Transcript

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

From Behind the Bastards · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 7 min · 13,673 words · 200 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Part Three: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All | BEHIND THE BASTARDS", an episode of Behind the Bastards published December 10, 2025 (1 h 7 min, about 13,673 words). It mentions 16 people, works and ideas, including General Curtis Lame, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, SACE, Rand Corporation, Douglas MacArthur.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Alfie Conn, Barton Bernstein, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman
  2. – 20:00: General Curtis Lame
  3. – 30:00: Rand Corporation, General Curtis Lame, Life Ray
  4. – 40:00: General Curtis Lame, General Dwight D. Eisenhower
  5. – 50:00: Douglas MacArthur, General Curtis Lame, Life Ray
  6. – 1:00:00: Annie Jacobson, Marshall Islands, Project Vista, General Curtis Lame
  7. – 1:07:16: General Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

  • It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfie Conn on kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein…
    about Alfie Conn · at
  • For the president's chief of staff to say about like Dwight Eisenhower reached a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. So, I guess I go with Ike on this one. Not a perfect man, but he.
    about General Dwight D. Eisenhower · at
  • With atomic weapons. And they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as for Curtis Lame, the existence of the atom bomb seems to have given some sort of purpose…
    about General Curtis Lame · at
  • Over the next 20 to 30 years. This resulted in 1946 in the Air Force setting up the Rand Corporation. You've heard of the Rand Corporation, right?
    about Rand Corporation · at
  • You know. And actually, our death the company the death ray company that sponsors us is called Life Ray, because it'll it's it's a it's a it's a death ray for personal defense, keep saves lives. It saves lives. That's that's the life ray.
    about Life Ray · at
  • Push the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur at the head of a UN amphibious landing force came ground at Inchan and…
    about Douglas MacArthur · at
  • That doesn't happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over like if a stand one of the standard hydrogen bombs were dropped on DC like and these are actively aimed at DC at all times, right? The Russians.
    about Annie Jacobson · at
  • Truman ignores this letter from Fermy. The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the Marshall Islands in November of 1952. It left behind a crater large enough to hold 15…
    about Marshall Islands · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • General Curtis Lame — Person · 13 mentions · first at
  • General Dwight D. Eisenhower — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • Douglas MacArthur — Person · 3 mentions · first at
  • Annie Jacobson — Person · 3 mentions · first at
  • Alfie Conn — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Robert Evans — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Special episodes on how we're all possibly going to die in nuclear hellfire. I'm Robert Evans. this is a series we'll be doing over the course of two weeks, five episodes.…
  • Margaret Kelljoy — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Margaret Kelljoy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? You thinking about nukes? Well, I got promised this was about Warhammer 40k, but I suppose we're learning about the nuclear.
  • Lewis Slutton — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Our friend Lewis Slutton, who was the partial father of the first atomic bomb, had his inards dissolved. due to a horrible nuclear error and he got to like kind of like leave a.
  • Harry Truman — Person · 1 mention · first at
    [gasps] And yeah, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, like has went on record basically saying that military planners had told him that when they were looking.
  • Barton Bernstein — Person · 1 mention · first at
    An article by Alfie Conn on kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein writes that military planners at the time put the number of American casualties…
  • John F. Kennedy (JFK) — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

  • Project Vista — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Left office in 1951, a group of scientists and researchers that included Dr. Robert Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze if there was any room for…

Places & events

Sponsors

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special episodes on how we're all possibly going to die in nuclear hellfire. I'm Robert Evans. Uh this is a series we'll be doing over the course of two weeks, five episodes. Uh, we're in our second week, so you'll be getting a bonus episode this week about the sons of [ __ ] who created the doomsday device that again could kill every single person you've ever known and loved and every animal and on earth except for, you know, cockroaches and the like. Uh, 15 minutes from now or or right now, you know, we'd have no way of knowing unless you're, I don't know, in the White House at this exact moment.

Uh, Margaret Kelljoy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? You thinking about nukes? Well, I got promised this was about Warhammer 40k, but I suppose we're learning about the nuclear apocalypse.

Uh, I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show. Uh, that'll Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of genetic for that cuz I actually don't know anything about Warhammer.

It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation poisoning. Uh, which is what we ended our last episode talking about. Uh, our friend Lewis Slutton, who was the partial father of the first atomic bomb, uh, had his inards dissolved. uh due to a horrible nuclear error and

he got to like kind of like leave a record for science because he was a pretty cool guy. Like that's that's that's that's badass. Like when you know that like okay well I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation. I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time to take notes. Like [ __ ] that's cool. That's cool. Like and I guess

acting with agency is like really good way to not stress, right? Yes. you know, like I have a job. I'm just doing my job.

And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrator. Like, he did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed, there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards, you know,

I'm taking him off the list of guys I'm pissed at. Um, so before we move on past World War II, we should at least linger on what guys like Lame and General Power would have argued was the most important question of the whole war, right? which is still a question that people debate today. Did the use of atomic weapons against the Empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender, thus sparing both Japan and the allies, primarily the US, a hideously bloody ground invasion. Right? This is a question people still argue about. I there's not an objective answer here. I think you it'll be pretty clear where I tend to land once we get through this, right? But this isn't something that like this is something that's debated, right? Like we're I'm not going to come in and just give one side of this. Um, again, I have my my take on the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing, even if you argue that the

sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan to surrender, that the military of Japan never independently agreed to call it quits. And if the emperor of Japan had not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations, we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued supporting the war effort no matter how many firebombs or even additional nukes fell, right? We actually don't know that. There's also like that's that's a a valid point. There's also an argument that the view pushed after the war, which is that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding a greater slaughter in Japan, that like if we had invaded the main island, so many more people would have died. That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as a single weapon system. In an article for outrider.org, or Jasmine Power writes, "There is general agreement that the bombing of Nagasaki did little in

the way of changing the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet Union having a hand in the post-war reconstruction process. Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to push a communist regime onto the country. It was also very convenient for the US that the Japan attributed their surrender to the atomic bombings."

And oh [ __ ] So, it was a way to stay capitalist was to be like, "Oh, it was the nukes. the nukes to us in

more than that it was a way to avoid what happened to Germany right they're watching Germany get split up right they that's obvious at this point and they don't want that you know

and surrendering now before the Soviets are in you know in the mix so to speak means that the country doesn't get split up right you're not going to have Tokyo divided or whatever right that's one argument people will make you know

and in this view pretty simply Japan was defeated not because of the nukes Although that's not a non-factor, but they were defeated because they were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor. It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we beat the [ __ ] out of them all across the Pacific, right?

Yeah. Like which is probably I mean certainly a more accurate view than just saying it was the nukes, right? Like there was a whole war. A lot of guys had to die to finish that thing, right?

[gasps] And yeah, uh, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, like has went on record basically saying that military planners had told him that when they were looking into like what how many people would die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, it American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of 500,000 to a million. And if you're talking about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on these other island hopping campaigns, then that would have meant both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have been higher than that. Right now, that said, this is not a real estimate as best as I can tell. You will encounter it often. It comes up constantly, but it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers, that 500 to a million American casualties estimate, have any basis in reality. Peric,

how many did we lose in Europe? Uh we lost in the whole war. The United States lost about half a million people.

Okay. Like so this this would be basically doing World War II all over again for us more or less, right?

It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfie Conn on kind of the the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein writes that military planners at the time put the number of American casualties between 20,000 and 46,000. But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong possibility that neither an invasion nor a nuclear attack was actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is a val an interesting point because if you're saying oh 500,000 to a million Americans killed and injured, millions of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes save lives. But if you're looking at well 20 to 40 or 50,000 American casualties, probably twice that many Japanese casualties, well maybe that's better than nuking the island, right?

Um, you know, could they have just laid siege to the whole because they were already

in fact doing that. And that's another point, as we'll get to, that's another point people will make is that Japan would have broken on its own, right? In a good essay on the subject for his book, you know what they say, the truth about popular belief. Alfie Conn gives a succinct version of what we might call the skeptics's case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He notes that the US firebombs had already incinerated m uh Japan's six largest cities and our basically the siege that we put on the home islands had blocked all oil from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was in part a desire for the emperor to retain his title. Con cites a 1946 report from the war department strategic bombing survey study group which concluded the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan. Nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade

Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The emperor, the lord privy seal, the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the navy minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the survey's opinion that certainly prior to this 31st of December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1st November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the US war department.

So that that's the they were already beat theory. They were beat. they were beat. And I I would say that's by far the strongest argument if you're going with a fact-based argument. Not that it's the only one, but I think it's the strongest.

You know, your your feelings may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm convinced pretty well. Um, now there was at least one other secret intelligence assessment from the same time done by the US Army's planning and operations group, which reached a similar conclusion, and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Ley, the president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time adopting quote an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's chief of staff to say about like um Dwight Eisenhower reached a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. So, I I guess I go with Ike on this one. Not a perfect man, but he pretty much he knew World War II pretty well.

That's why you have the I'm with Ike button. Yeah, I'm with Ike. We It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that.

Um, now I've allowed that there's still some room for argument here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's decision to surrender because the bombing campaign in general influenced their decision to surrender and the nukes were part of that, right? But what isn't arguable is this. President Truman and men in high positions within the US Army like Curtis Lameé never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew they had a bomb. Right? There was never any possibility in their minds but that they would use it. Perone's article, the fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option of last resort. It would be easier to accept the argument that he Truman had no choice but to drop the bomb if other possibilities such as demonstrating its power to Japanese leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender had been carefully considered. They were not. There was never a serious attempt at to find a

strategy short of obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist Kai Ericson put it, "Using nuclear weapons was not by any stretch of the imagination a product of mature consideration. We have it on the authority of virtually all the principal players that no one in a position to do anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the bombs on Japan.

So it's pretty much we have a new toy. We are we're going to see what this thing does.

Yeah. Okay. We're already goes up to 200. I'm going 200. Yeah. Like they handed lame a list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right? Like they wanted to use this thing in part to scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that was part of their logic. Right.

Um yeah. Now, it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped in Japan killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people. The initial death toll was horrific enough, but it was what came after that really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor and she described the sight of thousands of blinded, burnt people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to quench their burning bodies and all of these like a huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had tossed themselves burnt and singing and like melting basically into the water. Like it's it's it's it was horrible. And in the days and weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood, pulling their hair out in clumps from radiation poisoning, right? Like the this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that not only does the

bomb kill a shitload of people when it goes off, but there are knock-on effects that continue killing people, right? Even though we didn't have a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people with these things.

The Airore generals did their best to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of 1945, General Lesley Groves, who's again the military head of the Manhattan Project, sat before the US Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read you a selected Q&A from that meeting. Senator Milikin, General, is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves, I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway. I always love it when people say that the radioactive casualty can be of several classes. He can have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He can have a smaller amount which will cause him to die rather soon and as I understand it from the doctors without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.

Oh yeah, that's what people say about all that's what people say about radiation and having your insides liquefied.

Mhm. Pleasant. Chill. All the parts of you that tell you that you're in trouble are also destroyed. So

yeah, exactly. You're fine. You're chilling now. Happens to everyone. That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing. That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more palatable for Americans. When he said that, the average citizen and indeed the average senator would not have had to dig very deep to find at least a little counterveailing evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast site were available. More to the point, you've heard about the radium girls and the like. People had been exposing themselves to different kinds of radiation for decades and they died horribly. We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever dropped an atomic bomb. Right now again, the point here is that Groves was he was not

just lying. He was engaged in a coverup. This is a conspiracy. And it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. The campaign to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors of atomic weapons for a little while longer. We knew eventually it would get out, right? These generals all knew you can't lie about this forever, right? But the longer we lie about it, the more money we get into these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the more we can centralize the US def military and defense apparatus around nukes, which was their goal, right? Their goal was replace as many humans as possible with atomic weapons. And they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as for Curtis Lame, the existence of the atom bomb seems to have given some sort of purpose and provided

a dark animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after the wars end, they set to work launching a new kind of campaign, a media blitz targeted at convincing decision makers in the US that nukes were the only future for the military that was worth caring about. 3 months after the bombing of Hiroshima, Lame visited the Ohio Society in New York City to give a speech. He warned/promised the men assembled that the next war understood to be the next world war would be fought with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster than sound and involve atomic power. So he's he's got a pretty clear vision of the future or our friend Curtis Lame and he is now trying to sell it

and like are there other because okay we have this like thing where apparently people who build bombs are obsessed with how bombs are the only thing. Yes. Right. Are there other character classes who feel like similar about like like are like the fighter jets being like no all that matters is fighter jets like

Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yes, there there are and we will talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree with Lame just want nukes to be used differently. Um but there are some people there's a couple of decent human beings still in the military establishment in this period who are like, "What the [ __ ] is wrong with you people? Are you out of your minds?

Yeah. Do you know what this thing does? Like I'm able to figure out this means destroy the world. That seems bad.

Why are we building the world killing machine? Why are we doing this? Oh, we live here. This is our

This is the one planet that we've got. Yeah. Back in 1921, Dui had argued that the invention of the bomber craft bas basically rendered all other types of weaponry obsolete. And Lame was making a similar argument, but with the nuclear weapon at the heart of this fabled air force that could finally do the whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote, "The air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to our air power development." That doesn't sound at all like a crazy man. No. And it's, you know, this is a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say one thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis Lame tried harder than any single human ever has to end the human race and he didn't do it and I don't quite know why. Like it's shocking that we survived Curtis Lame.

He would do [ __ ] like fly bombers into Russian airspace just to like tweak them. Like he was such a piece of [ __ ] and they always had nukes, right?

Um quantum immortality as a species. That's all I got. It's nuts. Like the I no one has ever tried harder to wipe out the human race than Curtis [ __ ] Lame with his [ __ ] dead face. Oh man, it's nuts. Um

I wonder if like the villains and pulp stuff from like 200 years ago didn't even claim that they're going to destroy the world. Whereas like now we have villains who are like I'm going to destroy the world like

Yeah. Yeah. Cuz people can now. People can now. And we have examples of people who really worked hard to try to do that, you know,

and this is ultimately kind of why we are now at the point where the whole human race is, you know, 15 to 30 minutes away from annihilation at any given moment in time, which is Curtis Lame and a bunch of guys that followed him felt felt the air force and to them this means the nuclear air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. I cannot emphasize enough how much of Lame's speech to the Ohio Society was just warmed up duh. He insisted no air attack once it is launched can be completely stopped. This was an echo of Duhei's argument that the sky was too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted. Right? And this hadn't proved true in World War II, but when you got nukes, it kind of is true, right? If you send 500 bombers and they each have a nuke, one of them's going to drop that [ __ ] you know?

Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Yeah. This feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure. Dume and Duh and

Lame. Yeah. Yeah. It is weird how history they literally rhyme. Yeah. And I got that. [ __ ]

No. I was cuz I was struggling to remember which one was which. Yeah. Duh. Is the old Italian guy who was like in 1921, bombers of the future. All we need. No. No use in having anything else.

Yeah. A couple decades later, the man who rhymes says the same thing, right? Nuke.

Yeah. Yeah, if you get if anyone gets into the military whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we need to redact it immediately. Uh so as Richard [sighs] I'm going to quote now from a piece in the New Yorker by Richard Rhodess in which he lays out Lame's thinking in the rest of this speech. Uh and it all kind of follows from the basic idea that you can't stop an aerial nuclear attack. Quote this meant to lame that the United States would have to have an air force in being that could immediate move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come. It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare to attack us if we are prepared. So in November of 1945, Lame was already thinking in terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein lay the

contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country. It would only destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right? And what he means by an air force in being is you always have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs ready to fly minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean you always have planes in the air with nukes. And that's going to mean for a period of like a couple decades there are never not nukes flying around in the air. Always. And this is before there's no governor on these. This is not a thing today.

Every nuke that we have, you have to get like codes and [ __ ] from the nuclear football. This is some guys in a plane have the ability to activate these things right?

You're like, "Oh, my wife left me." Yeah. Exactly. Like it's it's [ __ ] remarkable. We lived through the Cold War.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, what we see in this period, as early as 1945, is men in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians. People were tired after World War II. Soldiers long deployed wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military. Yet, now that the Cold War was kicking up, the US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments. Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an impossible problem. I'm going to quote from Roads again. In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its military forces to bare bones. shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly $90 billion to less than $15 billion and counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter a Soviet march to the

Atlantic across a war ravaged Western Europe. Right? And this is kind of the first use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is we can't keep all these soldiers in the field, but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the the scary communists. So, let's just keep a bunch of nukes all over the place. That way, we don't need as many guys. we can just set off a shitload of nukes and we can slow these the these Russians down while we get our [ __ ] in gear, you know, and this this works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have a bomb, right? Because they don't have anything to counter this with.

Hap Arnold sent a letter in 1945 laying out, he's an Air Force general, laying out some of the first principles, well the Air Force doesn't exist yet, but he's an army air thing general. Uh laying out some of the first principles for what would become the theory of deterrence. quote, "We must therefore secure our nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to deter them from launching a modern, devastating war." In order to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific projects the Air Force should support over the next 20 to 30 years. This resulted in 1946 in the Air Force setting up the Rand Corporation. You've heard of the Rand Corporation, right?

Yeah. I did not know that they were Air Force. Yes, that's how they start. And Rand just means R&D. Like literally that's that's why it's Rand, right? Um

Oh [ __ ] Okay. I assumed it was someone's name. Yeah, it's the Rand Corporation. They're set up in Santa Monica right on the coast. Beautiful area. Um and a former defense engineer named James Rubel later wrote of the this is the first Rand project. Rand quickly proposed a death ray project which the Air Force approved. So, top men, guys, everyone's super sane. Not a bunch of dudes whose brains have been melted by lead and war trauma just trying to come up with apocalypse weapons.

I don't know, GUYS. DEATH RAY FEELS LIKE A GOOD IDEA. Let's get one of those [ __ ] I watched War of the Worlds to hell with it

now. And to be honest, if we'd made a death ray, that would be pretty cool. Yeah. Would it be Second Amendment? You know like

Yeah. I I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret. Uh, I'm I'm ready for a death ray. I I think I think certain people should have that.

A death ray is a one-on-one. It's It's not really a major step up from bullets, you know.

It's probably faster and less painless to get shot with. Yeah. You know, and I bet it's I don't know good at killing Martians, which we might need to do if Elon Musk ever sets up a a colony on Mars. Anyway,

so I think we're both pro death ray is what we're actually I've come around on the Rand Corporation, Margaret. I'm going to be honest with you.

Yeah. Speaking of the Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast? Not the Rand Corporation because we're primarily talking about how they nearly killed everyone like a million times.

It's the we're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why we're coming out so strong on death rays right now,

you know. And actually, our death the company the death ray company that sponsors us is called Life Ray, you know, because it'll it's it's a it's a it's a death ray for personal defense, you know, keep saves lives. It saves lives. That's that's the life ray.

And we're back having a good time. Uh so right around the time the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war is over because the normal normal life is starting to reassert itself or at least the new normal, some people have begun to question the logic with with which men like Bomber Harris, Curtis Lame, and General P. I still can't believe his literal name was General [ __ ] Power approached aerial warfare. Was it really possible to break a nation?

General Motor is in charge of the motor pool. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing? Right. This is a this was a question that people, you know, there are guys like Lame that were like, obviously it is. Look at what we did. And there are more thoughtful men who are like, actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out. And I want to read a quote here about members of the strategic bombing survey from Key's book 15 minutes. How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants, the loss of which ravaged the Germans war making capabilities and destroyed their economy. This led to postwar air atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike. Key targets that if destroyed would have a large an effect far larger than the facilities mere destruction. These

plants were often located in major urban areas, said one Air Force general of this conundrum. I think it was sort of a shock to people when a few began to talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital and particularly when they began to ask what was a city but a collection of industry and that's a an important Yeah. It's it's hideous stuff.

Where the [ __ ] do they live? It must be these are suburbanites. This is because suburbanites have entered the war.

Yeah. Yeah. And are now running the army share. Yeah. But that that term bonus effects is used a lot in nuclear war planning. And a bonus effect is the added destruction that you get while destroying your the targets you're actually aiming at in atomic war. So you're trying

the opposite of collateral damage, but it's the same concept. It's it's collateral damage but good, right? Like we needed to take out this tank factory and we killed a million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby. Right.

And there's other bonus effects. Radiation poisoning causes bonus effects. Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they cause firestorms. Massive firestorms. some theoretically some like the size of states, right? And that's a bonus effect, you know?

I mean, they've been trying to do that since the beginning based on what you've told me last week. Yeah.

And they and they have been. You know, a firestorm really [ __ ] people up. People don't like firestorms.

No. The argument military leaders were making about the future for the first four years after World War II can best be summarized by a memo General Loris Norstad, assistant chief of staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in 1945. He laid out the need for a ready force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives, he argued the existence of this ready force would act as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons. So, first we need a ready force so that no one else will get nukes. If we always have planes ready to nuke people, no one else will even try to get them. Right. This is this is their first argument, you know.

Yeah. Not as strong as the argument that I think is coming based on what you told me last week.

Right. Yeah. Now, this ready force is established in March of 1946 as part of what becomes known as the strategic air command. The the SACE is responsible not just for nukes, but for the air force's long range bombing operations, right? When we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam, the SAC, especially in Korea, going to be heavily involved, right? And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars. But they come to control a lot of our nukes and they come to control our long-range missile assets. I say control. Technically, all of our nuclear weapons at this point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right? And they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that were starting to build in the post-war period, right? But what you're going to see happen during these first four or five years after the war is we're increasingly deploying nuclear weapons around the world to have this

this air force in readiness, right? This ready force. And so basically they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and SACE is is maintaining control of them, right? But you know the SACE gets them from the Atomic Energy Commission and the S

I'm surprised that none of them got stolen. Oh, they Oh, Margaret, just wait. NONE OF THEM GOT stolen maybe, but we lose a lot of these [ __ ] bombs.

Okay, we'll get to that. But the SACE today, one of the things that scares me about our current nuclear force is that it is the shittiest job in the Air Force, maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this, but I've talked to a couple of nukes and they they did not like it. It is not a prestigious job. It is not a fun job. It is boring. People cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in nuclear silos doing [ __ ] ecstasy, you know, because it's a [ __ ] job. In this period of time, it is not seen as a [ __ ] job. These are seen as this is the best part of the military to be in. This is the most elite force in the military. It's certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind of pilot, right? And these are the best pilots and engineers that our entire military can put together, right?

And they are tasked with a singular purpose. Um, so it's different at this point. That is probably what you want. Now, that's the idea.

It's debatable. Are they ever really that good? We'll talk about that. Curtis Lame takes command of the SACE in 1948. He's not the first guy in charge of it, but he takes command and he really he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year, 1949, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead. Uh, terrifying members of the US defense establishment. There had been a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and knew, well, of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program. They have resources. They've got spies. They're going to get a bomb, right? They have the ability to get uranium or plutonium, all this the whatever [ __ ] they need.

They It's It's hu like a fifth of the world's land mass. They have the ability to do this.

Yeah. Like we invented the wheel. No one else has the wheel. No one's going to figure out the wheel.

They figured out MACHINE GUNS, TOO. GOD DAMN IT. NO, of course they were going to do this. But there were and and it's a mix. There were plenty of people, obviously. There were a number of people in our military who knew that this was going to happen at some point, but there are a lot of people who are shocked, right, and are terrified like, "Oh my god, I can't believe the communists figured out this bomb." Right. Um,

is this because of that like spy couple or is that they they there are several spies who play a role. And honestly, I I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear weapons from being used again in war than anything else. I think once the US has them, if the Soviets didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up nuking the USSR at some point, right?

Yeah, that seems very likely. That's unprovable, but that that's kind of where I come in, right? Of like, well, it's kind of

it's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were no semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in the country? That would probably be more pleasant. Am I not going to have one when the crazy ass [ __ ] I know have them? Like,

yeah, the people who want to kill me have it. I've read enough history to know what happens after you disarm.

And [snorts] here's the problem. That's there's a logic to that. And also that leads us both to having 400 million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes, right? So it's it's like I understand the thought process, but it might fundamentally be what's doomed what will doom us, right?

Um, so there's a degree to which like I I have to put myself in the in where these guys are and and keep in mind this is not a period of time in which all of our generals or most or many of them are dudes who just came up and have done this as like a desk job, right?

All of these Curtis Lame saw heavy aerial combat. All of these guys did, right? So these dudes ARE [ __ ] UP AND CRAZY at this point. These people have incinerated cities from the sky. They're they're not thinking the way normal people think anymore, you know. And the same is true of the Soviets, by the way. They lost 20 million people in this war. The Soviets, we're not getting into it cuz I have less detail on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to the US, right? Sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged by this hideous war, right?

Yeah. So I I do have a little bit of like, well, [ __ ] how could this not have gone bad, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so for quite a while after the Soviets detonate their first atom bomb, the US will retain a massive advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right? That will not last forever. Eventually, we reach parody. I think they do actually beat us at one point in total number of nukes, so it's a little hard to know. But from this point forward, there was no denying that nuclear deterrence would eventually be a thing, right? And so you wind up in this there's the 19 like 50 to like 52 53 is this insanely danger dangerous period really up until like the early 60s where the Soviets have some nukes but not all that many and the US has a lot and we could have started and won a nuclear war. It would have been really pretty easy for us, right? There would have been casualties and tens of millions of deaths but they would have mostly been over in Europe, right? because the Soviet Union just didn't have a lot of

bombs and they didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs over here. There's no Y ICBMs. You're flying [ __ ] bombers right?

Um and long range bombs are just starting to be a thing maybe. Right. Like their long range bombing capacity, especially in like 194950, is probably could have accomplished that, but it wasn't great, right?

Um in 1950, a year after the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly 300 nuclear weapons. The USSR had five the newly founded joint chiefs of staff in the US Department of Defense, which that all gets started in this post-war period, right? We don't have the joint chiefs or like you know in World War II, right? This is a post-war innovation, you know, if you want to call it that. Uh but the joint chiefs of staff in the DoD had concluded after a study that some 200 nuclear bombs would be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth. Quote, leaving only vestigial remnants of man's material works.

And it's the joint chiefs. They say 200 nukes will do that. And so we build 300 150%.

Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll get a lot more. In 19 by 1951, we'll have more than 400 such weapons. Right. Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power, the USSR goes from 1 to 50 atomic weapons of varying power. Shortly after taking over the SACE, Lame decided that the new post-war air force had gotten sloppy and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio to prove it. A massive bomber. I love that he's like, "Well, let's have them pretend to blow up Dayton. See how good they

Yeah, [ __ ] it. So, he has this massive bombing raid over the city that's like, it's a fake. They're not dropping real bombs, obviously, but all of the fake bombs are horribly offt target. Like the every they [ __ ] up really badly. the supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs to save their goddamn lives, right? This is probably less on train. I mean, there's some degree of training. It's more to that just like bombers aren't great at hitting things precisely at this point, right? Yeah.

Um, and nukes, they're not TV guided. I remember that there were plenty of TV guiding.

Yeah, not quite yet. And it's the kind of, you know, one of the benefits of nukes, it's horrible to say this, but it is a benefit from a military standpoint, is that you don't have to be very accurate because it's a [ __ ] nuke, right?

Yeah. But it's what people say about shotguns, but real, right? But but accurate. Yes. Accurate. Like, you really can be pretty far off with a nuke and still hit your target. But these guys do so badly that even with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their intended targets. This is not an effective raid. And Lame May calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton, quote, "The darkest night in American military aviation history because not one airplane finished. That mission is briefed." And like, man, you were part of raids where guys died. I think that's darker. Like where guys died and the mission wasn't really that successful. I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs just don't hit very well. I don't know.

Y'all incinerated babies like, "Yeah, that might be darker. Hiroshima, all might be darker, arguably."

Yeah. Now, this means that when the Korean War kind of starts up, it's going to be not quite the last point. Some people will argue that like, you know, there's a some [ __ ] in the JFK's early administration like Berlin. Uh there's some [ __ ] in during the Eisenhower administration in uh Taiwan where we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary annihilation or getting nuked into the stone age ourselves, right? But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things would have like spiral into global annihilation at least at that point, right?

And given that fact, given that we could have nuked North Korea and even China and guys wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't. It's like shocking to me when I get into the history that like we that it didn't happen, right?

Yeah. Um, and going into the war, some powerful men in the defense department argued for just that action. Curtis Lame was the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it, was a wasting asset. In other words, because we know the Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and starting to get long range bombers and the other things they need to be able to strike us. Every day we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically, he's saying we got to use them or lose them, right? If we don't use them now, we'll never be able to use them. Right.

Right. And if you're playing the world like a video game, this is true. Right. If I'm a video game general, I would

I will start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game that gives me a nuke right?

Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Which is why gamers should not be allowed in the Department of Defense. Um,

no. Oops. All gamers. Turns out under strict control by non-gamers, right? So at the start of hostilities in uh Korea, strategic bombing advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic targets in North Korea and they succeeded in these bombing raids on paper, right? The the our SACE destroys the targets assigned to them. But North Korea, if you know much about North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot of expo. There wasn't a lot that we could really do to [ __ ] them up that bad by bombing them, right? like we do some damage, but that's just kind of not how their military is wired at this point in time.

And to make matters worse for the United States, we start this war using very new high-tech guided bombs like the ASM A1 Tarzison, but those run out immediately, which is a thing in modern warfare, too. If you look at what's happened in Ukraine, right? Like to say,

you have these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things, but also you it's really hard to make them. And that you exploded them all. Yeah.

And it turns out you go through that [ __ ] real fast in a war. So, as I said, Curtis Lame had taken over control of the SACE in 1948. And he was the architect of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the fact that we had run through all of our most advanced munitions without ending the war as another L for team precision bombing. Basically, Lame's like, well, look, clearly just striking strategic targets doesn't work. So, he orders US bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rission in that article that he wrote uh describes SACE's plan to uh as to quote increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing civilian targets.

Lame and the SACE used US air power to kill around 2 million North Korean citizens over the next two years and change.

Jesus [ __ ] I straight up didn't know that sixth of the population of North Korea we kill through primarily aerial bombing.

Oh my god. It's also still a hideous war crime. like we murder two million people and it doesn't

win like again the thing that keeps happening that has always happened every time someone like Lame is like well we just got to cause them enough pain that their morale breaks and what happens is their morale doesn't break right and it [gasps] they're always like forever and ever I've been I just did a bunch of stuff about uh people defending against the Roman Empire and Gaul and things like that right and you start saying like oh well these people Like these people, you know, the horrible druids, they sacrificed children or whatever, right?

And who wasn't like I know one who wasn't. Yeah. And even if they were, do you know how many you know how many as children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere near the evil of what

Julian genocide in Gaul? Like Yeah. And so like communism is whatever it it's the same thing as the people who are like well the concisador stopped the child sacrifice and the Americans like all the children.

You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve ANY [ __ ] KIDS DYING, MAN? TOTALLY.

OKAY, BRO. TOTALLY. YEAH. LOOK, I'm not saying I'm not saying any of these any society, any organized empire anywhere in the Americas or elsewhere has been a nice empire. None of them are. But if you're just being like, "Well, look at the bad things they did." Uh-huh. What were you guys getting up to? Huh?

Yeah. Is that just by you killing two million people? Yeah. I Yeah. Come on, bro. Was North Korea so bad that they all just need to die? It's the it's the same thing as like well look at all these [ __ ] up things and plenty of [ __ ] up things. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic Republic of China did a lot of but like we murder millions of people from the sky repeatedly all over like the world.

Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. Don't don't get up your own ass about your side being particularly nice.

The angels, right? The angels as you incinerate cities. Yeah. Um villages largely. But yeah, once again though, this is really important. Actual war disproves all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off, North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge in strategic bombing. Per the theories that Lame and Duhi both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right? That's the point. It just doesn't work. It's never true.

um that also are the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop North Korea from fighting effectively and none of the bombing we do doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes as badly as it does because guys like Lame had gotten their way in the inter war period. As I noted earlier, we really cut back on the military after World War II. And in fact, all military development outside of making the SACE stronger took a back seat. And as a result, when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained. I've talked to my grandpa about this. He was there the whole war. And he was like, "Yeah, the we were in [ __ ] shape when the war started." And it was because they had let like we like [ __ ] our bazookas wouldn't fire and [ __ ] Like we had like there were serious issues with

like the maintenance of basic equipment because guys like Lame were like, "All we need are bombers, bro. Trust me. All we need are bombers." You know?

Yeah. Whereas they actually needed the life ray, right? We needed the life. A couple of life rays would have really solved this whole problem. They wouldn't have even tried if we had a life ray.

That's what I'm saying. Now, after North Korea invades, they push the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur at the head of a UN amphibious landing force came ground at Inchan and pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with China. Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes and suddenly the UN forces are in full retreat and they get pushed back. It's really it's a it's a it doesn't not enough study of not enough people Americans know anything about the Korean War, but it's a [ __ ] wild ass time.

Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War II and then Vietnam. That's what I know.

Right. It's a little it's it's and Korea is kind of halfway between World War II and Vietnam in terms of like fighting tactics and all that stuff. You know, you do have a lot of these big armored clashes. You have dog fights and stuff, but you also have more advanced these, you know, you have these guided missiles and stuff, right? Early ones. Um, so Douglas MacArthur, as he's getting the [ __ ] hammered out of him, requests 10 atomic bombers with live nukes be put on standby in Guam, right? Because he wants to have the option to use them if in an emergency situation, right?

Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants these planes and their nukes placed under his direct control. And this is a weird moment where Curtis Lame may have saved a lot of people's lives. And I I don't think it's for a good reason, but he steps in and he begs Truman to say no and keep the bombs under SACE. He wants the bombs to stay with the SACE, right? He wants to have control over them.

But I do think he is less I don't think he would have I don't think he certainly was not unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested in doing it than MacArthur, right? He was not convinced it was the only path forward. and MacArthur was really convinced it was the only way to win. Right.

Right. Um now for decades because the the fact that we sent nukes to Guam during the Korean War has been wellnown. But if you look up any histories that are like older prior to the 21st century, it will say the SACE sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam. We now know that this was inaccurate. And I'm going to quote from the book 15 Minutes here. The first nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last B29 accelerated down the runway, two propellers ran away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to shut down two engines. In what would later be described as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel laden, bomblated bomber into the air and managed to turn back towards the runway. But as he did, he lost altitude and the bomber simply went into the ground. The crash was not hard, reported an aid to General Lameé.

But 12 men were dead and eight were trapped in the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke. We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes cuz they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about they cover this the [ __ ] up, right?

So this is like this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe kind of. The good news is that because of how nukes work, they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set for in order to get the big the the explosion that we all recognize as a nuclear blast. You have to set off a nuke in a specific way. The bad news is that even if it's not set off in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're still talking about 5,000 lb of conventional explosives in the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So, it it can still make from what I've seen cuz this happens a few times. It doesn't always make a dirty bomb, but it can you can get radiation contamination when one of these things explodes in a plane crash, right? That does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does in this case because of how much was covered up. I can't tell you if any of these [ __ ] civilians in the base house got radick,

but the blast of this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt 30 miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel and it injures 181 civilians. The Air Force immediately lies and says, "Oh, that was just not loaded with normal bombs. It was a training mission. Sorry guys,

not a nuke, though. Don't worry." Yeah, unlike the nine planes next to it, right? It was 44 years before the fact that a [ __ ] nuke exploded was declassified. And Margaret, that's not close to the only nuke we lost. This is the thing I did not know. We [ __ ] lose so many nukes. It's crazy. On November 10th of 1950, an SACE bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an MK4 atom bomb set to self-destruct 100 miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SACE from the end of World War II to November of 1950. Five lost nukes IN 5 YEARS.

OH MY GOD. AND THAT THAT COUNTS AS a success because we self-destruct the nuke. So it doesn't just land, right? We'll get to that.

Back to the Korean War. All right. As this cuz this is all going right as this is all going on. You know, MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear warfare. As the situation in Korea grows more dire, he develops a plan that would have involved dropping between 30 and 50 tactical atom bombs on enemy air bases and depots. And then he would have followed up by a massive invasion of Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from China were to be blocked. This army that he's going to have basically cut Korea off from China, they're going to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross into Korea for generations.

That was the plan is to radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people. That's like salty and the earth behind you but another level.

I cannot exaggerate how [ __ ] insane Douglas MacArthur is at this point. Like he is completely dangerously unhinged. One of the craziest men to ever command a US military force. Truman refused this insane plan. Thank [ __ ] God. And as a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with a shitload of dead people and without a real peace, but also without additional nuclear explosions. So, you know, that's good. It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying. You know,

so civilian control of government is better than the military control of government.

Yeah, cuz again, these people lose their [ __ ] minds. And MacArthur, like Curtis Lame is a voice of reason here. That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice of reason, but a little bit of one cuz MacArthur is batshit crazy.

At the start of the Korean War, the US moved almost 90 nuclear weapons into Europe out of fears that a wider communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now, the Soviet arsenal is really small at this stage, and again, there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good, so time is not as much of a factor, right? We don't have to have these things ready to detonate at 5 minutes notice, right?

Mhm. And so for safety sake again this is one of these the Atomic Energy Commission kind of comes in and is like we'll send the bombs over but not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores in the US so that we can airlift them over to Europe on a moment's notice but like

they're smaller than the bombs themselves. Right. Right. And and and it's safer than just having a live nuke where someone could steal it or set it off. Right.

You store the ammo and the gun in a different place when there's children around. Yeah,

this is the moments like this of just minimal sanity are so rare in the Nuke story that it's just like a breath of fresh air. Like, oh, somebody wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind. But you know who is out of their goddamn mind Margaret?

Is it our our sponsor, Life? That That's right. Liferay. Uh because it turns out Life Ray is incredibly radioactive. They will fry your brain. Even being in the same state as one is very dangerous. Buy one today.

It's worth it. Uh-huh. For safety. Yeah. Yeah, and we're back. So, at this point, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were not actively in use. The DoD never likes this and they used the opportunity to argue that the military should have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Guam. Right? This kind of the first time that the military gets direct custody for a long period of time is in Guam during the Korean War. In 1951, the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from 299 to 438, twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told in an internal report could destroy civilization. As I noted, the USSR has around 50 bombs. Their stockpile will grow rapidly after this point. But to deal with the fact that the gap is starting to close, we start working on a bigger bomb, right? It it

we first known by its nickname, the super, and this is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. And okay, as a as a brief aside, most postapocalyptic at post-atomic apocalypse movies and fictions, imagine a bunch of bombs kind of like the Hiroshima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does really because like you look at DC in in Fallout, what is it, three or four? I forget which one DC is in.

I've played some of them, but I don't remember the You look at DC and like a lot most of the buildings are still relatively intact right?

Mhm. That doesn't happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over like like if a stand one of the standard hydrogen bombs were dropped on DC like and these are actively aimed at DC at all times, right? The Russians always have some aimed at DC, you know, just like we've got [ __ ] aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them. Like we're both doing this crazy [ __ ]

Everyone within a mile of the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles of the blast is incinerated over the course of a few seconds. Right? You're talking millions of deaths in the space of a minute or two. Like these these are not survivable. Everything is comb there's no buildings left. Everything is combusted near like like the power of these bombs cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not an after thermonuclear war.

Is it a different It's like a fundamentally different technology. It's like it's a it's the craziest thing you can imagine. Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, right? Like like thermonuclear weapons work on the premise. What if you set off a nuke with a nuke? Right. Here's Annie Jacobson describing how these work. The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion. An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb if detonated in a city like New York or Seoul will kill millions of people in a superheated flash. These are

So this I think it's fision versus fusion maybe or something. Yeah, I think that's that's basically what's going on here. But you're you're setting instead of using conventional explosives to start the nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a nuke basically, right?

Uh yeah. Yo, dog. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It's it's just the craziest thing. The prototype thermonuclear weapon was designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a 10.4 megaton explosive capacity that made it equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Um, oh my god.

For an idea of what that's the first one of these we make, right? These things when we start detonating them, we'll talk about it, but like we repeatedly horribly irradiate and like permanently injure huge numbers of US troops because we don't get nearly far away enough cuz we don't realize how big they're going to be. Like one of these is like 50% larger than we'd expected it to be. Um, Enrico Fermy, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist, actually sent a letter to President Truman, begging him not to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb.

Quote, "The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence, and the knowledge of its construction, a danger to humanity as as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

Don't build the Torment Nexus." I know. Yeah. But what if a torment nexus is built by the torment nexus?

Right. Right. Right. But Garvin wants to solve this fun problem. I love that they were like, "We built the ultimate weapon. It can kill God." And people were like, "Not enough.

Not enough. What if we use one of those to make a bigger one of those?" Yeah. Um Truman ignores this letter from Fermy. The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the Marshall Islands in November of 1952. It left behind a crater large enough to hold 15 pentagons. In her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power of this device. Sophie's going to put it up, but you can see the bomb was detonated on an island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before, there's Illu Lab. It's an island. And in the after, there's just no island.

Yeah, that's just a black spot on the map. And it's gone. The island is gone. Yeah. Um, uh, year or two ago, James Stout, uh, over at It Could Happen Here went to the Marshall Islands to report on I mean, there's still ongoing fallout both in the literal and figurative sense for the people of the Marshall Islands because of how many [ __ ] nukes we set off there, right? Like there's tremendous suffering in the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this on quote unquote I mean they're un to the extent that they're uninhabited, it's because we forced people off, right? Like this is a a crime against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that after this series. Right. I'm not going to be getting into it because he did that series, but I Yeah.

Yeah. You can see just in the picture how catastrophic these weapons are. Yeah.

In the immediate wake of the Ivy Mike test, President Truman gave his farewell address. He mourned that, quote, "The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men." Now, that's not wrong, but you're one of the irrational men who made this possible. LIKE, YOU'RE WEAR YOU'RE WEARING THE BANANA suit here, Truman. Like, come on, man. You gave the call to use the first of these [ __ ] things.

Yeah. Uh Jacobson goes into more detail about how military planners respond despite what Truman says to the existence now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, "What happened after the US after US war planners saw what 10.4 megat tons could instantly destroy simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. In 1952, the United States had 841 nuclear weapons. A year before Truman left office in 1951, a group of scientists and researchers that included Dr. Robert Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy for responding to a Soviet invasion. They concluded that having the SACE be in charge of basically everything through their one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead,

yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO should replace manpower with low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that would evaporate advancing Soviet forces and that could be deployed by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree to which they're trying to do a kind of noble thing here, right? The stated goal here is bring the battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every city in Europe with atomic hellfire, right? That's what project Vista is kind of trying to argue for.

And their conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces the influence of the SACE. Right. The SACE has the nukes now. The Army wants some nukes of its own. Right.

Right. As Schlloer writes in the book Command and Control, as would be expected, Curtis Lame hated the idea of low yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of fizzile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SACE, was to strike first and strike hard. "Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can now only lessen defeat," Lame told his commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer the SAC's top priority. Lame now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear facilities became SACE's primary targets. Lame did not

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's not completely off base here. Lame did not advocate preventive war. An American surprise attack on the Soviet Union out of a blue, but the counterforce strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war. SACE planned to attack the moment the Soviets seem to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal. Offensive air power must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies. Lame argued. This transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might be paid with national survival. Right? This is the origin of what becomes launch on war, right?

So, you don't wait to get a bloody nose. You don't wait for them to hit you. you wait until you're pretty sure they're about to hit you and you hit them.

That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right? You can understand kind of how he gets there, but that that ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly once you're now saying we won't wait to get hit right?

It's so interesting, too, cuz it's it's all predicated on this idea that national survival, right? He's very concerned about national survival. Like I'm much more concerned about human humanity survival and not even because I'm a humanitarian people think

but because I'm a human like like all if if you destroy all life on Earth the nation's gone.

Yeah. There's there's well and that's that's part of the craziness like the understated crazy in that paragraph is that lame thinks tactical nukes are a waste of file material. Bro, you have four times as many nukes by 1951 as it would take to end civilization in just your country. What's wasted, bro?

And that's way you're not going to have enough of these [ __ ] Like that's by the before they made them the god killing machine that kills by God or whatever.

We need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in the [ __ ] mess. Now one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first concerns when he took office would be to bring a resolution to this conflict, right? This conflict between the army and the and the air force via the SACE. Right after having his national security team take a new look at US defense policies, Ike decided both sides were right. The US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe, but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all, in late 1953, the USSR detonated its first thermonuclear device. By 1954, the United States had more than 1,700 nuclear weapons. By 1955, that number had climbed to nearly 2500. We were building roughly two bombs a day. By 1959, the United States had an arsenal of more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five per

day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You see just how quickly, like there's not any any conceivable use for 12,000 nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand at least, you know, maybe less right?

like um surprisingly it was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant budget cutbacks losing a fourth of its manpower. This has kind of been forgotten but Ike does you know we people are generally aware of like the military-industrial complex speech but at the start of his presidency Ike really prunes the military budget and actually causes like kind of an eruption of anger within the military at him at General Eisenhower because he's cutting back so much. The army in order to deal with this loss of ban power starts lobbying for more nukes of its own because that's the only thing you can get funded for now, right? That's all they're giving out. You know, General James R. Gavin during secret testimony before Congress laid out the number of atomic shells, anti-aircraft missiles, and landmines the army needed. These are all nuclear artillery, nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, and nuclear

landmines. Nuclear landmines's a great plan. I can't come up with any negative thought about

Sounds good. Sounds safe. Yeah. [clears throat] What's crazy is how many Gavin wanted. 106,000 for battlefield use, 25,000 for air defense, and 20,000 to hand out to the rest of NATO.

Jesus Christ, bro. These people are so crazy. Insane. I will say there's there is some maybe the only arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are the air defense nuclear weapons because the plan of this is if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in

the only way you can stop them maybe and ensure that none of them drop a nuke on a city is you nuke them in the air because nukes [ __ ] up planes really bad and that's actually kind of reasonable if if there's this many of these things that like

also is only going to kill soldiers right I mean the fallout and Well, there there will be consequences to that, too. But it's it's it's a defensible position as compared to everything else that they're doing, right?

Like, I can see how you might want to be able to just like try to blow up 500 planes in the air with a big nuke, right? That kind of makes sense.

Like, this is all crazy, but I get it, you know? Well, it's so interesting because I'm I'm under the impression our current system is the like shooting a bullet with a bullet approach.

Yep. Yep. Did we move away from ski shooting? Uh, we definitely have moved away from nuclear anti-aircraft artillery. We have the ability to use that, but also we've gotten a lot better and so have our quote unquote adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from EMP and the like. Um, it's I don't think it's as much there's just not much point in defenses. The other reason is that like okay

sure, you could stop some bombers, but it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and the sublaunched nukes and you can kind of again We have these things called like THAAD batteries that could be if we actually had any placed in the US could be useful against like a sub attack, right? You could actually stop a good number of subbased nuclear weapons, right? With with these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas protecting like Israel and the like, right? We don't have any. One of the scenarios Jacobson talks about is like a a North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant on the coast of California which would cause this ab titanic environmental catastrophe. And she points out like there are plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing but we just we're we're using them all overseas so we don't have any set up. Uh-huh.

And that's one of those things where I'm like, well, I guess I'm if we're going to be spending money on something, I would like to spend money on more of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet in the air or more nukes. I don't know.

Totally. But none of this really is going to be enough if there's a full scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best hope is that maybe someone it's just one or two nukes that get fires and maybe we're able to stop them, you know.

Yeah. Anyway, that's part three. Margaret, got any pluggables to plug? Well, if you like history, cool people who did cool stuff is the opposite of the show. Although

I still have to end up talking about terrible things all the time. And you can go listen to that cool people who did cool stuff. And you can also listen to Robert and I playing Pathfinder.

That's right. On the It Could Happen Here feed or the Cool Zone Media book club feed.

That's right. You can check all that out and you can check me out in a dike day when we do the next episode because you're getting a bonus one this week. You lucky ducks. Anyway, assuming that you know we don't all die in nuclear fire, which is entirely possible.

Could happen right now. Oh, no. We're good. All right. Oh, okay.

Questions about this episode

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

In order: 0:00 Alfie Conn, Barton Bernstein, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman; 10:00 General Curtis Lame; 20:00 Rand Corporation, General Curtis Lame, Life Ray; 30:00 General Curtis Lame, General Dwight D. Eisenhower; 40:00 Douglas MacArthur, General Curtis Lame, Life Ray; 50:00 Annie Jacobson, Marshall Islands, Project Vista, General Curtis Lame; 1:00:00 General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including General Curtis Lame, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, SACE, Rand Corporation, Douglas MacArthur, Annie Jacobson. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

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

The episode runs 1 h 7 min; the transcript is about 13,673 words in 200 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 7, 2026.