy. I talked about how that Los Alamos scientist came up with the idea to we need a lock on these [ __ ] things and they figure out how to do that um during the Kennedy administration and Kennedy gives the order to start putting locks on our weapons, right? Um which starts moving this this all I'm yada ying this takes longer to get to where we are now, but this starts the process, right? That leads to the situation we are we have now where these weapons all do at least have a lock and where we have the football, right? the nuclear football, which is ultimately a product of both that scientist Agnu realizing a single private with eight bullets was all that

39:58 stood between a nuke and whoever, as well as Reubel and his allies repeatedly insisting to their bosses that these Air Force [ __ ] are out of their goddamn minds, right? Like that is, you know, a a really good thing that happens here. And characteristically, when the switch, the lock is first demoed, it was presented to President Kennedy, who immediately is like, "Yeah, put these on everything we can." immediately right now. Do it today. You have no other priorities.

40:24 And the military loses their [ __ ] mind. The fears are bombs. THEY'RE BETTER TO LOCK OUR BOMBS UP. THE FEARS of one general, Alfred Starbird, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows. How is a pilot, US or foreign, somewhere around the world going to get a code from the president of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops?

40:48 I don't Okay, man. Maybe it's this. I'm fine with that, actually. Yeah, if a couple people die instead of all of us. I don't know.

40:57 Yeah. Look, I I I'm not casual about the lives of soldiers. They're people, too.

41:02 Yeah. But it's a soldier's job to potentially die for their country. And I prefer that to the whole world dying,

41:08 including that soldier. INCLUDING THAT SOLDIER. THEY'RE not living through it. All none of these bomber guys, all of these SACE bombers know that their missions are suicide missions. If they get the order to fly to the USSR, they are not coming back. There won't be anywhere to come back to, right?

41:22 Yeah. Or they'll the only people still alive. They'll be flying for another 10 minutes before

41:28 Yeah. I mean, that would that's how it is now cuz we have these doomsday planes that we literally call like doomsday planes, which are these huge shielded planes that are able the president basically can hand over control of continuing to launch our nukes to the official in the plane because the president's going to be dead pretty soon. everyone is none of these bunkers work nearly as well as people want to believe they do. Especially not when you're talking about multiple thermonuclear impacts. It doesn't matter how deep if people are dropping multiple hydrogen bombs as they would be or missiles as they would be in this. Very few things could prot could protect you.

42:03 All of these fancy bunker complexes are great if you don't get directly hit by multiple thermonuclear bombs, but they're not going to protect you from that. You're going to boil alive, right? Yeah. No, the and that's Annie Jacobson's nuclear war book which posits a pretty chilling theory about how this could all go down does have everyone dies like everyone in command and control is [ __ ] dead except for the guy in the doomsday plane who makes sure that everyone dies on the other side of the world.

42:31 Um that's nuclear war. Anyway, let's have some ads and then we'll come back and finish this story.

42:37 Woo. All right, we're back. So this is what gets us the stuff with Kennedy. evolves into like you know the system we have today which gives the president sole authority to end civilization. We'll talk about that a little more in a second but I want to finish with Curtis Lame's story first. In 1964 now as chief of staff of the Air Force Curtis Lame is still in 1945 Curtis Lame is in charge of all of the US air power in Southeast Asia basically.

43:07 During the Korean War, same deal. during the start of Vietnam, same deal. So when we

43:13 when in 1964 when we really start upping our commitment in Vietnam, he is running things and he pushes a plan to bomb northern Vietnam into submission. The plan is described and I believe this was his name for it as the Gentiel Duhi plan, right? I mentioned that earlier like it's the polite version of the Duhi plan, right? Duh being the guy who's like you just kill all the civilians until they're not willing to fight anymore. Now, there's a big battle between Kennedy's civilian advisers who wanted the US to threaten North Vietnam's industry, but not actually blow it up immediately so that we blow up some of it and we make it clear we can really d [ __ ] their industry so that we have a negotiating hand to push for peace, right? And I'm not I don't think we should have gotten involved in [ __ ] Vietnam whatsoever. I'm not saying that like these guys are good and ethical, but that is a much ser response

44:02 than Lame's cuz Lame just wants to send North Vietnam back to the stone age, right? right? Like these liberals are like, "Well, we can bomb them, you know, kind of strategically in order to exert a cost and make them want to come to the negotiation table." And Lame is like, "What if we just [ __ ] kill everybody?" Um, I'm going to quote from the book bombing to win by Robert Pape. Quote, "Destroying the North's industrial economy appears to have been valued more for its effect on civilian morale than for reducing the flow of military goods into the South. For instance, the rationale for closing the port of Hyong was not to interdict battlefield hardware, but to weaken civilian morale, right?

44:34 Which keeps not working. It as you may recall, none of this did. Um, this led to Operation Rolling Thunder, a Rolling Thunder is LA's baby. This is like Operation Rolling Thunder is the Gentiel Duhi plan put into effect. It is a three-year bombing campaign that resulted in what, Margaret? You want to guess? Uh, no effective destruction of the morale of the enemy.

45:00 I mean, stuff was just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't work. Uh, we we don't win Vietnam, in case you uh you were unaware of that. Um

45:07 Oh. Oh, interesting. This does not stop their ability to uh equip and support their troops. It does not break civilian morale. It does not it it it doesn't do the trick. Um, and this

45:19 one of the main things I've learned over this epic journey we've been on. I if you had asked me, I would have been like, well, it's probably immoral to bomb all these enemy cities, but it probably is effective

45:32 at destroying morale. And what I have learned is that it's not. No. No. Well, you got to think if like if somebody, for example, goes and stabs the person you love most in the world in the gut, are you going to like walk away because you're demoralized, or are you going to [ __ ] that person up? Like are you going to do everything in your power to destroy that person? Right.

45:56 Yeah. Yeah. I think people were think similarly when their family is incinerated from the sky.

46:02 Yeah. Um but this the fact that this fails and the fact that Lame's plans kind of fail a lot. Brings me to a key point about Lame and all the Duhi acolytes who came to run our air power during this time. These guys

46:16 Surrealist Man Ray is also one of these people. Yeah. These guys loved nukes because nukes were the weap the only weapon system that worked the way they thought all weapons should work. So they always insisted on using nukes at every corner. And when they were denied, they didn't know how to fight a modern war. Well, cuz they only have the one strategy and it only works if you use nukes. So when the president says, "No, you can't nuke them." Then they're left like, "Well, I guess we try to use conventional bombs and it just doesn't do it." But they don't. None of these people are actually capable of adapting and looking their failure in the face because they've based everything on this being how war works and it doesn't unless you're killing everyone, right? Yeah. Because they're 12-year-old boys.

47:03 Yeah. Now, I'm ending this story in the mid60s, right? Which there's a lot more to talk about in terms of nukes and [ __ ] obviously after this point, but I'm ending here because kind of by the point we're at in the story, right? Vietnam, the tale of how our nuclear arsenal functions changes, but not like in earthshattering ways, right? Everything gets kind of better. Our early warning systems get better. Our missiles get more destructive and reliable. Nuclear submarines are by this point a part of the deterrent. We're not talking about that all that much, but that's a major part of the deterrent package, right?

47:39 Because a nuclear submarine absolutely cannot be found, right? It's basically impossible. Like if you have nuclear submarines, you always have nukes out there that you can throw back at whoever [ __ ] with you. So it's a guarantee that you'll be able to get some sort of second strike. Nuclear nuclear submarines are [ __ ] terrifying. They're the scariest weapons human beings have ever made and probably ever will make, right? Like it is just death tubes. They're [ __ ] nightmares. I had a friend um I have a friend who uh went to Annapolis, that's the the the the Naval Academy, and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the uh the8s. Um there's a book called Blind Man's Bluff that's about like all the stuff that he used to do. And all of his like stories are cuz what US and Soviet subs were doing in this period of time was like basically one would try to like playing chicken trying to force the other to

48:28 surface, right? M so you know cuz it was like that was kind of part of the game that we were playing in the high seas. And so he has all these stories of just like he and a couple of his friends are standing in I guess the bridge or whatever doing a bunch of complicated math in their heads and if they [ __ ] up the math everyone dies because they crash into something right like it's like those kind of stories like um sub nuclear subs are [ __ ] terri but you know once we get nuclear subs that's we have all three kind of arms of our nuclear like posture. We have our ICBMs, we have nuclear subs, we have our bombers, right? Obviously, we also have like field artillery and, you know, nukes and stuff that the army can use.

49:10 Um, but nothing that happens after this point seriously alters the fundamental calculus up until something that's kind of more recent. And that fundamental calculus is we and the Russians and other people, China now as well, right? Obviously, more people have nukes, but all of the nuclear powers have a bunch of nukes ready to fire at a moment's notice. And in both the US and Russia, only the president gets to decide when we use them. Right. Right. That's the way it is starting in the '60s and that's the way it is today. Right.

49:41 Obviously, like I'm not going to talk a lot about hypersonic missiles. That's kind of the biggest recent change that might seriously alter a lot of calculus because it allows a strike that potentially might not get spotted at all. And so maybe there's no warning. Which is why I I read a really [ __ ] up War on the Rocks article that was basically arguing for like an automated AI like second strike system because of the fact that well maybe they are able to if they blow up the president no one can launch the nukes back, right? Um

50:08 so no one's watched the movie War Games is what I'm hearing. No one no one has ever watched the movie War. Actually actually War Games literally one of the generals they quote references War Games um in order to say that we don't have a machine that does that right now. like this. They were arguing that we need to do it. Yeah.

50:24 Oh my god. And and this is part one of the one of the things that that that I I have worry about cuz I I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're going to like give AI the ability to launch nukes or or do that. I that's not my immediate worry. But they're already integrating different machine learning tools into like the radar systems and our early warning systems. That's the worry is that people are being advised by these by machines that have by that that like the minute man will have

50:57 unanticipated flaws that the arrogant pieces of [ __ ] who designed these weapons refuse to consider because they cannot accept the fact that maybe they didn't think of everything and they will [ __ ] up and miss stuff and it could cause a ser it could cause the end of the world. Right? That's what scares me more than like a a death computer, right? which any hacker or wannabe hacker would immediately be like, "Oh, you can't build systems that don't have flaws." That doesn't happen.

51:26 No. No. That's why up until very recently, this was all being done on like the big 1980s floppy discs and everything's [ __ ] airgapped. It's like you want this [ __ ] simple and reliable as possible.

51:39 Yeah. Um anyway, well, now Bluetooth so now is Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the most reliable thing in electronics is Bluetooth. Everyone who has a headset knows that.

51:49 So, it's important everyone know that our launch policy from 1964 to today remains launch on warn. Now, the USSR, to be fair to them, officially rejected a launch on warn policy. There are grave doubts as to whether or not that was the real policy or propaganda, right? A lot of people say they were definitely launch on warn too. I think that's probably right. I think both the US and Russia more or less would have fired if they felt like they had a credible warning that the other was firing. Right.

52:18 I don't think either of us would believe. Russia needs us to believe their launch on war. Even if they're saying something else, they have to say it in a way where they're like,

52:26 "Oh, don't worry. We would totally not launch on war, but scare people into thinking they would."

52:31 Well, and now since Putin's taken, and this is really interesting in the last few years, Putin has made it very clear that the Russian Federation is now launched on war as well, right? So they are just straight up saying like we everyone is now launched on warned by the US and Russia and that's all that really matters. China's got some nukes.

52:46 I don't know as much about their system but they don't have near like both the all it takes is the US and Russia, right?

52:51 Yeah. Like you know there's there's it's worth being concerned about North Korea obviously because one missile opens the possibility that all of the missiles start flying, right? Because of the kind of cascading decision trees people will make. Um, but the US and Russia are by far the most heavily armed, right?

53:09 Um, now I know there's a tendency among folks on our side of the political aisle to say, "Oh my god, isn't it terrifying that Donald Trump has the [ __ ] nuclear football, right?"

53:20 And I'm going to say something controversial here, which is I don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other president. Not because he would do a good job at that, but because no one can. Everyone is bad at this. Nobody is competent to make that call. And it's a dangerous mistake to believe that, oh well, Obama's would have been a good guy to have in the seat or Biden would have been a good No, they're all bad at this. They would all have been terrible. No one will do a good job if they are put in that situation. In her chilling book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson makes one very important point several times. She quotes John Wolfthal, the former national security adviser to President Obama, who said, "No one, not even the president, has complete knowledge of what is going on in a crisis or in a conflict, let alone a nuclear war."

54:08 Former pres former secretary of defense for Reagan, William Perry, added, "Many presidents come into the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not to want to know." This is a point made several times that presidents generally don't know much about this. Even though this football's with them at all times, they don't like to think about it. They don't like to ask too many questions about it. They don't like to dwell on it. A bunch of people who were in a position to know have said similar things that like president's not super well informed generally on how all this works cuz it's scary. They don't like to think about it.

54:41 I don't like to think about it. Like this falls firmly into the like do things that you can't control. Oh, you don't worry about

54:50 if I was the president, I would think about this a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'd be sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes. But

54:58 no, Jacob. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why we're uh that's why you're running in what uh 2032.

55:05 That's right. That's right. On a on a take out Lake Superior. Uh yeah. More like inferior.

55:11 That's right. That's right. We're going to get revenge for those brave men on the Edmond Fitzgerald.

55:15 Yeah. you know. Uh anyway, Jacobson continues talking about how unready presidents are to make these kind of calls. Once at a press conference in 1982, President Reagan went so far as to incorrectly tell the public that submarine ballistic missiles are recallable. That's why that myth exists. After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union was dissolved, William Perry found in his experience as Secretary of Defense that many people clung to the idea that nuclear war was no longer a threat. when in fact he now says nothing could be further from the truth. In a nuclear war, confusion over protocol and speed of action will have unintended consequences beyond anyone's grasp. It will send the United States of America into the heart of darkness that defense official John Rubel warned about in 1960 into what he called a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless

56:04 group think aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one-third of the Earth's surface.

56:11 Yeah. Yep. The fundamental issue here in terms of is Trump any worse than anyone else on this specific issue, theoretically the president is only going to be asked to make a call on whether or not to launch our missiles if one or more are known to have been launched towards the US or an ally because of the way all of these weapon systems work. This means that the hypothetical president in this scenario is going about his day doing something else and is grabbed and taken bodily. Like the Secret Service like response team's job is to literally physically haul him, like carry him into the bunker and then into like a chopper to get to a more secure location. The White House bunker isn't really all that safe. Um but he will be grabbed in the middle of his day, taken into a situation room and told that the entirety of Washington DC is about to die in flames, including nearly every member of his

57:02 administration. In the most likely scenarios, he will then be told that he has between 3 and 6 minutes to decide to launch a worldkilling salvo of in most situations hundreds to a thousand nuclear warheads. The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisers whose entire job is to think about how important it is that we strike back before being decapitated will shout for him to launch everything that we've got. No one is qualified for that job.

57:31 Yeah. The only president we've ever had who could be argued to have stood up to this kind of pressure was JFK, right? And JFK was a combat veteran, had been in some scary situations before, and thank [ __ ] God, he was the guy on the ground at that point in time because it could have been a lot worse than it was, the Cuban missile crisis, a bunch of other [ __ ] I don't have any real faith that Obama or Biden would have performed much better in than Trump in this nightmare scenario. As John Rubble wrote in 2008, "We know that this mentality, given half a chance, will surface in military and government councils. We know from recent history that a compliant bureaucracy, military and civilian, will murder 6 million people in cold blood or plan, buy, design, build, and deploy the means to murder half of the people on Earth, probably including themselves. How come is all this built into the human genome? A

58:20 melancholy procession from stones to atoms, a predestined progress toward the end times, the inevitable rise of malign leaders over compliant masses. Anyway, thanks for listening to my podcast. Yep. Wow, what a way to end.

58:37 Yeah, like what did you do today? Oh, I got I my job is that I have to make jokes during the

58:41 as I get described the mechanism by which the world will end. Yeah, cool stuff.

58:46 Legit. I don't know. Probably should be something people are like asking presidents to change. We could change this. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this dangerous. Like

59:00 there are other ways this could all be designed to where we're not permanently 15 minutes or less away from annihilation, you know, and if we step back,

59:10 probably the Russians do at least a little bit, you know. I don't have a lot of faith in Putin, but I don't think he wants to die in nuclear hellfire either.

59:18 And I think most people don't. I think most people don't. Uh fair, fair. Anyway, maybe this should be like a voting issue that people talk about, right? Like it's, you know, climate change is obviously very important and people, it needs to be much more of an issue, but this is up there. This is an equivalent problem, right? Because this is potentially a much more thorough destruction of the biosphere than climate change will bring,

59:44 even quicker. We should probably care about this a lot. Yeah. Anyway, what a good system that we all have. Yeah, it's it's pretty nuts. I I actually recommend all the books that I read for this. Annie Jacobson's uh nuclear war a scenario. Um again, I don't entirely agree with kind of some of her panic about North Korea, but it's a it's a pretty good book on the whole about the way the system works today. The book 15 minutes is a really good look at like basically how we got to the point where we're 15 minutes away from annihilation at all times. then command and control um among other things talks about a bunch of the different like fuckups and errors that have happened along the way. Um they're all good books.

1:00:33 I uh the the movie House of Dynamite that just came out recently is the one that the way specifically the drama is just around it's around the nuclear football. around the chain of command as relates to it uh and the current one and it's what started me like a couple weeks before this starting thinking about being like oh this isn't as like I sort of thought I was like oh we probably have like decent intercept systems if it's just like one missile right you know you're like oh

1:01:01 if it's just one maybe but again we don't have decent intercept systems none of these work nearly as well as they're supposed to and there are some similar problems with at least some of the different early warning systems has been this is really a problem for the Russians because the Russians like one of the problems with the Russian system is that it's not smart enough to know cuz each of the missiles that we would be firing launches a bunch of chafe right so you have the actual warheads and ICBMs now often have multiple warheads right that it's called an MIRV I think and basically what you can do and this is particularly the case with like a lot of the submounted missiles too is you launch one missile but then it splits into like multiple warheads each of which is targeted at a different area Right. Um, but also all of these missiles have what's called chaff, which is basically like like little strips of

1:01:49 aluminum that come out with like the the warhead in order to confuse like a missile system.

1:01:59 Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So that like it it can protect the missile basically. But one of the main Russian systems can't tell the difference between that chaff and a shitload of additional missiles. So, like say there was a situation where North Korea launched an ICBM at somebody and we launch a decapitation strike at North Korea or a strike at their nuclear facilities. That's a limited strike. We're just firing a couple of missiles.

1:02:23 It might look because of where North Korea is, Russia and China might both think, "Oh [ __ ] the Americans are launching hundreds of missiles and they could be coming for us. We don't know where they're targeted." And if the president hasn't gotten through to both of those leaders to inform them and if or if they don't trust the president, who knows what's going to happen.

1:02:41 I hate to say that HG Wells is right cuz I don't actually believe in one world government um kind of famously with my political position, but this idea that like the only way out of this besides everyone deescalating

1:02:54 Mhm. is better diplomacy and everyone talking to each other and like moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your border zealously and moving Well, I think the solution to most problems is to get rid of national borders, but I'm, you know, whatever. Uh I'm not I'm so glad I'm not in charge of trying to figure out how to solve this. That's the main takeaway that I have.

1:03:17 Yeah. I I there's a couple of things we could do. Jacobson talks about this like one of the things that we don't do but ought to because it's so hard to basically impossible almost to stop an ICBM reliably once it gets above a certain level like once it gets and in terms of like there's no real way to like protect against the mass of ICBMs that Russia could launch. But North Korea doesn't have all that many. And if we were to keep like a bunch of uh predator drones in the area, we could theoretically have a quick reaction force that could intercept an ICBM before it could get to the point of no return where you have no ability to shoot it down. But we just decided not to do that. Like that got theorized. It was like I think it was too expensive.

1:03:59 It's the same thing with like, well, we could have THAAD batteries to protect certain things that might be like that nuclear plant that might be a target, but we're not we're just going to keep them, you know, protecting Israel. we're not going to have them, you know, in the US or whatever for the most part. Um, I mean, obvious we have a lot of those in in Ukraine and and there's good reason for that, but we we don't devote it's both a mix of none of it really works all that well. None of our missile interception stuff is perfect. Um, the THAAD is about as good as it gets, but it's not good for everything. Like it could be useful against like some of those subbased missiles, but I don't think like it can take out ICBMs.

1:04:36 Certainly not. or certainly not a hypersonic. I don't think anything can take out a hypersonic if it actually works the way they're supposed to. Um there's just not really reliable ways to stop a massive nuclear attack. If you get shot at by one missile, you might be able to do something right. That's kind of where we are.

1:04:59 Yeah. I love talking about it though. I love me some nukes. the ideas of all the things that I want to write fiction about as related to it.

1:05:08 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, get out there. Go to go to the Wasaw Sound. You know, look around. Hike around. Get your metal detectors out. There's a couple of nukes just waiting for a for a new home out there. Jesus Christ. You know,

1:05:21 you could be the next nuclear power. Uh yeah, take care of each other and tell your friends you love them, but not in a way where you don't get completely lost thinking about this stuff all the time. and also podcast cool people who did cool stuff which is uh the opposite of this but you know Yeah.

1:05:41 Yeah. Sweet. All right everybody go away.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

In order: 0:00 Minute Man system, General Curtis Lame, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, John F. Kennedy Library; 10:00 Minute Man system; 20:00 General Thomas Sarsfield Power, SCOP 62, General David M. Shupe, Minute Man system; 30:00 Kennedy administration, nuclear football, Annie Jacobson, General David M. Shupe; 40:00 Alfred Starbird, Annie Jacobson, Blind Man's Bluff, General Curtis Lame; 50:00 William Perry, Annie Jacobson, John Rubel, John Wolfthal; 1:00:00 Annie Jacobson, House of Dynamite, nuclear football.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

18 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Minute Man system, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, SCOP 62, Annie Jacobson, Kennedy administration, nuclear football. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 1 h 6 min; the transcript is about 13,019 words in 186 timestamped sections.

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