Transcript

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

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 48 min · 9,626 words · 135 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part Four: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published December 11, 2025 (48 min, about 9,626 words). It mentions 15 people, works and ideas, including Minute Man, 15 Minutes, Reubel, General Curtis Lame, John H. Rubel.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: 15 Minutes, General Curtis Lame, L. Douglas Keaney, Margaret Killjoy
  2. – 10:00: 15 Minutes, General Curtis Lame
  3. – 15:00: 15 Minutes, Nikita Kruev
  4. – 20:00: 15 Minutes, Albert Wolsteader
  5. – 30:00: Minute Man
  6. – 35:00: Minute Man, John H. Rubel, Reubel
  7. – 40:00: Minute Man, Life Fest, Reubel
  8. – 45:00: Minute Man, Reubel, Bob Bennett, Herman Khan
  9. – 47:30: Margaret Kiljoy

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

  • The Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands. Curtis Lame had, as I noted, become obsessed with the idea of being able to land a first strike…
    about General Curtis Lame · at
  • Nuclear attack. That was a lie. Turns out that's not that was not true. In the book 15 minutes, L. Douglas Keaney reveals I think this is a thing that was like came to light…
    about 15 Minutes · at
  • ICBM test. Their new missile, the SS6 Sapwood, could travel 6,000 m carrying a warhead Soviet Premier Nikita Kruev bragged could make Europe or the United States quote a…
    about Nikita Kruev · at
  • Yeah, it was an it was a development by a single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolsteader. he visualized fail safe. And again, you could argue this guy might have saved all of humanity in doing so.
    about Albert Wolsteader · at
  • System and it is a bad ICBM. By the 1959, the US was already hard at work at its replacement, the Minute Man. This was a missile with a stable fuel mixture that could be stored…
    about Minute Man · at
  • Confessional that was written in 2008 by one of the architects of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel. And Rubel is he's both a hero and a victim in this story. He's…
    about John H. Rubel · at
  • Yeah. So anyway, 3 years after this photo was taken in early 1959, Reubel left Hughes aircraft to become the assistant director of research and engineering for strategic weapons over at the Pentagon. He would receive.
    about Reubel · at
  • Well, is it the Life Fest? Yes. yes. The makers of the new life vest. get one today. get two, get three, get one for the whole family. everyone should have.
    about Life Fest · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Reubel — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • General Curtis Lame — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • John H. Rubel — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Margaret Killjoy — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Expect it to take this long to get to the mid50s, but there's a lot to talk about. Margaret Killjoy, how are you doing?
  • L. Douglas Keaney — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Nuclear attack. That was a lie. Turns out that's not that was not true. In the book 15 minutes, L. Douglas Keaney reveals I think this is a thing that was like came to light…
  • Nikita Kruev — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Albert Wolsteader — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Herman Khan — Person · 1 mention · first at
    The ideology behind launch on warning as quote flawed and terrifying and quoted Herman Khan.
  • Bob Bennett — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Reubel first sits down with the Minute Man project manager, who's a former Hughes aircraft guy named Bob Bennett in the spring of 1959. He noticed that despite their friendly…
  • Margaret Kiljoy — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. I have a Substack. I write about the things that I talk about on my show. and my subst Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on all of the various internet things that I'm on…

Books & papers

Products & tech

Concepts & topics

  • Minute Man — Concept · 10 mentions · first at
  • Warhammer 40k — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    I'm good. I've come up with a strategy and the strategy is I've decided I believe you are telling me Warhammer 40k lore. [snorts] That would make this a lot more comforting. Uhhuh.

Places & events

  • Leonire — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Postcards on sale in the village identify it as Leonire, a melancholy reminder of what happened in a pre-war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants. Before World War I, a small hill stood where only the crater.

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how everyone might die in nuclear hellfire. This is part four of our series on the bastards who built the doomsday device that we all currently live under. The looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads, the several thousand nuclear weapons ready at a moment's notice to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or cared about. back with me to to really get into some [ __ ] because I did not expect it to take this long to get to the mid50s, but there's a lot to talk about. Margaret Killjoy, how are you doing?

I'm good. I've come up with a strategy and the strategy is I've decided I believe you are telling me Warhammer 40k lore. [snorts]

That would make this a lot more comforting. Um Uhhuh. This is just something that some space orcs have decided to do.

There are orcs in space in Warhammer. That's a very important part of the setting. Um, so I'm going to start this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last couple of years that we've talked about in part three, right? As you know, the kind of fallout from the Korean War is going on and the US and the Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands. Curtis Lame had, as I noted, become obsessed with the idea of being able to land a first strike that would compromise or [ __ ] the Soviet ability to strike back. In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss a US nuclear response in defensive terms. But in 1954, the Eisenhower Doules declaration announced that the US would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons, quote, at places and with means of our own choosing. The term massive retaliation came to

symbolize the Eisenhower administration's promise to the Soviet Union, right? Basically, if you provoke us, if you [ __ ] with us, we'll kill everybody, right? That's that's kind of the idea, you know, that's not exactly it, but it's we will retaliate massively. And that that that isn't that means nuclear, right? like that.

It's like trying to have a fist fight with someone who has like a suicide vest on and you're just in a room,

which by the way is the best way to get into a fist fight. Which is why if you want to buy one of our patented suicide vests today, you know, never get beat up again. Um or get beat up exactly one more time is probably a more accurate way to look at the way the suicide vest works.

Well, we've actually we've workshopped it. They're called life vests now. They're called life vests now. Uh we're we're currently suing the boat people over their life vests, but I think this is going to work out well for The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing our product

with with Yeah, we were wore our product and we kept we brought a life ray too.

Macpie, stop encouraging him. Oh man. So this whole idea of the Eisenhower do declaration, it's not a promise that we actually keep, right? Eisenhower I think there's a degree to which I mean elements of this are things that the US will do at other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally a guy who he he has some respect for human life, right? So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency to exploding into nuclear hostilities.

Like we're seriously considering using nukes to like basically what like clear Taiwan's flanks, right? Um because they're they're in a rough strategic situation for us to respond to with anything else. But Eisenhower proves less willing to massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation. And the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons. Thank [ __ ] God. Right. Yeah.

So it it is this situation where Eisenhower is he he wants to he wants that threat to be out there, but he really does not and none of our presidents really do after Truman. They don't want to nuke people. They're really anti-nuke. um because they're they're not insane as a general rule. Like Nixon kind of is, but even he's not that crazy for the most part, right? Yeah.

Um for the most part, the evolving nature of nuclear warfare meant that units across the globe are now by the mid to late 50s armed with nukes meant for defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons could be launched to air burst and destroy entire fleets of Soviet bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now, by the mid1 1950s, every American was well aware of the horrors of nuclear war. And one of the few comforting thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only the president could order a nuclear attack. That was a lie. Turns out that's not that was not true. In the book 15 minutes, L. Douglas Keaney reveals I think this is a thing that was like came to light while he was writing his book as a result as a result of like uh information requests and stuff that he was filing. But in 1957, this was not known until very recently. In 1957,

President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for field commanders to use nuclear weapons in specific defensive situations without any outside approval. A small number of authorizing commanders and chief even had the ability to launch and command a retaliatory nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a direct attack on the United States. Right? It was never really true during this period of time, like at least not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing, there's no governor on these. So theoretically, anybody who had one could have made the decision, but also

Eisenhower gives field commanders the ability, and this is mainly meant for with the exception of those guys who had that small number of guys who could do a retaliatory strike. Most of these are guys who if they see a fleet of bombers incoming, they can fire anti-aircraft nuclear artillery, right? Like it's that sort of thing. So, it's not as crazy as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right? This

doesn't have Would that have brought on like if we had been like, "Oh, [ __ ] these bombers and nuked them in the sky." Would that have like brought on USSR's retaliation?

I [clears throat] mean, at that point, they were already sending a bomber fleet over, right? So, I mean, they probably would have continued to fight. Uh, right. It's, you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs, we still might have had a nuclear war that didn't kill everybody, right? Cuz you could have theoretically had one that was devastating enough that the major powers are not able to keep fighting, but everything doesn't get expended cuz we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, right? That's not really an option right now.

What makes this dangerous though is that by the late 1950s, there are nuclear weapons, US nuclear weapons. [ __ ] everywhere, all over the world at all times. Curtis Lame had insisted from the beginning because he's really obsessed with the SACE's readiness, right? And so he from from the jump is like, "Our bomber crews have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional nuclear weapons on board. It's not a real test if they don't have an actual nuke on the plane." Right.

Okay. I don't understand why, but sure. Well, cuz he's the craziest man who ever lived. Or second to MacArthur, maybe. You can only dry fire with bullets in the gun,

right? It's [ __ ] insane. And what this means practically is that from this point on, thousands of nuclear weapons are flying across the US and the world every year. There are always nukes flying around at all times. Tons of them.

That's so scary. It's [ __ ] insane. Okay, Sophie, this is Warhammer. It's all Warhammer lore. Oh,

in the early 1950s, Lame had developed the beginning of a strategy to keep what he called an airfleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in the air with nukes, ready to divert their course to attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice. The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men doing it. If the Soviets knew that they could get away with a first strike on the US, they might try. The best way to make sure they never did was by always having bombers in the air and ready to fight at all times, which meant at all times dozens to h to hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in the world. And this meant there would always be nukes going missing, right?

Mhm. If you are flying thousands of flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage of those bombers are going to crash or are going to need to drop their nukes in order to deal with some sort of like engine trouble. that is going to happen and it does in fact happen, right? I'm going to guess people are aware that this has happened once or twice generally like a couple there was one off like the coast of Spain,

but the reality is it happened constantly. This happens so much more often than you would have get. It's [ __ ] shocking how many nukes we just straight up lose. Lame and his successor at the SACE, General Power, considered it a necessity that the US always have armed nuclear bombers in the air. And a consequence of that is, of course, all of these things getting lost. I'm going to provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an SACE training mission to switch crews on ground alert every 21 days. It was it like so they they're basically this is kind of the the start of what allow like we always have a fleet of bombers that are like 6 to 15 minutes away from being in the air. They have a nuke on them. They're loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac.

They have a crew in a bunker nearby that can run onto the plane and take off at a moment's notice. Right? And that we also have I think it's like 10 or 11% of those planes are flying with a bomb in them at any given time. Right? That's what operates. It starts as a a testing plan to see if this is feasible. And in July of 1957, we make this like the SACE standard plan. Each B-47 bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home carried a 6,000lb 4 megaton MK39 hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear death machines. That same month, a B-47 in Texas crashed, killing the fourman crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of the emergency war plan load. But as Keany notes in the book 15 Minutes, as of this writing, no 1957 bomber crash in Texas is included in any official document disclosing accidents involving nuclear weapons. And there are several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed and based on how it

was coded, we know it should have had a nuke on it, but they never reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So this nuke presumably just blew up in Texas and they kind they covered it up. You know,

how often are they just being like, "Oh, whoops. It fell off the back of the truck." Are any nukes falling off the back of the truck?

No, not off a truck. They're falling out of plates. Oh, so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like, are they ever like Not that we know. Not that we know. There's not evidence of that. What what what's actually happening is much dumber than if they like someone stealing a nuke and scarier to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know, where a bomber that we we know should have been loaded with a nuke crashed and no report was ever made of a nuke getting lost. But cover-ups weren't always possible.

The same month that General Power takes over SACE command from Lameé, who goes on himself to become the vice chief of staff and then chief of staff for the air force, um a C124 cargo plane bound for an air base in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between Rahobath Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to lighten the load. These fall in the ocean and the Navy searches for the bombs and doesn't find any of them ever. Even though the ocean's just 150 ft deep at some parts of the potential drop zone.

So like New Treasure Quest has it just drops. There are folks listeners, if you live in the Jersey area, you could be the owner of an MK5 atom bomb if you just spend some time swimming around in the ocean, you know. And once you've got a nuke, for one thing, you're not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother.

No. No. You can you got a lot of you got a lot of leverage if you get your if you become a nuclear armed state in well.

Yeah. Um, so again, both 3,000lb MK5 bombs are missing to this day. These are never found. The number of times this happens is [ __ ] shocking. 1957 is a key year for our story because it is the year that we start being 15 to 30 minutes away from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August 26th, the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile, the SS6 Sapwood, could travel 6,000 m carrying a warhead Soviet Premier Nikita Kruev bragged could make Europe or the United States quote a veritable cemetery. A couple of months later in October, Spudnick entered orbit. If you're wondering why that freaked out Americans so much, this is one of those things I actually I have a little more empathy for like why so many people because Oh, because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah, that's a little scary. Okay.

Um, now obviously so they invented the ICBM. They they get they have a functional ICBM before we do. They have a successful test before we do. Not long before because between those two events in September of 1957, the U so after the Soviets launch their ICBM before Spudnik, the US Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully. Now, it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on this thing probably. So, it doesn't really matter if you're off by a couple by a mile or two, even like you'll do some damage probably. [gasps and sighs]

In November of that year, General Power revealed to the public for the first time that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. 11% of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in less than 15 minutes. And a certain number of bombers were kept up in the air at all times. Lame admitted they are bombed up and they don't carry bows and arrows.

Bombed up. Bombed up, baby. Yeah. It sounds like he's sounds like he's kind of horny for these things.

Yeah. In this period after the So the ICBMs exist now, but they're not a viable weapon system yet, right? We've we have our proof of concept, but we don't we don't immediately go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right? It takes a little bit of time, you know? That's just science, right? Um, so during this kind of awkward interstitial period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war are extremely low for one reason. The only way to deliver an atom bomb is by air, right? I mean, you could drive it somewhere, set it off on the ground, but re like realistically you're going to be using like a bomber or artillery. You you you can't launch it across continents yet, right? Unless you're flying it. That means that you could theoretically if you send out a bomber fleet to start a nuclear war, you could because you're in contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber fleet

right up to the last moment. You can't do that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you can do it with like the submounted nukes. We cannot. It is not possible. Once they're launched, they are heading for their targets, right? That's how these things work. But you can recall bombers if you can reach them up until the last minute. right now. If you can reach them is a key part of this cuz that presents a conundrum to the SACE. This is the [ __ ] late50s. Comms aren't as good as they're going to be that we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us to gamble the survival of the human race on. Right. And the SACE has another problem, which is that nobody outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet with the idea of nukes being sent off without a way to recall them. And while radio, you

know, it's just not there's not a great perfect way to guarantee you can reach these bombers. And that's really important. And this brings us to one of the most interesting innovations in nuclear war. And it's honestly the simplest. This doesn't require any technology whatsoever. And it's maybe s it may have saved the world, right? We may all exist because of this. It's called the project failafe.

Now, rather than relying on technology, which could fail, the way failafe worked is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to return without dropping their payloads, no matter what they were ordered to do, unless they were transmitted a go code. Right? The innovation of failafe, isn't that a go? The This is important. The go code does not trigger the bombing, right?

Instead, the default is in all instances return home without bombing unless you're given the code. And that's that's a meaningful distinction, right? That means there's no room for a bomb to be like, well, they didn't give us the go code, but we're right over the target. Should we do it? No. You fly home unless you get the code, right? Yeah.

And that's tech proof. It doesn't matter if your comms are out, right? Yeah. And that that means the default assumption is we we should heir on the side of not dropping the bombs, right?

No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but I makes sense that that was like literally a technological development.

Yeah, it was an it was a development by a single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wolsteader. Uh he visualized fail safe. And again, you could argue this guy might have saved all of humanity in doing so.

Um good idea. Thank you, Albert. Um it's the opposite of a dead man switch, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a it's a I guess a live man switch. I don't know. Um speaking of a dead man switch, I have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you spend money on the products and services advertised on this show.

Oh boy, we're back. So, we've just hit the point where fail safe has been implemented. Uh and

fit on your knuckles. Just going to point out, right? Oh, actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah.

Yeah. Um I've been meaning to get a knuckle tattoo. Um, so yeah, we we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World War II because a radio goes out, right? Which is a good thing to do. Now, in February of 1958, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error. A bomber and a fighter wing in Florida were doing a training mission, which for some reason required a trio of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B-47 bombers armed with actual 1.6 megaton MK-15 nuclear bombs. One of these fighters [ __ ] up and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines.

The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing. But the nearest airfield was under construction. And to make a long story short, the pilot was worried that when landing, they would crash into something that would send the nuke in their bomb bay, launching forward like a bullet into the crew cabin. In order to protect the crew, the pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasau Sound east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs. It's a little unclear to me. These are never found. This bomb is never found.

It is theoretically still some east east of Savannah to this day. Oh my god. I'm going to write terrible fiction about a crew of people who go and find these things.

Go nuke hunting. Let's go find them. Let's get us a nuke. Yeah, we could be the f we could be a finally a nuclear armed podcast. This is this is what podcasting's been missing. [gasps]

Um so it's obviously big news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own Georgia, not even the one overseas. and the good people of that state expected the air force to recover the nuke. A study of the air force press releases around this matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of a portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no one knew quote whether the nuclear device landed in the sea or on land. Great. There's a chance some hillbilly has just been passing this nuke down to his kids for the last like [gasps]

um that's what I want that be like you take some pride in our family. We are nuclear power.

Yeah. Now, don't don't touch it too much. I don't really know how it works. Yeah.

Now, when they dropped these this bomb or bombs, both pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were when they dropped it, but they both write down different sets of coordinates, which is a real high watermark for the competency of our brave boys in the SACE. After several days of searching with no luck, the Air Force issued another press release elaborating that the bomb had been carried in transportable condition. This means nothing. The Air Force defined that when asked what transportable condition means as a form carried for safety reasons, which again means nothing. If you're wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying, here's another excerpt from 15 Minutes.

Those in Savannah made little sense of this warding, but they took it to mean that the weapon was perhaps disassembled or in crates, or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all. The second press release, however vague, nonetheless seems to have had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers, had arrived. The Bowers brought with it 14 more divers and men from the explosive ordinance disposal unit in Cedar Keys, Florida. The Air Force explained the stepped up activity by saying that the objective component was a very expensive piece of equipment. So the Air Force is like, "Ah, it's not even a real bomb. We are sending the bomb squad in though." The bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for this thing. Trust us, not a functional bomb. Definitely. We do fly exclusively with functional bombs for missions like this, but this one isn't.

You're good. Yeah. No, right. I mean, and they they did sometimes they would have like the fizzile material outside of the bomb so that when they dropped it, they're just But that didn't happen in a lot of cases and we don't know that it happened in this case. What is their argument for like clearly a dummy that is exactly the same size and weight is the only thing that makes sense. I can't understand the argument.

Laan powers want them to be training with real nukes and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice. Uh that is very

invite him to a paintball game with AR-15s. What? Yeah. Yeah. It It's crazy. It's crazy. But this is like there's this is super important to both lame and power, right? We're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at the SACE. Um

so by this point it should be clear to you we don't know and never will know how many nuclear bombs our government lost on US soil. But there's a couple at least just sort of lying around. So again folks, get your metal detectors out.

Yeah. Yeah. Have some fun with it. What could go wrong? That's what we'll call our scavenger hunt.

Now, you asked earlier about stealing nuclear weapons, and I don't I haveve I've I've seen no evidence that that happened, but it could have very easily. It was for a long time startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon. Uh the only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever crazy enough to try. In her book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos scientist named Harold Agnu paid to a NATO air NATO base in Europe in December of 1959. This was one of the bases where US nukes were in NATO hands, as they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, "During the trip to the NATO base, Agnu noticed something that made him wary. I observed four F84F aircraft sitting on the end of a runway.

Each was carrying two Mark 7 nuclear gravity bombs." He wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that custody of the Mark 7s was under the watchful eye of one very young US Army private armed with an M1 rifle with eight rounds of ammunition. Agnu told his colleagues the only safeguard against unauthorized use of a nuclear bomb was this single GI surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea. Like I feel like I've got a decent chance of stealing a nuke FROM THAT GUY, RIGHT? I KNOW oneyear-old with a rifle.

Like I like those odds. And this is all part of the whole all that matters is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right? Because one of the things that guys like Lame and Power are doing that the SACE is doing is like we don't need to be putting money into infantry. We don't need to have like dudes on the ground doing stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste of resources. More nukes, more planes, less guards. This is like how they're treating AI like just like we don't need anything else. We just need this.

No guardrails, no governors. Make it illegal to to put any safety measures in. [ __ ] it.

Now, after returning home, this is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes a while, but this is what starts that process because once he gets home having this startling moment, Agnu pairs up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories and they try to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a lock and coded switch which required a three-digit code to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take several years until the Kennedy administration for the president to actually order these locks placed on bombs. Right? But that's where this leads, right? That's why we we get the nuclear football in the system we have now where like you have to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons, right? That starts with Agnu realizing like, oh [ __ ] someone could just take these. There's just like

a kid standing in a field with a rifle and there's four nukes. [ __ ] [gasps] Eight [ __ ] bullets. At least give him another couple of clips. Jesus Christ.

Totally. Um, send a union of people you hate first and then Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. Send more guys. [ __ ] it. There had to be more 18y olds. My god,

I'm getting ahead of myself here cuz the we don't immediately put the It takes some time to figure out how to build these locks, right? Um, there are two key inventions from the late 1950s that help set the doomsday device into motion. The first is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes, and it's the distributed system of radar stations in the middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously, the Soviets are building their own versions of this, too, right? But the early warning systems, right? These aren't a major topic of these episodes because just wanting to know if someone's about to murder you isn't really [ __ ] up in the same way as, for example, building 12,000 nuclear weapons. But all of these early warning systems are flawed and capable of generating false positives.

And in fact, we have both us and the the USSR have several near nuclear catastrophes because we get false positives. Like one of these radar installations thinks it sees missiles coming in or thinks it sees bombers coming in and it causes problems. Right.

Or some [ __ ] Right. Right. Right. All these early warning systems are flawed. You know that that and that's still the case to this day. Right. Um, and so it's both understandable that you'd want to have these, but also the fact that these are flawed and the fact that our strategy increasingly becomes launch on war moves us a lot closer to midnight. Right? So, by far the most influential move from an approaching the apocalypse point of view was the deployment of ICBMs. These made it possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could not be recalled. There was and is no failafe for ICBMs.

The idea that we can cancel them is just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM, they are almost impossible to stop. You can only really stop them by shooting them down. And we're terrible at it. Right there. We have this thing, this the bullet basically that we use to shoot them down. And it works about half the time in tests and we have like 44 of them.

Yeah. I would want more magazines than like like 44 bullets isn't enough if it's

that's not a lot. You have to stop the end of the world. Here's a magazine and a half of bullets

and your enemy has 3,000 missiles or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, good luck, private.

The Now, our first ICBM is kind of a piece of [ __ ] The only good thing about the Atlas C, which is declared operational in September of 1959, is that it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time. It has to be fueled right before launch. Something to do with the kind of fuel that they're using, right? Um, which means that you can't have these things ready to go in a matter of minutes, you know, like you need more lead time to do that. Atlases are stored above ground. Also, we're starting to build hardened silos. That is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. US war planners were worried that the USSR would be able to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just parked out like on bases and stuff, and they are. The Soviets are a they have, you know, surveillance and stuff. They are able to see them. But this also causes another near calamity because the Soviets don't assume that

we're just have these things parked in the open because we're not finished building silos. They assume we have them in the open because we plan to use them as a first strike weapon. Right.

Right. So, this is another thing that like ramps up the paranoia between everybody.

Because the Atlas was such a [ __ ] weapon system and it is a bad ICBM. By the 1959, the US was already hard at work at its replacement, the Minute Man. This was a missile with a stable fuel mixture that could be stored for long periods of time in launch ready conditions. So, you can have a Minute Man ready to fire. And in fact, it's called a Minute Man because you can literally from the moment you get the order, you can have it in the air in a minute or less,

right? Again, they're just starting to explore this technology. This is very new and they don't have the kinks out, right? which is a problem because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect of they have to figure out none of this is immediately obvious, right? How this is going to work, how nuclear silos are going to work, how our warning system will work, how these things will be triggered to fire under what conditions, right? It is important you remember there's no locks on these missiles yet, right? So every Minute Man is stored launch ready and every Minute Man silo

no locks at all. Right? Well, there's a lock in that in order to fire it. You So, you have you have like these twoman teams in like a command bunker,

and each of these twoman teams can launch 10 missiles, right, that are each held in separate silos that are like a decent distance from each other. So, you can't stop them all if you nuke them, right? If you nuke the silos. That's one of the reasons.

So, each twoman team, if they if both men turn a key at the same time, it will fire the missile, right? And then as we'll talk about the it will start a process of firing all of the other missiles. So that means two guys have the ability if they both decide to turn a key to fire 10 nuclear missiles across the world into Russia, right?

Yeah. Or one guy who like are they in the same place or the keys next to each other like in movies? Cuz in which case it's like or one guy beats up his friend. That that's a great that's a great point you brought up because the Air Force did consider this, right? That this is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this. What if a crazy person winds up in a silo? Would he just be able to start World War II on his own? And the answer is no. Because the Air Force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that kind of behavior, Margaret. Both guys in the silo have guns and they're separated from bulletproof glass.

So they're just ready to go insane. Yeah. This way, one guy can't threaten to shoot the other guy if he doesn't launch a missile, right? Like, that's literally the plan is like, WE'LL GIVE THEM BOTH GUNS AND PUT THEM BEHIND BULLETPROOF GLASS.

IT'S FINE. ALSO, it's like people can hotwire cars, right? This is an electrical system on some level.

It's so much worse than that, Margaret. Okay. I feel like you can probably figure out a way to give a positive signal over this electrical wire.

It's It's good that you bring that up. That's what we're going to be talking about a lot of the rest of this episode because this is so much worse than you're than you're guessing.

So, another issue with the Minute Man program is that because of some errors in how they construct this thing, they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsday device. This is not known by Air Force planners when they start putting this stuff out and and and constructing these silos and putting out the plans of how they're going to use it because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing. We only know about the immediate the initial problems with the Minute Man system because of a confessional that was written in 2008 by one of the architects of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel. And Rubel is he's both a hero and a victim in this story. He's one of these guys who may have saved all of our lives because of the story I'm about to tell, but he also is an integral part of building this system. Born in 1920 to a wealthy Jewish German family in Chicago, Rubel moved to

Los Angeles as a kid after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech in 1942. His older brother died in action fighting the Nazis and Rubel was inspired to do his bit for the war by moving to Skenctity with his wife and becoming a junior engineer at GE. After the war, he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Loheed Martin. By 1956, Rubel was a successful executives at Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company, right? He was featured in an ad by his employer which described him as America's new kind of man. This meant he was an expert and a successful professional in a field that had not existed just a couple years earlier, defense electronics. And from that ad, at Hughes, we have 2,700 of these men in our research and development laboratories. Men like John H. Rubel brought together from all over the country to solve urgent new problems of

national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time. And the work they have done is so basic it is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics. And Sophie's going to show you the ad just because I want everyone watching the video to see what a 36-year-old man looked like in the mid1 1950s. Look at those crows feet.

That's that's what you get when you're just consuming lead every day. Just just just puffing it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff.

Um yeah. So anyway, 3 years after this photo was taken in early 1959, Reubel left Hughes aircraft to become the assistant director of research and engineering for strategic weapons over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over the next four years, becoming the sole deputy and assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering in 1961. He is a very highly placed civilian within our military research and defense infrastructure. Right? This rapid advance was because he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was at all concerned about whether or not we might be about to kill the whole planet accidentally.

In 1959, he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force cuz the Air Force as they're getting ready to deploy the Minute Man, they have this missile designed and they have these these uh silos under construction, but they're not operational yet. And so the Air Force is sitting down with high-ranking civilian DoD employees and explaining all their different nuclear retaliation systems, including Minute Man. According to Rubel, he has conversations with a number of military uh officers and he comes to realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack, right? And if an adversary, again, the logic the military has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive a launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it. So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is to have quote first strike capability and the way to use it aka launch on warning.

Quote from Rubel's P piece consider however launch on warning almost necessitates an automated response. The electronic warning signal itself in the scenario would trigger our first strike missiles many of them ready to go in a minute or so. The will to use the strategy would require no highle decision-making or intervention. Now, [ __ ] this is extremely dangerous and this is the thinking that leads to the Minute Man, right? And when when Reubel talks about the Minute Man, he's referring to both a single missile and quote to the aggregate of more than a thousand of them comprising a system of missiles and control centers spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Right? That's what the Minaman system is. It's about a thousand of these missiles split up into groups of like 10 and 50 and spread out all over these kind of plain states.

Right. Um, that makes sense. Yeah. Minute Man was not yet in effect, right? That doesn't happen till ' 61. But two aspects of the program, the wide dispersal of missile silos and the fact that each silo was hardened to withstand anything but a direct nuclear hit, came from suggestions made by Rand thinkers. Reubel makes the important point that all these defense nerds and all the high-ranking Air Force officers behind these plans are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we would be able to fire our nukes if the government was destroyed. He writes, quote, "Equally important considerations such as flexibility of command and control of these weapons, provisions to prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result in a missile launch or some comparably dreadful catastrophe were treated little or not

at all." Right? I was expecting that sentence to end very differently. It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay this system and make it safer because anything that you do

to like make the Minute Man system less dangerous is reducing its automation, right? Which is increasing the odds that we don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable,

right? partly because the game theory thing is that they need to know that even if they kill the president and the whoever comes after that,

yeah, they still lose, too. As a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people are like, "Well, but like are you not worried about maybe something going wrong and the missiles all launching accidentally?" And they're like, "Well, that's not nearly as scary as the missiles not launching." You know, that really is how all these guys are thinking. And you know who else thinks that way, Margaret?

Well, uh, is it the Life Fest? Yes. Uh yes. The the makers of the new life vest. Uh get one today. You know, um get two, get three, get one for the whole family. You know, everyone should have one of these vests.

Uhhuh. A society where everyone's wearing a suicide vest at all times is a polite society.

That's what everyone says. We'll see what happens. You know, we'll see what happens. And we're back. Yeah. Margaret, how you how you taking this revelation? [gasps] I you know okay so I I can't remember if we talked about on mic or not but I we we talked about the the dark forest theory and the

the the books I can't remember the name of oh yeah yeah yeah the by that uh that Chinese sci-fi author about uh yeah yeah the dark forest theory folks if you're not aware is this basically this idea that if there's life out there the chance that it's hostile is so high that everyone would b basically be trying to either hide or [ __ ] up other life first, right? Like it's it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest is kind of where the name comes from. But it's it's more game theory stuff, right? But trying to imagine how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it, but whatever.

No, I I don't either. And I it's not shocking that it's a right-wing [snorts] author, but like

which doesn't make the [clears throat] opinion in it wrong. I think very highly of the books. I thought the show was good. Like I I I don't have to agree with someone's politics to be interested in their

Yeah. Yeah. And I find it so interesting because it is so much of it is around this idea of like whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button need we need to make sure that they're reliable and by reliable we mean not thinking

not thinking about the consequences of their actions. And it's like cuz to me I clearly shouldn't be in charge of mutually assured of destruction because I'm like I would rather

I die and everyone I know die than all humanity die. Like it just Yeah. It just seems so obvious to me, you know?

Yeah. Like I don't I don't and this I guess is just the difference between different kind of value systems. I don't think American lives are worth more than any other kind of life, right? I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives or Chinese lives or Latvian lives. And I guess my I I don't want to get nuked, but my preference would be if someone's going to get nuked that not everyone gets nuked, right? that's better to me than anyway, right? Um that is not how these people

even if the enemy even if the leaders of another country are my enemy, that doesn't make every single person who whatever. Anyway, yeah. Yeah. The leaders of every country are my enemy. They're all [ __ ] but I still don't want them in a room.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so one of the things that I think is valuable here to get into is Rubel talks about when he starts realizing how this system works, he has this realization which is that our whole nuclear deterrent system is what he describes as dangerously unstable. Right? And this is valuable just in terms of understanding how like military planners think and kind of the the logic that this guy's going through as he's trying to deal with this problem, right? Quote from Reubel. Instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary world when vast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up ready to go in minutes. If one side does go for any reason, or even for none, the other is set to respond and must respond.

Strategic weapons, I soon realized, could often determine policy by their very design. Military instability arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage. It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner shrinks to almost nothing as it does in the missile age. Right? He's describing this doomsday device that's being built. Right? It's an unstable system. Right?

Um because of how fast everything works and how destructive these weapons are. Rubel in no uncertain terms described the ideology behind launch on warning as quote flawed and terrifying and quoted Herman Khan.

[ __ ] my guy. No [ __ ] my guy. Yeah. He quoted Herman Khan and calling this arrangement a doomsday machine. And he he discussed he wrote about something that happened in World War I as an example for like why he considered all this so frightening. And I'm I'm going to quote an extended piece here. On a visit to France in 1963, I came across the remains of a World War I catastrophe near a small village along the canal Denord northeast of Paris. There, one discovers a crater about 50 ft deep and a couple of hundred feet in diameter.

Postcards on sale in the village identify it as Leonire, a melancholy reminder of what happened in a pre-war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants. Before World War I, a small hill stood where only the crater remains. The little hill was a formidable obstacle in the path of the French on one side and the Germans on the other, each holed up in extensive trenches. Unable to see the enemy on the other side of the hill and likely to get blown away if they dared peer over the top, an obvious solution occurred to each side. Mine the other side and blow it up. Each side began mining the hill.

The process went on for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form tunnels extending under the German side dug by the French and under the French side dug by the Germans. Eventually, the tunnels were filled with TNT by each side under the part of the hill occupied by the other. Then one day, somebody on one side or the other, nobody will ever know which side or who it was, detonated a charge that ignited all the French and all the German explosives. Who knows? Maybe it was an accident. Either way, accident or on purpose, this little mountain with hundreds of luckless humans and trenches on it, still or still tunneling beneath it, was blown to kingdom come, leaving only an impressive cla crater to remind an occasional visitor forever what military instability can mean. It was not too early in 1959 to envision a ghastly replay of this littleknown drama on a global scale.

That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame that it's like a it took a lot of people dying to give us that metaphor.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, he's he's he's right here now. Yeah. Reubel first sits down with the Minute Man project manager, who's a former Hughes aircraft guy named Bob Bennett in the spring of 1959. He noticed that despite their friendly relationship, Bob was squirly and didn't like to give out information when asked basic questions like, "How do these missiles actually fire? And how many missiles fire at once?" Right? At this point, the Minute Man system was being built as a second strike system, but there was no reason you'd need a weapon like the Minute Man for a second strike. It was clearly meant for a first strike in a launch on warned scenario. The Air Force was just lying to everybody, right? In order to make this seem less dangerous. Each Minute Man was to be aimed at all times at a different city in the USSR or China. We don't have good computers back then, right? So the way these things are

targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside each of these missiles rotating on frictionless ball bearings at all times which will guide the missiles when launched towards a specific set of coordinates. Missiles cannot be retargeted on the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're launching them at, no matter who starts the war, if the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are you seeing a problem potentially?

Yeah. Also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring out incredibly impressive. Like these people are very smart and very stupid at the same time.

Yep. Yep. 20th century engineering. Yeah. You like there's a there's a very high chance with this that we wind up nuking a country that has not fired at us because we're just launching all of our [ __ ] and some of it's targeted towards them. Right. We'll talk more about that in the last episode.

Now, this is a problem because each squadron of 50 missiles is divided into five groups of 10. And each squadron of 10 would be fired by just two guys. If two men chose to insert their keys at the same time, the launch control center they were in would considered to have voted to launch and all 10 missiles would fire. If two or more centers voted yes within a short period of time, all 50 missiles in the squadron would fire. Each missile is targeted to a city. We have no way of knowing who might provoke us, which means by default, our automated response was to nuke both the USSR and China, even if one of those nations did nothing to piss us off or threaten us.

Oh my god. When did China get nukes? uh China detonates their first nuke in October of 1964. So they don't they don't have it yet. But you know military planners at this period of time even before China has nukes are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as one unified communist block. They are not

as Nixon will make very clear those countries don't like each other really like they realize that

um [ __ ] Nixon did but um but our assumption is we got to start by nuking them both right. So

yeah, it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk about uh in the last episode. But I think this is a good point to end here, just

with the dread of how [ __ ] dangerous this system is. My god. God, I'm so glad that this is just in this weird nerd game that you play in called Warhammer.

Uh certainly not real. If this was if this was real, this would be like big news.

Terrifying. What a nightmare. Yeah. How does anyone sleep? Yeah. If this was all real and people actually tried to build a built a system like this, we would have to throw them all in prison, right?

I assume so. Yep. They didn't we wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars. That would be crazy.

No. All right. Well, Margaret, pluggables. Yeah. Uh, I have a Substack. I write about the things that I talk about on my show. and my subst Margaret Kiljoy. You can find me on all of the various internet things that I'm on and not the ones that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any other Margaret Kiljoy except apparently a Disney character where she from the second Fantasia movie or something where she's a nag like a misogynist character that

oh I actually could be have these character it might be I might have the move wrong movie wrong.

I [clears throat] don't know. Someone just pointed out to me recently but I'm not a misogynist stereotype from Disney. I am instead everyone's nightmare of if you're a transphobe, I'm your nightmare.

And you can find me by googling me. That's what I got. Yeah, I actually am a misogynist nightmare from a Disney movie. I was the inspiration for Gaston. Uh, a lot of people don't know that.

No comment. Mhm. I don't have a counterargument. I've met you in real life. Podcast is over. All right.

Questions about this episode

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

In order: 0:00 15 Minutes, General Curtis Lame, L. Douglas Keaney, Margaret Killjoy; 5:00 15 Minutes, General Curtis Lame; 10:00 15 Minutes, Nikita Kruev; 15:00 15 Minutes, Albert Wolsteader; 25:00 Minute Man; 30:00 Minute Man, John H. Rubel, Reubel; 35:00 Minute Man, Life Fest, Reubel; 40:00 Minute Man, Reubel, Bob Bennett, Herman Khan; 45:00 Margaret Kiljoy.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Minute Man, 15 Minutes, Reubel, General Curtis Lame, John H. Rubel, Margaret Killjoy. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

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

The episode runs 48 min; the transcript is about 9,626 words in 135 timestamped sections.

More from Behind the Bastards

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.