American History Tellers - The Cold War - Nuclear Fear | 3

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

What is the United States to do when direct conflict with the Soviet Union promises almost certain annihilation? They turned to proxy wars and psychological warfare with the threat of nuclear weapons keeping both countries in check. Ever wondered how an atom bomb works? We’ll cover it in Episode 3 including the scientific concepts, the arms race and the problem of ensuring complete and absolute control over these weapons.For more information on the subjects and themes discussed in the episode, see the book “Raven’s Rock” by Garrett Graff. It goes into great detail about the secret plans our government made to ride out a nuclear holocaust.Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control” examines the ways the nuclear arsenal was required to function at 100% — and what happened the few times it didn’t.“Command and Control” was also made into a riveting documentary film.Finally, Audra Wolfe’s book, “Competing with the Soviets,” was crucial to our overall understanding of the Cold War.Listen and subscribe to Wondery's podcast Tides of History.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine that it's Wednesday, October 24th, 1962. It's early evening and dark. Your commute to the suburbs feels longer this time of year, especially tonight. Your radio is broken and you're desperate to get home to catch up on the news. Client meetings all day while the nation's on the brink of war. Martini poured, you make it a double.

You head to the living room and flip on the TV. You're both eager and anxious to see the news. Two nights ago, the entire country learned from President Kennedy that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba, nuclear missiles, and they could reach the United States in minutes. In response, Kennedy said, the United States was establishing a naval quarantine around the island and the Soviets had announced that they would run the blockade. Today, no one knows what's going to happen. This is a special report from CBS News. Good evening, this is Walter Cronkite at CBS News headquarters in New York. At its beginning this day looked as though it might be one of armed

conflict. The tension, the real threat of nuclear war, feels like a physical presence. You can feel it in your neck, in your shoulders, and has a gnawing pain in your gut. Your family joins you on the couch in hopes that the most trusted voice on television has reassuring news. The good news? The United Nations has a plan to de-escalate the crisis But CBS correspondents in Washington, New York, and the Pentagon suggest This crisis in Cuba cannot be confined to the Caribbean Last year, the Soviets put up a wall separating West Berlin from the rest of Soviet-occupied East Berlin In response, the United States declared that it had deployed hundreds of nuclear weapons throughout West Germany. Even Cronkite, that voice of reason, seems anxious.

His eyes dart back and forth and he blinks uncontrollably while talking to the correspondents. This is the point at which we are concerned that there might be shooting among the ships at sea. That story that we heard a great deal of today, the possibility that invasion might have to be undertaken to assure that those bases are eliminated. If invasion is undertaken, the Russians have said that they would retaliate with rocket fire. We have said if there's rocket fire from Cuba, we will retaliate. And there goes the whole ballgame.

The whole ballgame. By 1962, both the United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world many times over. The threat of nuclear apocalypse loomed large in Cold War culture. And there was absolutely nothing the average citizen could do about it. And yet, when the moment came, neither President Kennedy or Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could bear to pull the nuclear trigger. We survived the It Now, where aspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts. Gwyneth Paltrow.

Anthony Anderson. Tabitha Brown. Tony Hawk. Oh, my God. Buy It Now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. From Wondering comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money?

Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness? Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. In the first two episodes of our six-part series on the Cold War,

I talked a lot about ideology, communism versus capitalism, and how the United States and the Soviet Union hoped to win the battle for hearts and minds. But the Cold War was never just a battle of ideas. The Cold War was the first conflict of the nuclear age. This was a new kind of war, and it required a new kind of strategy. On today's episode, we're taking a closer look at how the threat of nuclear war transformed American life, unleashing consequences that the Manhattan Project scientists could never have dreamed of. So let's start at the beginning. What are nuclear weapons? Are they really so different from conventional weapons? Military planners during the Second World War didn't necessarily

think so. By 1945, World War II had become a total war, with Germany, Japan, and the United States targeting major population centers. Earlier that year, Allied firebombs rained down on Dresden, Germany, completely leveling the city. The casualties? 25,000 dead. A month later, U.S. forces firebombed Tokyo. Half the city was destroyed. 100,000 civilians perished. In this context, most military planners saw nuclear weapons as larger, more expensive firebombs. The most notable thing about an atomic bomb, from their perspective, was efficiency. You could inflict an enormous amount of damage from a single plane. But the scientists behind the bomb had more doubts. The military may have

paid for it, but scientists owned the idea of the bomb. Albert Einstein himself penned a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 urging him to develop an atomic weapon. It took military leaders at least until 1942 to understand the potential of atomic power. They wanted to use it for things like powering submarines. But American and immigrant physicists kept pushing. Many of the United States' top physicists had fled Hitler's Germany, and they lived in fear that Hitler would beat them to the bomb. When the Army finally created the Manhattan Project in 1942, it did so because scientists had finally convinced enough generals that the threat of atomic war was real. The physicists

understood that the science of atomic weaponry is not in itself that complicated, and that's what worried them. In the mid-1930s, scientists discovered that you could split the nucleus of an atom, a process called nuclear fission that releases energy in the form of heat and light. Under certain conditions, fission can trigger a chain reaction in neighboring atoms, and that fission chain reaction, if harnessed and controlled, could be an incredible resource. You could use this energy peacefully, for instance, to generate electric power. Or you could use it to create explosions of terrifying force. The Manhattan Project concentrated on the latter, fission bombs.

But the same scientists who suggested that the military build atomic weapons to defeat Hitler got cold feet when it came time to use the bombs in Japan. In the spring of 1945, a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, led by Nobel laureate James Frank, tried to talk the military out of using these new weapons on civilians. Instead of dropping the bomb on Japan, they argued, the military should invite Japanese leaders to witness a demonstration. Imagine you're a fly on the wall during a conversation between the scientific heads of the Manhattan Project in the summer of 1945. They've read the Frank Report and are debating

whether to endorse it. One of the scientists with close ties to Chicago makes the case. The world's never seen anything like this. We don't even know what it will do. The moral and ethical approach is to show the Japanese what we have, then give them the chance to surrender. J. Robert Oppenheimer takes a long drag from his cigarette and asks the question they're all dreading. But what if the demonstration fails? Then the secret's out. It won't fail. You don't know that. But I'm not sure it's up to us anyway. This is a weapon, not a physics experiment. We have a responsibility. We've proposed this bomb to defeat the Nazis,

not kill Japanese civilians. I'll be sure to pass your concerns along. Oppenheimer did tell the military brass what other scientists thought, without endorsing the ideas. He, like his military superiors, wondered what was the point of investing millions of dollars in a weapon that couldn't be used. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare over Hiroshima. Over 80,000 people were killed instantly. Three days later, the boxcar dropped the second atomic weapon over Nagasaki. At least 40,000 people died in the firestorm. Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands more died from burns and radiation sickness.

When Japan surrendered less than a week later, U.S. authorities credited the bomb. The atomic bomb was hardly the only high-tech weapon that won World War II, but its particular success left military planners wondering, what else could American scientists do? And while some worried about tying scientific research so closely to the military, others embraced this new direction. For instance, Edward Teller. Five foot six with a widow's peak, Edward Teller never lost the Hungarian accent of his youth. Teller arrived in the United States in 1935. In 1941, he became a citizen. Teller might politely be described as a nuclear enthusiast. Over the course of his career, he championed plans to use nuclear explosions to dig a new harbor in Alaska and blow open a new Panama Canal. He tried to convince President Reagan to put nuclear weapons in space. When he died in 2003 at age 93, almost every obituary

referred to him as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Edward Teller joined the Manhattan Project to build a fission bomb, but even before that first bomb was finished, Teller was leading the campaign to build something even bigger and more destructive, a fusion bomb. Remember, fission splits atomic nuclei. Fusion joins them. The same process at work at the core of the sun, where hydrogen atoms are fused and become helium. In fact, fusion bombs use a form of hydrogen. That's why they're often referred to as hydrogen bombs or H-bombs. If you had to explain this concept to third graders like myself, you might find it helpful to grab a hunk of modeling clay. Take that hunk and split it in two. That's fission. Now smoosh them back together. That's fusion. For this analogy to be really compelling, you'd need

a sound and a light show, and preferably a very large explosion, but you get the idea. The thing that really excited Teller about hydrogen bombs was that there are virtually no upper limits on their size. Bomb yields are measured by the amount of dynamite needed to make the same size explosion. The fission bombs the United States used in Japan had a yield equivalent to 16 and 20 kilotons of dynamite. That's 16,000 and 20,000 tons of dynamite. Teller predicted that a single hydrogen bomb would be at least 100 times bigger, 1.5 megatons. That's one and a half million tons of dynamite. And maybe a bomb could even be as big as 15 megatons. Even military leaders at the time understood that there was no military use for a bomb that big.

In 1949, a group of scientists charged with evaluating this program recommended against it. They warned that a hydrogen bomb could only be used to slaughter innocent civilians. A Hiroshima-style atomic bomb dropped in New York's West Village would destroy most of lower Manhattan. A 15-megaton hydrogen bomb in the same location would wipe out not only the entire island of Manhattan,

but also the other four boroughs, most of northern New Jersey and parts of Westchester County. Five of the committee members wrote a blunt addendum. We believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon.

This statement wasn't the work of a radical fringe. Oppenheimer was one of the signers. Perhaps he regretted his failure to stop the bomb back in 1945. But by then, the Soviet Union had an atomic bomb of its own. If you caught the first episode of this series, you may remember that the intelligence authorities were beginning to suspect that Soviet spies might know about the H-bomb, too. Teller won the debate. He argued that scientists like Oppenheimer had overstepped their bounds. Scientists had a duty to serve their country. It was up to

politicians to decide what to do with that knowledge. President Truman declared the United States would build a hydrogen bomb, and the arms race was underway. The United States tested its first thermonuclear device in November 1952. I say device instead of bomb because it was as big as a house. Still, even though it wasn't the kind of bomb you could drop from a plane, the Ivy Mike test showed that Teller was right. Hydrogen bombs were enormous. Ivy Mike's yield came in at about 10 megatons.

It vaporized an entire Pacific island. The following year, the Soviets detonated their own hydrogen bomb. The yield was smaller, on the order of 400 kilotons, but so was the bomb itself. This was a deliverable weapon. For the rest of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union would spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing seemingly endless varieties of nuclear weapons. The biggest, the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, topped out at almost 60 megatons. The smallest, the Davy Crockett, had a yield of only 20 tons. Starting in the mid-1950s, most research went into finding new ways to deliver existing weapons. The earliest nuclear

weapons would be dropped from airplanes, but military planners dreamed of sending bombs to their destination within minutes atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, more commonly known as ICBMs. And this is why the nuclear arms race and the space race went hand in hand. A rocket is a rocket. You put a capsule on top and you're going to the moon. Put a warhead on top and you're fighting World War III. When the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, it demonstrated its ability to successfully launch and control an ICBM. If you could loft a satellite into space, you could put anything up there. After an initial fright, the United States caught up quickly, launching its own satellite atop its own ICBM in January 1958. We call it Explorer 1. Eventually, the United States created what came

to be known as its nuclear triad. Nuclear weapons could be delivered from torpedoes launched from submarines, from underground missile silos, or from airplanes. Each system was unbelievably complex, involving not only the bombs themselves, but also solid and liquid fuel systems, electronic guidance systems, computer software for tracking new materials that could survive re-entry, and on and on. And the success of all of these systems depended on the human being sitting behind the controls. Imagine that it's 1961. You're an airman in the U.S. Air Force. You're stationed at a base in Plattsburgh, New York, a picturesque town just south of the Canadian border.

The airfield sits on the edge of Lake Champlain, but you spend most of your time in the far less scenic environment of a B-52. From the outside, the B-52 Stratofortress is a great whale of an airplane. From the inside, it's a windowless war machine with every spare inch covered in monitors and controls. The base at Plattsburgh is part of the Strategic Air Command, the SAC, the division of the Air Force that handles the missile silo and airbase parts of the nuclear triad. SAC is worried that a Soviet first strike might wipe out the nation's missile silo complex.

Now that the Soviet Union had functional ICBMs, the United States would only have a few minutes warning, not hours, of a surprise attack. The military brass have come up with a terrifying solution. Operation Chrome Dome. The Air Force will keep 12 nuclear armed B-52s in the air at all times. Two of them will fly out of Plattsburgh. Congratulations, men, you got a new mission. Starting today will be the first line of defense against a Soviet nuclear attack. Are you up for it? Yes, sir!

The commanders fill you in, but it's such a surreal mission that none of you can quite believe it. That night, you and your fellow airmen pass around a bottle and talk about what you've heard. Technically, liquor is contraband, but this is a special occasion. Let me get this straight. We're going to fly in circles over Greenland, way up above the Arctic Circle, carrying live Mark 28. Ah, but we're in luck. The Mark 28 is a little bomb. Some of them are barely 70 kilotons, and we're not supposed to use them, you know. Just fly around with them for hours above the Arctic. I feel so much better now. Thank you.

The bottle makes another round. After some predictable dark jokes, the conversation turns more serious. But really, why Greenland? Well, the Air Force has a base in Tula. It monitors the skies for incoming Soviet missiles. But if the Russians wanted to attack us, they'd knock out Tula first. So our job is to monitor the monitor. And so if anything happens to Tula, we'll be making a surprise delivery.

But the weapons aren't armed, right? Right, supposedly. But there's got to be a way for us to arm them in the air, or it wouldn't work. This seems like a bad idea, even for SAC. I mean, if it's a nuclear war, how do you trust the signals? What happens if the plane crashes? Won't the bombs explode? Yeah, probably.

Spare and remote do not begin to describe where these airmen are headed. It's all ice, snow, runways, and radar stations. The sun sets in October and does not return until February. Not that you'll know the difference from the belly of a B-52. It'll be an appropriate landscape to contemplate the end of the world. The nuclear Cold War combined moments of high terror, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, with mind-numbing routine. For the next seven years, 12 B-52s cruised the skies at all times, each armed with two to four hydrogen bombs.

The crews hoped simultaneously for something to relieve their boredom and that the call would never come. Except in times of crisis, their work was largely invisible to the American public. But out of sight isn't quite out of mind. To be continued... secret lover, or maybe you're robbing a bank. Based on the real-life false alarm that terrified Hawaii in 2018, Incoming, a brand-new fiction podcast exclusively on Wondery Plus, follows the journey of a variety of characters as they confront the unimaginable. The missiles

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not tech startups and high-end condos. The Institute had expanded rapidly over the past decade, flush with Cold War funds. Even strangers to the campus can see the university's growth in its architecture. Core buildings nestled close to the Charles River are solid, impressive, conservative, neoclassical, lots of bricks and limestone. But you're headed to a new, grittier part of campus, specifically a converted factory rumored to smell of shoe polish. You're headed to the Instrumentation Laboratory, the I-Lab for short. You'll be graduating next year, but you've never been inside the I-Lab.

With an MIT mechanical engineering degree, you could do almost anything you want, maybe even move to Detroit and design the next Thunderbird. But what's lured you over here today is the possibility of putting humans into space. you could do almost anything you want. Maybe even move to Detroit and design the next Thunderbird. But what's lured you over here today is the possibility of putting humans into space. Word around campus is that the iLab's going to get a NASA contract. Your first surprise comes before you're even past the front doors. The iLab has a security guard. Officially, the iLab does research in aeronautics,

but unofficially, the iLab is a de facto military institution. Even though it's located on campus and grants graduate degrees, almost everything happening within these walls is sponsored by the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force. A secretary whisks you into the office of Professor Walter Wrigley. He's a professor of aeronautics and has a second, more dramatic title, the ILAB's Declassification Officer. After some idle chit-chat about the lingering odor of shoe polish, Wrigley starts selling you on the graduate program. You won't find an air tunnel like ours anywhere else in the world, and if you're interested in guided missiles, well, no one else does that.

Missiles? I know MIT's doing the research, but surely the Pentagon handles the development. Wrigley leans back, puts his arms behind his head. No, not exactly. missiles? I know MIT's doing the research, but surely the Pentagon handles the development. Wrigley leans back, puts his arms behind his head. No, not exactly. I can't get into the specific details of the equipment, but we've got a womb-to-tomb contract for the Navy's Polaris guidance system. We're a federal contract research center, which means that we carry out research on behalf of the government. We're like a mini Los Alamos right here in Cambridge. Huh. If you had wanted to work on weapons,

you would have gone into the military. You say as much in more polite terms. But if I applied to this program, it's because I want to work on spaceflight. NASA is a civilian agency. Is everything here classified? No, not necessarily. But the thing is,

an inertial guidance system is flexible. You can use it in a Polaris missile, or you can use it in a space capsule. If you work with us, I can't guarantee that your thesis won't be classified. He says that like it's a selling point. You leave the meeting perplexed. And the more you look into the program,

the more confused you become. About half the graduate students are military officers, and you can't get a good sense of the courses being offered. Even course titles are classified. Nor can you review the work of other students. Anything on guidance systems for missiles is classified. And here's the thing. This program isn't separate from MIT's aeronautics program. It is the aeronautics program.

If you want a career in spaceflight, you've got some hard choices to make. This hypothetical engineering student might have had a similar experience at any number of prestigious universities. John Hopkins, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, all of these hosted major defense research laboratories. In the most striking case, the University of California officially managed Los Alamos National Laboratory from the beginning of the Manhattan Project until 2006. By the late 1950s, defense funding dominated several scientific fields, including physics, electronics, aeronautics, and materials science. According to the historian Stuart Leslie,

about 80% of the federal R&D budget in the 1950s came directly from the Department of Defense. Some of this money went to universities like MIT, and some went to the military's own in-house labs. But the bulk of it went to defense contractors like Lockheed, RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse. Leslie's research suggests that the DOD sponsored a third of all industrial research in the 1950s, with the number as high as 75% in electronics. As the 1950s wore on, the lines dividing academic, military, and industrial research became more and more blurred. Campuses like MIT and Johns Hopkins housed weapons development programs. An Air Force think tank, the RAND Corporation, developed the field of

theoretical economics. It's not an exaggeration to say that defense projects created some fields of academic study out of whole cloth. In the mid-1950s, the Air Force asked another MIT laboratory, the Lincoln Laboratory, to come up with a way to monitor and display radar information in real time. The idea was to speed up the Air Force's response time in the event of a nuclear attack. The Air Force started Project SAGE, the most advanced computer undertaking in the world. SAGE stood for Semi-Automated Ground Environment, and to build it, the Air Force contracted with IBM for the hardware and a new company called System Develop Corporation, or SDC, to provide the software.

By 1957, half of the country's programmers were for this spinoff company. By the time the contract wound down in 63, more than 6,000 programmers had passed through SDC's doors. These SAGE alumni fanned out into private industry. Any number of civilian technologies came out of SAGE, either directly or indirectly, through the work of project alums. Let's say, for instance, that you want to reserve a seat on an airplane. In the late 1950s, you'd make your reservation, the travel agent would call it in, and a representative from the airline would then confirm whether or not the seat was available. The problem here is obvious. The seat you booked might have been sold by the time your agent called

it in. Airlines had the same problem as the Air Force. They needed real-time information. In 1964, American Airlines unveiled the first computerized reservation system, the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment, or SABR. SABR used the same IBM machines, the same programming logic, as SAGE. This post-war model of science policy came to be known as the linear model. Basic research begets applied research begets useful applications. In other words, by the early 1960s, it had become nearly impossible to separate American corporate ingenuity from national defense. Right after World War II, Americans had been excited by the prospect of converting the wonders of scientific research into military and civilian technology.

Yes, atomic energy had led to a new type of warfare, but it also offered promises, energy too cheap to meter, and cures for cancer. But even by the late 1950s, this military-to-industrial pipeline began having significant consequences for American society. Think back to the first episode, where I talked about the differences between American capitalism and Soviet communism. During the Cold War, American politicians opposed any kind of centralized planning, even in scientific research. Government-led planning was part and parcel of communism, so the United States government wouldn't do it in science or anything else. According to the logic of anti-communism, American innovation would be driven by

private industry and unfettered genius. But by the mid-1950s, the research economy was being shaped more by military needs than anything else. The military was investing so heavily in certain industries like aeronautics and electronics that private companies were shaping their research programs to build weapons. From a business perspective, this made sense. Government contracts carried less risk than product development, but it also meant that private industry wasn't necessarily looking beyond its next government contract. This wasn't a planned economy exactly, but it wasn't unfettered free enterprise either. Something similar was happening within universities,

traditionally the home of basic research. In the United States, federally funded civilian research programs emphasized scientific freedom, but Congress found it hard to get excited about a research program driven by scientific interests instead of national needs. Funding for civilian research lagged, but defense appropriations went up and up. And since the military thought scientific discoveries had won World War II, they wanted to fund scientific research. The end result? The military became the de facto funding agency for all kinds of scientific and technical research, even basic research, even at universities. The budget of the National Science Foundation paled in comparison to that of the Office of

Naval Research. So in the 1950s, the DOD was calling the shots in American R&D. On January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address. Farewell addresses aren't usually memorable events. With the exception of perhaps George Washington's farewell address, most Americans would be hard-pressed to recall anything from a farewell speech. But Eisenhower's is the exception. Eisenhower's speech began by describing the fundamental shifts in American life occasioned by the Cold War. So far, he said, the United States had weathered each new crisis with its spirit intact. The United States had developed stronger defenses than ever before and a research

system that was the envy of the world. But from there, Eisenhower's speech turned darker. He warned that Americans had lost sight of balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. He was particularly worried about the growth of the defense industry. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense.

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. If you listen to this in isolation, it sounds like Eisenhower, a former general, might have been celebrating the strength of national defense. But that's not quite what he's up to. He's already warned his listeners about balance. But now he goes further. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.

The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We remember Eisenhower's address because it gave name to a phenomenon that many Americans have observed but lacked language to describe. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex. It's a powerful phrase,

and Americans were increasingly uneasy about what we had to show for this. Sure, by the early 60s, we had enough nuclear warheads and ICBMs to destroy the Soviet Union many times over, but the Soviets also had enough nuclear warheads and ICBMs to destroy the United States. A hot war would likely

destroy the entire world. But Eisenhower was warning Americans that the Cold War posed a threat to their democratic institutions, their economy, even their spiritual life. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814.

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Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Criminal Attorney early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. All this talk of nuclear weapons, could they actually be used? There was a turtle by the name of Bert. And Bert the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He'd yuck and cover. Yuck and cover. For most Americans, the answer was obvious. No, these weapons would not be used.

Virtually no one believed that you could survive a nuclear war by taking cover beneath a desk. Now, this didn't stop thousands of schools from holding bomb drills and hospitals from building bomb shelters. But no one took those as effective measures against thermonuclear destruction. Americans moved to the suburbs in part because they thought they'd have a better chance of surviving a nuclear attack. Bombs were more likely to be dropped on dense population centers, after all. Suburbs, farther away from city centers and more sparsely populated, might buffer against calamity.

Plus, the new suburban backyards offered plenty of space to build fallout shelters. Eisenhower himself wasn't sure whether the country could survive a nuclear war. A quick Google search turns up lots of pessimistic Eisenhower quotes about nuclear war, and the surprising thing is, most of them are very real. Eisenhower really said, for instance, that any nation that survived a nuclear war would end up a dictatorship. He really said that in the event of a nuclear attack, you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself. And yet, in the logic of the Cold War,

the country's survival depended on acting as if all-out nuclear war was not only a real option, but survivable. And because someone had to keep control of the nuclear weapons, it was especially important to make sure that the government survived. Put yourself in Adams County, Pennsylvania, just north of the Maryland border in 1951. For years now, government agents have been buying up property. Fields, pastures, hillsides. Topography didn't seem to matter.

The feds were interested in what was underneath. At this point, in 1951, construction had finally started. You and some of your neighbors have taken up positions across the entrance to watch the action. Between the lingering mountain fog and the diesel exhaust, it's hard to get a good view, but you immediately notice the armbands on the security guards. What are they doing? Gotta start with the tunnel. It's been a steady stream of dump trucks coming out all morning.

Hey, are those MPs? Why are there military police at a construction project? Oh, I thought you knew. They're building a little pentagon here in Pennsylvania. If the Russians attack, this is where the government will end up. A bunker? That doesn't make any sense. We're more than 50 miles from D.C. How could you get the government here? How can you run a country from a hole in the ground? Your neighbor shrugs and agrees with you. It doesn't make any sense. And yet, as journalist Garen Graff describes in his new book, Raven Rock, the government built nearly 100 bunkers in an arc

surrounding Washington, D.C. in the 1950s. The mountains and caves of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina held the infrastructure to run a shadow government in the event of a nuclear war. If the residents of Adams County had ever been allowed in the facility underneath their land, they might have been shocked at what they found. Thousand-foot-long tunnels, enormous blast doors, 100,000 square feet of office space built on coiled springs. These were facilities designed

to withstand a nuclear attack. The State Department made plans to relocate to Fort Royal, Virginia. The Supreme Court would move to Asheville, North Carolina. Congress would be evacuated by train to an enormous bunker underneath a Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. Civil defense officials prepared elaborate lists of helicopter pickup points throughout Washington, D.C. in the event of an emergency. All of these preparations were premised on the idea of protecting the existence of the American state. Yet, as Graff explains, no one seriously thought that the democratically elected officials would make it out of Washington alive. If the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the joint chiefs of staff were all killed in a nuclear attack,

who would be authorized to launch a counterattack? In the nuclear age, war planning meant planning for continuity of government. Someone had to be in charge, because only one person could order a nuclear attack. Cold War planners came up with a line of succession that stretched into the hundreds. As Graf explained, under no circumstance would the presidency itself remain vacant. So let's back up a moment and think about why this was the case. Nuclear weapons raised the stakes of warfare, obviously. A simple misunderstanding or mistake could cause a nuclear holocaust.

But theories of nuclear deterrence acted as if mistakes weren't possible. The Air Force's theorists at the RAND Corporation dreamed up elaborate scenarios of warfare, game theory, that depended on leaders acting like rational actors. Here's the idea. Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short. MAD assumes more nuclear weapons add stability to the nuclear system by limiting the advantage of a first strike. Let's say, for instance, that the Soviet Union launched 35 ICBMs topped with hydrogen bombs. Presumably, Washington, New York, and L.A. would be wiped out. But the United States is a big country.

At least a handful of missile silos would survive. And don't forget about those 12 B-52s circling the Arctic. The United States could strike back, wiping out Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. In MAD, any use of nuclear weapons virtually assures total annihilation. The least damaging scenario involves hundreds of millions of casualties. But MAD also assumes that only one person could decide to pull the trigger, and that that person understands the consequences. MAD has no margin of error. Journalist Eric Schlosser explores this concept in his fascinating,

terrifying book, Command and Control. Schlosser builds his book around an accident in a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas. But it's really a story of the illusion of nuclear safety. The military referred to close calls involving nuclear weapons as broken arrows. Here's why the book's so frightening. At one point, Schlosser reports that the military cataloged more than 1,000 significant incidents and accidents involving nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1968. Elsewhere, Schlosser describes nuclear safety as an always-never problem. By that, he meant nuclear weapons need to always be availablever problem. By that, he meant nuclear weapons need to always be available in the event of a crisis, and they must never be used accidentally.

The same system that kept a rogue military officer from launching a world-ending nuclear strike might prevent the Strategic Air Command from responding if the president were killed. Now, I've just described to you the government's elaborate plans to make sure that one person was always in charge. But in reality, the military would not stand for this. They saw it as irresponsible. If Washington, D.C. was wiped off the face of the earth, the Air Force was damn well going to respond. And so, with great reluctance, President Eisenhower delegated nuclear launch capabilities to a handful of commanders to be used only in an emergency, only if the president could not be reached. When President Kennedy arrived in office in 1961, he was appalled to realize that most of

the nuclear stockpile could, in fact, be launched without an order from the president. Once again, the military turned to a technical solution. They developed an electromagnetic switch, known as a permissive action link, or PAL, to prevent unauthorized uses. But the Air Force and Navy resisted installing PALs on the bombs of their planes and in their silos and submarines. Instead, they turned to human solutions, like two-man authorization, to make sure that the bombs weren't used without permission. Which brings us back to our B-52 crew member, circling in the air above Tula.

The commander wing wasn't lying. The nukes weren't armed. But if the crew mutinied and wanted to use the nuclear weapons, the Strategic Air Command would have few options to stop them. Sure, they could shoot down the plane, but downing a plane carrying nuclear weapons, even unarmed nuclear weapons,

poses its own risks. And there were accidents. When a B-52 armed with two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs fell out of the sky over Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961, we were lucky. The Air Force knew what was happening. The plane had a fuel leak, had radioed in, and crashed before it could return to base. Neither bomb on that plane detonated, but one came awfully close. Documents declassified in 2013 at Schlosser's request showed that three of the four safeties failed in that intact bomb. Had the bomb fired, it would likely have killed more than 40,000 people. Most of eastern North Carolina would have been showered in radioactive fallout.

And this would have been a best-case scenario, because the military would have known it was an accident. On January 21, 1968, one of the B-52s flying above the Arctic crashed. In an attempt to stay comfortable in the relatively dull flight, pilot had stuffed extra cushions under his seat. The cushion, and then the plane, caught fire. It crashed four miles short of the runway. Remarkably, six of the seven crew members survived.

Once again, the pilots had been in touch with the airfield. Once again, the bombs did not detonate. But the explosives surrounding the bomb cores did. When the base commander saw the giant fireball out on the ice, they knew what was happening. What if the plane had crashed closer to the base commanders saw the giant fireball out on the ice, they knew what was happening. What if the plane had crashed closer to the base? What if the pilots hadn't been able to make contact? As it was, Thule didn't notify the SAC about a potential problem until after the plane had crashed. Schlosser dryly puts it, the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon,

or two, or three, without any warning at the airbase considered essential for the defense of the United States could have been misinterpreted at SAC headquarters. Nobody expected the Thule Monitor to destroy Thule. The day after the Thule crash, the Air Force ended Operation Chrome Dome. It is utterly remarkable that humanity survived the Cold War. Nuclear war was ultimately not survivable, and American leaders knew it. Think back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we opened the show. If there was ever a moment to push the button, that was it.

All the red lines had been crossed. At the worst moments of the Cold War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the theory of mutually assured destruction worked. Faced with the choice of destroying everything or backing down, both Kennedy and Khrushchev did the latter. May our luck continue to hold. For Unwondery, this is episode three of The Cold War from American History Tellers. On the next episode, Americans fall in love with the atom, but struggle to make sense of the nuclear weapons that structured so much of their lives.

Bikinis, the environmental movement, and consumer protections have more to do with nuclear weapons than one might think. To be continued... Tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode is written by Audra Wolfe, Ph.D. Executive producers are Ben Adair and Hernán López for Wondery. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, the show where aspiring entrepreneurs get the opportunity of a lifetime.

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