EP10 Strangelove Whisperings

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the inevitability of war's impact on individuals, emphasizing the relevance of historical perspectives on conflict, particularly nuclear war, and the necessity for society to maintain awareness and critical thinking regarding global threats. It highlights a quote by Leon Trotsky, suggesting that while many may wish to focus on their personal lives, the repercussions of war inevitably intersect with everyone’s reality.

Key takeaways

• War doesn't wait for your consent; it's a party crasher that demands attention.
• Nuclear threats might seem distant, yet their repercussions can charge into our lives overnight.
• History warns: chaos shifts in an instant; today’s fears may seem trivial tomorrow.
• From 'superpower standoffs' to 'rogue state antics,' the nuclear landscape has bizarrely inverted.
• Fred Kaplan teaches that understanding nuclear history is less about past crises and more about current fears.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 43 min speaking
• Fred Kaplan (Guest) · 18 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, 1917, The Wizards of Armageddon
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Donald Trump, The Wizards of Armageddon, Bob Keeler, Bob Corker
3. 30:00 – 40:00: The Wizards of Armageddon, Herman Kahn, MIT
4. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Fred Kaplan, 1917, The Wizards of Armageddon
5. 1:00:00 – 1:01:28: 1917

Notable quotes from "EP10 Strangelove Whisperings"

• Today's show is sponsored by the multi Academy award-winning first world war themed film 1917 which is available to own starting March 10th on digital streaming and on March 24th on 4k Ultra.

  about 1917 · at 0:00

• Then getting them together in groups to dis I mean it's it's it's interesting stuff and he's just coming out with a new book called the bomb presidents generals and the secret…

  about The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War · at 5:16

• A anyway without further ado my conversation with Fred Kaplan author of the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war you can read Kaplan's a regular column by the way war stories in Slate he's written.

  about Fred Kaplan · at 6:38

• Were involved in nuclear policy in the late 50s to mid 60's George Raft Jones and Jack Ruina so I could ask people questions sort of speaking their tongue I understood how the…

  about MIT · at 7:51

• Herman Kahn in his book on thermonuclear war said that what he was trying to do was to create a vocabulary in which these problems can be discussed rationally it was sort of a…

  about Herman Kahn · at 9:56

• Out of his you know Golf Club house in Edmundston New Jersey on August 8th 2017 and said that if I have North Korea keeps making threatening noises and testing nukes and…

  about Donald Trump · at 14:20

• In 2017 around the same time as fire and fury Senate Foreign Relations Committee the Republican chairman at the time bob corker suddenly realized I mean you'd think that…

  about Bob Corker · at 17:29

• Say that's outrageous or anything like that and one of the people testifying was a retired general named Bob Keeler he had recently been the commander of Strategic Command and…

  about Bob Keeler · at 19:37

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Fred Kaplan — Person · Main guest · 6 mentions · first at 0:19
  Primary interview subject; discusses the history, strategy, and command-and-control realities of U.S. nuclear war planning and his new book on the topic.
• Donald Trump — Person · Referenced political figure · 2 mentions · first at 14:17
  Used as a contemporary trigger for renewed public anxiety about nuclear war and presidential sole launch authority; cited for 'fire and fury' rhetoric and nuclear modernization budgets.
• Herman Kahn — Person · Referenced strategist / exemplar · 2 mentions · first at 9:56
  Used as a canonical example of RAND-era nuclear strategists who tried to build a rational vocabulary for discussing thermonuclear war.
• Bob Keeler — Person · Referenced military witness (likely mis-transcribed) · 1 mention · first at 19:42
  Described as a retired general and former commander of U.S. Strategic Command who testified and was distressed by public doubts about the chain of command without reforms; likely refers to Gen. Robert Kehler.
• William Kalman — Person · Referenced academic mentor (likely mis-transcribed) · 1 mention · first at 7:45
  Kaplan cites studying at MIT with 'William Kalman' as one of the nuclear-policy insiders who helped him speak the strategists’ language; likely refers to William Kaufmann.
  Nuclear strategists that sort of thing to talk to me about stuff now one reason for this is that many years ago I studied in graduate school at MIT with William Kalman who was…
• Jack Ruina — Person · Referenced academic/defense official · 1 mention · first at 7:53
  Cited as one of Kaplan’s MIT-era connections to nuclear policy circles; Ruina is a known figure in U.S. defense research administration.
  Studied in graduate school at MIT with William Kalman who was one of them and also with a couple of other people who were involved in nuclear policy in the late 50s to mid 60's…
• Bob Corker — Person · Referenced U.S. senator / committee chair · 1 mention · first at 17:38
  Cited as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair who held a 2017 hearing on presidential nuclear launch authority after Trump’s rhetoric.
• Leon Trotsky — Person · Referenced historical figure · 1 mention · first at 0:45
  Credited (with some uncertainty by the host) for the quote framing the episode’s theme: war’s inevitability intruding on civilian life.
  A wonderful quote by would you call him founding father of modern Soviet Communism maybe Leon Trotsky the guy Stalin had an assassin go halfway around the world to assassinate…
• Tim Naftali — Person · Referenced historian (blurb source) · 1 mention · first at 7:22
  Identified by Kaplan as the person behind the 'Dr. Strangelove whisperer' blurb; described as a presidential historian.
  Interesting thing to be considered an expert on well I guess what he meant by that this was from Tim Naftali the presidential historians is that I do get the kind of dr.…
• George Raft Jones — Person · Referenced nuclear-policy figure (likely mis-transcribed) · 1 mention · first at 7:53
  Named by Kaplan as one of the people at MIT involved in nuclear policy (late 1950s–mid 1960s) who shaped his understanding; likely refers to a defense analyst with a similar name.
  Studied in graduate school at MIT with William Kalman who was one of them and also with a couple of other people who were involved in nuclear policy in the late 50s to mid 60's…
• Chuck Klosterman — Person · Referenced author / blurb-writer · 1 mention · first at 6:15
  Mentioned as someone who provided a memorable blurb for the host’s book; used to segue into discussion of blurbs for Kaplan’s book.
  Apocalyptic discotheque which I thought was a really wonderful turn of phrase but I love somebody called Kaplan the preeminent dr. Strangelove whisperer and so I started by asking him that's a heck of a nickname isn't it or a heck of a.

Books & papers

• The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War — Book · Primary recommendation · 1 mention · first at 6:43
  Fred Kaplan's new book discussed as a current examination of nuclear war history and strategy.
• The Wizards of Armageddon — Book · Primary recommendation · 4 mentions · first at 4:57
  Referenced as source material for the podcast and discussed as a key work on nuclear strategy.
  A doctorate but he's an author who wrote a book called the Wizards of Armageddon among others we used that book as source material for our destroyer of worlds podcast and it's…

Companies & orgs

• MIT — Company · Referenced expert · 2 mentions · first at 7:39
  Mentioned as the institution where Fred Kaplan studied with experts in nuclear policy.
• Slate — Company · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 6:50
  Mentioned as the platform where Fred Kaplan writes a regular column on war stories.
  Conversation with Fred Kaplan author of the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war you can read Kaplan's a regular column by the way war stories in Slate he's written for everyone so without further ado Fred Kaplan.

Sponsors

• 1917 — Product · Sponsor · 3 mentions · first at 0:10
  The film is being promoted as a sponsor of the podcast, with detailed discussion about its cinematography and availability.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 today's show is sponsored by the multi Academy award-winning first world war themed film 1917 which is available to own starting March 10th on digital streaming and on March 24th on 4k Ultra HD and blu-ray more on what's available then the end of our upcoming interview with Fred Kaplan it's hardcore history attending you may not be interested in war the war is interested in you that is a wonderful quote by would you call him founding father of modern Soviet Communism maybe Leon Trotsky the guy Stalin had an assassin go halfway around the world to assassinate with an axe pick so dangerous was he it's a great line though isn't it you may not be interested in war a war is interested in you says a lot doesn't it it says basically that it doesn't matter if you want to go think about happy things or focus on other pursuits and things maybe that you have more control over after all what do I have to do with a giant war that may

1:16 start with governments somewhere I'll just go about my life and and and do my own thing and let those people worry about their own things accept their own things will turn into your own things at some point right the war will be interested in you I thought about that when I thought about what would happen if we could rationally divide our thinking energy based on threat level and triage and try to come up with an idea of how much time we should spend on this or that given issue right how much time how much mental energy in a realistic sense should an educated individual at a modern society devote to thinking about X in this case I'm going to talk about nuclear war something that I think a rational person would have to admit if you thought about it for five seconds belong somewhere up near the top of your triage list it used to be there people used to think a lot about this when they thought it

2:17 could happen at any minute the funny part is it could still kind of happen at any minute you'd be surprised how quickly the tensions could ramp up and we could be in a situation where everybody forgets about that virus that mutated that might be coming over here and might give you a flu-like symptoms might kill millions of people like the 1919 flu all of that starts to fade into the background when you start talking about people using serious mega tonnage on your fellow man it is also funny to me in a triage sense that when we think about the use of nuclear weapons today we think about an infinitely less dangerous scenario than the one I grew up with we think about some rogue state somewhere getting a few nuclear weapons and and using them somewhere and it's dangerous because we think about this is a much less controlled system so the likelihood of something happening is much worse even if the worst case

3:17 scenario is nowhere near as bad as what would happen if you know superpowers lobbed missiles at each other with Merve Dwarfs on them you know it's one of those things where you think okay North Korea is a bigger nuclear thing to worry about then Russia is because North Korea might use their weapons and Russia is pretty safe right now but right now is the operative phrase things change on a dime history doesn't teach lessons right but it teaches the things change on a dime doesn't teach you when the next thing that will change on a dime is but there's plenty of examples that show the pattern right you might be worried about this coronavirus today two weeks of saber rattling and a degeneration in world tensions and all of a sudden you're thinking about what we probably should have been thinking about the whole time given where it probably belongs in the triage level the possibility in fact the fact that it's

4:17 easier than you might think to have happen of nuclear war not a nuclear bomb being used on a minor exchange from some third-world rogue state that doesn't know how to handle these things but a true threat from one country to another involving states that do know how to handle these things and I've thought about what you would do if you needed to handle them for decades now one of the best writers that you'll ever read talking about this question of thinking about how you would use or prevent the use of these weapons is a guy named Fred Kaplan you should probably call him dr. Fred Kaplan's got a doctorate but he's an author who wrote a book called the Wizards of Armageddon among others we used that book as source material for our destroyer of worlds podcast and it's fantastic stuff the people who had to try to get their mind around the mental challenge of human beings living with that kind of weapons

5:13 power the whole thing is fascinating and then getting them together in groups to dis I mean it's it's it's interesting stuff and he's just coming out with a new book called the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war so it takes like what we did or what he did in the earlier books of what we did in the destroyer of worlds and brings it up to modern times which in a really weird way makes it more chilling because you can't just say wow things got really hot during the Cuban Missile Crisis it must have been heavy right because Kaplan's bringing you up to the way the situation kind of is currently and that doesn't just make it heavy makes it scary and real and current these weapons have not only not gone away they've become much more accurate much more deadly is a better way to put them we haven't necessarily gotten any more intelligent about how to use them I love the phrase and this is

6:07 how we'll start the interview we did with Kaplan today I love the phrase that was used as a blurb on his book you know what the blurbs are the comments on on the back or in the flaps and Chuck Klosterman gave me one I liked in my book he called he called it an apocalyptic discotheque which I thought was a really wonderful turn of phrase but I love somebody called Kaplan the preeminent dr. Strangelove whisperer and so I started by asking him that that's a heck of a nickname isn't it or a heck of a anyway without further ado my conversation with Fred Kaplan author of the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war you can read Kaplan's a regular column by the way war stories in Slate he's written for everyone so without further ado Fred Kaplan the first thing is I have to tell you I absolutely think it is one of the best blurbs I've ever read on the back of the book the one that calls you the world's

7:11 pre-eminent dr. Strangelove Whisperer how do you feel about that it's an interesting thing to be considered an expert on well I guess what he meant by that this was from Tim Naftali the the presidential historians is that I do get the kind of dr. Strangelove types nuclear strategists that sort of thing to talk to me about stuff now one reason for this is that many years ago I studied in graduate school at MIT with William Kalman who was one of them and also with a couple of other people who were involved in nuclear policy in the late 50s to mid 60's George Raft Jones and Jack Ruina so I could ask people questions sort of speaking their tongue I understood how the analysis of you know exchange calculations as they were called were done so you know I seem to be one of the tribe and they could open up to me better okay so if we talk about a personality type certain kinds of personality types make good actors and

8:21 actresses certain types of personality people make you know titans of business if you had to sort of give us a short description of and obviously there's probably not one size fits all but is there a type that's attracted to this sort of Wizards of Armageddon job description well you know in the early days and what we're talking about in the 1950s through the 19th early 60s let's say I mean there really was a cold war done you know you know as well as anybody that this wasn't some fabrication of paranoia there was a real cold war people really thought there was a good chance that there was going to be a war between the United States and the Soviet Union so the kind of person who was say at the RAND Corporation back in those days where the Hudson in to examining this first thought they were talking about they were dealing with a real thing and they saw it in their powers and their mission to

9:23 enhance determines in other words to to do things that would maybe make sure that this war doesn't happen and then to limit damage of it did so they had a kind of a crusader image but they were also by and large economists social scientists mathematicians in other words they saw that that that the discipline in which they had been trained had some unique power to deal with this problem Herman Kahn in his book on thermonuclear war said that what he was trying to do was to create a vocabulary in which these problems can be discussed rationally it was sort of a religion of rationality that rationality defined as mathematical calculation can get us out of not just this problem but you know for a while that this sort of elevation of systems analysis and things like that there were people who thought this could solve all the problems of the world I have to say the kind of person who does this for a living now after you know

10:42 that the kind of elevation mystification of rationality has been you know has crumbled in the face of all kinds of things from the Vietnam War to the breakdown of all kinds of social processes I have a I have a little list I don't know the way of you could if you could put it down to a type of what what kind of person gets in this at least in a very deep deep way now unless they're a military officer and it may be that there aren't people like this anymore and as a result maybe these problems aren't dealt with rationally but maybe they could never be downwind rationally you know it's fascinating if you look at how much ink and time and effort what went in in the 1950s 1960s and into the 1970s towards exactly what you're talking about the Omo spock-like analysis of the game itself and the various options and the rationale you know countermoves and all that sort of stuff and to talk about I was struck by

11:49 what you said that maybe there aren't those people today and then all of a sudden it popped into my head that I don't hear those kinds of conversations today is this all been so internalized that we don't have to have maybe that the first few decades were the discovery period and this stuff's all been absorbed or is this something that went out of fashion when the the seeming inevitability or at least extreme likelihood of a general nuclear exchange went away well I think I think for a while it was it was internalized to the point where you know I conclude my first book was the Wizards of Armageddon was awesome by the way oh we used it as a source it was fantastic oh thanks but I mean it was about these people that that's mainly what it was about and and how they how they had influence on policy and I ended the book by noting that this book came out in 1983 that the sort of second generation of these

12:42 people you know the Cold War was still going on they had so absorbed the analytical framework of the founding fathers that Rand and so forth that they had come to think that it was it was real that it reflect a reality that at least these ideas had been hammered home so often in books and treatises it was also it was almost like the stone of dogma whereas you know you talked to the first generation people you know they'll admit like hey you know we never knew whether this was real in fact we thought it was unlikely that you could limit a nuclear war or control how it would spin out but if we if there was any chance that you could do it at least we we should try instead of blowing up the world all in one in one stroke now though at least until a couple years ago for about the previous 30 years nobody was thinking about nuclear war nuclear weapons at all the Cold War was over you know we were all on a holiday

13:52 from history quite the contrary to it being internalized I think all of these ideas have been at least among the broad educated public interested in international relations let's say forgotten and one reason I wrote that this new book the bomb is precisely because of that when Donald Trump came out of his you know Golf Club house in Edmundston New Jersey on August 8th 2017 and said that if I have North Korea keeps making threatening noises and testing nukes and missiles he will rain fire and fury on North Korea like the earth has never seen and you know that was kind of a provocative first of the rhetoric alone but second he wasn't saying that a bay attack us will rain fire and fury but just if they developed the capability to attack us he would do that and that got people all kind of people very worried and nervous about the possible prospect of nuclear war for the first time in decades but this

15:07 nervousness took form in the shape of a kind of vague anxiety because people had forgotten all of the discussion about nuclear strategy and so forth and they ever knew it and so I thought well it's it's time maybe to to take another look at the history of this thing I have a persistent devil's advocate side in me and and there's a part of me that thinks that the awakening to how dangerous it is perhaps to have a single individual in charge of the the world's most powerful Arsenal ever i I think people maybe were a little complacent because they felt like the person in power would never violate whatever they we can trust you know this individual to act responsibly it's almost like you had to get somebody that shattered that sense of trust to maybe give the right amount of attention to a command-and-control problem that if you look at the Constitution seems ridiculous right you put the power to

16:02 launch a war into one person's hands alone and we can talk about you know the actual restrictions that might be on a person in a second but but I mean it seems like that and I always look at it as a technological question right there you don't have time for Congress to deliberate and everything when the missiles are in the air but I mean it seems like maybe if there was an upside to this whole thing it's the people are examining this obvious hole in our whole you know defense strategy in constitutional design now in a way that they weren't when we had the Obama presidency or the Bush presidency or the Reagan presidency does that ring true you could take this all the way back yeah I think it is true I think one thing that Trump has done is to sort of slap this awake to the reality that hey you know maybe we'd forgotten but these these thousands of nuclear weapons are still here and always have been here and

16:55 there's a whole machinery a whole apparatus that is planning how to use them in various contingencies and keeping them maintained you know the the the new defense budget that Trump just put out has twenty nine billion dollars devoted to nuclear weapons and the things that carry them that was about a 17% increase over the previous year so yeah these things are still here now what people will do about it I don't know there there's a there was a hearing in 2017 around the same time as fire and fury Senate Foreign Relations Committee the the Republican chairman at the time bob corker suddenly realized I mean you'd think that someone in that position would have known this already but kind of suddenly realized that the president has the sole power to blow up the world of he wants to there's nothing anybody can do about it and so he held a hearing and it was the first hearing that Congress had held on this subject

18:03 since the mid-70s that tells you something right there it was an open hearing wasn't reported on much I I watched it on c-span 3 it was live and it was the notion the premise of the hearing was confirmed that yeah yeah the president it's it's the human factor is the deciding element now did Congress do anything about this no and the issue is brought up you're right it's one thing if the missiles are coming and you've got 20 minutes warning you don't have time to you know call hearings or assemble the group of eight in Congress to discuss this but they were talking about well what if the president is contemplating a first strike and even if not even so much a preemptive strike but a preventive strike say against North Korea if they're starting to cast ICBMs and nuclear weapons that's a legitimate question I think you do have time do you want it all to rest in the power of one person but nothing was done that there

19:13 was a moment in the hearing where a Democratic senator even said look let's cut the let's cut the politeness out of this where we're holding this hearing because the president is erratic he has poor judgment and you might get us into a war and the remarkable thing is that no Republican senator on the panel disagreed with this you know it didn't say that's outrageous or anything like that and one of the people testifying was a retired general named Bob Keeler he had recently been the commander of Strategic Command and he came away from the hearing very distressed because to his mind hey if Congress wants to change the rules about launch Authority that's fine that's that's their right to do but what he was really upset about was that they shouldn't publicly raise doubts about the reliability or legitimacy of the chain of command and then do nothing about it and that's that's what they had

20:19 done in this hearing I want to I want to talk a little bit about something you just mentioned the human factor and get into that a second because um as you explained it and I've heard this elsewhere too that this is if you say to the to the military higher-ups are the people involved in the in the decision-making here does the president have the power to start a nuclear or all by themselves they will often say no as you pointed out because they're not supposed to follow illegal orders or irrational orders or all that but at the same time when when in the hearings you just mentioned they dialed down and got granular on that question that's what they answered kinda that you know it's sort of the human question in other words somebody at some chain of command has to say no and the likelihood maybe of that happening in certain situations I mean you mentioned in your book people that were transferred and fired simply

21:06 for asking questions about how they would know if the launch orders they received were legitimate right that was enough to get somebody so do we have a cyst do we have a system that is encouraging the human factor no in fact quite the contrary you're right I mean the military military officers and enlisted personnel as well are trained that they should not they should not obey they have an obligation to obey legal orders which suggests that they should not obey illegal orders but what is in the illegal order you know there's a book you know but the football the thing that the guy carries around in a case next to the president all the time it's not a button and it's not a palm print that the president lays his fingerprints in it's a book and it has codes in it and the codes refer to options to attack options and a have an attack option is in that book that means that the the military lawyers have

22:13 already deemed that it is legal now there's all kinds of other circumstance as well you know under what circumstances but you know who is to determine that wait who is oh is a one-star general the person to determine whether something is legal or not that's generally not what he's trained for and then here's how the chain of command works president gets warning of something going on or just gets it in his head he wants to attack there is assembled a conference call involving some cabinet people some four-star generals if they can be found and gathered and there's a consultation but ultimately it's up to the president in fact the chain of command does not go through the people that he's consulted he sends a the guy carrying around the football president somehow authenticate who he is the order goes to a one-star general in the National Military Command Center which is located in the basement

23:20 of the Pentagon and that person sends the order to the submarines the missile ears bombers and that's it the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the Strategic Command commander the Secretary of Defense they are not in that actual chain of command oh there was an incident in the 70s there was a an Air Force officer named he's a major harold herring he was a Minuteman in late 73 he was training to be a Minuteman launch officer he had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam so forth and in the training center he asked he asked his instructors how can I know that an order I received to launch my missiles came from a same president and what checks and balances exist to verify that an unlawful order does not get into the missile man now these are crucial and you would think you would you would want you would wanted an officer who asks these kinds of questions right he's he's asking you know what what can I do it to

24:28 assure that I'm not abetting a serious war crime right well he was basically taken out of the MS I'm an instructor Minuteman instructor class and put before a panel and they drummed him out of the Air Force so you know this is they the people who are in places like the National Military Command Center and the people holding the football and the people supposedly down in the missile holes and so forth the missile silos they are selected in part on their perceived inclination to salute and follow orders so okay so let's talk I'm gonna shift gears a little bit because that is so disturbing but but but you use a word that's and and this is um so as a civilian let's say let's say you're an 18 year old kid and listening to this interview that's the first you've heard of this right it reminds me of and you use the description several times the the the reaction to new presidents when they get that first big briefing on what the

25:36 nuclear war plan is and you used I wrote it down several times you use the word the president came out appalled over and over and over again um these are intelligent people who ran for office who were briefed all through their debates and all through the process some of them had political experience of to very high levels before they were elected how can almost all these people be so changed when they come out of these meetings how could they know so little going in theoretically versus the reality after they get the the behind-the-scenes briefing well because it isn't something that's generally discussed or at least not on this level I mean the president gets a briefing on what's called the SIOP assign the new president coming in yeah a new president coming in single integrated operational plan it's one of the first things like okay you're the guy who might have to decide whether to go to nuclear war

26:27 let's take you through what this involves and they just have no idea of how well I mean it's changed over time but let me let me tell you what the first SIOP said the one that kennedy was briefed on there the first tie up where they actually integrated all of the nuclear weapons into one plan in 1960 this was the plan the plan and it was the only plan was that if the Soviet Union in dated Western Europe or grabbed West Berlin and you know it wasn't something for which we had enough conventional forces to push back the invasion D plan the only plan was to unleash the entire US nuclear arsenal against every target in the Soviet Union the satellite nations of Eastern Europe and communist China even if China hadn't been involved directly in the war and it was estimated that this would kill about two hundred and eighty five million people in 1960 1962 nnedi and Eisenhower as well also received every year a

27:39 briefing this was there was something called the the net evaluation subcommittee it was a very secretive office inside the National Security Council it's very existence was classified they would take the data on how many weapons we had how many weapons it was believed the Soviet Union had and they would run a computer-generated war game and then look at the consequences and there was a briefing of just you know maybe a dozen people and it was just appalling that was you know tens of millions of people killed hun tens of millions more injured in in need of hospital care for which there were no hospitals the government completely breaking down the economy a wreck and when Kennedy received this briefing he turned to Dean Rusk the Secretary of State was sitting next to him and said and we call ourselves the human race now when Eisenhower first heard this briefing he was innocent you know five-star general secure you know World

28:46 War two hero he wrote in his diary how disturbed he was he said I guess maybe the only option is to launch a pre-emptive first strike before this happens but that would go against our values and Congress would never stand for it which is kind of an entry take and then he said this only makes me more determined to keep the threshold to to keep deterrence Furman Eisenhower his view was okay we don't have conventional forces so I'm going to put out he put out a policy called massive retaliation which said you make one move on an into our vital interests we will blow you to smithereens that was a way to deter them that's what he thought and by this wasn't just you know Curtis LeMay and Strategic Air Command this was General Eisenhower the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed a document saying that armed conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union will go nuclear at the first opportunity regardless how the war

29:53 was initiated I want to I want to expand on that a little bit because I I know more than the average bear on this and you you still had a ton of things in the book that I'd either never heard or never saw integrated into the story well and and one of the things that you did a really good job and I've been meditating on it sort of ever since um is the disconnect between military leadership and political leadership I mean I I had never heard the the Kissinger line that you used that he had said because because this this seems to strike against all the public released information about the president regardless of which president's desire to maintain deterrence especially in the 60s and 70s where he said that Nixon would not push the button basically that he would not kill 80 million people I actually quoted he said said in a remarkable statement your words that he meaning Nixon won't push the button he

30:46 won't use nuclear weapons in a crisis and that to only have the option of killing 80 million people is the height of immorality I found that fascinating when you juxtaposition that sentiment the civilian leadership sentiment with the Curtis LeMay Strategic Air Command a scion sentiment well you know it's interesting because this is an I'm going to now reveal the one thing that I got wrong in the Wizards of Armageddon I had which gun was written 37 years ago I had in that book that when Kennedy came in and as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reformed the SIOP I'm putting all kinds of limited options so that the first step would not be total catastrophic destruction of everything you know he put little you know we would restrain we wouldn't attack these kinds of targets the first instance we'd only attack those strategic forces not the cities it was very elaborate very detailed very sophisticated what I

31:47 learned in researching my new book is because what when I when I did that first book I learned about McNamara's reforms only by interviewing people who were involved in it there was no documents on the subject Declassified yet at that point what I learned in the new book is that the Strategic Air Command just ignored these directives me not not totally what they would do they they would they would get the joint the joint staff to put little caveats like to the extent feasible or if it is consistent with military objectives we will do these limited options as they were called and then of course they were determined they knew that it were actually come they would determine that it wasn't feasible and it wasn't consistent with with military objectives so by the time Nixon becomes president and he and Kissinger get their SIOP briefing and you know Kissinger has been writing about this since the mid-50s and

32:53 he thinks that and he's peed been following because he had been a consultant in the Kennedy administration he knew about these options that McNamara was putting forth as directives to sac he he was stunned that that none of it it had the slightest impact and Nixon once gave a public speech where he talked about the need to develop some options that would not leave us the choice of surrender or suicide in the event of a war like this so that that's what he was talking about the line that you quoted where where Kissinger says I think Nixon just won't push the button the only outcome is 85 million people killed that was in a behind doors meeting of the National Security Council of his advisers it was you know that I got that from a top-secret note-takers account of the meeting which had recently been Declassified because that would destroy deterrence if something like that ever got out uh yeah

34:00 might if you're saying if the whole idea is to convince the other side that yeah you're going to you're you really are gonna do this the other side thinks that you won't do it well maybe it's maybe he'll get aggressive I was I was interested in sort of the polarities and if you'll pardon the the analogy the triad of interests here that develops after the the bomb is first discovered I mean you could talk about the the Bertrand Russell sometimes robert Oppenheimer we need to rid the world of past behaviors because they'll destroy us the middle ground which is maybe the Von Neumanns and the Herman Kahn's and these people who try to figure out how to use our rationality to live with the tough situation but then on the far side is the military and you could say not just in our country but also the establishment in the Soviet Union I was I found it interesting when you were talking about Kissinger had talked about

34:53 how and this is what you just talked about how unresponsive to presidential direction the military was and and you don't just point out that they found wonderful little lawyer like wiggle words in the in the specifics and the small print but also they had because I was trying to figure out in a democratic system how they worked this and you were very clear about how they would have allies in Congress and in the Senate you know in the house and in the Senate who controlled important committees on defense and expenditures and whatnot and they could sort of undermine a president that they didn't like or or anyone that was soft on security or what-have-you through their allies in the legislative branch is that kind of how the military was able to in a free society where the president's supposed to hold the cards in all this is not how they kind of count balanced his power well to some degree

35:40 I'm you know the military is also evolved over this time I mean the 50s and the 60s Strategic Air Command was was basically dominated by people who had been strategic Bamba dears second little boy tots yeah and you came up in the culture of of Curtis LeMay you know who was the first effective commander of sac and you know Curtis LeMay had fire but he had been in the head of the 21st Bomber Command in World War two he'd been in charge of fire bombing Japan and in the spring of 1945 general HAP Arnold who was the commander of army air forces came to him and said when were the war be over that Nazis had already surrendered the Japanese were still fighting LeMay took the problem to his staff they did the math they you know how much how many how much territory has been destroyed so far how minutes more territory there is to go how many bombs that'll take how long it'll take the bombers to get there and he came back

36:45 and said the war will be over September 1st because that will be the time by which we will have bombed every square mile in Japan so that was his idea of war it's bomb everything and when the atom bomb and then the hydrogen bomb came along this became more appealing still so the notion the very notion having this incredible weapon that you would want to employ strategies involving restraint or using them in some limited way struck guys like LeMay and his successor at SAC whose name was general Tommy Power who had been Lemay's deputy but whom LeMay once referred to as a sadist god this notion is this notion of restraint struck Lemus is perverse why would you want to restrain yourself I I mean in this incredible moment there was a my professor old professor at MIT who bill Kaufman who had come up with some of these ideas of restore to counter for us and so forth was giving Tommy power briefing on this and

37:55 Tommy power pound is just on the table and said why are you talking about restraint look if at the end of the war there are two Americans and one Russian then that means we won Kaufmann said well you better make sure it's a man and a woman and power stormed out now power was an exception not everybody was like that but they did have this bomb everything mentality as time went on the military about the LeMay types died out more people came into the command who had had experience as tactical fighter pilots or as tactical bombers in other words looking at-at at military use a military function is to go after discrete targets as you would in a military campaign and a conventional military campaign so things did loosen up a little bit but still there was this you know sac is out in Omaha and and LeMay and his successors exploited that fact yeah they were isolated from Washington but that also allowed them to

39:00 do their own thing away from the peering eyes of Washington and much of what they did was incredibly technical and based on very very highly classified stuff and so they were allowed to get away with with an incredible amount of of excess and and really almost perverse thinking about strategy I was shocked and you know I again I know quite a lot about this but it is interesting how much of the way the whole nuclear apparatus developed could be I mean you might be able to make a case that one of the key reasons for it is inter-service rivalry and and and jealousy over military budgets I mean I've never heard a better argument in my life for that age-old question about whether or not there's too much duplication and redundancy by having multiple service branches um I want to use your your knowledge of this for a second so we've been talking about the way things were but I always think that when somebody spent as much time on

39:57 a subject as you have on this I'd like to get your own personal insights if you don't mind for a second but for exam we talked earlier about the command and control problem there's this dicey issue of what if the situation we have now is insane what makes more sense and is something that would work as opposed to you know we can't say let's deliberate for two weeks but but in your mind have you heard talking to all these people any any reforms that would make sense in this area and that were workable well you mean about Seoul presidential a way to diversify the decision-making on something as big as that well I would well you know there have a few times been amendments weum Proxmire offered amendment in the 70s Edward Markey did it his most recent hearing which basically said that four first strikes that do not involve you know a response to an imminent threat that I don't know either Congress gets a vote or the cabinet has

40:58 to be consulted or the sort of eight people in Congress that you consult about covert operations has to be consulted I think that's eminently feasible you know the president is not facing have only got an hour to make this decision right to to get that kind of power I think also listen I believe it or not look that there there is a system where again eight eight members of Congress are led in on really every covert operation the people in they call it the Select Committee on House Intelligence and the Select Committee unscented intelligence they are informed about all covert operations that the intelligence agencies do and there's never been a leak out of these committees you have to agree to certain things even to beyond these committees there is no such committee dealing with nuclear war planning the Armed Services committees of the House and Senate they get into it in a very cursory way they don't get

42:11 nobody has shown not even the Secretary of Defense he gets a brief the vague outlines nobody has shown the targeting is I have this one chapter in my book and maybe this is what you're getting to even if you're not if I did you tend to bring it up there was no civilian interference in this and no real limited options it was the nuclear war plan remained you know blow up everything really all the way until almost the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and it there were there was a civilian a civil servant in fact in the Pentagon named Frank Miller and this was when first carlucci and then Dick Cheney of all people was Secretary of Defense and before he got this job Frank who had been working in the State Department immersed himself in all of these documents that McNamara and McNamara successors had written over the decades calling for restraint and limited options and the guidance that

43:17 they sent to the to sack and so forth and then he sits it on the SIOP briefing to the Secretary of Defense and he doesn't hear anything about this doesn't hear anything about limit options restraint or anything and he says what's going on here and Cheney basically gave him authority to go make a deep investigation of the war plan and told ordered people in fact to let him and his staff see everything in the books and they discovered some amazing things that the level of overkill was just staggering now that we're talking about 1989 here the 50 miles there were 700 nuclear weapons aimed at a 50-mile radius around Moscow there was an airbase in the Arctic Circle it was it was a secondary airbase it was an airbase that Russian bombers would land on on their way back from having nuked the United States and it was so cold it couldn't be used for most of the year there were 17 nuclear weapons aimed at

44:26 this space there was an anti-ballistic missile site in Moscow that we learned later really didn't work at all there were 69 weapons aimed at this missile site I went there also the wave target sets for time for example one target set was destroyed the Russian tank army okay well what they did it wasn't even just destroying just the tanks they also destroyed the factory that made the tanks the factory that made spare parts for the tanks the factory that made it rolled the steel to make the tanks the mines what I mean you know went on and on like that it was just incredibly redundant and then here came the kicker here came the the thing that blew the whole system apart at this point George HW Bush was negotiating a strategic arms treaty with the Russians and one of Frank's staffers a guy named Gil clinger asked his contact at the joint strategic target planning staff which was the division of Sacrement

45:34 actually did the mechanical targeting above a war plan he said you know they're thinking of lowering number of nuclear weapons to such-and-such would you still be able to perform your mission with so few weapons and the guy and said well no that that's not how we think about this because what what I mean no no I understand what you mean but that's not what we do what we do we take the number of weapons that are given to us and we apply them to the targets that are on our lists now the implications of this are insane it means that at no point had anybody in the operational side of this asked well how many weapons do we really need to perform whatever mission it is they want to perform no it was complete there was a there was a sac commander named Jack Shane who when hearing in the 90s I guess I was a late 80s said I need 10,000 weapons because I have 10,000 targets and people thought he was either joking

46:46 or or maybe he wasn't very bright but no that is exactly how it worked it was a it was a completely out of control process with no with no reference to policy or aims or proportionality and this is what happens when you let a very powerful highly highly specialized bureaucracy go completely rogue go completely independent with no oversight even from the people who are actually setting the policies that this bureaucracy is was set up to implement now we've been talking about high-minded stuff and policy and all these kinds of things which is fascinating but I think we we should not lose track of what you point out in the book over and over and what is the key issue here and it's bodies on the ground right Bertrand Russell's I dream of London in ruins with corpses everywhere you know I was wondering about humankind's ability to stay on a knife's edge of concern and alert generation after generation I think

47:56 maybe after thinking about this that it might almost be an evolutionary help that we don't continually worry about nuclear weapons to the same degree that we did in like 1955 and yet if we don't do we risk presidential campaigns where we're talking about minutiae and small little opinion things or optics things that don't matter at the expense of talking about some of the very important things we we talked about here how can you keep something this important and this almost impossible in your mind to imagine thing how can you keep this at the height of the triage alert level indefinitely yeah I think you're right I don't think like you and I are sitting here you know I'm 65 years old I'm 59 okay well maybe I've got another 15 years and I don't think about this every day maybe I should you know there's a whole bunch of things that that that that we don't think about I mean much of much of what we do in life is kind of an

48:57 evasion and this of course what we're talking about nuclear war is a is a super evasion but you know that this does lead to one thing that you mentioned a little earlier about presidents versus the generals now the subtitle of this book is president's generals and the secret history of nuclear war and one thing that I found consistent leading up to the current president who has meant hasn't yet been tested on this but about whom one can make some inferences is that a lot of these presidents more than we realize faced crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was seriously contemplated and the records show that they immersed themselves very deeply in the logic and the strategy and the scenarios and in the consequences and they were led through this by briefers who spoke of it in very calm and rational terms in some cases advocating certain kinds of uses of nuclear weapons and in every case

50:10 when the president got to the bottom of this rabbit hole he realized now I'm not going to go there the consequences are just too catastrophic and they figured out some way to scramble out of the rabbit hole and to settle this crisis through some diplomatic solution and you know you can ask um why is it I think if you had gone back to 1947 say and asked somebody there what do you think the chances are that we'll get to the year 2020 and never use these nuclear weapons again nobody uses them I I I don't think you'd find very many people who would think that was a possibility I think you'd be seen as a as a naive or an excessive optimist if you said yeah I think that's possible and yet we've done it we've done it so why is that well I think it's three things one thing I think you know nuclear deterrence I mean you know it's powerful thing not a lifetime guarantee but the idea that have you start messing around that

51:17 the other person will strike back and destroy you that's that's a restraining influence the second part is that as I discovered in this book we've had the lie we we've been blessed with leaders who in a pinch turn out to be fairly shrewd and rational at least when it comes to this sort of thing and three we've had good luck I mean there have been lots of accounts of you know incidents in which you know a flock of geese just somebody looks out on a radar screen it looks like missiles coming their way or a software error that that makes it look like that missiles are coming our way and there's somebody in the middle level of the command who decides yeah this probably isn't real and doesn't entice nothing about it so we've had it's a combination of deterrence shrewd leaders and good luck but what happens if we have a situation where we have slow-witted lure slow-witted leaders and a spate of bad

52:27 luck and that's what converts a combination that you know the dice are gonna come up that way at some point even if they haven't just yet and and then what happens that's that's the sort of frightening thing uh and not to change the Soviet on a note that I found another fascinating thing and like I said I know quite a bit about this and you threw things out there where I was like wow I didn't I didn't know that or I didn't realize that or I didn't internalize that I was fascinated by how the different presidents sort of dealt with this issue in a way that sort of matched their personality so watching an Eisenhower try to figure out how to deal with this versus a Kennedy and then when you got to Reagan I found that so interesting because instead of doing it like an Eisenhower level or a Kennedy level where he was looking at the giant dr. Strangelove and and and and and vaughn know him inside of this he took

53:18 it down to a human level I love that story where we're you and I'm gonna let you tell it cuz you'll tell it better but we're we're ray and Gorbachev right when they're at this you know they had been at a knife's edge within drop-off and Brezhnev and and sure and and and the various leadership that was dying left and right then you get this transformative first person Gorbachev in an environment where everybody distrust one another and Reagan the ultimate cold warrior you know we start bombing in five minutes that guy sends everybody else away and with just the translators gets Gorbachev on a couch and and brings it down to a level far below the the Rand Institute level and just gets it to a real human thing can you tell the story about the aliens yeah well you know Reagan you know I was a reporter I was covering Reagan and and he turns out to be a more complicated figure than then I thought for one thing

54:09 he was kind of a secret nuclear abolitionist but his staff tried to keep this from everybody but this was why he was in favor of Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative he might have been one of two or three people who really thought that's what that program was about which was to kind of erect a shield that would keep all nuclear weapons out rendering them a bit interrupts ly first term comes in boosts the budget does make all kinds of provocative statements about the Soviet Union the NSA and CIA are doing incredibly provocative things and then Reagan realizes that the Soviets believe that we're setting up to launch a first strike and he says oh god we have to start dialing this back and he reaches out to Soviet leader as you say a couple of them died then he goes to meet with Gorbachev this is in 1985 in Geneva and they're their first round of talks is kind of tense and so they go for a walk

55:06 along the lake and they duck into a cabin where fire is roaring and it's just them and their Trent and their translators and load takers Reagan leans in and says if the United States were lot were attacked by aliens from outer space would Russia come to our defense and Gorbachev says absolutely and Reagan says I feel the same way about you and so when they came back to the conference room Secretary of State George Shultz who had no inkling of this until much much later wrote in in his account of this that all of a sudden the atmosphere had changed completely these two guys were laughing and joking like they were old friends and that's what led to the sort of pivot away from Cold War to the end of the Cold War and this was something real to Reagan a couple years later Reagan wrote a speech to the UN General Assembly and: pal tried to exercise this line that I'm about to read cite a couple of times and Reagan

56:11 kept adding it back in and it was this he said and we were attacked by aliens from outer space the corrals and cut disputes between us here on earth would seem trivial by comparison now on the one hand this is kind of nutty right but on the other hand hey you know he has a point and and maybe when you're dealing with with a subject that is cataclysmically catastrophic maybe a view from a billion miles up is is is not a bad way to go holy cow is that the best ending I could ever think of for an interview why don't why do we call it quits here unless there was something that I left out that you really want to include please bring that up you know I mean there is if you if you want to talk about an insert things about the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Berlin crisis or but but whatever these are this is you certainly asked a lot of questions that nobody's ever asked before my thanks to Fred Kaplan for coming on

57:20 the program the book is called the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war available right now you can also check out his column as regular column war stories in Slate Magazine and my goodness if you're into this stuff and it's a fascinating book about trying to figure out the most logical ways for human beings to live with the ever increasing power of their weapon systems check out Fred Kaplan's earlier work the Wizards of armageddon fascinating stuff we appreciate him coming on the show hope you enjoyed it

57:55 have you seen 1917 yet in the theater the reason I ask is because it's one of those films that if you are a fan of filmmaking is well you can't take your eyes off the way they did it from a cinematographer standpoint I mean there's a reason people who'd a nod about it when they saw it and it wasn't necessarily the sort of things that speak to your is truly I'm gonna go to a First World War film that's done like this cuz there there haven't been many of them we've talked about that in the past so I'm already hooked before you even show me how you shot it but then when you show me how you shot it I couldn't take my eyes off it now I don't talk about this very much but I come from a family of film people and knowing how stuff is done and watching how scenes are shot and the way they're framed and all this kind of stuff kind of is a second nature discussion around the dinner table when I was a kid and

58:49 I'm watching this and all I could think about was oh you know I really missed my dad at that moment when you want to have your dad back and you want to show it to me you want to just say dad what do you think of that and just get his feedback because if you don't know if you haven't read anything about this you're not like the fly on the wall or the spider up in the corner of the room you're there the way they shot it you're like on the mission with the people in the mission and so you feel like you are in real time here like almost I felt like sometimes like I was looking through my own eyes but then they'd spin the camera around you'd be like oh I found myself thinking of all the other subjects besides the First World War that you could give this kind of treatment to and how interesting and weird and why would be in all those circumstances it did change the feel of the film made the very unique sort of feel because it

59:37 didn't feel like there are certain kinds of reactions you get out of the theater and you go oh I have this I mean I remember with platoon it was like I've been hit in the face with a sledgehammer there was a mood and a lot of these films where war is a part of it you get this a different field not necessarily the platoon field but a different field when you walk out this felt this was much more the way they shot it turned it into an edge of your seat thriller suspense thing that reminded me more of some of the really well-done horror movies when I was a teenager you would just go holy cow there's some kind of dopamine or something that it's pumped into my brain because I felt like I was on the edge of my anything could happen to me at any time I felt the same way in 1917 I didn't feel like I was watching one of these war films where there are tens of thousands of people in a panoramic you know fields of glory or

1:00:22 paths of glory type of movie it was much more of a holy cow my heart rate is up and I feel like I've actually gone on this mission with these guys I loved it I thought they did a great job and so did the you know Academy of Motion Pictures obviously too this is the kind of film you're gonna want to splurge for the extra clarity and all that because they did a fantastic job if you want to hear how they did it by the way I'm told there's gonna be some fabulous bonus content along with all this you'll get the whole story on the behind the scenes cinematic ideas the the music was fantastic the soundtrack was fantastic exclusive interviews with the cast of production crew commentary by director and co-writer Sam Mendes and the director of photography well worth your time enjoy it it's available to own March 10th 2020 on digital streaming and of course March 24th for those of you who want to see it in 4k Ultra HD or

1:01:16 blu-ray and I just have to tell you this is the kind of film you're going to want to splurge for the extra clarity and all that because they did a fantastic job

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP10 Strangelove Whisperings"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Fred Kaplan (Guest).

What is "EP10 Strangelove Whisperings" about?

The discussion explores the inevitability of war's impact on individuals, emphasizing the relevance of historical perspectives on conflict, particularly nuclear war, and the necessity for society to maintain awareness and critical thinking regarding global threats. It highlights a quote by Leon Trotsky, suggesting that while many may wish to focus on their personal lives, the repercussions of…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, The Wizards of Armageddon, Donald Trump, Herman Kahn, Bob Keeler. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP10 Strangelove Whisperings"?

The episode runs 1 h 1 min; the transcript is about 10,165 words in 60 timestamped sections.

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