Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Robert tells Margaret about the giant meeting the military held to tell everyone how they planned to kill the world. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  And we're back. It's Behind the Bastards. This is our special episodes on the guys who built the nuclear doomsday machine that could kill us all at any moment. Episode five, the end is finally in sight. That could be literal. Margaret Kiljoy, welcome back to the program. How are you doing?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I'm doing great. I've gone full circle. I've accepted that this is reality and I am just very happy to get to live in these times.

• 0:35Robert Evans?

  It's great that you got to that point because actually the next 10 pages are all Warhammer. I just stopped writing about nukes at a certain point, but you can just assume that that's real.

• 0:44Speaker 01

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

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna relax to the comfort of a game where every single person is worse than Hitler. Like where Hitler would be a moderate bleeding hearts.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:38Robert Evans?

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• 2:14Robert Evans?

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

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  an electrical error, right? These are all concerns. And the Air Force is like, what the fuck are you asking questions for? You fucking nerd? Get the hell out of here. Let us build our death machine. Yeah? Yeah. You a commie?

• 3:12Robert Evans?

  So, here's Rubel discussing- Because if you are, you gotta tell me. Yeah, you gotta tell me if you're a communist. Here's Rubel discussing his concerns. "I was curious about the procedures for launching. How are the decisions to be made? And what happens when the launch commands are given? What if you decide you really didn't want to launch the rest after you've already launched some? Can you launch missiles one at a time selectively? What if some operators decide to launch without authority? Here I cite from a transcript of my discussion of this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library. A moment arrived in this briefing in the June of 1959, when I could ask the question I wanted to ask, one I had asked Bennett in private before, but without getting a satisfactory response. I had the feeling that if I asked the question, surrounded as I was by members of the President's Science Advisory Committee panel, that I might elicit a better answer.

• 3:55Robert Evans?

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

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  These are like, science guys, who are, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust, right? And they're like, "What? Four guys can launch 50 missiles with no one getting in the way? Really? And there's no way to stop all 50 from launching once you start the process of launching one? Are you serious? He was. So, everybody gets upset. So Bob, Bob is like, now in damage control mode. And Bob Bennett goes like, "Now, look, you have to understand, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. There are two modes that we can fire these in, right?

• 5:15Robert Evans?

  One of these modes is salvo, and the other is ripple launch, right? One of them launches all the missiles as close to simultaneously as possible, and the other staggers them, right? Does that make it better? There's two modes, Margaret! There's two modes! It's fine!

• 5:30Speaker 01

  The hose has shower and jet.

• 5:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  That doesn't make it not a hose.

• 5:39Robert Evans?

  You just know Bob has not sat down with anyone who is not constantly spending every second of their life, like, touching themselves to the thought of ending humanity, right? And he's just like, "Wait, these people don't, they don't know there's two modes? That'll fix it! I'll tell them about the modes, right?"

• 5:54Speaker 01

  See, I think game theory and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

• 5:58Robert Evans?

  It's a fucking catastrophe, yeah. Once people start thinking about game, again, that needs to be a bricking. If you ever encounter somebody who starts talking game theory shit, just brick 'em, you know? Give 'em a good, hard brick.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Game theory says you have to brick 'em. That's the terrible trap.

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  It's the only way to stop these people.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:15Robert Evans?

  All right. Rubel continues, quote, "It turned out, in pursuing the matter further, that if you had preset the system for a ripple launch, there was no way to interrupt it after the launch command was transmitted to the silos. If the first missile went, then six seconds later, let us say, the second, and after another six seconds, the third. And if after the 20th missile, you decide that was really enough missiles, you couldn't stop the system from launching the remaining 30, according to what Bennett told us at the time." Rubel describes the committee as "pretty shook by this revelation." "I don't think anybody had ever realized before that there would be four men buried in the ground somewhere in North Dakota who might someday stick their keys into four little slots, turn them, and irrevocably launch 50-minute men missiles." Yeah. And life on Earth.

• 7:01Robert Evans?

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

• 7:46Robert Evans?

  That's why they built it this way. That was conscious. That was intentional.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  Fuck. So, now, I should note here, and this is something Rubel points out, 50 of these Minuteman missiles with the standard explosive loads they had would have meant more explosive power than all of the bombs used in all of the wars in human history put together up to that point. Four guys could do that.

• 8:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And again, the whole Minuteman system was meant to eventually have at least 1,000 missiles. General Power, in fact, advocated for 200 squadrons, a total of 10,000 missiles, all set up the same way.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Every state gets four.

• 8:33Robert Evans?

  Every state gets four, yeah. So, Rubell was so frightened by all of this that he dedicated his career to stopping the system as it existed from being implemented. He sat down first with General Curtis LeMay, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Rubell expressed to LeMay that he believed the Minuteman system represented a crucial loss of civilian command and control. Here's LeMay's response. Command and control? Command and control? What's that? It's telling the fighting man what to do, that's what it is. And that's a job for the professional soldier. They talk about the president exercising command and control? What is the president? Rubell notes that LeMay spit out the P in president. A politician. What does the politician know about war? Who needs a president if there's a war? Nobody. All we need him for is to tell us that there is a war. We are professional soldiers.

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  We'll take care of the rest.

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  Just the craziest motherfucker. Just out of his mind?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. I'm impressed that you got, this is like, almost the worst bat, this is Schrodinger's worst bastard in all history.

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  Right, right, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Like, this man's dedication to ending all life on Earth is really unique in history. I mean, I assume he had a Soviet counterpart, but like, I'm not as familiar with them.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Do you think that they get lonely, the American one and the Russian one, and they have only each other to talk to? Where they talk about their doomsday machine, that they're the only people who really understand?

• 9:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, man, they won't give me 10,000 missiles. Ah, bro, I know, it's so hard to get enough missiles to kill the whole world 1,000 times over, like, don't worry, we got a bunch too, though, homie, like, it'll be fine. No one's gonna live through this.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  We'll do our part, too, all right? As long as you do your part.

• 10:14Robert Evans?

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

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Right? Oh, my God. So you can hack one position and get all four. Sorry. Yeah.

• 10:58Robert Evans?

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

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 11:18Robert Evans?

  You wouldn't think so, right? Clearly, anyone putting the effort of putting missiles in hardened bunkers meant to withstand an atom bomb would have made sure that something as simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in the 60s wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust. Only no.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 11:33Robert Evans?

  They did not. They never considered it for a second.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

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

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

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

• 12:33Robert Evans?

  after a limit, after whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining 40 missiles in a squadron.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  Right? Yeah. Now, when this is explained to Rubell...

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I'm impressed this is worse than I expected.

• 12:48Robert Evans?

  It's so bad. It's so fucked.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:54Robert Evans?

  It's so bad. Like, it's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles. It's nuts.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Not even Kel-Tec, or it's at least interested.

• 13:05Robert Evans?

  No, not even Kel-Tec. Yeah, they built a nuclear SIG P320. Check to go off in a cop's pocket. Oh, man. So when all this was explained to Rubel, the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that like, well, the minimum setting is 58 minutes, right? And we want to have at least that much time to allow the military to disable the system if two men vote to launch without warning and we decide we don't want to launch the rest of the squadron, right? That seems like maybe it's a safety feature, right? Now, many of these silos are hours away from anything else. That's kind of the point. Even to this day, you can't reach a lot of these in 58 minutes. You know? But the other problem is that the Air Force Colonel who described the way this clock system worked to Rubel lied to him.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  The minimum count you could set it to wasn't 58 minutes. It was zero minutes.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  So you really genuinely could just automate all the Minutemen?

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we damn near did. We damn near did. Here's Rubel again. Zero could mean that only two men, or perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing of 50-minute-man missiles by accident or effectively by designing the system this way in the event of a series of power interruptions.

• 14:23Robert Evans?

  So Rubel is like, oh, God, I have to do something. This system, these missiles are not active yet. These silos aren't active yet. And I have to stop them from being made active, at least until this is fixed, right? So he sets to work trying to get someone at the Air Force to give a shit about these problems, right? He sits down with the head of missile development, General Shriver, who he described as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject. Eventually, in late 1960, he manages to have lunch with the Deputy Secretary of Defense. And while they're arguing about this system, he's like, look, man, tell me, would you feel safe knowing the Soviets had a system that worked the way the Minutemen does? And

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Robert Evans?

  He thought I had a point there. But my concerns again dropped into another organizational black hole. Everyone's just trying to push this guy on. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to think about it. Why are you trying? Why are you causing problems? Just let us build this thing and forget about it, man. No one else has a problem with this. That's literally how he's being treated.

• 15:25Speaker 01

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

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  Come on, man. Don't fuck with us. A lot of people's jobs are on the line building the torment nexus.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Robert Evans?

  Come on. So as I noted, Rubel, because he's good at his job, he gets promoted regularly. Right? And in 61, I think, 60, 61, he passes his job at the Strategic Warfare Office. I think it's 60, onto a guy named Martin Stern. He tells Stern that his top priority is to change the Minuteman Launch Control System and warns him, you will not get this done unless you get a presidential directive ordering the Air Force to do something. And Marvin has a good relationship with some of these generals. And so he starts up being like, that's not how you get things done in the Air Force. Right? You just got to let me talk to these guys. But then he starts talking to these guys and all of these generals lie to him. And he realizes like, oh, fuck, no, they really are refusing to fix these problems, these apocalyptic problems. And they're trying to fast track these missiles to being activated.

• 16:28Robert Evans?

  To make a long story short, Rubel and several of his friends spend the next two years of their lives shouting at everyone who will listen about this. This culminates in another guy at the DOD named Jim Fletcher heading a committee that issues a report on the Minuteman system. Their research found a very real chance that simple power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal to fire. The ultimate bill for, and this is, it's because of this commission report that we retrofit the whole Minuteman system. Right? And the ultimate bill for retrofitting this system is hundreds of millions of dollars. Right? It's very expensive to fix these problems, which is why the Air Force hadn't wanted to fix them. But Rubel does win. The most dangerous features of-

• 17:08Speaker 01

  You know what's bad for the economy?

• 17:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Nuclear Holocaust. Yeah. Yeah. Real bad. Fucking the stock market does not do well when everyone's dead. Um, nope. Nope. Doesn't do much at all. Now, Rubell does win. The most dangerous features are removed by the time the first Minuteman silo goes active at the end of 1961. But a big part of why, I noted all of this stuff, none of this comes out until 2008, when Rubell, at the end of his life, publishes a confession, talking about all this, right? As a way to try to warn people. Essentially, he's warning people, nothing's really all that much better today, right? Like, that's why he writes this. Fuck. To try to, try to get people to understand how much danger we're all in. And a big part of like, the point of that confession is he's talking about all of the gaps in the

• 17:52Robert Evans?

  system of civilian control of the military that allowed all of this to happen in the first place, because those gaps weren't entirely eradicated by fixing this one system. He documented a conversation one of his allies had with another Air Force general around the same time. Quote, "General Cutter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS, Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, as soon as possible, and he urged that we expand it in order to create a highly redundant capability at each site. We must have an absolutely reliable early warning of a missile attack. Basically, I agreed. All would have been well if he had stopped there, but he didn't. In words I can't precisely recall, he went on to say that we had to have this redundancy and the resulting high level of reliability, so

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  that when we finally connected the warning system directly to the launch button of our own ICBMs, there would be no false alarms. I was astonished. I told him flatly, we would not automate our response, and we would not connect the warning system directly to the launch button. We would not, in some, go to a launch on warning strategy. We would especially not go to one that did not have the president in the decision-making loop." Cutter coldly replied, "In that case, we might as well surrender now."

• 19:04Speaker 01

  I love it. It's like, no one who's ever done plumbing or hacking.

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  No, yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Air gap. You need a fucking air gap for a system to be safe.

• 19:14Robert Evans?

  Never trust a computer. Don't trust people and don't trust computers.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Every hacker is like, this is my computer that matters, so it doesn't have the internet.

• 19:24Robert Evans?

  Right. Like, it, it's just, it's fucking insane. Like, the whole, well, we might as well surrender now if we're not just gonna have an automatic doomsday device that goes off if a radar has an hallucination. Why don't we just quit? Fuck it. Let's be communists. Like, it's fucking crazy. And I should note that, this happens later, but the Soviet Union does devise a similar automated system called the Dead Hand. And some ask, but it's kind of unclear exactly how put together this is, but they do a version of the same thing, right?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's a cooler name.

• 19:58Robert Evans?

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

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Right, yep.

• 20:11Robert Evans?

  It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but they, this is, these same versions of all of these same conversations happen in the USSR too.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Cause they, if nothing else, they need the Americans to believe they do that. Yeah.

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Exactly. And like, everyone is worried about what the other guy is doing, and everybody's out of their fucking minds.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  Now, the good news is, Margaret, it's time for ads.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Oh, good. It is a nice thing. It makes the ads seem like a nice refreshment.

• 20:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Probably not gonna get ads for nukes. Huzzah.

• 20:46Speaker 04

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• 21:16Robert Evans?

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• 22:15Robert Evans?

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• 22:26Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, the good news is this. This is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern military advisors and officers today. But General Cutter's type of thinking is not extinct at the Pentagon, and it is still very common. I don't know if I'd say it's completely dominant, but there are a lot of guys who think this way, who are still part of our nuclear defense architecture, right? This, in fact, getting that job kind of requires that you're at least a little bit like these people, right? It's fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with some of this to wind up in those positions. Rubel points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized for examining the technical status

• 23:11Robert Evans?

  of launch controls for any of our nuclear weapon systems, and there is none today, right? And that's a real problem. There's no one checking, other than guys like Rubel, to make sure we don't build another really flawed, suicidally flawed missile system, which the Minuteman initially was. Now, while Rubel was fighting to reform the Minuteman system, he was part of the problem in a different way, right? We've just talked about how maybe he saved everybody's lives. Here's him being kind of a bastard. In late 19, yeah, in late 1960, which is right in the middle of when he's having this fight, President Eisenhower issued an order for all three military departments to formulate a single operational plan, or SIOP, for nuclear war, like S I O P, not like a psy-op, but it is pronounced the same way, right?

• 23:56Robert Evans?

  And this will, this will get finalized in 62, but they start working on it and they presented initially in 1960. So in late 1960, the DOD, the Department of Defense, shares a cohesive plan for nuclear war to a mix of military personnel and selected civilian defense officials for the first time. The Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP 62, was, in Rubel's words, "deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on innocent civilians in the USSR and China." This plan was presented at an underground meeting at the SAC headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. General Power stage managed a deliberately theatrical display in which, at his command, aides would simultaneously set up easels and start flipping maps over, that like each

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  new map would show different detonations from different waves of planned strikes, you know, five minutes in, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, right? This is like, it's an analog PowerPoint, right? He has like guys being his PowerPoint presentation, basically. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from Rubel, because Rubel is at this meeting, right? I'm going to quote from his description of, of what he sees here. "At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying, 'Just a minute, just a minute.' He turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, 'I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path, and we take it out.'" With that, to which the response was utter silence, Power turned to the speaker and

• 25:26Robert Evans?

  with another wave of his hand, told him to "go ahead." Just casually was like, "By the way, we're killing everyone in Albania immediately."

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, famously our enemy, uh huh.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  "Hope, hope you don't got family there." Because again, we nuked them right away because of a radar station. We're just gonna kill everyone in the country because of a radar station. Everyone in the country. We're wiping the whole country out.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:49Robert Evans?

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

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:06Robert Evans?

  Right? He's upset, but he doesn't say shit, right? He writes about this decades later. He writes about his discomfort in this meeting, and that specifically, he writes about his discomfort at the fact that Psyop 62, quote, "deliberately removed effective operational control from the president or any other civilian or even military commander in the event of a nuclear conflict." Now, none of this is public knowledge for decades, right? It takes a long time. We only know what we know because in 2008, Rubel published his experiences as a warning to the rest of the country. And he noted that during this meeting, General Power and the other authors of Psyop 62 gave an anticipated death count of 500 to 600 million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR and China.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  That gets into that, like, that's like, combined death count of every war that's ever happened to levels, probably.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, right, it's gotta be up there, right?

• 27:05Robert Evans?

  Quote, "No accounting was presented of reciprocal effects in the United States or collateral deaths and damage in many other parts of the globe where global clouds of radioactive dust would eventually descend." They just don't bother with that. We're not interested in what the fallout might do. We're not interested in the knock-on effects. We're just interested in killing half of all of the people or more in the USSR and China, right?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Robert Evans?

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

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  They don't care. They-

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  They don't give a shit.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

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

• 28:34Robert Evans?

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

• 28:45Speaker 01

  We already had the banner printed, you know?

• 28:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We've got the banner printed and everything. We got a mission accomplished board here. Come on.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:52Robert Evans?

  You don't want to kill 300 million people in China? What's wrong with you?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what was it? Bonus effects?

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, bonus effects. Now, it says something about Rubell that it was not until this moment that he found himself thinking about the Von Say Conference in January of 1942, in which a group of top Nazis planned the Holocaust. For some reason, this is one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War to me. A man who truly cared about protecting his country and stopping a dangerous system from going live finds himself stuck in a room where something many times worse than the Holocaust is being casually planned, and he realizes, "Oh, fuck. Oh, shit. I'm like some junior SS guy, sitting in the back of the Von Say Conference, too scared to speak up and ruin my career. Fuck. Fuck. I'm a Nazi. Fuck." Like, that's literally how he describes his recollection, is like, "This is the fuck.

• 29:41Robert Evans?

  This is so much worse than the Von-" They're talking about killing 600 million people. Like-

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And he doesn't do anything, doesn't say anything about it.

• 29:48Robert Evans?

  He doesn't say shit. He does not. He is not that kind of brave, right? He is a work within the bureaucracy.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  That's like a telling, human-conditioned thing.

• 29:57Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Right? Because we all imagine ourselves saying something.

• 30:01Robert Evans?

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

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Good. He shouldn't have.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he shouldn't have. This should haunt you to the end of your days.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  But he's still the most deeply human person in that room.

• 30:19Robert Evans?

  I'll say the second most because we're about to talk about someone who does speak up. There is one guy who has, who actually has some courage here.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  So the day after this first meeting at the SAC headquarters, Rubel takes part in a smaller meeting about the meeting they just had, right? Even the military, you can't escape meetings about meetings, you know? Like, that's just, that's just, that's just bureaucracy, baby. So this smaller meeting includes the Secretary of Defense, all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of each major branch of the military, plus the Commandant of the Marine Corps. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, speaking on the harrowing meeting they just had, quote, "told everyone that they'd done a very fine job, a very difficult job." Right? So, and that sentiment is echoed by everyone. Everyone just goes around congratulating each other at the start of this meeting, being, "It was a great meeting. It was really tough, but you guys really pulled together and came up with a plan to kill 600 million people, and I'm proud of you."

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  You know, it's not easy to figure out how to kill half a billion people or more, but you guys really got the job done. Yeah, yeah. So everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment, except for one guy, General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. And, you know, the Marines, the Marines are an interesting branch because both the chudtiest maniacs in the military and the absolute, like, coolest, like, best soldiers in American history, like Smedley Butler, were Marines, right?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:44Robert Evans?

  They have a history of producing occasionally these, like, really weirdly, like, woke generals and stuff. Like, Smedley Butler is a committed anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist who gets very angry about being used as a gangster for capitalism. And David M. Shoup, who's the Commandant of the Corps at this point, is cut from the same cloth. He's the same kind of guy.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  He probably seems like more like honor, like, more like,

• 32:08Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  whatever you believe in, you're still like, you're like, no, I'm willing to risk my life to go do this thing.

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  That's why I joined the Marines.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Like, my dad was a Marine. He doesn't have entirely positive things to say about the people and in it with him, but like...

• 32:21Robert Evans?

  That's what I'm saying. Is there's, they run the gamut, you know?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  Um, but Shoup is a really interesting guy. In the long history of Marine Corps Commandants, he is one of the men who earned that job title the most. He'd been born in Indiana in 1904 to a poor family, and he was raised politically progressive and grew into a staunch anti-imperialist with a very strong anti-business outlook. He is not super sold on capitalism, and he hates imperialism. As a starving young man, he joins the military to survive. He proves very good at the job and is deployed twice to China during their civil war. He serves as a staff officer in the Pacific during World War II until he was given a combat command to lead the invasion of an island called Tarawa. His forces encountered immediate and fierce resistance. His transport was disabled before landing, and he had to

• 33:11Robert Evans?

  wade ashore, where he was struck by shrapnel and shot in the neck. Despite this, he continued to organize and lead his men from the front with a gunshot wound to the neck. On the afternoon of the second day of the attack, he sent a message to his divisional headquarters. Combat efficiency: "We are winning." Just, just a badass. Like, what are these, what of our, what of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war? Shoup receives a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts, right? If you want to know, like, how, like, what kind of a badass this dude was. Like, he is a general leading from the front in such a way that he gets a Medal of Honor for his service in combat. And he is the only man

• 33:53Robert Evans?

  in this entire story who gives us anything we can be truly proud of as Americans. And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War, here. No one's, and this is after they're going over the plan again to kill 600 million people. "No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a US government-led preemptive first-strike nuclear attack," Rubell wrote. "Not any of the Joint Chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense, not John Rubel. Then, finally, one man did. General David M. Shoup, the Commandant of the US Marine Corps. A Marine awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II. Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural, mid-American community, recalled Rubell. He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole opposing

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  view on the plan for nuclear war. That Shoup said, 'All I can say is, any plan that murders 300 million Chinese, when it might not even be their war, is not a good plan. That is not the American way.'" The room fell silent, Rubel wrote. Nobody moved a muscle. Nobody seconded Shoup's dissent. No one else said anything. According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way.

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fuck. Yeah. Yeah. At least there was one. I know. At least there was one guy being like, are you, do you guys realize how fucking evil this is? Are you out of your minds? Yeah. You know what you're talking about, killing 300 million people who might not have fun? Fuck all to us. They don't even have nukes yet. Yeah. We, we killed Japan for trying to kill the Chinese people. Yeah. Do you not see a problem here? Yeah. Um, yeah, that's not the American way. Unfortunately, it is, but I can't blame Shoup for trying to make it not be. Yeah, exactly. Shoup is, goes on to be a cool guy the rest of his life. He spoke vocally against nuclear escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, like he was a major voice trying

• 35:48Robert Evans?

  to be like, no, no, no, we need to take a step back. And he was also, he advised against entering South Vietnam during the opening stages of the Vietnam War. He was one of the few generals who was like, this is a terrible idea and we should not get involved at all. This is a really bad plan, right? Yeah. In general, he was the one sane man not afraid to speak his mind in the entire defense establishment during some of the maddest years of the Cold War, right? So, yeah. Thank you, General Shoup. I got shot in the neck. I'm good. Like, I know what this is involved. We shouldn't do this. Yeah. Yeah. And he clearly, like, not afraid of confrontation is willing to say, like, you people are fucking maniacs. Yeah. But unfortunately, he, uh, he's the only one. So Rubel, who is not a fighter,

• 36:32Robert Evans?

  not great at confrontation, one gets the idea, does continue to push bureaucratically for a saner nuclear posture, but he does so from within the bureaucracy in which he was comfortable. In his 2008 report, he accused defense planners of building both Psyop-62 and the Minuteman system deliberately to deny, quote, "any but a go-no-go option to civilian leadership." As Henry Kissinger put it in 1961, and this is the only time I'll quote Kissinger approvingly, "These plans offered the president just one choice, quote, 'suicide or surrender, Holocaust or humiliation.'" In other words, the military has set it up that the only choice the president gets to make is let the country get nuked? Or kill everybody. Right.

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  The good news is that in the early 1960s, at the very start of the Kennedy administration, is probably the high watermark for at least the danger of an atomic holocaust during the Cold War. Part of why we stepped a tiny bit back- I think they have to point out that part because you're like, well, the high watermark is so far. Yeah. Part of what got us to step back from the brink a little bit is that after the Berlin crisis, which is, you know, the Soviet Union tries to cut off supplies into the chunk of Berlin that NATO is occupying and we have to like drop, drop a bunch of shit in by plane. Right. After that, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy comes to realize what Rubel had known for a while, which is that the men running the Strategic Air Command in particular, and the Air Force in general,

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  are out of their goddamn minds. Right? Like that, he starts to become, Kennedy starts to become very aware that like, these people are crazy and they're going to get us all killed. I have to do something about the way the system works. Right? Yeah. And this is arguably the best thing he did in his presidency. One of the first moments where this was made clear to him was on September 5th during Kennedy's first year in office, in which several Air Force men submitted a first strike study that suggested killing 54% of the USSR's population. An alternate plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy named Kason, the study author, estimated would kill only around a million civilians. However, US casualties from a Soviet response ranged from basically none to 75% of the US population. Uh huh. Right.

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  Rubel includes a note about the reactions of people in the Kennedy administration to this horror show. Ted Sorensen, the chief White House counsel and speechwriter who had been with Kennedy since his earliest Senate days, was outraged when Kason told him about the study, shouting, "You're crazy. We shouldn't let guys like you around here." Even more appalled was a friend of Kason's on the NSC staff named Marcus Raskin. Raskin had served as foreign policy advisor to a few liberal Democratic senators and had been hired as a token leftist. "Raskin was horrified by the very existence of such a study. How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?" He hollered at one point. Raskin never spoke to Kason again. Good question. Yeah, really good question.

• 39:33Robert Evans?

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

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:51Robert Evans?

  The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded across 13 days in 1962. And it seems to have inspired Kennedy to take action to reduce the ability of his insane generals to destroy the world. When he imposed a blockade of Cuba to force the USSR to remove their nukes, General LeMay insisted on direct military intervention as the only path forward, claiming that "any attempt to solve the problem without violence would lead to war." Look, we might have a war if we don't get violent with these guys. You don't want a war, do you?

• 40:23Robert Evans?

  Quote, "LeMay indirectly threatened to make his dissent public. I think that a blockade in the political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time." LeMay's words angered Kennedy, who asked, "What did you say?" LeMay responded, "You're in a pretty bad fix." Kenneth O'Donnell recalled in his memoirs that after the meeting Kennedy asked him, "Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong."

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I, I better understand the, like, second half of the 20th century is a big push for pacifism on the left.

• 41:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And like, and it's one of those things you like, look back at and you're like, oh, that seems kind of silly. And you're like.

• 41:13Robert Evans?

  Some parts worked, some didn't. But, oh, yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  I get why people lean towards that.

• 41:18Robert Evans?

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

• 41:54Robert Evans?

  Can decide to launch everything and it's the president. Now, that does mean we have civilian control. And I think that's a positive step away from a bunch of insane generals potentially having that command or four kids in a cornfield having that ability. Right? Um, but, and that this is, that is a major thing that happens under Kennedy, right? Is that command and control of our nuclear arsenal gets shifted much further to the president. And that, that process continues over the years. This is what leads to the nuclear football, right? Um, which I think people are generally aware of, right? Because it's under Kennedy, I talked about how that Los Alamos scientist came up with the idea to, we need a lock on these fucking things. And they figure out how to do that, um, during the Kennedy administration. And Kennedy gives the order to start putting locks on our weapons.

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  Right? Yeah. Which starts moving this, this all, I'm yada yada. This takes longer to get to where we are now, but this starts the process, right? That leads to the situation we are, we have now where these weapons all do at least have a lock. And where we have the football, right? The nuclear football, which is ultimately a product of both that scientist Agnew realizing a single private with eight bullets was all that stood between a nuke and whoever, as well as Rubel and his allies repeatedly insisting to their bosses that these air force fuckers are out of their goddamn minds. Right? Like, that is, you know, a, a really good thing that happens here. And characteristically, when the switch, the lock is first demoed, it was presented to President Kennedy, who immediately is like, yeah, put these on everything we can.

• 43:22Robert Evans?

  Like immediately, right now, do it today. You have no other priorities. And the military loses their fucking mind. They locked up our bombs. They're trying to lock our bombs up. The fears of one General Alfred Starbird, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows. How is a pilot, US or foreign, somewhere around the world, going to get a code from the president of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops? I don't know, man. Maybe it's the, I'm fine with that, actually.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, if a couple of people die instead of all of us, I don't know.

• 43:59Robert Evans?

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

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:04Robert Evans?

  But it's a soldier's job to potentially die for their country, and I prefer that to the whole world dying.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Including that soldier.

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  Including that soldier. They're not living through it. Oh, none of these bomber guys, all of these SAC bombers know that their missions are suicide missions. If they get the order to fly to the USSR, they are not coming back. There won't be anywhere to come back to, right?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although the only people still alive, they'll be flying for another 10 minutes before.

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, that would, that's how it is now, because we have these doomsday planes that we literally call like doomsday planes, which are these huge shielded planes that are able, the president basically can hand over control of continuing to launch our nukes to the official in the plane, because the president's going to be dead pretty soon. Everyone is. None of these bunkers work nearly as well as people want to believe they do, especially not when you're talking about multiple thermonuclear impacts. It doesn't matter how deep, if people are dropping multiple hydrogen bombs as they would be, or missiles as they would be in this, very few things could protect you. All of these fancy bunker complexes are great if you don't get directly hit by multiple thermonuclear bombs, but they're not going to protect you from that. You're going to boil alive.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, the, and that's Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War book, which posits a pretty chilling theory about how this could all go down, does have, everyone dies. Like, everyone in command and control is fucking dead, except for the guy in the doomsday plane who makes sure that everyone dies on the other side of the world. Um, that's nuclear war. Anyway, let's have some ads, and we'll come back and finish this story.

• 45:40Speaker 01

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• 47:11Robert Evans?

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• 47:22Robert Evans?

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

• 47:50Robert Evans?

  During the Korean War, same deal. During the start of Vietnam, same deal. So when we, when in 1964, when we really start upping our commitment in Vietnam, he is running things and he pushes a plan to bomb northern Vietnam into submission. The plan is described, and I believe this was his name for it, as the Gentile Du Hey Plan, right? I mentioned that, or like it's the polite version of the Du Hey Plan, right? Du Hey being the guy who's like, you just kill all the civilians until they're not willing to fight anymore. Now, there's a big battle between Kennedy's civilian advisers, who wanted the US to threaten North Vietnam's industry, but not actually blow it up immediately. So that we, we blow up some of it and we make it clear, we can really cripple their

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  industry so that we have a negotiating hand to push for peace, right? And I'm not, I don't think we should have gotten involved in fucking Vietnam whatsoever. I'm not saying that like, these guys were good and ethical, but that is a much saner response than Le May's. Cause Le May just wants to send North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, right?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  Like, these liberals are like, well, we can bomb them, you know, kind of strategically in order to exert a cost and make them willing to come to the negotiation table. And Le May is like, what if we just fucking kill everybody? I'm going to quote from the book Bombing to Win by Robert Pape. Quote, "Destroying the North's industrial economy appears to have been valued more for its effect on civilian morale than for reducing the flow of military goods into the South. For instance, the rationale for closing the port of Haiphong was not to interdict battlefield hardware, but to weaken civilian morale." Right?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Which keeps not working.

• 49:20Robert Evans?

  It does. As you may recall, none of this did. This led to Operation Rolling Thunder. And Rolling Thunder is Le May's baby. This is like, Operation Rolling Thunder is the Gentile Du Hey Plan put into effect. It is a three-year bombing campaign that resulted in what, Margaret? You want to guess?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  No effective destruction of the morale of the enemy.

• 49:43Robert Evans?

  I mean, stuff was just, yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't work.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:46Robert Evans?

  We don't win Vietnam, in case you were unaware of that.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  This does not stop their ability to equip and support their troops. It does not break civilian morale. It does not, it doesn't do the trick.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  And this is actually one of the main things I've learned over this epic journey we've been on. If you had asked me, I would have been like, well, it's probably immoral to bomb all these enemy cities, but it probably is effective at destroying morale. And what I have learned is that it's not.

• 50:20Robert Evans?

  No, no, you gotta think, if like, if somebody, for example, goes and stabs the person you love most in the world in the gut, are you gonna like, walk away because you're demoralized? Or are you gonna fuck that person up? Like, are you gonna do everything in your power to destroy that person? Right?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:41Robert Evans?

  I think people think similarly when their family is incinerated from the sky.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:48Robert Evans?

  But this, the fact that this fails and the fact that LeMay's plans kind of fail a lot, brings me to a key point about LeMay and all the Du Hey acolytes who came to run our air power during this time. These guys-

• 51:00Speaker 01

  The surrealist man Ray is also one of these people.

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  These guys loved nukes because nukes were the only weapon system that worked the way they thought all weapons should work. So they always insisted on using nukes at every corner. And when they were denied, they didn't know how to fight a modern war well. Cause they only have the one strategy and it only works if you use nukes. So when the president says, no, you can't nuke them, then they're left like, well, I guess we try to use conventional bombs and it just doesn't do it. But they don't, none of these people are actually capable of adapting and looking their failure in the face. Cause they've based everything on this being how war works. And it doesn't, unless you're killing everyone. Right?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  Because they're 12 year old boys.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47Robert Evans?

  Now, I'm ending this story in the mid 60s, right? Which, there's a lot more to talk about in terms of nukes and shit, obviously, after this point. But I'm ending here because kind of by the point we're at in the story, right? Vietnam, the tale of how our nuclear arsenal functions.

• 52:05Robert Evans?

  Changes, but not like in earth shattering ways, right? Right. Everything gets kind of better. Our early warning systems get better. Our missiles get more destructive and reliable. Nuclear submarines are by this point a part of the deterrent. We're not talking about that all that much, but that's a major part of the deterrent package, right? Right. Because a nuclear submarine absolutely cannot be found, right? It's basically impossible. Like, if you have nuclear submarines, you always have nukes out there that you can throw back at whoever fucks with you. So it's a guarantee that you'll be able to get some sort of second strike. Nuclear submarines are fucking terrifying. They're the scariest weapons human beings have ever made and probably ever will make, right? Like, it is just death tubes. They're fucking nightmares.

• 52:46Robert Evans?

  I had a friend, I have a friend who went to Annapolis, that's the Naval Academy, and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the 80s. Yeah. There's a book called Blind Man's Bluff that's about like all the stuff that he used to do. And all of his like stories are, because what US and Soviet subs were doing in this period of time was like, basically, one would try to like, playing chicken, trying to force the other to surface, right? So, you know, because it was like, that was kind of part of the game that we were playing in the high seas. And so he has all these stories of just like, he and a couple of his friends are standing in, I guess, the bridge or whatever, doing a bunch of complicated math in their heads.

• 53:28Robert Evans?

  And if they fuck up the math, everyone dies because they crash into something, right? Like, it's like those kind of stories, like, um, nuclear subs are fucking terrifying. But, you know, once we get nuclear subs, that's, we have all three kind of arms of our nuclear, like, posture. We have our ICBMs, we have nuclear subs, we have our bombers, right? Obviously, we also have like field artillery and, you know, nukes and stuff that the army can use. But nothing that happens after this point seriously alters the fundamental calculus, up until something that's kind of more recent. And that fundamental calculus is, we and the Russians and other people, China now as well, right? Obviously, more people have nukes, but all of the nuclear powers have a bunch of nukes ready to fire at a moment's notice.

• 54:12Robert Evans?

  And in both the US and Russia, only the president gets to decide when we use them, right? Right. That's the way it is, starting in the 60s, and that's the way it is today, right? Obviously, like, I'm not going to talk a lot about hypersonic missiles. That's kind of the biggest recent change that might seriously alter a lot of calculus because it allows a strike that potentially might not get spotted at all. And so maybe there's no warning, which is why I read a really fucked up War on the Rocks article that was basically arguing for like an automated AI like second strike system because of the fact that, well, maybe they are able to, if they blow up the president, no one can launch the nukes back, right?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  So no one's watched the movie War Games, is what I'm hearing you say.

• 54:54Robert Evans?

  No one has ever watched the movie War Games. Actually, actually, War Games, literally, one of the generals they quote references War Games, in order to say that we don't have a machine that does that right now.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  They were arguing that we need to do it. Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 55:09Robert Evans?

  And this is part, one of the, one of the things that that, that I, I have worry about, because I, I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're going to, like, give AI the ability to launch nukes or do that. I, that's not my immediate worry, but they're already integrating different machine learning tools into like the radar systems and our early warning systems.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  That's what I would worry about.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  That's the worry, is that people are being advised by these, by machines that will have, like them, by, that, that, like the Minuteman, will have

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  unanticipated flaws, that the arrogant pieces of shit who designed these weapons refuse to consider, because they cannot accept the fact that maybe they didn't think of everything, and they will fuck up and miss stuff, and it could cause a, it could cause the end of the world, right? That's what scares me more than like a death computer, right?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Which, like, any hacker, or wannabe hacker, would immediately be like, oh, you can't build systems that don't have flaws. That doesn't happen.

• 56:10Robert Evans?

  No, no, that's why up until very recently, this was all being done on like the big 1980s floppy disks, and everything's fucking air gapped, is like, you want this shit simple and reliable as possible.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Well, now it's all Bluetooth, so.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Now, yeah, exactly. Well, that's the most reliable thing in electronics is Bluetooth. Everyone who has a headset knows that. So it's important, everyone know that our launch policy from 1964 to today remains launch on warn. Now, the USSR, to be fair to them, officially rejected a launch on warn policy. There are grave doubts as to whether or not that was the real policy or propaganda, right? A lot of people say they were definitely launch on warn, too. I think that's probably right. I think both the US and Russia more or less would have fired if they felt like they had a credible warning that the other was firing, right?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Well, and Russia needs us to believe. Russia needs us to believe they're launch on warn, even if they're saying something else. They have to say it in a way where they're like, oh, don't worry, we would totally not launch on warn, but scare people to thinking they would.

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  Well, and now, since Putin's taken, and this is really just in the last few years, Putin has made it very clear that the Russian Federation is now launch on warn as well, right? So they are just straight up saying like, everyone is now launch on warn, the US and Russia, and that's all that really matters. China's got some nukes. I don't know as much about their system, but they don't have near, like, both, all it takes is the US and Russia, right?

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:35Robert Evans?

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

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  Now, I know there's a tendency among folks on our side of the political aisle to say, oh, my God, isn't it terrifying that Donald Trump has the fucking nuclear football, right? And I'm going to say something controversial here, which is, I don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other president. Not because he would do a good job at that, but because no one can. Everyone is bad at this. Nobody is competent to make that call. And it's a dangerous mistake to believe that, oh, well, Obama's would have been a good guy to have in the seat, or Biden would have been a good, no, they're all bad at this. They would all have been terrible. No one will do a good job if they are put in that situation. In her chilling book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson

• 58:36Robert Evans?

  makes one very important point several times. She quotes John Wolfsthal, the former national security advisor to President Obama, who said, "No one, not even the president, has complete knowledge of what is going on in a crisis or in a conflict, let alone a nuclear war." Former Secretary of Defense for Reagan, William Perry, added, "Many presidents come into the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not to want to know." This is a point made several times, that presidents generally don't know much about this. Even though this football's with them at all times, they don't like to think about it. They don't like to ask too many questions about it. They don't like to dwell on it. A bunch of people who were in a position to know have said similar things that like,

• 59:17Robert Evans?

  "President's not super well-informed, generally, on how all this works, because it's scary." They don't like to think about it.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  I don't like to think about it. Like, this falls firmly into the, like, things that you can't control, you don't worry about. On the other hand, if I was the president...

• 59:35Robert Evans?

  I would think about this a lot, yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:39Robert Evans?

  I'd be sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes, but...

• 59:42Speaker 01

  No, yeah, yeah.

• 59:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  That's why we're, uh, that's why you're running in, what, 2032?

• 59:48Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. On a, on a takeout Lake Superior.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, more like Lake Inferior.

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. We're gonna get revenge for those brave men on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

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

• 1:00:44Robert Evans?

  Underworld, governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one-third of the Earth's surface."

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yep. The fundamental issue here, in terms of is Trump any worse than anyone else on this specific issue? Theoretically, the president is only going to be asked to make a call on whether or not to launch our missiles if one or more are known to have been launched towards the US or an ally. Because of the way all of these weapon systems work, this means that the hypothetical president in this scenario is going about his day, doing something else, and is grabbed and taken bodily, like the Secret Service, like, response team's job is to literally physically haul him, like, carry him into the bunker and then into, like, a chopper to get to a more secure location, because the White House bunker isn't really all that safe.

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  But he will be grabbed in the middle of his day, taken into a Situation Room, and told that the entirety of Washington DC is about to die in flames, including nearly every member of his administration. In the most likely scenarios, he will then be told that he has between three and six minutes to decide to launch a world-killing salvo of, in most situations, hundreds to a thousand nuclear warheads. The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisers, who his entire job is to think about how important it is that we strike back before being decapitated, will shout for him to launch everything that we've got. No one is qualified for that job. Yeah. The only president we've ever had who could be argued to have stood up to this

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  kind of pressure was JFK, right? And JFK was a combat veteran, had been in some scary situations before, and thank fucking God, he was the guy on the ground at that point in time, because it could have been a lot worse than it was, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a bunch of other shit. I don't have any real faith that Obama or Biden would have performed much better than Trump in this nightmare scenario. As John Rubel wrote in 2008, "We know that this mentality, given half a chance, will surface in military and government councils. We know from recent history that a compliant bureaucracy, military and civilian, will murder 6 million people in cold blood or plan, by, design, build, and deploy the means to murder half of the people on Earth, probably including themselves. How come? Is all this built into the human genome?

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  A melancholy procession from stones to atoms? A predestined progress toward the end times? The inevitable rise of malign leaders over compliant masses?"

• 1:03:14Robert Evans?

  Anyway, thanks for listening to my podcast.

• 1:03:17Speaker 06

  Wow, what a way to end.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, what did you do today? Oh, I got, my job is that I have to make jokes during the, as I get described the mechanism by which the world will end.

• 1:03:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cool stuff.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Legit.

• 1:03:32Robert Evans?

  I don't know, probably should be something people are like asking presidents to change. We could change this. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this dangerous. Like, there are other ways this could all be designed to where we're not permanently 15 minutes or less away from annihilation, you know, and if we step back, probably the Russians do, at least a little bit, you know? I don't have a lot of faith in Putin, but I don't think he wants to die in nuclear hellfire either.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  I think most people don't.

• 1:04:04Robert Evans?

  I think most people don't.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Fair, fair.

• 1:04:07Robert Evans?

  Anyway, maybe this should be like a boating issue that people talk about, right? Like, it's, you know, climate change is obviously very important and people, it needs to be much more of an issue, but this is up there. This is an equivalent problem, right? Because this is potentially a much more thorough destruction of the biosphere than climate change will bring.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Even quicker.

• 1:04:29Robert Evans?

  We should probably care about this a lot.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  What a good system that we all have.

• 1:04:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty nuts. I actually recommend all the books that I read for this. Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War A Scenario. Again, I don't entirely agree with kind of some of her panic about North Korea, but it's a, it's a pretty good book on the whole about the way the system works today. The book 15 Minutes is a really good look at, like, basically how we got to the point where we're 15 minutes away from annihilation at all times. And then Command and Control, among other things, talks about a bunch of the different, like, fuck-ups and errors that have happened along the way. They're all good books.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:45Robert Evans?

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

• 1:06:29Robert Evans?

  of these missiles have what's called chaff, which is basically like, like, little strips of aluminum that come out with, like, the warhead in order to confuse, like, uh...

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Oh, setting anti-missile system.

• 1:06:43Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that, like, it can protect the missile, basically.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Robert Evans?

  But one of the main Russian systems can't tell the difference between that chaff and a shitload of additional missiles. So like, say, there was a situation where North Korea launched an ICBM at somebody, and we launch a decapitation strike at North Korea, or a strike at their nuclear facilities, that's a limited strike, we're just firing a couple of missiles. It might look, because of where North Korea is, Russia and China might both think, oh shit, the Americans are launching hundreds of missiles, and they could be coming for us. We don't know where they're targeted. And if the president hasn't gotten through to both of those leaders to inform them, and if, or if they don't trust the president, who knows what's going to happen?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  I hate to say that H.G. Wells is right, because I don't actually believe in one world government, kind of famously with my political position. But this idea that, like, the only way out of this, besides everyone de-escalating, is better diplomacy, and everyone talking to each other, and like, moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your borders zealously, and moving, well, I think the solution to most problems is to get rid of national borders, but I'm, you know, whatever. I'm not, I'm so glad I'm not in charge of trying to figure out how to solve this. That's the main takeaway that I have.

• 1:08:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I...

• 1:08:04Robert Evans?

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

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  But we're not, we're just gonna keep them, you know, protecting Israel. We're not gonna have them, you know, in the US or whatever, for the most part. I mean, obviously, we have a lot of those in Ukraine, and there's good reason for that. But we don't devote, it's both a mix of, none of it really works all that well. None of our missile interception stuff is perfect. The THAAD is about as good as it gets, but it's not good for everything. Like, it could be useful against, like, some of those sub-based missiles, but I don't think, like, it can take out ICBMs, certainly not, or certainly not a hypersonic. I don't think anything can take out a hypersonic if it actually works the way they're supposed to.

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  There's just not really reliable ways to stop a massive nuclear attack. If you get shot at by one missile, you might be able to do something, right? That's kind of where we are.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Well, that's fun.

• 1:09:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I love talking about it, though. I love me some nukes.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  The ideas of all the things that I want to write fiction about is related to it.

• 1:09:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, folks, get out there, go to, go to the Warsaw Sound, you know? Look around, hike around, get your metal detectors out. There's a couple of nukes just waiting for, uh, for a new home out there. Jesus Christ. You could be the next nuclear power.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, take care of each other and tell your friends you love them, but not in a way where you don't get completely lost thinking about this stuff all the time. And also, podcast cool people who did cool stuff, which is the opposite of this. But, you know, yeah.

• 1:10:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Sweet. All right, everybody, go away.

• 1:10:30Speaker 06

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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