Transcript

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

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 15 min · 15,157 words · 203 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published December 3, 2025 (1 h 15 min, about 15,157 words). It mentions 15 people, works and ideas, including Vice President Harris, General Duhi, Manhattan Project, Leo Szilard, Pathfinder.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Command and Control, HG Wells, Manhattan Project, Margaret Killjoy
  2. – 20:00: Manhattan Project, Albert Einstein
  3. – 50:00: Colonel Everest Rion
  4. – 1:00:00: Vice President Harris, Operation Millennium
  5. – 1:10:00: Vice President Harris, Operation Double Strike
  6. – 1:14:32: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Pathfinder, Vice President Harris

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

  • Takes. rubber band. That's how we do it on the sheep. anyway, Margaret Killjoy, how are you doing?
    about Margaret Killjoy · at
  • Responsible for getting the new like Leslie Groves, right? Who was the general who oversaw the Manhattan Project, right? You can put a lot of deaths under his name. But most of the people who built this system never killed anybody.
    about Manhattan Project · at
  • And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schllother, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used as sources for these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlloer.
    about Command and Control · at
  • And in 1939, he sends a letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears. And Einstein, this is the guy who sent the letter to Einstein. And then Einstein helps him.
    about Albert Einstein · at
  • Now, one of my sources for this episode is an article by Colonel Everest Rion of the one of the more who's one of the more influential pilots in US combat aviation history. He's an interesting guy. he was a key member of what.
    about Colonel Everest Rion · at
  • To give a great deal of credence to his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris, also known as Bomber Harris, who became head of the RAF's bomber command.…
    about Vice President Harris · at
  • Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign, Operation Millennium. On May 30th of 1942, nearly 1100 Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating…
    about Operation Millennium · at
  • Retreating a little bit into escapism, you could listen to me and Robert and some of our friends play Pathfinder where we're just pretending to be people in a fantasy world.
    about Pathfinder · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    And if you like weird history, I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff with a totally original the format. Robert, you got to try this format. What I do is that I research a topic every week. Okay.
  • Command and Control — Book · 1 mention · first at
  • The World Set Free — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Conceive directly of an atomic bomb was HG Wells, who wrote a 1914 novel titled The World Set Free. I was not aware of. Now, there's some other candidates, but this is like the…

Concepts & topics

Full transcript with timestamps

I was just doing the atonal screaming for you, Robert. Well, now now you [ __ ] up the introduction soap. It doesn't feel good now, does it?

Feels bad. Well done, Magpie. It's harder than it sounds, you know. Honestly, kind of fun.

Yeah. I I'm just hoping that uh the the listeners here will uh appreciate how much work goes into my atonal screeches because to be polite, they sound a lot better than your atonal screeches. That's all I'm saying.

I actually I absolutely agree. So, give the listeners one. No, no, no. I think they've gotten enough atonal screeches.

Okay. Instead, let's talk about I don't know. I I'm not We're not on video this week, folks. I'm not feeling well. I just had a vasectomy. Uh which

I debated on cuz I I don't like talking about my private life on the show too much. But I also think it's a good thing to encourage. So guys out there, if you if you're thinking about getting a vasectomy, if you're like, should I get a vasectomy? Go do it. Or do it yourself. You know, it doesn't look that hard. The doctor wasn't down there very long. You could figure it out.

You know, pruners. Pruners. Sure. You know, whatever it takes. Uh rubber band. That's how we do it on the uh the sheep. Uh anyway,

Margaret Killjoy, how how are you doing? I'm good. I uh didn't have surgery this week.

That's also good. That's better than having surgery as a general. I love that for you, Magpie.

I certainly prefer the weeks when I don't have surgery. Um, even if it's minor surgery, it's never very fun.

Margaret, how often do you think about the fact that at any given moment, we're at the most 30 minutes away from the entire planet being wiped out?

Well, I've been thinking about more recently. I was depressed. God damn it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a I watched a movie about this recently and it's back on my mind have a lot which is kind of why I haven't actually seen that movie yet, but I've I this is always on my mind. It's a special the whole nuclear doomsday planetary nuclear doomsday device that we largely co-created with Russia uh is on my mind a lot. I I'm just interested in the facts of how it came together and who made it. And I'm interested in because our our subjects this week are broadly speaking all of the people in the US at least who built that because we don't have quite as much granular detail on the their counterparts in the Soviet Union. You can generally assume a version of everything we're talking about this week happened over there too, right? Like they didn't not create a planetary killing doomsday device. Yeah.

Um, we both just kind of built one that was heavily based on our game theory understanding of how the other side would respond in like an escalating nuclear scenario. And the end result of that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still today uh ready at all times to wipe out more or less all of human civilization in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. That's that's about how long it would take.

Do you ever think about quantum immortality? Sorry, I'm just going to go straight into wigman [ __ ]

That's a nice thing to think about. It's it's comforting at least the idea that like we'll never experience the worst case scenario because our consciousness doesn't persist in those moments

except kind and I think about that specifically around nuclear destruction because I think about how often the people of the generation you know ahead of mine are like they almost seem silly how worried they were about nuclear apocalypse because it didn't happen during the cold war. So we're like, "Oh, obviously humanity would never do that." But it would be impossible for me to be alive now

if the world had been destroyed. So even if nine times out of 10 we destroyed the world, we're stuck being alive in the one the one out of 10. So it actually makes me less it actually makes me more fearful because I'm like, well, it might just be pure raw luck that we didn't annihilate ourselves. Unfortunately, I think that is if you're trying to look at this from an educated and accurate perspective, that is the only reason we're all alive because it we nearly wiped out we like the number of times that the whole world nearly got wiped out in atomic hellfire is like I you have you have too many to count on all of our fingers and toes in this podcast combined, right? Oh god. Um it happened so many times. Uh and and the the the amount of resistance whenever someone pointed out, oh hey, the way this was built could kill us all at any moment accidentally. That happened so many times. We'll be talking

about the [ __ ] Minutemen missiles and how they were initially set up. But what's interesting about this week is that our our subjects are kind of like Schroinger's bastards where

some of these guys do have big body counts, especially the folks who were, you know, responsible for getting the new like Leslie Groves, right? Who was the general who oversaw the Manhattan Project, right? You can put a lot of deaths under his

his name. But most of the people who built this system never killed anybody even indirectly really.

And but they could at any moment guys in fact guys who whose last bit of work was in the 60s could 15 minutes from now if if the right things had started happening 15 minutes ago or a a couple of seconds ago. 15 minutes from now all of these guys could become the biggest murderers in world history. Right. But they won't be remembered.

But they won't. No one will be. Nothing will be. Right. That's the beauty of atomic hellfire.

History is written by the victors and there's no victims. There's going to be no victors of a nuclear war. Simply no history written. But they are they they are interesting in that cuz a lot of them are not like bad. And some of them are even deeply sympathetic. There's a guy we're going to talk about who may have saved all of human life but also helped still did help build the machine that could at any moment end it all. Right?

Because it's and I need to correct this from the start. All of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has been done to make this system safer since the end of the Cold War. And in fact, it's significantly more dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War. Uh in part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be in a launch on warn situation, which is where both both Russia and the United States are today is launch on warn which means that the policy of both governments is to start shooting everything they have when they have a credible warning that they're being nuked. Right? And our best case scenario would be like one crazy country like North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the United States. But that would still trigger a massive nuclear response. And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch with the Russian government and as a heads up, there have been times where we've been

out of touch with them for as much as 48 hours when there's been like critical things to like like that happens. The gaps and comms like that, especially since Ukraine, happen. And if we started launching missiles the way that most of our missiles would work, a lot of them would go through or at least appear to be going towards Russian airspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of these radar systems are perfect. So there's a very good chance even if we weren't didn't have it set up to cross Russian or Chinese airspace. They would think that for a period of time that is longer than the amount of time they know they have to choose to launch their arsenals in response. As per the way deterrence theory works, this could happen at any moment. This could have h started happening seconds ago, right?

Um, so that's what we're talking about this week is how we got to this point that we we have not ever stepped back from. We are just as close as we were during the Cold War. That's very important for people to understand. Um, so this these next couple of weeks we're going to talk about how this all came to be, right? Because all of the men we're talking about this week, most of whom again have no body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives, all of these guys put the work in to make this machine knowing that they were building a system that if used would lead to planetary genocide and they built it anyway. They built it because they knew it would work that way. Right?

So we're going to talk about why. we're going to talk about cuz they thought they were doing the morally right thing and up until now you could make a case up until the missiles fly you could continue making a case that it was the right thing to do which is part one of the [ __ ] up things about it right

right um so this is this is a complicated topic but I do think these people are worth discussing in part because these are all people who sat down and had conversations about like okay we do this and that'll kill about 600 million people yeah build it you know like these are these are the talks that they were having there's there's a joke that gets It's made online today a lot. A meme about a tech company building the torment nexus, an imitation of classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus. It's kind of a joke about the way a lot of tech bro a lot of tech projects feel now where it's like this is exactly what the sci-fi that inspired you was warning against, right? Um, but that really is the reality of the atom bomb.

And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schllother, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used as sources for these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlloer points out that the first person to conceive directly of an atomic bomb was HG Wells, who wrote a 1914 novel titled The World Set Free. Um, I was not aware of. Now, there's some other candidates, but this is like the first I I'll tell you why this is, I think, the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine an accurate a semi-accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it, Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the backstory of the Federation and Star Trek. Scientists create the ultimate explosive, a radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry in a purse or suitcase quote, "an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city." As Schlawer writes,

"These atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind as every nation seeks to obtain them and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world's great capitals are destroyed, and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government." And this is Wells. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs was shook which shook men out of cities shook them also out of their old established habits habits of thought. Wells wrote full of hope

and yeah I think that's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. Um he also he's really into wargaming.

He also he would have oh he would have been so into Warhammer if he was alive. He genuinely was into wargaming.

Yes, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Him as Warhammer man. I like that idea. He would have been also another war big wargaming nerd who would have been into Warhammer was the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin. Uh early Napoleonic War Gamer. Anyway,

oh yeah, Wells's nukes didn't work quite like the real things. They went off slowly and they let off huge amounts of radiation over years of time, but Wells came pretty close to foreseeing that the real thing. close enough to foreseeing the real thing that in 1929 a Hungarian physicist named Leo Sillard uh S I L A R D met with Wells to try and purchase the literary rights to publish his novel in central Europe. This is relevant in terms of like who was the closest to a nuke because Leo Zillard is one of the fathers of the atom bomb. a decade or so after trying to buy the rights to this the he comes to he comes to the US and he's he's he's becomes one of the architects of the Manhattan project and he's a guy you can't really blame Sillard right again if we're talking about where does the moral blame lay the most understandable reason for wanting to help the US build a nuke of anybody um and it's kind of good to talk about

him because it it does make the point that it's a little unfair to judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the world that formed them was a Jewish refugee. He fled Nazi Germany and he wound up in the United States. Because he was a physicist and because he was a refugee of the Holocaust, he knew not only the threat that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a bomb program going. And in 1939, he sends a letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears. And Einstein,

this is the guy who sent the letter to Einstein. And then Einstein helps him write a letter to FDR. Yeah, please.

Yeah. But and then they send a like Einstein helps him craft this letter and he sends it to FDR and this letter warns about bombs of a new type. Uh and FDR takes the warning seriously that he keeps exploring the idea which helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan project in 1942. Like that's Leo Zillard and he ties directly back to the Wells idea.

That's awful. That's so the fact that it we can like literally say not only don't build the Tournament Nexus, but maybe don't write the Torment.

MAYBE DON'T WRITE ABOUT THE TOURNAMENT NEXUS. I MEAN, IT'S I think Sillard probably was I think he probably was into Wells because he he like people had theorized before Wells that something like an atom bomb might be feasible unlike the like physicists had. And I think Sillard was impressed that Wells had gotten something so close and also he clearly wanted to warn the world about this thing which I think is why he was interested in in purchasing the rights to this. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more about him later, but it is it is so tragic cuz you you can't blame him. Like he's like his attitude is like we need we need to have this cuz Hitler might have it, right? Which like yeah, maybe. I don't know. But that's the same logic that like and you know the USSR is not Nazi Germany. Obviously we can the proof of that is as simple as what happened in the Cold War, right?

And to be fair, neither is the United States. Neither country used the damn things

on the scale that would have ended civilization. Um, you know, we'll talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki too, but it's I you you understand like Sillard's motivations are deeply sympathetic, right? And a number of scientists behind the Manhattan project. Some of them are refugees, right? But the ones that aren't still get into it because they're reading the news. They're see they're aware of how dangerous the U like the US's enemies are during World War II. And it's a legitimate threat that Germany in particular might get the bomb before we do, right? And those stories are like half the reason this happened because a lot of people of goodwill got involved with with the Manhattan project because they were like, well, this is probably the lesser it's probably better that the US has this than that a fascist country is the only one with a nuke.

Right. Right. Like that's their logic here. And they they they had to operate on we know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke, right? Just based on the choice because they didn't, right? the not they went in different directions. They did not make the choices ultimately that would have given them.

Have you have you heard this thing maybe it's in the script or maybe I'm like wrong about this that there was a work slowdown of the Nazi the Nazi bomb program where they were like and they went and they tried to tell their US counterparts like hey we're we're slowing down this bomb. You all need to slow it down too. But the person that they told didn't believe them and was like oh [ __ ] they're trying to lie to us. They must be like right about to build this bomb. Have you heard this story?

No, I haven't actually. No, no, no, it's not. Uh I I Okay, I can never remember the name of the book cuz I found it in a trash can 20 years ago. It was about the social history of building of the bomb and I read this and and it like changed the way that I was perceiving this stuff. But I've since read more about this and researched more about this and I think it's like messier than that. But I think again just from memory that there was like a work slowdown in the Nazi program because it was all of these physicists who used to work with Jews because before all the Jews got kicked out of the physicist programs.

I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not. Uh neither do I. Um so check on that.

I want to believe. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple there's some good there's some stories like I mean and espionage is heavily baked into the whole story of how this all happened, right? And it's a the the spies in the US who bring bomb information to the USSR are people working on a similar logic to Zillard where they're like, well, the US is obviously not a good actor and if they're the only ones with a nuke, they're going to kill everyone in the Soviet Union, right?

Oh, yeah. like and maybe, you know, they we talked ABOUT IT. PLENTY OF GUYS TALKED about it.

We had a plan to do it, you know. So, you're not and maybe by, by the way, it's if it's arguable that building this doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do. And a lot of people argue that to this day, then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the US would have killed 600 or so million people.

Right. Right. Um we know that because we talked about doing it a lot. Um and you were really right with the like Schroinger's bastards.

Yeah. Exactly. These people are heroes or bastards and we will never know. And in half the timelines they're one and in half they're the other. I guess part of why I'm doing this is that if this happens uh like 15 minutes after you finish listening to this podcast, you'll know who to be angry at in your last couple seconds of consciousness, assuming you're not near ground zero for one of these things.

Um uh it, you know, and you probably want to be at ground zero. It's the least painful option available.

The road is optimistic in terms of like the aftermath of thermonuclear war on a planetary scale. Um anyway, so those guy but guys with that logic basically that like well this is a messy thing. I don't really want to be building a giant bomb but it might save a lot of lives in the long run. That's like a sizable chunk of the Manhattan project, right? That's like a a big amount of the logic behind in the reason individual people got involved, right? The other half though is a mil and this is largely on the military side of things. It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is this is how the military thinks of these weapons. Both when we're starting to plan one and then immediately after we start using them, right? And the military logic for why this is why building this system, why getting as many of these things as possible is a good idea is based on a military theory that starts to take hold after the end

of the first world war. And this is ultimately the theory that leads us to the system of international mutually assured destruction that we live in today. Right? And there's a there's an element of historical rhyming here that we we build this global real literal global doomsday device as a result of a theory that takes off in the end of World War I based on what happened in World War I. Because World War I is itself the result of a doomsday device going off. a device that was never supposed to go off and a device that a lot of people a lot if you right up until the start of World War I if you talked about this this system of alliances and military buildup right and like an arms buildup that like you've got all these munitions refit schedules and whatnot and interlocking alliances was meant to ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war right that was the people who would

defend it would say that like well if everyone's really wellarmed and if everybody's always and if we have all these alliances between different powers that make it an unwininnable situation we won't have this war right people would make that argument you know um now obviously the technology at the time they didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines so they had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf and these do work like a machine right and that's that is what happens you know you have Austria declares war on Serbia that brings France and Germany into it the German plan that that they had built meant that like well the only way we can possibly win this war is we have to do this specific kind of invasion that takes us through Belgium that brings Great Britain into the you know and so on and so forth

right and they maxim gun and they've got the everyone's got a version of the maxim gun and everyone's got you're everyone's also thinking well I just re like we just refurbished and upgraded our artillery and France is France has just upgraded this thing but they haven't upgraded this thing and if we go now they won't have the new version of this thing and ours will still be that like that's a big part of the thinking too right and this is like always the case and it had been for decades prior to World War I and prior to World War I the fact that it would be so costly and it was so like everyone's plan to for victory rested on so many like assumptions and was sketchy enough no one really wanted to do this right I mean you with the exception of the military thinkers who had spent their entire lives building and planning out this this system of like this is how we're going to uh activate our troops.

This is the order at which we'll get them marching and this is where they'll move in. They really So you have this mix of nobody on the civilian side of governance wants to think about this seriously because it would be a calamity and they know it and everyone in the military is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start having leaders need to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to go to war, the loudest voice in the ear is this general who's thought of nothing else his entire professional life. And by the way, in the six minutes a US president would have to decide whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice in his ear is going to be a guy who thinks about using the nukes non-stop.

Yeah. It's like his job. It's his job. This is like the, you know, the whole like an armed society is a polite society. logical fallacy.

Yeah. You know, like it's it's just so interesting that it's this large where we have

Yeah. We have data that shows that an armed society is not a polite society. It

sure isn't. Not I I'm pro- second amendment for complicated reasons, but very complicated.

But like it's just not. It's like you could watch all the videos of people being like, "You parked in my space and now they're shooting at each other and they would have been punching each other in a different world."

Yes. Like, and it's one of those things I have had I've literally had the exact situation of like I had a situation that would have been violent, but we all had guns and knew it. And so, nobody started [ __ ]

right? And I'm also more than aware of the fact that like the United States is more violent than a lot of unarmed societies, right? Um, and

yeah, because if you carry a gun, you have to have an entirely different mindset where you kind of

it changes everything. Yeah. You actually can't stand up to for yourself. You kind of have to take

possibly even the first punch, right? You just have to be you have to do everything possible.

Literally everything to avoid including taking a couple hits. Yeah. Because you know that you're capable of an overwhelming capacity of violence.

And it people don't do that. Instead, they're like, "Isn't this sick? I've got overwhelming capacity of violence." And that's one of the worries with like the nukes is when they go from because prior one thing I will say and this is something I'll even give Nixon basically all of our leaders and all of the Soviet leaders, right? It's it's a mistake to leave them out too. This is the thing that would only have worked if both sides were similar for all of the flaws of all of the men running both countries the duration of the Cold War. All of them had one thing in common, which is they were guys who were like, "No, that would be [ __ ] up.

No, that that'd be [ __ ] up. We're just not going to do that." Right? There's some great I mean [ __ ] Reagan has some really good quotes of like oh like where he's like having this conscience of like I can't believe we as human beings created this nightmare system. This is so much worse than I ever knew it was. What's wrong with people? Reagan had those moments, right? cuz he wants to punch people, you know, he wants that he wants to do the lower level of violence like

and uh there's some good there's a good JFK quote when this all got explained to him for the first because JFK one of the things he did is he took away the military's control of the nukes, right? And made it because the military used to be have a basically theoretically could have made the call to launch the missiles when without presidential authority. It wasn't mechanically necessary the way it is now, right? Like the way the code system works now, you mechanically have to have the president looped in, right? Um although there we'll talk about that. It's not a perfect system either. Um but that that became the way we do it during JFK's administration. And when he when all of this got explained to him how this works, I think his exact quote was like, "Can we call ourselves the human race?"

Like what what the [ __ ] Yeah. Are you [ __ ] kidding me? Yeah. Um, and they all like there's a lot you get a lot of reactions like that from presidents and that's the only reason we're all alive to this day. And that's the thing not just with the US and Russia but with any country that gets a nuclear power is maybe you get someone at the head of that country who can think about that and who can think about for whom it's not an unthinkable. Right? And that changes everybody's calculus to a startling degree. Right? This is why a lot of people, there's a good book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in a pretty unsparing term and she provides like a theoretical and her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles for unclear reasons, right? Um, and I what I don't like about it is I don't really agree with the whole the the the Kim family are like crazy thing. I think

they're pretty rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the same things that other countries are entirely. Yeah, their backs are to the wall. Like I'm not trying to apologize for them, but you know,

I I I see a logic in what they're doing. I don't think they're crazy, right? And I don't I which is there's a I what I think is I don't think his book is as good, but there was another book that came out a year or two previously by another like uh person who is like a scholar interested in the nuclear mutually assured destruction system. that was also a North Korea US exchange hypothetical, but that didn't rely on North Korea being crazy. In fact, everyone was performing logically, right? It it it like basically the the premise was uh North Korea does something that kills some South Korean civilians, right? I think it's they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits, which has happened before, right? North Korea has in fact killed South Korean civilians uh not all that long ago, right? Um, and as a result, the North Korean president, without seeking US approval, fires missiles at military targets, non-uclear missiles,

at military targets in North Korea. But the the leader of North Korea uh doesn't know that the US didn't approve of the firing of missiles and their system can't entirely tell what's incoming and what's not. and they see on once North South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the US starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes aware. And anyway, it's this whole it's this whole cycle of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just requires, and by the way, one of the things we found out very recently is that the currently imprisoned former president of South Korea, who is being charged with, I believe, insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into North Korea illegally without uh getting US approval or anything while he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically get to declare martial law, right? So, like this stuff, like [ __ ] like that happens all the time and just

hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple stages of a few different apocalypses occur. This is not a cra this is not crazy and it doesn't require any power. Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes to be like a mustache twirling madman. It just requires them to all be have incomplete imperfect information and focused on their own survival. Right.

Yeah. It's it's good. I love I I'm like while you're talking I'm thinking about all the other countries that also have nukes and like their own things going on like

you know like like I mean Israel and North Korea are like comparable entities in my mind in terms of being like

small powers with that are like pariah states that probably aren't going to do something to get themselves like I actually could see personally I could see a big state feeling more confident to do it

you know but yeah Uh anyway, we'll keep talking about this, Margaret, but uh first here's some ads. We're back. Um yeah, so we got off on a little bit of a tangent, but I wanted to get back to a point I was making, which is the the historical rhyming between the the system like the the mutually assured destruction is a product of a military theory that gets born at the this like this theory of strategic bombing that's gets born at the end of World War I, right? And that theory only exists because World War I happens. And World War I is the result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go off going off, right? Um you have all these like treaties and stuff that uh basically guarantee that if one of a couple of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them, it will start a chain reaction that leads to a general European war. Right? And because of the way that armies work in this period,

right? and and all basically all military wisdom at this point is based on the last war as it always is. And the last war for Europe is the Francoressussian War of 1870 to 1871. Um that's not literally the last conflict in Europe during this period, but it's the last big one that people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions like this.

Germany versus France is the only way to have a European war as far as I can tell. So,

oh man, I mean, we have not had a good European war since those two got their [ __ ] together. And that's why I think we should start tweaking them both, you know, just just start see who we can make angrier at the other, you know. Germany, I hear France has been talking hell of [ __ ] you know? Just set the invade a little bit. Yeah. Set the R on fire. [ __ ] it. Let's see what happens. Um, only France has nukes, so we should be fine. Uh, anyway, the great land powers of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent, AustroHungary, knew that the instant war was declared, there was this clock ticking, right? Because most of your army is reserves, right? The largest amount of manpower you have isn't your active duty. It's this this mass of like reserve troops. These guys who when they're 18 or whatever, they're basically drafted. They sometimes serve like a year and then for a period of

time they have to do it's basically they're all in the National Guard, right? That's the norm in most of these states. You have some ver version of that. And so it takes a period of time to call these guys up from civilian life to issue them their gear to get them moved into their units and then to get them moved to the front. So everyone is working. Not just not only do you have this interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side knows I have to be able to get my reserves ready for active duty before the enemy can.

Otherwise, they're going to invade before I have my army, which means I have a ticket like I once the Archduke of AustriaHungary is assassinated and then people start to realize that general European war is in play. It's not just a matter of diplomatically can we smooth this. It's the every all of my generals are shouting that like if we don't mobilize now we don't know that France isn't mobilizing right we can't tell they might be mobilizing and if they're mobilizing we only have this period of time to start mobilizing in turn right that's a big part of everybody's thinking here and that's the same with nuclear war right where you don't know entirely what the other side is doing we the US have pretty good data on when people are because we have this nuts insane like level of like spy satellites and [ __ ] like that although all of it has errors. All of it has things that can go wrong, right? None of

it's perfect. Soon AI will run it. It'll be fine. Yeah. So, everyone's acting off of imperfect information and everybody has a very limited time frame and they're being shouted at by their generals that if we don't move in time, we're [ __ ] right? The whole country could be [ __ ] And you have x amount of time. Now, they have it's days and weeks, you know, in the case of these European monarchs, right? But that's still a ticking clock, right? Um anyway, we all know how World War I goes. Not not great. Uh badly for everyone. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide. Um and and basically all of the one of the things that's fascinating to me, and this is the case in a lot of wars, everyone's planning at the start of World War I is based on how the last war had gone. And everyone's planning is wrong. Germany Germany's plan to knock France out of the war in the first couple of months doesn't work. France

and Russia have this plan where like we'll both hit Germany on either side, right? If Germany starts some [ __ ] we'll come in on both flanks and we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, "Well, we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up and it'll probably be fine, right?" And they realize, "Oh, no. Actually, we're kind of we we you have to have actually millions of guys with guns. You know, how fast can we draft all the coal miners?" all of these and Germany or Great Britain's plans are based in part on like well we've got this great navy that's probably all we'll need right

and they have a Tolken and they got they got JR Tolken somewhere in there you know surely we'll be okay anyway everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war and it leads to disaster and so after the carnage a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying what had happened to try to make predictions about what would happen in the next war which is the same thing that had happened after 1871 one and they made the wrong predictions, but they're sure this time we'll get it right. We're smarter than that last generation of military thinkers. We'll make conclusions from the last war that are right, you know. And one of these guys, among the most influential of these [ __ ] is an Italian general named Guilio Duh. Now, he had been born in Casera, Italy in 1869, but his family were refugees from Seavoi, which was a former Italian possession that had been seated to the profitious French. As a

young man, he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer in the Italian army. He continued his formal education by studying engineering at a university in Trin. Duh rose steadily through the ranks and by the early 1900s he was a member of the Italian general staff. Basically, their joint chiefs, right, that's kind of the idea. Uh he had been an early advocate for durigibles. Uh initially used as spotters for artillery and the like. And once the first aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for aircraft as a weapon system. Right now, this on its own isn't noteworthy. He was right. Obviously, aircraft are pretty important in modern war,

but very a lot of people I'm not, it wasn't universal. There were certainly some guys being like, "NO, THE INFANTRY MAN WITH A RIFLELESS WILL BE THE ALWAYS BE THE core of any war fighting effort. We don't need planes." There were some nuts, but most intelligent people were like, obviously planes are going to be useful. You know, being able to have the sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict. Um, and Duhei, but one thing that did make him noteworthy, where he was kind of seeing far ahead was that he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of ground commanders, right? It would effectively need to be its own kind of service, you know? And this is something even during World War II, there's not an air force in the US.

We have the Army Air Corps, right? It's a part of the army. Um, Duhi ahead of time says like, "No, the air air air air power should be its independent its own independent branch. It's different enough, right? It it's like the navy." Um, in 1911, he got a chance to act on some of his theories when Italy went to war in Libya against the Ottomans because an awful lot of Italians had never really gotten over the Roman Empire. That's the gist of why we keep [ __ ] with Ethiopia. Duh's conclusion from this was and this was like the first realworld use of air combat power for Italy and his conclusion is that in the future planes will get better and high altitude bombing will become the number one battlefield role of planes right this is not true for World War II entirely uh I mean it's debatable right but there's a lot of argument that that that that's not entirely that high altitude bombing was not the number one battlefield use

of air power yeah wasn't high altitude bombing ori like bombing civilian civilians but ideally close air support is less high altitude because you can't do it as accurately, right? Like you need to be closer to not hit your own guys as much.

This is one of those things technology has made this kind of true because like even a lot of what we'd call closeair support today is still pretty high altitude cuz you can fire a missile from pretty high altitude, right? Like if like modern like modern weapon systems, you can shoot from higher up. But he's wrong in in spirit, right? Um which is that like this is not the way most milit most most effective combat use of air power in World War II is not high altitude bombing, right? Um and even if you look in the uh the Pacific theater, right? Like it's a lot of naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but it's not really high altitude bombing.

You know, Pearl Harbor isn't high altitude bombing, right? Like like it's it's a different kind of use of aircraft. Um, but Duhi is certain that high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the not just like critical but basically the only thing that air power will be used for, right? Um, and he's he he's so certain of this that he becomes kind of an [ __ ] about it, right? Like he he illegally orders the construction of bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money. And it burns out his career. He gets forced into the infantry and he spends the early stages of World War I basically screaming that Italy can win.

we can we can break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make the enemy harmless if we can just gain command of the air. And he calls for the construction of 500 bombers to drop 125 tons of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the stalemate of trench warfare. Now, um yeah, so this is the kind of thing it seems ahead of its time, right? Because this is sort of where military thinking went, right? Like it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking World War II because of Duhi, but it's not correct ahead of its time. In part like Italy simply couldn't have built 500 high altitude bombers to drop that kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have the capacity. Like the Italian Italian industry, the Italian military in the middle of World War I was not going to be able to do that, right? It's just not a realistic ask of the country.

Busy not getting slaughtered in the war already. Yeah, they don't have the spare resources and also bombers aren't that good yet, right? Like they will be by World War II, but Duhei is not saying this is what I mean he will eventually say this is how the future should work. But he is also arguing we should be trying to do this right now. And Italy just doesn't have the resources or technical knowhow to create the bomber fleet he wants in 1915 when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen. And he is such an [ __ ] about this that he is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about how incomp because he's calling his superiors incompetent for not following through with his impossible plan. Like

Yeah. And you don't get away with that during a war. No, they they lock him up for a while. But he keeps writing about his ideas while he's in jail. And the war gets worse and worse for Italy and he's eventually brought back and given command of the aviation bureau which shows you how desperate Italy is. After the end of hostilities, he starts work on his magnum opus, a manifesto on the future of strategic air power. In 1921, it was published under the title the command of the air. Now, some of his arguments are pretty strong, right? One of the things he's saying is that like look at what happened in this [ __ ] first world war. It was a [ __ ] show.

Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right? You can get right over them. You can hit targets behind the trenches like their artillery, right? And you could maybe knock infantry out of trenches. Now, this is actually something one of the things he'll be proved wrong on that is that infantry and trenches are a lot less vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be, right? Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people. Um, especially with the kind of technology they're going to have by World War II, it's better than just shelling them endlessly, but it is not the get out of trench free card that Duhi pretends it is. Right. Um now Duhei is also he's one of a number of growing military theorists who who had learned from the last war that these huge conscript armies that everybody has moved towards like if that's how war works if the whole civil male civilian population is potentially part of the

military and the whole country is being mobilized to support the military then you can't limit yourself to just striking troops in the field in future wars. civilian populations. Duh's attitude is civilian populations make continued resistance possible and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure of war must be attacked,

right? Yep. Oops. You know, it's funny whenever there are these things that are technologically developed that I just would have assumed are older. Like I would have just assumed somehow that like bombing civilian populations is somehow older than this as a like tactic. You know

it is like this Duhei is not the first military leader to be like civilians are a valid. This in fact is the norm in a lot of ancient warfare, right? Like [ __ ] a lot of times in ancient Greece, one city state goes to war against the other. The one that loses

does not get to keep being a city state. You annihilate them, right? You kill the men. You you it make you rape the women, right? Like that's not every war, but a lot of wars in classical history go that way. So,

I've been reading that for my for my show recently and I suddenly like had to realize I was like, "Oh,

the concept of surrender is sort of new. It's like a new technology is you actually like let people go home after you beat them."

It's it's more that it had stopped being the norm to consider the whole country to be enemies. But even during World War I, right, Great Britain starves a million Germans to death by by blocking ports. Germany, we know they can't grow. They don't have the ability to produce sufficient food stuffs on their own. That's part of the military effort, right? It's not as direct as bombing civilians, but it would be it would be very inaccurate to pretend Dhe is the first guy who is like civilians are on the table, right?

No, totally. But the but specifically the idea of this like bombing exactly exactly. It's meaningful.

Yeah. Yeah. Like I think that that is important that he is the guy writing in a book this is the strata this is a a logical strategy for how modern war ought to be pursued is the systematic destruction of civilian populations through strategic bombing. Right. It is does matter that he's the first guy to write that out. You know like that's that's upon his soul.

Yeah. Yeah. Um which is not to say that nobody would have thought to do stuff like this if he hadn't been around. Right. No, but I mean just because someone else will invent the torment nexus is not a reason to invent the torment nexus.

And no, nor does it erase your culpability in making it. Now, one of my sources for this episode is an article by Colonel Everest Rion of the one of the more who's one of the more influential pilots in US combat aviation history. He's an interesting guy. Um he was a key member of what became known as the fighter mafia which is a group of guys in the air force who argue and this is in like the latter half of the 20th century. Uh they argue that like the branch's bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about the this is like right before the birth of I think the F-16. They're they're they're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt and it's lying about how well certain weapon systems work for corrupt reasons. Uh and as a result they have all these complaints about like hybrid roll fighters as opposed to dedicated anti-aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not the fighter

mafia was right. I'm just bringing this up because this is a guy who has a history of being on controversial sides of arguments, right? And he wrote an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for the air force, right? Where he is kind of laying out uh his thinking as to why Duhi was wrong. Um and he summarizes Duhi's arguments this way. He also believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land and at sea and that an enemy's ability to sustain a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of enemy air power in the air and on the ground. The need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but also to destroy their eggs and their nests. Duhi wrote enemy aircraft production plants were defined as prime strategic targets. He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses against them were useless. He believed that attacking populations with relatively

small amounts of explosives, incendiary, and gas weapons would make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the way very influential people in military planning still think to this day. Duh's thinking is incredibly common or at least a descendants of Duhi's thinking is incredibly common within military planners to this day. And this is the root of mutually assured destruction. It starts with these ideas, right?

Particularly the idea Yeah. that people won't put up with it from their leaders.

that people won't put up with it. That you can well and that a a powerful strategic bombing force can deter an attack.

Right. Right. Okay. Because your ability because they can't be stopped. You can't stop a bombing run. Right. It's impossible. His part of his attitude is that the sky is too big. Right. You can't actually stop bombers from getting to where they're going to go. So if you have a powerful enough bombing fleet, like no one will attack you because they they know they're doomed in that instance, right? And it like this is basically how we think about nearpeer nuclear warfare to this day, right? And that knowledge deters those sort of wars. So this is part of why people will argue to hey round up being right even though he did not foresee nuclear weapons, right? In any way, shape or form.

He was wrong about bombing. He's not but he was right for now about nukes. Well, this is kind of the theme of our episodes is that a lot of people buy into Duh Haye's theories and base their careers in the Air Force on believing that this is more or less right. And once nukes come around, that's the thing that like makes that their the things they had already believed true and is part of why they become such advocates for nuclear warfare. Right now, I want to really emphasize how wrong Duhi is here because he is not making grand predictions about the distant future. Nor is he theorizing about 21st century nuclear warfare or even late 20th century warfare. He is discussing the war he expected to break out in the next 20 years or so. And on basically every technical point, Duhei was desperately wrong. Again, he argues the sky is so big that air power should only be offensive because air power

cannot defend territory and the only way to protect the homeland is to build an air force that can bomb the enemy into the ground before your opponent can do the same. He makes really specific predictions, arguing in 1928 that dropping a payload of just 300 tons of bombs over a capital city in under a month would be enough to end a war. This would all be re proven catastrophically wrong. But for the later period of his life, Duhei is effectively the first air power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but it it becomes the bible of how to make an air force for basically all of the men who were in charge of the air forces in World War II. Like on every side, he's super influential. And that's not entirely accurate. He has his detractors obviously, but he's massively influential. And I'm sure Duhei would have been thrilled to have had such an influence because everyone in World War

II 2 tries out his ideas. But he never gets a chance to see that. Shortly after Bonito Mussolini makes him the Italian chief of aviation, he dies of a heart attack in 1930. So, by the way, ends his life as a fascist, too.

Yeah. Couldn't have happened to a worse guy. You know who else died of a heart attack in 1930 after being made the fascist minister of aviation by Bonito Mussolini?

Uh, his twin brother. Yeah, sure. Or these sponsors. I don't know. And we're back. That was an awkward ad pivot. I'm not going to lie, Margaret. I'm not going to lie. But I I think the audience will forgive us.

I I think they will. I think they'll be able to find it in their heart attack to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's actually what I'm trying to do is make you feel better by making a terrible joke

so that people have already forgotten about your bad ad pivot. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. Uh, let's continue talking about this guy's stupid ideas about how planes work, right? Um,

300 bombs. Yeah. 300 tons of bombs. All you need that'll wipe out any city's will to fight. Um, so German war planners influenced by Duhei built a bomber fleet that was tailored for the attack. Not operations on enemy cities, but providing close support to their advancing infantry and armor. And this is, you could call this an adaptation of some of Duhi, certainly influenced by it. this idea that like air power should just be for the offense, right? Like that that's its primary purpose. Um, and so it's kind of an adaptation, right?

England also duh attitudes have a lot of influence on how the Royal Air Force is constructed in the inter war period. And England spends a lot of resources creating a bomber command that was meant to deter German action on the continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids. You know, uh, that does not exactly work out. Here's how Colonel Reion describes what happened next. Uh, Germany then turned to the invasion of England. In its first test of Duhei's theories, the Battle of Britain was engaged to gain air superiority for Operation Sea Lion.

Britain's bomber command had failed to deter the war and the attacks on England, but Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to its knees. The Luftvafa tried to gain air superiority over England. The initially frail fighter force of the Royal Air Force under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowing and using the nent technology of radar was able to inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts. After the battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population to its knees. Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to a higher pitch.

So from the start, Duhei has proven wrong just immediately. on both counts about

yes. Yeah, the having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also, you can defend from a bombing attack and aircraft are great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works really [ __ ] well.

It's it's funny cuz like this is the Europe gave medieval warfare was a big part of medieval Europe, right? And like the development of armor until you get to guns.

Yeah. It's like it's the development of armor that is the new technology that's changing [ __ ] You put a a [ __ ] armored knight against anybody and they're just like, "Yeah, you kind of can't do anything unless you get a dagger to my throat, you know?"

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's like it is it is the same. It takes place over a longer per or over a shorter period of time with air power cuz [ __ ] moves faster now, right? But it is the I mean this it's the it's the the red queen hypothesis, right? like everyone is constantly moving as fast as they can just to stay in place, you know, like you're you you you build up this great bomber fleet

just in time to get attacked by a bomber fleet of your own and realize actually we probably should have had more fighters. That might have been that might have been handier at the jump, right?

But also, the Germans are learning all you need is a bunch of bombers. We've got a bunch of bombers. Oh [ __ ] fighter aircraft really [ __ ] up bombers.

Oh no, all our pilots are gone. Who would who would have thought Mussolini would have named a guy who wasn't actually as good at things as he said he was?

Who'd have thought the Italian fascist minister of aviation was wrong about some important points, right?

Um, now one of the things that is important for what will come next is it is true air power is great on the defensive and it's actually very possible to interdict and damage bombers before they can hit their targets. But not a single group of bombers on any side during the war is turned back,

right, entirely without being able to drop any bombs. That doesn't happen. which for nuclear planning, this is again one of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes Duhi correct on is that like well once you've got nukes if you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs then yeah fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers and do enough damage that it it renders like you know the Germans will drop some bombs in response but you can make it be more costly for the Germans than it is for Great Britain, right? If a thousand bombers each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from hitting and all they need is one.

Right. Right. That is an important point about this is another lesson that's being learned. Right. At the same time as we're learning how wrong Duhi is.

Once the nukes come into the picture, people are going to be looking at this data and seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a nuclear attack of sufficient size

even before ICBMs. Yeah. Yeah. The scale of destructiveness of a nuke is just so different. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Huh. Yeah. Now, I do want to really emphasize the wrongness that Duhi was because again, he said that about 300 tons of explosives in a month dropped over an enemy capital would be enough to break any people's will to fight. During a single night during the Battle of Britain, May 10th to May 11th, 1941, Germany dropped more than 700 tons of high explosives on London as well as 86,000 incendiary devices. England kept fighting. Yeah. Yeah. No, they they uh they came up with a whole catchy slogan about it. Uh

everyone pulled together. You have socialists like Orwell like organizing in the home guard.

Yeah. A lot of people felt better. Yeah. Um which is a fun story. Uh but yeah, we we like it punk rock that people punk rock. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um but yeah, that is an important point again just to how wrong du is like yeah we took more than twice as much as he said would break any city in a month and a night London did and it people don't break under bombing you know which is also going to influence nuclear thinkers because then the attitude becomes well you just have to kill all of them then. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so despite the fact that Duhi is right out the gate proven wrong, war planners on the Allied side continue to give a great deal of credence to his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris, also known as Bomber Harris, who became head of the RAF's bomber command. He was a huge advocate of area bombing. Precision bombing, which is another thing people are the strategic bombing side, also

breaks down to a couple of broad schools. And as is always the case, most people are are, you know, have are a little take a some from column A, some from column B, but there's you've got area bombing and precision bombing, right? And the idea behind precision bombing is that you can hit just the target you want. That is like the factory making bombs or the factory making planes, right? Or a barracks and not hit the high-rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is a lie, right? It's especially it's it's not all that true today, but it's especially a lie in World War II, right? It's a lot. Now, you can kind of do it, although it never works as well as planners like to claim it does, but in World War II, it's just a fantasy, right? Um, and so there's a lot of that that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris who are like, well, [ __ ] precision bombing. Just bomb

saturate an area with bombing, right? you accept greater civilian casualties so that you can [ __ ] their industrial cap capabilities. Right? That's the public argument. In private, they're saying something different. The p the public argument is that this is just the way it has to work. The first area bombings by the RAF on German cities uh was in 1941 uh and 1942. And they did not work very well. Right? They're spun as winds, but on an actual strategic level, they're not huge hits. They cause some shock to the German citizenry, but they don't accomplish the stated goal, which is to damage war production, right? And the RAF suffers high casualties because German air defenses are excellent. You know, Duh continues to be very wrong about air defense. It is pos possible. I mean, in in Vietnam, North Vietnam, part of why the war goes the way it does is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air

defenses, right? Um there something gets lost in the whole it was just some farmers in the in the jungle that beat the US. NO, THEY HAD AN ARMY. YES, THEY HAD THEY HAD RADAR GUIDED MISSILES and everything, you know. Um, when Arthur Harris took over bomber command for Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign, uh, Operation Millennium. On May 30th of 1942, nearly 1100 Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some 600 acres of the city and rendering 100,000 people homeless. Harris declared the raid a success. The British press did too, but they focused on the destruction of war industry, not the civilian cost. And this frustrated Harris in part because it was inaccurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent of a month's air war production. The real cost to Germany, as Bomber Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later

described the purpose of bomber command. In his eyes, the aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem in an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it also does the same stealing the reserve. Like I've I've met someone whose family I think it was Col or Cologne. Uh I just did the [ __ ] thing where I've been to a city. So I'm like let me use the whatever. Uh

yeah. But you know it's like I've met someone who was like oh yeah my whole family was like staunch anti-Nazis and then 80% of the family was wiped out in one night by a

by a bombing and then they all joined the army. And I'm like yeah they still join the Nazi army so [ __ ] them. But like also like, man, I I couldn't tell you that anyone I've ever met would do anything different.

That's just how people work. When their family gets killed in a bombing, they get pissed. They don't always They're not their best selves, you know?

Exactly. That's That's just how people be, homie. I I don't know what to tell you. They don't like having their families killed by bombs. Um,

and there's, as we'll talk about, a lot of debate as to the influence of strategic bombing on on the German civilian population, but what we can say is that it's not why they lose. However, however, whatever it does to morale doesn't end the war, you know,

um, so Bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude, right, as to like what would work to actually end the war. And he doesn't get he never gets called on that because we win the war anyway. And everyone kind of thinks [ __ ] those guys low key or highkey but and you know [ __ ] them but it doesn't work. That is important. Now there's not agreement and in fact a huge a lot of conflict between the US and Great Britain over the strategy initially. Um the guys in the US Army Air Command do not all agree with Harris and in fact we keep conducting the Brits are doing nighttime raids which allows you to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for a long time which are way more dangerous because the idea is it gives the these civilians more of a chance to get away, right? That's part of why you're doing it. It's it's more honorable basically, right? Which it is,

but it also means you lose a lot more guys, right? Like it's way more dangerous.

Yeah. It's a very admirable thing I think that we're doing for a while. We're not always going to be that way. Um so yeah, this this debate really starts to erupt after this point. And on one hand, you've got these area bombing, strategic bombing advocates saying like, you know, I know it it hasn't quite worked yet, right? Like we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not giving up yet, but if we just get more bombers, bro, it'll work, right?

And on the other side, and again, a lot of people do kind of wind up in the middle here, but the other side broadly are like, well, close air support is what's most important, right? Air power's primary use is its ability to augment conventional forces in taking and holding territory. Right? And air support works really well, right? It had proved to be tantalizingly potent in North Africa and guys in the US like General Pete Casada were bullish about its potential in a future invasion of France. An early test for the strategic bombing advocates on the other hand came prior to the invasion of Sicily. Uh there's this island called Pantellaria uh which is garrisoned with about 11,000 Italian troops that we need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy. Uh and I'm going to quote from an article in National Interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pentellaria became an experiment. One

anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that bombing would ratify what uh what up to then had been a matter of faith, but would soon offer proof through bombing alone surrender was a certainty. All these forces were assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing more in, then in due course of time, it becomes impossible for him to defend himself. Major General Jimmy Doolittle said, "If bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies plan to invade the island by June 11th." In an attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, the Allies generated 5,284 sorties, dropping a total of 12.4 million pounds of bombs on Pantellaria.

Jesus, did it work? Kind of. After a month of unopposed roundthe-clock bombing, the Italians surrendered after Allied ground troops had approached the island, right? They didn't surrender on their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops came in. Now, you could still say, but that still worked, right? However, there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses were remarkably intact still given the force deployed against them because nearly every bomb missed. The B7s were most accurate with a 22% hit rate. That's defined as landing a bomb within 100 yards of its target. So the B7s hit 22% of the time and that's our best bomber.

And that's within a football field cuz Yeah. And that's still within a football field.

Yeah. And our our medium bombers hit rate is about 6%. Now this is a problem because we had been claiming very different things about the accuracy of our bombs. Back at the start of 1943, we'd had something called the Casablanca Conference in which Winston Churchill sat down with the eighth air force commander, Ira Eker, who promised the British prime minister that the B7 flying for fortress, which that's fancy new. We had these things called the Nordon bomb site, which was like this is the [ __ ] This makes precision bombing possible. It's like a almost it's like a little computerized bombing system that like we can do things with bombs we never could do before. You can drop a bomb from 25,000 ft and hit a target the size of a pickle barrel. Right? That's the promise Ira Eker makes Winston Churchill when he's like sitting down like we can hit a pickle barrel at 25,000 ft. Now in combat a few months

later these things would hit within a football field only 22% of the time. So you're getting this this is going to be also a theme with all of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They will make all these claims about yes it it you know it'll it's it's this accurate and it's this safe and it can only be activated if this and this and this happens so it like could never be accidentally fired and they're like oh wait but what if this things happens that happens every day. Oh yeah that could accidentally launch all of our missiles. Yeah. Are you guys going to fix it? We actually don't want to.

That's the story of the minute man in a nutshell but we'll talk more about that later. Um anyway, with a fleet of these, Ekker promised we can disembowel the German Reich and destroy its industrial capacity with no need for ground forces, right? We can just gut the Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct experience with aerial warfare. And he does not believe Eker, right? He doesn't believe him about the accuracy. And the other thing that Ira Eker is saying is we don't need fighter escorts for our B7s because they have all these guns on them that will that'll be enough to deter attack. We could just send the bombers for part.

Yeah, that's basically the idea behind that title. But like Yeah, because these B7s are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to if they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate. And that that's necessary because the bombers can fly a lot f further than the fighters. So what Ekker is saying is we can send these bombers into the heart of of enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range of the fighters and they'll be fine. And he's going to be wrong about that, too. Um, so one result of this the Casablanca conference is that the allies put together a list of military assets they want to prioritize destroying or disabling. A task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power. These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities, and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first of these targets was a ball bearing production facility in

Regansburg. Ball bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and a number of other important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by Major General Eeker's Eighth Army Air Force on August 17th, 1943. 376 bombers plowed deep into German territory beyond the range of any fighters to escort them per the website code names operations of World War II. The mission inflicted heavy damage on the Riginsburg target, but only at catastrophic loss to the force and as much as 60 bombers were lost and many more damaged beyond economical repair. As a result, the eighth air force was incapable of immediately following double strike with a second attack that might have seriously crippled German industry. When Schwinfort, that's the industrial facility, was attacked again 2 months later, the lack of long-range fighter escorts still had not been addressed and losses were even higher. As a

consequence, the US deep penetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for 5 months.

Could you imagine going on a thing where you're like, well, last time we did this about uh you know, one in six of us died anyway. So, we didn't change anything different.

Yeah. Are we doing anything new? Yeah. No. Same plan, huh? Okay. Yeah. I mean, you talk to anyone who saw heavy combat and they have stories like that where it's like, well, this was this went really badly. So, we're just doing the same thing, huh?

Yeah. Okay. That is that is how armies work. Um, now this was a double failure, not just for Eer, but for Duh's theories. Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a defending military from inflicting severe casualties on a bomber fleet. And that despite the damage done to the Regensburg plant, German industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. As Reich Minister of Supply Albert Shere stated after the war, no plane or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings. As Colonel Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Rioni noted in his article, the Allies failed in their choice of a target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad.

Germany was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point and it also stop they had foreseen this and stockpiled pre-war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft and [ __ ] to not as many ball bearings.

This was for like a home alone style plan they had. That was actually the stockpile was unrelated.

It was they were dropping it down the stairs. Yeah. Did horrible damage to the Third Army. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, Rristioni writes, "This was a failure both in target definition and target priority. Worse, because it was vulnerable, the eighth air force had become the target." Now, over in England, Arthur Harris never accepted the primary contentions of the advocates of precision strategic bombing. In October of 1943, not long after Regensburg, he stated, "The aim is destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy.

They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories. Yeah, Bobber Harris, one thing you have to give him, HE'S VERY CLEAR. NO, NO, NO. THIS IS ABOUT KILLING WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND RENDERING THEM HOMELESS. THAT'S WHAT WE'RE DOING. THAT'S the business the RAF is in. You guys need to stop pretending that you're [ __ ] with ball bearings.

I mean, there's like a there's an honesty to that that I respect. Yes. The man knows what he's about. It's killing civilians, but he's about it.

Yeah. Um he has made his peace with whatever he believes and he thinks that this is the lesser evil is by doing a lot of evil and like, you know,

by doing a lot of evil quickly, right? Yeah. Uh a little before the Regensburg attack, Bomber Harris had launched a nighttime raid on Hamburg. It was the opposite of a precise attempt to destroy a specific target. Incendiaries created a firestorm that swept through the downtown area incinerating roughly 40,000 civilians. Um, this is like and this is one of the this becomes a theory, right? Like not this is a theory put into practice, but there had been this theory that by dropping incendiaries in the right place in a certain parts of a city, you can create these firestorms that massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign.

Right? And this is like when it when it really works for the first time. This is going to be a massive part of our strategy in in when we're bombing the Japanese home islands, right? Is creating these these hideous firestorms. And this also this becomes it's b like I think the term is literally like bonus damage. Basically, this is like a concept of nuclear war too is a big part of the appeal of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them is that you create these firestorms the size of states and like that's really handy. It it really amplifies the amount of a country you can destroy when you create firestorms that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain.

So, it has never occurred to me until this moment that the phrase firestorm I'm aware that firestorms happen in wildfires.

Mhm. It has never really actually occurred to me until this moment that people artificially create them and that's where firestorm like uh

you know a firestorm to purify if you're into shitty hardcore music. Yeah. Um it Yep. Okay.

Yep. Yep. I mean, I think most people have learned the term Firestorm from Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun Firestorm. Obviously, the the Tiberian Sun expansion pack that was pretty good.

Uh but some people learned it from history, I'm sure. Um I learned it from a shitty hardcore band. So,

you learned it from a hardcore band. I learned it from Command and Conquer. Yeah. In November of 1943, in March of 1944, vast there were vast raids on Berlin, uh which left much of the capital in ruins. And yet German morale continued to hold. This is the thing. Bomber Harris, he's more honest, but what he's saying will happen still doesn't happen.

Yeah, he's wrong. No amount of bombing causes Germany to give up. By the time the war in Europe enters its endgame, there were very mixed conclusions to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and precision bombing. Both ideologies had suffered failures, and both had claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success. Months earlier, Bomber Harris had considered strate strategic bombing the same as opening a new front. Summarized in a write up for the Juno Beach Center, quote, "Until D-Day, he was convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force Germany into submission without the Allied casualties that were bound to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe." And in part two, we're going to talk about what happens next. We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll talk start talking about the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the these are the

foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device that we all live under right now. Like this second an incident could have started maybe just because a radar station was wrong. That will in 15 to 30 minutes result in the annihilation of all organized life, human life on the planet. That could have happened as I say this sentence. Um and we mostly won't know until the bombs fall. And there's really nothing like one thing that maybe will comfort you is that that like none of the facilities we have to protect our our government will work.

Like none of them are sufficient for the amount the tonnage the mega tonnage of explosives coming at them. That little like this is a good this is a good thing about Jacobson's book nuclear war. She one thing she points out is like yeah there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone will bake to death slowly as if they're in an oven. Like we know what kind of forces will be deployed against DC. There's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a much worse death than the people topside will have. Well, that's good. That's good.

Anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up as we roll out of part one. I appreciate this idea of like I hadn't put together this idea that World War I the powder keg was intentional, you know, that that it was this mutually assured destruction concept and like seeing the

the through line is fascinating. It it wasn't as direct cuz it did kind of a lot of this started to like this evolved accidentally out of stuff that had existed before. It was not constructed as consciously as nuclear mad,

but it was something people were conscious of. people talked about. There's that's a reason why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances and uh like military arament schedules and like uh uh the the different like arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device, right? Cuz it worked that way.

Um and it is really relevant to discuss that in the context of the doomsday device that we all live under right now.

Yeah. Yep. Cool. Cool. All right. All right, everybody. the heck pie. Do you want anything?

You got a plug? Oh, well, if you respond to the possible imminent destruction of all things by retreating a little bit into escapism, you could listen to me and Robert and some of our friends play Pathfinder where we're just pretending to be people in a fantasy world.

If you don't know what Pathfinder is, it's a tabletop game thing much in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons or a number of other games.

Just legally distinct. legally distinct. Yeah. And if you like weird history, I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff with a totally original the format. Robert, you got to try this format. What I do is that I research a topic every week. Okay.

Mhm. And then I get a guest who doesn't know as much about that topic, but sometimes knows like kind of related things around that topic

and then I tell them what I've learned. That seems like the newest idea in podcasting. Yeah.

Is there a a producer named Sophie there that doesn't say very much but sometimes talks a lot?

That doesn't uh Robert, you should you should use that part, too. Get a producer named Sophie.

I'll see. I'll think about it, Mark. I'll think about it. I'll think about it. But uh but don't take my name. You already you have a decent name for Behind the Bastards. Mine's cool people who did cool stuff.

Okay. Cool people who did cool stuff. Check out us playing Pathfinder on It Could Happen Here's Book Club. And uh remember, if there is a nuclear war, all of the people who got us into it will also die unthinkable deaths. So,

yay. I don't know. Try to live near the center of a city and just, you know, say the things to your loved ones that you need to say.

Yeah. Tell your friends you love you. Tell your friends you love them. Yeah. Bye.

Bye.

Questions about this episode

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

In order: 0:00 Command and Control, HG Wells, Manhattan Project, Margaret Killjoy; 10:00 Manhattan Project, Albert Einstein; 40:00 Colonel Everest Rion; 50:00 Vice President Harris, Operation Millennium; 1:00:00 Vice President Harris, Operation Double Strike; 1:10:00 Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Pathfinder, Vice President Harris.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Vice President Harris, General Duhi, Manhattan Project, Leo Szilard, Pathfinder, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

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

The episode runs 1 h 15 min; the transcript is about 15,157 words in 203 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.