Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part Three: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All About this episode Robert continues the harrowing story of the men who decided we should be ready to rain nuclear hellfire on everyone at a moments notice forever.
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Transcript 14,729 words · 8 speakers
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0:06 Robert Evans? Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special episodes on how we're all possibly going to die in nuclear hellfire. I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing over the course of two weeks, five episodes. We're in our second week, so you'll be getting a bonus episode this week about the sons of bitches who created the doomsday device that, again, could kill every single person you've ever known and loved and every animal and on earth except for, you know, cockroaches and the like, 15 minutes from now, or right now, you know, we'd have no way of knowing unless you're, I don't know, in the White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
0:47 Speaker 01 Thanks.
0:47 Robert Evans? You thinking about nukes?
0:48 Speaker 01 Well, I got promised this was about Warhammer 40k.
0:51 Robert Evans? Oh, no.
0:52 Speaker 01 But I suppose we're learning about the nuclear apocalypse.
0:56 Robert Evans? I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show. That'll...
0:59 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:00 Robert Evans? Yeah, there's a lot of genocide in that, too.
1:02 Speaker 01 I could be the podcast edit for that because I actually don't know anything about Warhammer.
1:06 Robert Evans? It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation poisoning, which is what we ended our last episode talking about. Our friend Louis Slotin, who was the partial father of the first atomic bomb, had his innards dissolved due to a horrible nuclear error and...
1:21 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, and he got to, like, kind of like, leave a record for science.
1:25 Robert Evans? Because he was a pretty cool guy. Like, that's badass. Like, when you know that, like, okay, well, I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation. I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time to take notes. Like, fucking, that's cool. That's cool. Like, and I guess...
1:43 Speaker 01 Also, acting with agency is like a really good way to not stress.
1:46 Robert Evans? Right, yes.
1:47 Speaker 01 You know? And like, all right, I have a job. I'm just doing my job.
1:51 Robert Evans? And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrate. Like, he did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed, there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards, you know?
2:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, his comeuppance happened.
2:01 Robert Evans? I'm taking him off the list of guys I'm pissed at.
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3:42 Robert Evans? So before we move on past World War II, we should at least linger on what guys like LeMay and General Power would have argued was the most important question of the whole war, right? Which is still a question that people debate today. Did the use of atomic weapons against the Empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender, thus sparing both Japan and the allies, primarily the US, a hideously bloody ground invasion, right? This is a question people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here. I think it'll be Pretty clear where I tend to land once we get through this, right? But this isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right? Like, I'm not going to come in and just give one side of this. Again, I have my, my take on the matter.
4:28 Robert Evans? I think it's worth emphasizing, even if you argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan to surrender, that the military of Japan never independently agreed to call it quits. And if the emperor of Japan had not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations, we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued supporting the war effort, no matter how many firebombs or even additional nukes fell, right? We actually don't know that. There's also, like, that's, that's a valid point. There's also an argument that the view pushed after the war, which is that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding a greater slaughter in Japan that, like, if we had invaded the main island, so many more people would have died. That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as a single weapon system.
5:13 Robert Evans? In an article for outwriter.org, Jasmine Power writes, "There is general agreement that the bombing of Nagasaki did little in the way of changing the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet Union having a hand in the post-war reconstruction process. Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to push a communist regime onto the country. It was also very convenient for the US that Japan attributed their surrender to the atomic bombings." And-
5:38 Speaker 01 Oh, shit. So it was a way to stay capitalist, was to be like, oh, it was the nukes, the nukes did us in?
5:44 Robert Evans? More than that, it was a way to avoid what happened to Germany, right? They're watching Germany get split up, right? That's obvious at this point, and they don't want that, you know? And surrendering now, before the Soviets are in, you know, in the mix, so to speak, means that the country doesn't get split up, right? You're not going to have Tokyo divided or whatever, right? That's one argument people will make, you know? And in this view, pretty simply, Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's not a non-factor, but they were defeated because they were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor. It's not just the nukes, it's the fact that we beat the shit out of them all across the Pacific, right?
6:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:25 Robert Evans? Like, which is probably, I mean, certainly a more accurate view than just saying it was the nukes, right? Like, there was a whole war. A lot of guys had to die to finish that thing, right?
6:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:36 Robert Evans? And, yeah, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on record basically saying that military planners had told him that when they were looking into, like, what, how many people would die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands? American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of 500,000 to a million. And if you're talking about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on these other island hopping campaigns, then that would have meant both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have been higher than that, right? Now, that said, this is not a real estimate, as best as I can tell. You will encounter it often. It comes up constantly. But it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers, that 500 to a million American casualties estimate, have any basis in reality.
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, how many did we lose in Europe?
7:23 Robert Evans? We lost in the whole war, the United States lost about half a million people.
7:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
7:28 Robert Evans? Like, so this, this would be basically doing World War II all over again for us, more or less, right?
7:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:34 Robert Evans? It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfie Kohn on kind of the, the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein writes that military planners at the time put the number of American casualties between 20,000 and 46,000. But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong possibility that neither an invasion nor a nuclear attack was actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is a, an interesting point, because if you're saying, oh, 500,000 to a million Americans killed and injured, millions of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes saved lives. But if you're looking at, well, 20 to 46, 40 or 50,000 American casualties, probably twice that many Japanese casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuking the islands, right?
8:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:17 Robert Evans? You know.
8:18 Speaker 01 Well, could they have just laid siege the whole, because they were already.
8:20 Robert Evans? They were, in fact, doing that. And that's another point, as we'll get to, that's another point people will make, is that Japan would have broken on its own, right? In a good essay on the subject for his book, You Know What They Say: The Truth About Popular Belief, Alfie Cohn gives a succinct version of what we might call the skeptic's case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He notes that the US firebombs had already incinerated Japan's six largest cities and are basically the siege that we put on the home islands had blocked all oil from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was in part a desire for the emperor to retain his title. Cohn cites a 1946 report from the War Department's Strategic Bombing Survey Study Group, which
9:00 Robert Evans? concluded, "The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended, even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the survey's opinion that certainly prior to its 31st of December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1st November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or completed." This is the US War Department.
9:45 Speaker 01 So that's the, they were already beat theory?
9:47 Robert Evans? They were beat. They were beat. And I would say that's by far the strongest argument, if you're going with a fact-based argument, not that it's the only one, but I think it's the strongest. You know, your feelings may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm convinced, pretty well. Now, there was at least one other secret intelligence assessment from the same time done by the US Army's Planning and Operations Group, which reached a similar conclusion, and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff during the war, called Truman's decision to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time "adopting, quote, 'an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,'" which is a nuts thing for the President's Chief of Staff to say about what, like.
10:31 Robert Evans? Dwight Eisenhower reached a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I go with Ike on this one. Not a perfect man, but he pretty much, he knew World War II pretty well.
10:46 Speaker 01 That's why you have the "I'm with Ike" button.
10:48 Robert Evans? Yeah, "I'm with Ike." It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that.
10:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:55 Robert Evans? Now, I've allowed that there's still some room for argument here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's decision to surrender, because the bombing campaign in general influenced their decision to surrender, and the nukes were part of that, right? But what isn't arguable is this: President Truman and men in high positions within the US Army like Curtis LeMay never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew they had a bomb, right? There was never any possibility in their minds but that they would use it. Per Coen's article, "The fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option of last resort. It would be easier to accept the argument that he, Truman, had no choice but to drop the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power to Japanese leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender,
11:37 Robert Evans? had been carefully considered. They were not. There was never a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist Kai Erickson put it, "Using nuclear weapons was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration. We have it on the authority of virtually all the principal players that no one in a position to do anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the bombs on Japan."
12:02 Speaker 01 So it's pretty much we have a new toy. We are going to use it.
12:04 Robert Evans? We're gonna see what this thing does.
12:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. The speedometer goes up to 200, I'm going to 200. Yeah.
12:09 Robert Evans? We're already planning for the next war. Like, they handed LeMay a list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right? Like, they wanted to use this thing in part to scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that was part of their logic, right?
12:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:24 Robert Evans? Now, it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people. The initial death toll was horrific enough, but it was what came after that really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor, and she described the sight of thousands of blinded burnt people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to quench their burning bodies. And all of these, like, a huge number of these people died. Like, the rivers were just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had tossed themselves burnt and singeing and, like, melting basically into the water. Like, it was horrible. And in the days and weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood, pulling their hair out in clumps from radiation poisoning, right? Like, this is something that...
13:08 Robert Evans? We were pretty immediately aware that not only does the bomb kill a shitload of people when it goes off, but there are knock on effects that continue killing people, right?
13:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:17 Robert Evans? Even though we didn't have a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of 1945, General Leslie Groves, who's again, the military head of the Manhattan Project, sat before the US Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy. And I want to read you a selected Q and A from that meeting. Senator Milliken, "General, is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation?" General Groves, "I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway." I always love it when people say that. "The radioactive casualty can be of several classes. He can have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He can have a smaller amount, which will cause him to die rather soon. And as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering.
14:00 Robert Evans? In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die."
14:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that's what people say about it all the time.
14:05 Robert Evans? That's what people say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied?
14:09 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
14:10 Robert Evans? Pleasant. Chill.
14:12 Speaker 01 All the parts of you that tell you that you're in trouble are also destroyed, so...
14:16 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. You're fine. You're chillin'.
14:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, happens to everyone.
14:22 Robert Evans? That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing. That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more palatable for Americans. When he said that, the average citizen, and indeed, the average senator, would not have had to dig very deep to find at least a little countervailing evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast site were available. More to the point, you've heard about the radium girls and the like. People have been exposing themselves to different kinds of radiation for decades, and they died horribly. We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever dropped an atomic bomb.
15:02 Robert Evans? Right? Now, again, the point here is that Groves was, he was not just lying. He was engaged in a cover up. This is a conspiracy and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. The campaign to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors of atomic weapons for a little while longer. We knew eventually it would get out, right? These generals all knew, you can't lie about this forever, right? But the longer we lie about it, the more money we get into these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the more we can centralize the US military and defense apparatus around nukes, which was their goal, right? Their goal was replace as many humans as possible with atomic weapons and they start on it almost immediately.
15:47 Robert Evans? For these generals, as for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after the wars end, they set to work launching a new kind of campaign. A media blitz targeted at convincing decision makers in the US that nukes were the only future for the military that was worth caring about. Three months after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society in New York City to give a speech. He warned slash promised the men assembled that the next war, understood to be the next world war, would be fought with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster than sound and involve atomic power. So he's, he's got a pretty clear vision of the future
16:31 Robert Evans? of our friend Curtis LeMay, and he is now trying to sell it.
16:36 Speaker 01 And like, are there other, because, okay, we have this like thing where apparently people who build bombs are obsessed with how bombs are the only thing.
16:43 Robert Evans? Yes.
16:43 Speaker 01 Right? Are there other character classes who feel like similar about like, like are like the fighter jets being like, no, all that matters is fighter jets?
16:52 Robert Evans? Yes. Yeah.
16:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, go ahead.
16:55 Robert Evans? Yes, there are, and we will talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree with LeMay just want nukes to be used differently. But there are some people, there's a couple of decent human beings still in the military establishment in this period who are like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you out of your minds?
17:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I bet you know what this thing does.
17:15 Robert Evans? Yeah.
17:16 Speaker 01 I'm able to figure out, this means destroy the world.
17:19 Robert Evans? Yeah.
17:19 Speaker 01 That seems bad.
17:20 Robert Evans? Why are we building the world killing machine? Why are we doing this?
17:24 Speaker 01 We live here, this is our world.
17:26 Robert Evans? This is the one planet that we've got.
17:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:30 Robert Evans? Back in 1921, Duhae had argued that the invention of the bomber craft basically rendered all other types of weaponry obsolete, and LeMay was making a similar argument, but with the nuclear weapon at the heart of this fabled air force that could finally do the whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote, "The air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to our air power development." That doesn't sound at all like a crazy man.
17:57 Speaker 01 No.
17:58 Robert Evans? And it's, you know, this is a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say, one thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis LeMay tried harder than any single human ever has to end the human race, and he didn't do it. And I don't quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived Curtis LeMay. He would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace just to like tweak them. Like, he was such a piece of shit. And they always had nukes, right?
18:25 Speaker 01 Quantum immortality as a species, but that's all I got.
18:28 Robert Evans? It's nuts. Like, no one has ever tried harder to wipe out the human race than Curtis fucking LeMay. With his fucking dead face. Oh, man, it's nuts.
18:39 Speaker 01 I wonder if like the villains in pulp stuff from like 200 years ago didn't even claim that they're gonna destroy the world, whereas like now we have villains who are like, I'm going to destroy the world, like. Yeah.
18:52 Robert Evans? Yeah.
18:52 Speaker 01 Because people can now.
18:54 Robert Evans? People can now, and we have examples of people who really worked hard to try to do that, you know? And this is ultimately kind of why we are now at the point where the whole human race is, you know, 15 to 30 minutes away from annihilation at any given moment in time, which is Curtis LeMay and a bunch of guys that followed him felt the air force, and to them, this means the nuclear air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. I cannot emphasize enough how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio society was just warmed up Duhey. He insisted no air attack, once it is launched, can be completely stopped. This was an echo of Duhey's argument that the sky was too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right? And this hadn't proved true in World War II, but when you got nukes, it kind of is true, right?
19:39 Robert Evans? If you send 500 bombers and they each have a nuke, one of them's going to drop that fucker, you know?
19:44 Speaker 01 Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
19:48 Robert Evans? Yeah.
19:49 Speaker 01 This feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure, LeMay and-
19:54 Robert Evans? Duhey.
19:54 Speaker 01 Duhey and LeMay.
19:56 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, it is weird how they literally rhyme. Yeah, I hadn't even got that, fuck.
20:01 Speaker 01 No, because I was struggling to remember which one was which.
20:04 Robert Evans? Yeah, Duhey's the old Italian guy who was like, in 1921, bombers are the future, all we need, no use in having anything else.
20:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, a couple decades later, the man who rhymes says the same thing.
20:16 Robert Evans? Right.
20:16 Speaker 01 Nuke.
20:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, if you get, if anyone gets into the military whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we need to redact it immediately. So, as Richard, I'm going to quote now from a piece in The New Yorker by Richard Rhodes, in which he lays out LeMay's thinking in the rest of this speech, and it all kind of follows from the basic idea that you can't stop an aerial nuclear attack. Quote, "This meant to LeMay that the United States would have to have an air force in being that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat of it, might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come. It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare to attack us if we are prepared." So in November of 1945, LeMay was already thinking in terms-
21:01 Robert Evans? Of what came to be called deterrence. But therein lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country. It would only destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right? And what he means by an air force in being is you always have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs, ready to fly, minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean you always have planes in the air with nukes. And that's going to mean for a period of like a couple decades, there are never not nukes flying around in the air.
21:36 Robert Evans? Always. And this is before there's no governor on these. This is not a thing today. Every nuke that we have, you have to get like codes and shit from the nuclear football. This is some guys in a plane have the ability to activate these things. Right?
21:51 Speaker 01 You're like, oh, my wife left me.
21:52 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. Like it's, it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the Cold War.
21:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:58 Robert Evans? Yeah. So, yeah. Um, what we see in this period as early as 1945 is men in the military establishment, expressing a sense of interest in minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians. People were tired after World War Two. Soldiers long deployed wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military. Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments. Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an impossible problem. And I'm going to quote from Rhodes again. "In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its military forces to bare bones, shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly $90 billion to less than $15 billion,
22:41 Robert Evans? and counted on the small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter a Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war ravaged Western Europe." Right? And this is kind of the first use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is we can't keep all these soldiers in the field, but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the, the scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes all over the place. That way we don't need as many guys. We can just set off a shitload of nukes and we can slow these, the, these Russians down while we get our shit in gear, you know? And this, this works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have a bomb. Right? Because they don't have anything to counter this with. Pat Arnold sent a letter in 1945, laying out, and he's an air force general,
23:24 Robert Evans? laying out some of the first principles, well, the air force doesn't exist yet, but he's an army air thing general, laying out some of the first principles for what would become the theory of deterrence. Quote, "We must therefore secure our nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to deter them from launching a modern devastating war." In order to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific projects the air force should support over the next 20 to 30 years. This resulted in 1946 in the air force setting up the RAND Corporation. You've heard of the RAND Corporation, right?
23:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did not know that they were air force.
24:01 Robert Evans? Yes, that's how they start. And RAND just means R and D, like literally, that's, that's why it's RAND, right?
24:06 Speaker 01 Oh shit, okay, I assumed it was someone's name.
24:09 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's the RAND Corporation, they're set up in Santa Monica, right on the coast, beautiful area. And a former defense engineer named James Rubell later wrote of, this is the first RAND project. RAND quickly proposed a death ray project, which the air force approved. So, top men, guys, everyone's super sane, not a bunch of dudes whose brains have been melted by lead and war trauma, just trying to come up with apocalypse weapons. I don't know, guys, death ray? Feels like a good idea, let's get one of those fuckers. I watched War of the Worlds, to hell with it. Now, and to be honest, if we'd made a death ray, that would be pretty cool.
24:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, would it be second amendment, you know?
24:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, oh yeah, I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret. Yeah, I'm, I'm ready for a death ray. I think, I think certain people should have them.
24:59 Speaker 01 A death ray is a one-on-one, it's, it's not really a major step up from bullets, you know?
25:05 Robert Evans? No, it's probably faster and less painless to get shot with.
25:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:09 Robert Evans? You know? And I bet it's, I don't know, good at killing Martians, which we might need to do if Elon Musk ever sets up a colony on Mars. Anyway.
25:18 Speaker 01 So, I think we're both pro death ray, is what we're saying.
25:20 Robert Evans? Actually, I've come around on the RAND Corporation, Margaret. I'm gonna be honest with you.
25:26 Robert Evans? Speaking of the Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast? Not the Rand Corporation, because we're primarily talking about how they nearly killed everyone like a million times.
25:35 Speaker 01 It's the, we're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why we're coming out so strong on Death Rays right now.
25:41 Robert Evans? That's right. And actually, our, the company, the Death Ray company that sponsors us is called Life Ray, you know, because it'll, it's, it's, it's a death ray for personal defense, you know?
25:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. It saves lives.
25:53 Robert Evans? It saves lives. That's, that's the life ray.
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28:36 Robert Evans? And we're back, having a good time. So, right around the time the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war is over, because the normal, normal life is starting to reassert itself, or at least the new normal, some people have begun to question the logic with which men like bomber Harris, Curtis LeMay, and General Pow-- I still can't believe his literal name was General Fucking Power, approached aerial warfare. Was it really possible to break a nation's will?
29:02 Speaker 01 And General Motor, who is in charge of the motor pool.
29:04 Robert Evans? Yeah, right, yeah. Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing, right? This is, this was a question that people, you know, there are guys like LeMay that are like, "Obviously it is, look at what we did." And there are more thoughtful men who are like, "Actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out." And I want to read a quote here about members of the Strategic Bombing Survey from Keeney's book, 15 Minutes. "How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants, the loss of which ravaged the Germans' war-making capabilities and destroyed their economy. This led to post-war air atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike, key targets that if destroyed would have a large, an effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction.
29:46 Robert Evans? These plants were often located in major urban areas, said one Air Force general of this conundrum. 'I think it was sort of a shock to people when a few began to talk about the bonus effects in industrial capital, and particularly when they began to ask, what was a city but a collection of industry?'"
30:01 Robert Evans? And that's an important, yeah, it's hideous stuff.
30:04 Speaker 01 Where the fuck do they live? It must be, these are suburbanites. This is because suburbanites have entered the war.
30:09 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, and aren't outrunning the army, Cher.
30:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:12 Robert Evans? But that, that term bonus effects is used a lot in nuclear war planning. And a bonus effect is the added destruction that you get while destroying your, the targets you're actually aiming at in atomic war. So you're trying to take out-
30:24 Speaker 01 That's just the opposite of collateral damage, but it's the same concept.
30:26 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's collateral damage, but good, right? Like, we needed to take out this tank factory and we killed a million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby, right?
30:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:35 Robert Evans? And there's other bonus effects. Radiation poisoning causes bonus effects. Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they cause firestorms, massive firestorms, some theoretically some like the size of states, right? And that's a bonus effect, you know?
30:50 Speaker 01 I mean, as they've been trying to do that since the beginning, based on what you've told me last week, yeah.
30:53 Robert Evans? And they have been, you know? A firestorm really fucks people up. People don't like firestorms.
30:59 Speaker 01 No.
30:59 Robert Evans? The argument military leaders were making about the future for the first four years after World War II can best be summarized by a memo General Loris Norstad, Assistant Chief of Staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in 1945. He laid out the need for a ready force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives, he argued the existence of this ready force would act as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons. So first, we need a ready force so that no one else will get nukes. If we always have planes ready to nuke people, no one else will even try to get them, right? This is, this is their first argument, you know?
31:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, not as strong as the argument that I think is coming, based on what you told me last year.
31:39 Robert Evans? Right, yeah. Now, this ready force is established in March of 1946 as part of what becomes known as the Strategic Air Command. The SAC is responsible not just for nukes, but for the Air Force's long-range bombing operations, right? When we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam, the SAC is especially in Korea going to be heavily involved, right? And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars. But they come to control a lot of our nukes and they come to control our long-range missile assets. I say control, technically, all of our nuclear weapons at this point are in the custody of the atomic energy- Commission, right? And they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that were starting to build in the post-war period, right? But what you're going to see happen during these first four or five years after the war is we're increasingly deploying nuclear weapons
32:24 Robert Evans? around the world to have this, this air force in readiness, right? This ready force. And so basically they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and SAC is maintaining control of them, right? But you know, the SAC gets them from the Atomic Energy Commission. And the
32:38 Speaker 01 I'm surprised that none of them got stolen.
32:41 Robert Evans? Oh, they, oh, Margaret, just wait. None of them got stolen, maybe. But we lose a lot of these fucking bombs.
32:48 Speaker 01 Okay.
32:49 Robert Evans? We'll get to that. But the SAC today, one of the things that scares me about our current nuclear force is that it is the shittiest job in the air force, maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this, but I've talked to a couple of nukes and they, they did not like it. It is not a prestigious job. It is not a fun job. It is boring. People cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a shit job. In this period of time, it is not seen as a shit job. These are seen as this is the best part of the military to be in. This is the most elite force in the military. It's certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind of pilot, right? And these are the best pilots and engineers that our entire military can put together, right? And
33:30 Robert Evans? they're tasked with a singular purpose. So it's different at this point. That is probably what you want. Now, that's the idea. It's debatable. Are they ever really that good? We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the SAC in 1948. He's not the first guy in charge of it, but he takes command and he really, he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year, 1949, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead. Terrifying members of the US Defense Establishment. There had been a lot of guys, anyone who was smart knew, well, of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program. They have resources. They've got spies. They're gonna get a bomb, right? They have the ability to get uranium
34:12 Robert Evans? or plutonium, all this, whatever shit they need. It's, it's, there's like a fifth of the world's landmass. They have the ability to do this.
34:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, like we invented the wheel. No one else has the wheel. No one's gonna figure out the wheel.
34:24 Robert Evans? They figured out machine guns too? God damn it. No, of course, they were going to do this, but there were, and it's a mix. There were plenty of people, obviously, there were a number of people in our military who knew that this was going to happen at some point. But there are a lot of people who are shocked, right? And are terrified and like, oh, my God, I can't believe the communists figured out this bomb, right?
34:42 Speaker 01 Now, is this because that like spy couple? Or is that?
34:46 Robert Evans? They, there are several spies who play a role. And honestly, I, I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear weapons from being used again in war than anything else. I think once the US has them, if the Soviets didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up nuking the USSR at some point, right?
35:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, that seems very likely.
35:05 Robert Evans? That's unprovable, but that, that's kind of where I come in, right? Of like, yeah, well, it's kind of the gun.
35:10 Speaker 01 Proxy war.
35:11 Robert Evans? It's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were no semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in the country? That would probably be more pleasant. Am I not gonna have one when the crazy ass motherfuckers I know have them like?
35:25 Speaker 01 No. Yeah. The people who want to kill me have it. I've read enough history to know what happens after you disarm.
35:31 Robert Evans? And here's the problem, that's, there's a logic to that. And also that leads us both to having 400 million guns and having 10s of thousands of nukes, right? So it's, it's like, I understand the thought process, but it might fundamentally be what's doomed, what will doom us, right? So there's a degree to which like, I have to put myself in the, in where these guys are. And keep in mind, this is not a period of time in which all of our generals or most or many of them are dudes who just came up and have done this as like a desk job, right? All of these, Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these guys did, right? So these dudes are fucked up and crazy at this point. These people have incinerated cities from the sky. They're, they're not thinking the way normal people think anymore.
36:16 Robert Evans? And the same is true, the Soviets, by the way, they lost 20 million people in this war. The Soviets, we're not getting into it because I have less detail on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to the US, right? Sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged by this hideous war, right? So I do have a little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not have gone bad, right?
36:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:42 Robert Evans? Yeah. So for quite a while after the Soviets detonate their first atom bomb, the US will retain a massive advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right? That will not last forever. Eventually, we reach parity. I think they do actually beat us at one point in total number of nukes. So it's a little hard to know. But from this point forward, there was no denying that nuclear deterrence would eventually be a thing. Right? And so you wind up in this, there's the 19, like 50 to like 52, 53 is this insanely dangerous period, really up until like the early 60s where the Soviets have some nukes, but not all that many, and the US has a lot. And we could have started and won a nuclear war. It would have been really pretty easy for us, right?
37:24 Speaker 01 Right.
37:25 Robert Evans? There would have been casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would have mostly been over in Europe, right? Because the Soviet Union just didn't have a lot of bombs and they didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs over here. There's no ICBMs. You're flying fucking bombers, right?
37:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. So we would have lost Alaska.
37:42 Robert Evans? Maybe, right? Like their long range bombing capacity, especially in like 1949, 50 is probably could have accomplished that, but it wasn't great, right?
37:50 Speaker 01 Right.
37:51 Robert Evans? Um, in 1950, a year after the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly 300 nuclear weapons. The USSR had five. The newly founded Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US Department of Defense, which that'll get started in this post-war period, right? We don't have the Joint Chiefs or like, you know, in World War II, right? This is a post-war innovation, you know?
38:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
38:11 Robert Evans? If you want to call it that. Uh, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the DOD had concluded after a study that some 200 nuclear bombs would be sufficient to depopulate most of the earth, quote, "leaving only vestigial remnants of man's material works." That is the Joint Chiefs. They say 200 nukes will do that, and so we build 300.
38:34 Speaker 01 150%.
38:35 Robert Evans? Yeah, cool. Well, we'll get a lot more in 19, by 1951, we'll have more than 400 such weapons, right? Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power, the USSR goes from one to 50 atomic weapons of varying power. Shortly after taking over the SAC, LeMay decided that the new post-war air force had gotten sloppy, and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio to prove it. A massive bomber raid. I love that he's like, "Well, let's have them pretend to blow up Dayton. See how good they do."
39:04 Speaker 01 Poor Ohio.
39:05 Robert Evans? Yeah, fuck it. So, he has this massive bombing raid over the city that's like, it's a fake, they're not dropping real bombs, obviously, but all of the fake bombs are horribly off-target. Like, they fuck up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs to save their goddamn lives, right? This is probably less on train, I mean, there's some degree of training, it's more that just like bombers aren't great at hitting things precisely at this point, right?
39:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:31 Robert Evans? Yeah. And nukes-
39:33 Speaker 01 They're not TV-guided? I remember that there were plenty-
39:35 Robert Evans? Right.
39:36 Speaker 01 -of them in TV-guided.
39:37 Robert Evans? Yeah, not quite yet. And it's a kind of, you know, one of the benefits of nukes, it's horrible to say this, but it is a benefit from a military standpoint, is that you don't have to be very accurate because it's a fucking nuke, right?
39:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:48 Robert Evans? But-
39:49 Speaker 01 It's what people say about shotguns, but real.
39:50 Robert Evans? Right. But accurate, yes, accurate. Like, you really can be pretty far off with a nuke and still hit your target, but these guys do so badly that even with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their intended targets. This is not an effective raid. And LeMay calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton, quote, "The darkest night in American military aviation history because not one airplane finished that mission is briefed." And like, man, you were part of raids where guys die, I think that's darker. Like, where guys died and the mission wasn't really that successful? I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs just don't hit very well. I don't know.
40:24 Speaker 01 Y'all incinerated babies.
40:26 Robert Evans? Yeah, that might be darker. Hiroshima, all might be darker, arguably.
40:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:32 Robert Evans? Now, this means that when the Korean War kind of starts up, it's gonna be, not quite the last point, some people will argue that like, you know, there's some shit in JFK's early administration, like Berlin, there's some shit in, during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan, where we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary annihilation or getting nuked into the Stone Age ourselves, right? But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a tactical level and known the risks were minimal, that things would have like spiraled into global annihilation, at least at that point, right? And given that fact, given that we could have nuked North Korea and even China, and
41:16 Robert Evans? the guys wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't. It's like shocking to me when I get into the history that like we
41:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:23 Robert Evans? That it didn't happen, right?
41:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:25 Robert Evans? And going into the war, some powerful men in the Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it was a wasting asset. In other words, because we know the Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and starting to get long-range bombers and the other things they need to be able to strike us, every day we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically, he's saying, we gotta use them or lose them, right?
41:54 Speaker 01 Right.
41:55 Robert Evans? If we don't use them now, we'll never be able to use them, right?
41:58 Speaker 01 Right. And if you're playing the world like a video game, this is true, right?
42:02 Robert Evans? Yeah.
42:02 Speaker 01 If I'm a video game general, I would
42:05 Robert Evans? I will start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game that gives me a nuke, right?
42:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
42:10 Robert Evans? Yeah, which is why gamers should not be allowed in the Department of Defense.
42:15 Speaker 01 No.
42:17 Robert Evans? Oops, all gamers, turns out.
42:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, under strict control by non-gamers.
42:22 Robert Evans? Right. So, at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic targets in North Korea. And they succeeded in these bombing raids on paper, right? The SAC destroys the targets assigned to them. But North Korea, if you know much about North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot of expo-- there wasn't a lot that we could really do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right? Like, we do some damage, but that's just kind of not how their militaries wired at this point in time. And to make matters worse for the United States, we start this war using very new, high-tech guided bombs, like the ASMA-1 Tarzan.
43:07 Robert Evans? But those run out immediately, which is a thing in modern warfare, too. If you look at what's happened in Ukraine, right?
43:12 Speaker 01 That's what I'm saying, yeah.
43:13 Robert Evans? You have these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things, but also you get really hard to make them.
43:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, we already exploded them all, yeah.
43:21 Robert Evans? And it turns out you go through that shit real fast in a war. So-- As I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the SAC in 1948, and he was the architect of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the fact that we had run through all of our most advanced munitions without ending the war as another L for Team Precision Bombing. Basically, LeMay's like, "Well, look, clearly just striking strategic targets doesn't work." So he orders US bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rissione, in that article that he wrote, describes SAC's plan as to, quote, "Increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing civilian targets." LeMay and the SAC used US air power to kill around 2 million North Korean citizens over the next two years and change.
44:03 Speaker 01 Jesus, fuck. I straight up didn't know that. I know so little about the Korean War.
44:09 Robert Evans? It's between a fifth and a sixth of the population of North Korea we kill through primarily aerial bombing.
44:15 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
44:16 Robert Evans? But it's also still a hideous war crime. Like, we murdered 2 million people, and it doesn't win. Like, again, the thing that keeps happening, that has always happened, every time someone like LeMay is like, "Well, we just gotta cause them enough pain," that their morale breaks. And what happens is their morale doesn't break, right?
44:39 Speaker 01 They're always like, forever and ever, I've been, just did a bunch of stuff about people defending against the Roman Empire in Gaul and things like that, right? And you start saying like, "Oh, well, these people, like, these people, you know, the horrible druids, they sacrificed children or whatever, right?"
44:53 Robert Evans? Fucking who wasn't?
44:55 Speaker 01 I know. One who wasn't. Yeah. And even if they were, you know how many, you know how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere near the evil of what Rome did in terms of killing them?
45:05 Robert Evans? Julius Caesar does a genocide in Gaul.
45:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so, like, communism is, whatever.
45:13 Robert Evans? It's the same thing as the people who are like, "Well, the conquistadors stopped the child sacrifice in the Americas."
45:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, by killing all the children.
45:21 Robert Evans? You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve any fucking kids dying, man?
45:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally.
45:26 Robert Evans? Okay, bro.
45:27 Speaker 01 Totally. Yeah.
45:28 Robert Evans? Look, I'm not saying, I'm not saying any of these, in any society, any organized empire anywhere in the Americas or elsewhere has been a- Nice empire. None of them are. But if you're just being like, well, look at the bad things they did. Uh huh. What were you guys getting up to? Huh?
45:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Is that justified? You killing 2 million people?
45:44 Robert Evans? Yeah. I, yeah, come on, bro.
45:46 Speaker 01 Was North Korea so bad that they all just need to die?
45:49 Robert Evans? It's, it's the same thing as like, well, look at all these fucked up things and plenty of fucked up things. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China did a lot of, but like, we murder millions of people from the sky repeatedly, all over, like the world.
46:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:02 Robert Evans? So, you know, I don't know. Don't, don't get up your own ass about your side being particularly nice.
46:09 Speaker 01 Angels.
46:10 Robert Evans? Right. The angels as you incinerate cities.
46:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:14 Robert Evans? Um, villages largely, but yeah. Once again, though, this is really important. Actual war disproves all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off, North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge in strategic bombing. Per the theories that LeMay and Duhae both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right? That's the point.
46:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:41 Robert Evans? It just doesn't work. It's never true. That also are the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop North Korea from fighting effectively. And none of the bombing we do, it doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier, we really cut back on the military after World War II. And in fact, all military development outside of making the SAC stronger took a backseat. And as a result, when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South Korea are not well-prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained. I've talked to my grandpa about this. He was there the whole war and he was like, yeah, we were in shit shape when the war started.
47:24 Robert Evans? And it was because they had let, like, we, like, fucking, our bazookas wouldn't fire and shit. Like, we have, like, there were serious issues with, like, the maintenance of basic equipment because guys like LeMay were like, all we need are bombers, bro. Trust me, all we need are bombers, you know?
47:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. Whereas they actually needed the life ray.
47:41 Robert Evans? Right, we needed the life, a couple of life rays would have really solved this whole problem. They wouldn't have even tried if we had a life ray.
47:48 Speaker 01 That's what I'm saying.
47:49 Robert Evans? Now, after North Korea invades, they pushed the small US garrison and the South Korean forces down the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur, at the head of a UN amphibious landing force, came aground at Incheon and pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with China. Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes, and suddenly the UN forces are in full retreat and they get pushed back. It's really, it's a, it's a, it doesn't, not enough study of, not enough people, Americans, know anything about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time.
48:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War II and then Vietnam. That's what I know.
48:23 Robert Evans? Right. It's a little, it's, it's, and Korea is kind of halfway between World War II and Vietnam in terms of like, fighting tactics and all that stuff. You know, you do have a lot of these big armored clashes, you have dogfights and stuff, but you also have more advanced, you know, you have these guided missiles and stuff, right? Early ones. So Douglas MacArthur, as he's getting the shit hammered out of him, requests 10 atomic bombers with live nukes be put on standby in Guam, right? Because he wants to have the option to use them if, in an emergency situation, right?
48:52 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
48:52 Robert Evans? Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants these planes and their nukes placed under his direct control. And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may have saved a lot of people's lives, and I don't think it's for a good reason, but he steps in and he begs Truman to say no, and keep the bombs under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay with the SAC, right? He wants to have control over them. But I do think he is less, I don't think he would have, I don't think, he certainly was not unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested in doing it than MacArthur, right? He was not convinced it was the only path forward. And MacArthur was really convinced it was the only way to win, right?
49:30 Speaker 01 Right.
49:31 Robert Evans? Now, for decades, because the fact that we sent nukes to Guam during the Korean War has been well-known, but if you look up any histories that are like, older, prior to the 21st century, it will say the SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam. We now know that this was inaccurate. And I'm gonna quote from the book 15 Minutes here. The first nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last B-29 accelerated down the runway, two propellers ran away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to shut down two engines. In what would later be described as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel-laden, bomb-laden bomber into the air and managed to turn back towards the runway. But as he did, he lost altitude and the bomber simply went into the ground.
50:14 Robert Evans? "The crash was not hard," reported an aide to General Lemay, "but 12 men were dead and eight were trapped in the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge of a trailer park that housed military families." That's a nuke. We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes, because they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about, they cover this the fuck up, right?
50:38 Speaker 01 So this is like, this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe?
50:41 Robert Evans? Kind of. The good news is that because of how nukes work, they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set up for, in order to get the big, the explosion that we all recognize as a nuclear blast, you have to set off a nuke in a specific way. The bad news is that even if it's not set off in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're still talking about 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives in the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it does, it can still make, from what I've seen, because this happens a few times, it doesn't always make a dirty bomb, but it can. You can get radiation contamination when one of these things explodes in a plane crash, right? That does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does in this case because of how much was covered up.
51:23 Robert Evans? I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians in the base housing got rad sick, but the blast of this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt 30 miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel and it injures 181 civilians. The Air Force immediately lies and says, "Oh, that was just loaded with normal bombs. It was a training mission. Sorry, guys. Not a nuke, though. Don't worry."
51:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, unlike the nine planes next to it.
51:48 Robert Evans? Right. It was 44 years before the fact that a fucking nuke exploded was declassified. And Margaret, that's not close to the only nuke we lost. This is the thing I did not know, we fucking lose so many nukes. It's crazy. On November 10th of 1950, an SAC bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an MK4 atom bomb set to self-destruct 100 miles outside of Quebec.
52:20 Robert Evans? And here's the wild part. That was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from the end of World War II to November of 1950.
52:27 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
52:28 Robert Evans? Five lost nukes in five years?
52:31 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
52:32 Robert Evans? And that, that counts as a success because we self-destruct the nuke. So it doesn't just land, right? We'll get to that. Back to the Korean War.
52:42 Speaker 01 All right.
52:42 Robert Evans? Because this is all going, right, as this is all going on, you know, MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear warfare as the situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan that would have involved dropping between 30 and 50 tactical atom bombs on enemy airbases and depots. And then he would have followed up by a massive invasion of Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from China were to be blocked. This army that he's going to have basically cut Korea off from China, they're going to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is to radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people.
53:25 Speaker 01 That's like salty in the earth behind you, but another level.
53:28 Robert Evans? I cannot exaggerate how fucking insane Douglas MacArthur is at this point. Like, he is completely dangerously unhinged, one of the craziest men to ever command a US military force. Truman refused this insane plan, thank fucking god. And as a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with a shitload of dead people and without a real peace, but also without additional nuclear explosions. So, you know, that's good. It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying, you know?
54:02 Speaker 01 So civilian control of government is better than military control of government?
54:07 Robert Evans? Yeah, because again, these people lose their fucking minds. And MacArthur, like Curtis LeMay is a voice of reason here. That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice of reason, but a little bit of one. Because MacArthur is batshit crazy.
54:24 Robert Evans? At the start of the Korean War, the US moved almost 90 nuclear weapons into Europe out of fears that a wider communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now, the Soviet arsenal is really small at this stage. And again, there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good. So time is not as much of a factor, right? We don't have to have these things ready to detonate at five minutes' notice, right? And so for safety's sake, again, this is one of these, the Atomic Energy Commission kind of comes in and is like, we'll send the bombs over, but not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores in the US so that we can airlift them over to Europe on a moment's notice.
55:01 Speaker 01 Okay, because they're smaller than the bombs themselves.
55:03 Robert Evans? Right, right. And it's safer than just having a live nuke where someone could steal it or set it off, right?
55:11 Speaker 01 You store the ammo and the gun in a different place when there's children around.
55:15 Robert Evans? Yeah, this is, moments like this of just minimal sanity are so rare in the nuke story that it's just like a breath of fresh air, like, oh, somebody wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind. But you know who is out of their goddamn mind, Margaret?
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55:43 Robert Evans? Uh huh. For safety, yeah.
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58:00 Robert Evans? And we're back. So, at this point, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were not actively in use. The DoD never likes this, and they use the opportunity to argue that the military should have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Guam, right? This is kind of the first time that the military gets direct custody for a long period of time, is in Guam during the Korean War. In 1951, the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from 299 to 438, twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told in an internal report could destroy civilization. As I noted, the USSR has around 50 bombs. Their stockpile will grow rapidly after this point.
58:43 Robert Evans? But to deal with the fact that the gap is starting to close, we start working on a bigger bomb, right? It's first known by its nickname, "The Super", and this is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. Okay. As a, as a brief aside, most post-apocalyptic, post-atomic apocalypse movies and fictions, imagine a bunch of bombs kind of like the Hiroshima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does, really. Because like, you look at DC and Fallout, what is it, 3 or 4? I forget which one DC is in.
59:15 Speaker 01 I've played some of them, but I don't remember them.
59:16 Robert Evans? If you look at DC and like, most of the buildings are still relatively intact, right? That doesn't happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over like, if a one of the standard hydrogen bombs were dropped on DC, like, and these are actively aimed at DC at all times, right? The Russians always have some aim to DC, you know? Just like, we've got shit aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them. Like, we're both doing this crazy shit. Everyone within a mile of the blast dies immediately. Everyone within 2 or 3 miles of the blast is incinerated over the course of a few seconds, right? You're talking millions of deaths in the space of a minute or two. Like, these are not survivable. Everything
59:57 Robert Evans? is, there's no buildings left. Everything is combusted near, like, the power of these bombs cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not an after thermonuclear war.
1:00:10 Speaker 01 Is it a different, it's like a fundamentally different technology?
1:00:14 Robert Evans? It's a, it's the craziest thing you can imagine. Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, right? Like, thermonuclear weapons work on the premise, what if you set off a nuke with a nuke? Right? Here's Annie Jacobson describing how these work. "The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction, which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion. An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people, as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York or Seoul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash."
1:00:50 Speaker 01 So this, I think, it's fission versus fusion, maybe, or something?
1:00:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, I think that's, that's basically what's going on here. But you're setting, instead of using conventional explosives to start the nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a nuke, basically, right?
1:01:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, yo dog, uh huh.
1:01:05 Robert Evans? Uh huh. It's, it's just the craziest thing. "The prototype thermonuclear weapon was designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a 10.4-megaton explosive capacity that made it equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs." Um, for an idea of what would, that's the first one of these we make, right?
1:01:22 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:01:23 Robert Evans? These things, when we start detonating them, we'll talk about it, but like, we repeatedly, horribly irradiate and like permanently injure huge numbers of US troops because we don't get nearly far away enough because we don't realize how big they're going to be. Like one of these is like 50% larger than we'd expected it to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist, actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb. Quote, "The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light." Don't build the torment nexus.
1:02:05 Speaker 01 I know.
1:02:06 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:02:07 Speaker 01 But what if a torment nexus is built by the torment nexus?
1:02:09 Robert Evans? Right, right, right. But Garvin wants to solve this fun problem.
1:02:13 Speaker 01 I love that they're like, "We built the ultimate weapon. It can kill God." And people are like, "Not enough."
1:02:19 Robert Evans? Not enough. What if we use one of those to bake a bigger one of those?
1:02:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:23 Robert Evans? Truman ignores this letter from Fermi. "The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the Marshall Islands in November of 1952. It left behind a crater large enough to hold 15 pentagons." In her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power of this device. Sophie's going to put it up, but you can see the bomb was detonated on an island called Eluge Lab. And you see the before, there's Eluge Lab, it's an island. And then in the after, there's just no island.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's just a black spot on the map.
1:02:53 Robert Evans? It's gone. The island is gone.
1:02:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:56 Robert Evans? Um, a year or two ago, James Stout, uh, over at It Could Happen Here, went to the Marshall Islands to report on, I mean, there's still ongoing fallout, both in the literal and figurative sense for the people of the Marshall Islands because of how many fucking nukes we set off there, right? Like, there's tremendous suffering in the Marshall Islands. We are not... Doing this on quote unquote, I mean, they're on to the extent that they're uninhabited because we forced people off, right? Like, this is a crime against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that after this series, right? I'm not going to be getting into it because he did that series, but you can see in that, yeah.
1:03:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:37 Robert Evans? You can see just in the picture how catastrophic these weapons are.
1:03:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:41 Robert Evans? In the immediate wake of the Ivy Mike test, President Truman gave his farewell address. He mourned that, quote, "The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men." Now, that's not wrong, but you're one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like, you're wearing, you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman. Like, come on, man. You gave the call to use the first of these fucking things.
1:04:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:13 Robert Evans? Yeah. Jacobson goes into more detail about how military planners respond, despite what Truman says, to the existence now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, "What happened after US war planners saw what 10.4 megatons could instantly destroy simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands." In 1952, the United States had 841 nuclear weapons. A year before Truman left office, in 1951, a group of scientists and researchers that included Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy for responding to a Soviet invasion.
1:04:56 Robert Evans? They concluded that having the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead, whoa, yeah. Here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO should replace manpower with low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that would evaporate advancing Soviet forces and that could be deployed by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree to which they're trying to do a kind of noble Thing here, right? The stated goal here is bring the battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on soldiers, but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every city in Europe with atomic hellfire. Right? That's what Project Vista is kind of trying to argue for.
1:05:40 Robert Evans? And their conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces the influence of the SAC, right? The SAC has the nukes now. The Army wants some nukes of its own, right?
1:05:54 Speaker 01 Right.
1:05:54 Robert Evans? As Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low-yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of fissile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can now only lessen defeat, LeMay told his commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer the SAC's top priority. LeMay now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear facilities became SAC's primary targets. LeMay did not.
1:06:33 Speaker 01 That makes sense.
1:06:34 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's not completely off base here. LeMay did not advocate preventative war, an American surprise attack on the Soviet Union out of a blue. But the counterforce strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war. SAC planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal. Offensive air power must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies, LeMay argued. This transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might be paid with national survival. Right? This is the origin of what becomes launch on Warren, right? So you don't wait to get a bloody nose. You don't wait for them to hit you.
1:07:17 Robert Evans? You wait until you're pretty sure they're about to hit you and you hit them. That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right? You can understand kind of how he gets there, but that that ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly. Once you're now saying, we won't wait. To get hit, right?
1:07:36 Speaker 01 It's so interesting to, because it's all predicated on this idea that national survival, right? He's very concerned about national survival. Like, I'm much more concerned about humanity's survival, not even because I'm a humanitarian.
1:07:47 Robert Evans? People think.
1:07:47 Speaker 01 But because I'm a human.
1:07:49 Robert Evans? Right.
1:07:49 Speaker 01 Like, all, if you destroy all life on Earth, then nation's gone.
1:07:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, there's, there's, well, and that's, that's part of the craziness, like, the understated crazy in that paragraph is that LeMay thinks tactical nukes are a waste of fissile material. Bro.
1:08:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:03 Robert Evans? You have four times as many nukes by 1951 as it would take to end civilization in just your country.
1:08:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:09 Robert Evans? What's wasted, bro?
1:08:12 Speaker 01 And that's by the old standards.
1:08:14 Robert Evans? Enough of these fuckers? Like.
1:08:15 Speaker 01 That's by the, before they made them the god-killing machine that kills by God.
1:08:20 Robert Evans? Right. We need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in the fucking nukes. Now, one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first concerns when he took office would be to bring a resolution to this conflict, right? This conflict between the army and the, and the air force via the SAC, right? After having his national security team take a new look at US defense policies, Ike decided both sides were right. The US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe, but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all, in late 1953, the USSR detonated its first thermonuclear device. By 1954, the United States had more than 1,700 nuclear weapons. By 1955, that number had climbed to nearly 2,500. We were building roughly two bombs a day.
1:09:05 Robert Evans? By 1959, the United States had an arsenal of more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You see just how quickly, like, there's not even any conceivable use for 12,000 nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first 1,000, at least, you know? Maybe less, right? Like, um.
1:09:31 Robert Evans? Surprisingly, it was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant budget cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has kind of been forgotten, but Ike does, you know, we, people are generally aware of like the military industrial complex speech, but at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes the military budget and actually causes like kind of an eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower, because he's cutting back so much. The army, in order to deal with this loss of manpower, starts lobbying for more nukes of its own, because that's the only thing you can get funded for now, right? That's all they're giving out, you know? General James R. Gavin, during secret testimony before Congress, laid out the number of atomic shells, anti-aircraft missiles, and landmines the army needed. These are all nuclear artillery,
1:10:16 Robert Evans? nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, and nuclear landmines.
1:10:18 Speaker 01 Nuclear landmines are great plan. I can't come up with any negative thought about-
1:10:22 Robert Evans? Sounds good. Sounds good. Sounds safe.
1:10:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:24 Robert Evans? What's crazy is how many Gavin wanted. 106,000 for battlefield use, 25,000 for air defense, and 20,000 to hand out to the rest of NATO. Jesus Christ, bro. These people are so crazy. They're insane. I will say, there is some, maybe the only arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are the air defense nuclear weapons, because the plan of this is, if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in, the only way you can stop them, maybe, and ensure that none of them drop a nuke on a city, is you nuke them in the air. Because nukes fuck up planes really bad. And that's actually kind of reasonable, if there's this many of these things.
1:11:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, keep shooting.
1:11:07 Robert Evans? Also, is only gonna kill soldiers, right? I mean, the fallout and right, there will be consequences to that, too, but it's, it's a defensible position, as compared to everything else that they're doing, right?
1:11:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:11:18 Robert Evans? I can see how you might want to be able to just like, try to blow up 500 planes in the air with a big nuke, right? That kind of makes sense. Like, this is all crazy, but I get it, you know?
1:11:28 Speaker 01 What's so interesting, because I'm under the impression our current system is the like shooting a bullet with a bullet approach?
1:11:33 Robert Evans? Yes, yep, yep.
1:11:34 Speaker 01 Did we move away from skeet shooting?
1:11:37 Robert Evans? Uh, we definitely have moved away from nuclear anti-aircraft artillery. We have the ability to use that, but also we've gotten a lot better and so have our quote unquote adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from EMP and the like.
1:11:51 Speaker 01 Oh shit.
1:11:52 Robert Evans? I don't think it's as much, there's just not much point in defenses. The other reason is that like, sure, you could stop some bombers, but it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and the sub-launched nukes. And you can kind of, again, we have these things called like THAAD batteries that could be, if we actually had any placed in the US, could be useful against like a sub-attack, right? You could actually stop a good number of sub-based nuclear weapons, right? With these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas protecting like Israel and the like, right? We don't have any, one of the scenarios Jacobson talks about is like a North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant on the coast of California, which would cause this ap- ap- Titanic environmental catastrophe.
1:12:36 Robert Evans? And she points out like, there are plans for having THAAD batteries that could protect this thing, but we just, we're using them all overseas, so we don't have any set up.
1:12:44 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:12:45 Robert Evans? And that's one of those things where I'm like, well, I guess I'm, if we're going to be spending money on something, I would like to spend money on more of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet in the air or more nukes. I don't know.
1:12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally.
1:12:58 Robert Evans? But none of this really is gonna be enough if there's a full-scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best hope is that maybe someone, it's just one or two nukes that get fires and maybe we're able to stop them, you know?
1:13:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:08 Robert Evans? Anyway, that's part three, Margaret.
1:13:10 Speaker 01 Yay.
1:13:11 Robert Evans? Got any pluggables to plug?
1:13:13 Speaker 01 Well, if you like history, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is the opposite of the show, although I still have to end up talking about terrible things all the time. And you can go listen to that, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and you can also listen to Robert and I playing Pathfinder.
1:13:29 Robert Evans? That's right.
1:13:30 Speaker 01 On the It Could Happen Here feed or the Cool Zone Media Book Club feed.
1:13:34 Robert Evans? That's right. You can check all of that out and you can check me out in the Dyke Day when we do the next episode, because you're getting a bonus one this week, you lucky ducks. Anyway, assuming that, you know, we don't all die in nuclear gunfire, which is entirely possible. It could happen right now. Oh, no, we're good. All right.
1:13:54 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
1:13:57 Speaker 07 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/behindthebastards.
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