Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

ICBMs made it possible to end the world in 15 minutes or less. Robert tells Margaret about the nightmarishly incompetent first draft of the Minuteman, a nuclear weapons system almost perfectly designed to end the world on accident.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzo Media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how everyone might die in nuclear hellfire. This is part four of our series on The Bastards Who Built the Doom's Day Device that we all currently live under the looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads, the several thousand nuclear weapons, ready at a moment's notice to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or cared about. Back with me to really get into some shit, because I did not expect. it to take this long to get to the mid-50s, but there's a lot to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing? I'm good.

I've come up with a strategy, and the strategy is I've decided I believe you are telling me Warhammer 40K lore. That would make this a lot more comforting. Uh-huh. Yeah. This is just something that some space orcs have decided to do. There are orcs in space in Warhammer.

That's a very important part of the setting. This is an unresolved. My Heart Podcasts. Guaranteed Human. A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium, women began to go missing. It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized. A sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved.

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Whenever there was a posse formed, Doc Holliday was always there to help out. So he's like, I'm sick, I'm half dead, I'd love to throw in. So he just gets excited when there's a possible. It's like your buddy drew a tag, you know. Listen to the Meat Eater podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm going to start this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last couple of years that we've talked about in part three, right? As, you know, the kind of fallout from the Korean War is going on and the U.S. and the Soviet nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands, Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the idea of being

able to land a first strike that would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back. In public, President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss a U.S. nuclear response in defensive terms, but in 1954, the Eisenhower-Dolus Declaration announced that the U.S. would respond to Soviet provocation anywhere, even using conventional weapons, quote, at places and with means of our own choosing. The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's promise to the Soviet Union, right? Basically, if you provoke us, if you fuck with us, we'll kill everybody, right? That's kind of the idea. You know, that's not exactly it, but it's we will retaliate massively. And that means nuclear, right? It's like trying to have a fist fight

with someone who has like a suicide vest on and you're just in a room. Which, by the way, is the best way to get into a fist fight, which is why if you want to buy one of our patented suicide vest today, you know, never get beat up again. Yeah. Or get beat up exactly one more time is probably a more accurate way to look at the way the suicide vest works. Well, we've actually, we've workshopped it. They're called life vests now.

They're called life vests now. We're currently suing the boat people over their life vest, but I think this is going to work out well for us. The lawsuit worked really well because we went in wearing our product. Yeah, we wore our product and we brought a life rate too. And by stop encouraging him. Oh, man. So this whole idea of the Eisenhower Dolis Declaration, it's not a promise that we actually keep, right?

Eisenhower, I think there's a degree to which, I mean, elements of this are things that the U.S. will do at other times without using nuclear weapons. But Ike is fundamentally a guy who he has some respect for human life, right? So there's this big conflict between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China that comes very close during his presidency to exploding into nuclear hostilities. like we're seriously considering using nukes to like basically what like clear Taiwan's flanks right because they're they're in a rough strategic situation for us to respond to with anything else but Eisenhower proves less willing to massively retaliate than he was willing to talk about massive retaliation and the situation eventually resolves without the use of nuclear weapons thank fucking God right yeah so it is this situation where Eisenhower is

he wants to he wants that threat to be out there but he really does not And none of our presidents really do after Truman, they don't want to nuke people. They're really anti-nuke because they're not insane as a general rule. Like Nixon kind of is, but even he's not that crazy for the most part, right? For the most part. The evolving nature of nuclear warfare meant that units across the globe are now by the mid to late 50s armed with nuke's meant for defensive purposes. This becomes an obsession for the military as a whole. The idea was that nuclear weapons could be launched to airburst and disembust.

destroy entire fleets of Soviet bombers or naval vessels at a time. Now, by the mid-1950s, every American was well aware of the horrors of nuclear war. And one of the few comforting thoughts they could rely on was the fact that only the president could order a nuclear attack. That was a lie. Turns out that's not, that was not true. In the book 15 minutes, Elle Douglas Keeney reveals, and I think this is a thing that was like came to light while he was writing his book as a result of like information requests and stuff that he was filing. But in 1957, this was not known until very recently. In 1957, President Eisenhower issued a presidential authorization that provided instructions for field commanders to use nuclear weapons in specific defensive situations without any outside approval.

A small number of authorizing commanders in chief even had the ability to launch and command a retaliatory nuclear strike on the Soviet Union after a direct attack on the United States, right? it was never really true during this period of time, like at least not after the middle of the Eisenhower administration, that only the president could order a nuclear strike. For one thing, there's no governor on these. So theoretically, anybody who had one could have made the decision. But also Eisenhower gives field commanders the ability. And this is mainly meant for, with the exception of those guys who had that small number of guys who could do a retaliatory strike.

Most of these are guys who, if they see a fleet of bombers incoming, they can fire anti-aircraft nuclear artillery, right? Like, it's that sort of thing. So it's not as crazy as it could have been, but it's pretty crazy, right? This does make... Would that have brought on... Like, if we had been like,

oh, fuck these bombers and nuke them in the sky, would that have, like, brought on USSR's retaliation? I mean, at that point, they were already sending a bomber fleet over, right? So, I mean, they probably would have continued to fight. Right.

It's, you know, at this point, because we don't have ICBMs, We still might have had a nuclear war that didn't kill everybody, right? Because you could have theoretically had one that was devastating enough that the major powers are not able to keep fighting, but everything doesn't get expended because we can't just launch thousands of ICBMs at a moment's notice, right? That's not really an option right now. What makes this dangerous, though, is that by the late 1950s, there are nuclear weapons, U.S. nuclear weapons, fucking everywhere, all over the world at all times. Curtis LeMay had insisted from the beginning because he's really obsessed with the SAC's readiness, right? And so he from the jump is like, our bomber crews have to train regularly by flying test missions with functional nuclear weapons on board.

It's not a real test if they don't have an actual nuke on the plane, right? Okay. I don't understand why, but sure. Well, because he's the craziest man who ever lived or second next to MacArthur, maybe. Yeah, you can only dry fire with bullets in the gun. Right, right. It's fucking insane. And what this means practically is that from this point on, thousands of nuclear weapons.

are flying across the U.S. and the world every year. There are always nukes flying around at all times, tons of them. That's so scary. It's fucking insane. That's okay, Sophie. This is Warhammer. It's all Warhammer lore. In the early 1950s, Lemae had developed the beginning of a strategy to keep what he

called an air fleet in readiness, with planes always armed and always in the air with nukes, ready to divert their course to attack the Soviet heartland or other targets at a moment's notice. The reasoning for this seemed sound to the men. doing it. If the Soviets knew that they could get away with a first strike on the U.S., they might try. The best way to make sure they never did was by always having bombers in the air and ready to fight at all times, which meant at all times, dozens to hundreds to even thousands of nukes might be out in the world. And this meant there would always be nukes going missing, right?

If you are flying thousands of flights a year that have nukes on them, a percentage of those bombers are going to crash or are going to need to drop their nukes in order to deal with some sort of like engine trouble. That is going to happen and it does in fact happen, right? I'm going to guess people are aware that this has happened once or twice generally. Yeah, I'm aware of like a couple. There was one off like the coast of Spain. That's the one I know of, yeah.

But the reality is it happened constantly. This happens so much more often than you would have got. It's fucking shocking how many nukes we just straight up lose. LeMay and his successor at the SAC. General Power, considered it a necessity that the U.S. always have armed nuclear bombers in the air. And a consequence of that is, of course, all of these things getting lost. I'm going to provide you with two examples. Operation Reflex was an SAC training mission to switch crews on ground alert every 21 days.

This is kind of the start of what allowed, like we always have a fleet of bombers that are like six to 15 minutes away from being in the air. They have a nuke on them. They're loaded up and fueled up on the tarmac. They have a crew in a bunker nearby that can run onto the plane and take. off at a moment's notice, right? And we also have, I think it's like 10 or 11 percent of those planes are flying with a bomb in them at any given time, right? That's what operates, it starts as a testing plan to see if this is feasible, and in July of 1957, we make this like the SAC

standard plan. Each B-47 bomber flying out on reflex overseas or heading home carried a 6,000-pound four-megaton MK-39 hydrogen bomb. These are these thermonuclear death machines. Yeah. That same month, a B-47 in Texas crashed, killing the four-man crew. The crash listed the bomber as part of the emergency war plan load, but as Keeney notes in the book 15 minutes, as of this writing, no 1957 bomber crash in Texas is included in any official document disclosing accidents involving nuclear weapons. And there are several of these where, well, we know that plane crashed, and based on how

it was coded, we know it should have had a nuke on it, but they never reported losing a nuke because they covered it up. So this nuke presumably just blew up in Texas, and they kind of, they covered it up, you know? How often are they just being like, oh, whoops, it fell off the back of the truck? Or any nuke's falling off the back of the truck? No, not off a truck. They're falling out a plate. Oh, so I mean, like, are they being stolen? Like, are they ever like? Not that we know. Not that we know. There's not evidence of that. What's actually happening is much dumber than if they, like, someone stealing a nuke. And scarier, to be honest. There are several examples like this, you know, where a bomber that we know should have been loaded with a nuke crashed

and no report was ever made of a nuke getting lost. But cover-ups weren't always possible. The same month that General Power takes over SAC command from LeMay, who goes on himself, become the vice chief of staff and then chief of staff for the Air Force, a C-124 cargo plane bound for an airbase in Morocco with three atom bombs encountered engine trouble between Rehoboth Beach and Cape May, New Jersey. The pilot ejected, two out of three nuclear bombs on his plane to lighten the load. These fall in the ocean, and the Navy searches for the bombs and doesn't find any of them, ever, even though the ocean's just 150 feet deep at some parts of the potential drop zone.

So, like, new treasure quest is just dropped. There are, folks, listeners, if you live in the Jersey area, you could be the owner of an MK5 atom bomb if you just spend some time swimming around in the ocean, you know? And once you've got a nuke, for one thing, you're not paying taxes anymore. I'll tell you that much, brother. No, no. You got a lot of leverage if you become a nuclear-armed state in and of yourself. It always goes well.

Yeah. So, again, both 3,000-pound MK5 bombs are missing to this day. These are never found. The number of times this happens is fucking shocking. 1957 is a key year for our story because it is the year that we start being 15 to 30 minutes away from nuclear catastrophe at any given time. On August 26th, the Kremlin announces their first successful ICBM test. Their new missile, the SS6 Sapwood, could travel 6,000 miles carrying a warhead Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, bragged could make Europe or the United States,

quote, a veritable cemetery. A couple of months later, in October, Spudnik entered orbit. If you're wondering why that freaked out Americans so much. This is one of those things. I actually, I have a little more empathy for like why so many people. Because, oh, because they also fired an ICBM right before that. Yeah, that's a little scary. Okay. So they invented the ICBM.

They have a functional ICBM before we do. They have a successful test before we do. Not long before, because between those two events in September of 1957, the U.S. So after the Soviets launched their ICBM before Sputnik, the U.S. Air Force tests its first Atlas ICBM successfully. Now, it can't really hit things accurately yet, but the idea is you're going to stick a thermonuclear bomb on this thing probably, so it doesn't really matter if you're off by a couple, by a mile or two even.

Like, you'll do some damage, probably. In November of that year, General Power revealed to the public for the first time that the Air Force was maintaining a fleet of ground alert bombers in a permanent state of readiness. 11% of the SAC's fleet was always parked on a runway, loaded with a live nuke, ready to take off in less than 15 minutes, and a certain number of bombers were kept up in the air at all times. LeMay admitted they are bombed up and they don't carry bows and arrows. Bombed up.

Bombed up, baby. Yeah, it sounds like he's kind of horny for these things. Yeah. In this period, after the ICBMs exist now, but they're not a viable weapon system yet, right? We have our proof of concept, but we don't immediately go from testing an ICBM to having them ready to fire, right? It takes a little bit of time.

It's just science, right? So during this kind of awkward interstil period, the actual odds of an accidental nuclear war are extremely low for one reason. The only way to deliver an atom bomb is by air, right? I mean, you could drive it somewhere or set it off on the ground, but realistically, you're going to be using, like, a bomber or artillery. You can't launch it across continents yet, right, unless you're flying it. That means that you could theoretically, if you send out a bomber fleet to start a nuclear war, you could because you're in contact with these guys, you could theoretically recall that bomber fleet right up to the last moment.

You can't do that with ICBMs. People think you can. People think you can do it with like the sub-mounted nukes. We cannot. It is not possible. Once they're launched, they're heading for their targets, right? That's how these things work. But you can recall bombers.

If you can reach them up until the last minute, right? Now, if you can reach them is a key part of this. Because that presents a conundrum to the SAC. This is the fucking late 50s. comms aren't as good as they're going to be that we're starting to figure out stuff that will allow us to stay in regular contact, you know, in all sorts of situations, but it's not nearly good enough for us to gamble the survival of the human race on, right? And the SAC has another problem, which is that nobody outside of their weird little death cult is comfortable yet with the idea of nukes being sent off without a way to recall them. And while radio, you know, it's just not, there's not a great, perfect way to guarantee you can reach these. bombers. And that's really important. And this brings us to one of the most interesting

innovations in nuclear war. And it's honestly the simplest. This doesn't require any technology whatsoever. And it may have saved the world, right? We may all exist because of this. It's called Project Failsafe. Now, rather than relying on technology, which could fail, the way Failsafe worked is that all dispatched bombers were under permanent orders to return without drop. their payloads no matter what they were ordered to do unless they were transmitted a GoCode, right? The innovation of Failsafe, isn't that a go, this is important, the GoCode does not trigger the bombing, right? Instead, the default is in all instances return home without bombing unless you're given the code. And that's a meaningful distinction, right?

That means there's no room for a bomber public, well, they didn't give us the go code, but we're right over the target, should we do it? No, you fly home unless you get the code, right? Yeah. And that's tech proof. It doesn't matter if your comms are out, right? Yeah. And that means the default assumption is we should err on the site of not dropping the bombs, right? No, that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it makes sense that that was like literally

a technological development. Yeah, it was a development by a single dude at the Rand Corporation named Albert Wollstetter. He visualized fail-safe, and again, you could argue this guy might have saved all of humanity in doing so. Yeah. Good idea. Thank you, Albert. It's the opposite of a dead man switch, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's a, I guess a live man switch. I don't know.

Speaking of a dead man switch, I have one that will launch a nuclear attack unless you spend money on the products and services advertised on this show. Oh, boy. In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the path of worry, dump road, and fear creak. The terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman. Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American. FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

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Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car, like a Rolling Stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is shoes and identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one

or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So, we've just hit the point where FailSafe has been implemented.

Which would fit on your knuckles, I'm just going to point out. Right. Oh, actually, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah. Yeah. I've been mean to get a knuckle tattoo. So, yeah, we've now reduced the risk of some guys starting World War III because a radio goes out, right? Which is a good thing to do. Now, in February of 1958, the Strategic Air Command has another nuclear error. A bomber and a fighter wing in Florida were doing a training mission, which for some reason required a trio of fighters to try and intercept a pair of B-47 bombers armed with actual 1.6 megaton MK15 nuclear bombs.

One of these fighters fucked up and crashed into one of the bombers, damaging its engines. The bomber had to come in for an emergency landing, but the nearest airfield was under construction. And to make a long story short, the pilot was worried that when landing, they would crash into something that would send the nuke in their bomb bay, launching forward like a bullet into the crew cabin. In order to protect the crew, the pilot dropped a nuclear bomb somewhere over the Wasaw Sound, east of Savannah, Georgia. It may have been two bombs. It's a little unclear to me. these are never found this bomb is never found it is theoretically still some east of savannah to this day oh my god i'm going to write terrible fiction about a crew of people who go and find these things

go nuke huntin let's go find them let's get us a nuke yeah yeah we could be the we could be at finally a nuclear armed podcast this is this is what podcasting's been missing um so it's obviously big news that we dropped atomic bombs on our own georgia not even the one overseas and the good people of that state expected the Air Force to recover the nuke. A study of the Air Force press releases around this matter is useful. Their first message denounced the jettisoning of a

portion of a nuclear weapon and added that no one knew, quote, whether the nuclear device landed in the sea or on land. Great. There's a chance some hillbillies just been passing this nuke down to his kids for the last life. That's what I want.

You take some pride in our family. We are nuclear power. Yeah. Now, don't touch it too much. I don't really know how it works. Yeah. Now, when they drop this bomb or bombs, both pilots took coordinates down for where they thought they were when they dropped it, but they both write down different sets of coordinates, which is a real high watermark for the competency of our brave boys in the SAC. After several days of searching with no luck, the Air Force issued another press release, elaborating that the bomb had been carried in transportable condition. This means nothing. Air Force defined that when asked what transportable condition means as a form carried for safety

reasons, which again means nothing. If you're wondering what they might have been trying to avoid saying, here's another excerpt from 15 minutes. Those in Savannah made little sense of this warning, but they took it to mean that the weapon was perhaps disassembled or in crates or perhaps it shouldn't be considered a weapon at all. The second press release, however vague, nonetheless seems to have had the intended effect. It was calming. But then the Navy announced that another ship, the USS Bowers had arrived. The Bowers brought with it 14 more divers and men from the explosive ordinance disposal unit in Cedar Keys, Florida.

The Air Force explained the stepped up activity by saying that the objective component was a very expensive piece of equipment. So the Air Force is like, ah, it's not even a real bomb. We are sending the bomb squad in, though. The bomb squad is actually absolutely looking for this thing. Trust us, not a functional bomb. Definitely. We do fly exclusively with functional bombs for missions like this, but this one isn't.

You're good. Yeah, no, yeah. I mean, and they did sometimes they would have like the fissile material outside of the bomb so that when they dropped it, they're just, but that didn't happen in a lot of cases, and we don't know that it happened in this case. What is their argument for like clearly a dummy that is exactly the same size of weight is the only thing that makes sense? I can't understand the argument. LeMay and Powers want them to be training with real nukes, and they want them to be testing those nukes regularly to make sure they will go off at a moment's notice. that is very important to them. I'm going to invite him to a paintball game with AR-15s.

Right. What? Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. But this is like this is super important to both LeMay and power. God, we're kind of in this period where they're transitioning at the SAC.

So by this point, it should be clear to you. We don't know and never will know how many nuclear bombs are government lost on U.S. soil. But there's a couple at least. just sort of lying around. So again, folks, get your metal detectors out. Yeah, yeah. Have some fun with it. Yeah.

What could go wrong? That's what we'll call our scavenger hunt. What could go wrong? Now, you asked earlier about stealing nuclear weapons, and I don't, I have, I've seen no evidence that that happened, but it could have very easily. It was for a long time, startlingly easy to hijack a nuclear weapon. The only thing stopping it from happening, if indeed it was stopped from happening, is that no one was ever crazy enough to try. In her book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson tells a story about a visit a Los Alamos scientist named Harold Agnew paid to a NATO base in Europe in December of 1959.

This was one of the bases where U.S. nukes were in NATO hands, as they are to this day. Jacobson writes, quote, during the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. I observed four F804F aircraft sitting on the end of a runway, each was carrying two Mark 7 nuclear gravity bombs. He wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that custody of the Mark Sevens was under the watchful eye of one very young U.S. Army private armed with an M1 rifle with eight rounds of ammunition.

Agnew told his colleagues, the only safeguard against unauthorized use of a nuclear bomb was the single GI, surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away. Maybe a bad idea. Like, I feel like I've got a decent chance of stealing a nuke from that guy, right? I know. One 18-year-old with a rifle?

Like, I like those odds. And this is all part of the whole, all that matters is bombers. All that matters is the nukes, right? Because one of the things that guys like LeMay and Power are doing that the SAC is doing is like, we don't need to be putting money into infantry. We don't need to have, like, dudes on the ground doing stuff like watching our nukes and planes. That's a waste of resources. more nukes, more planes, less guards.

This is like how they're treating AI. Like, it's just like, we don't need anything else. We just need this. No guardrails, no governors, make it illegal to put any safety measures in. Fuck it. Now, after returning home, this is actually how we get the nuclear football. It takes a while, but this is what starts that process. Because once he gets home, having this startling moment, Agnew pairs up with an engineer at Sandia Laboratories.

And they try to figure out how to insert an electronic lock into nuclear weapons that would prevent a rando from arming a bomb they gained access to. This eventually led to a lock and coded switch, which required a three-digit code to be entered to arm the weapon. It would take several years until the Kennedy administration for the president to actually order these locks placed on bombs, right? But that's where this leads, right? That's why we get the nuclear football and the system we have now where, like, you have

to use codes to activate the ability to deploy these weapons, right? That starts with Agnew realizing, like, oh, fuck, someone could just take these. there's just like a kid standing in a field with a rifle and there's four nukes shit eight fucking bullets at least give them another couple of clips Jesus Christ send a unit of people you hate first and then yeah Jesus yes and more guys fuck it there had to be more 18 year olds my god yeah I'm getting ahead of myself here because we don't immediately put the it takes some time to figure out how to build these locks right There are two key inventions from the late 1950s that help set the doomsday device into motion.

The first is what we'll spend the least time discussing in these episodes. And it's the distributed system of radar stations in the middle of the ocean and other inaccessible points that first provided us with an effective early warning system of Soviet attack. Obviously, the Soviets are building their own versions of this too, right? But the early warning systems, right? These aren't a major topic of these episodes because just wanting to know if someone's about to murder you isn't really fucked up in the same way as For example, building 12,000 nuclear weapons. But all of these early warning systems are flawed and capable of generating false positives.

And in fact, we have both us and the USSR have several near nuclear catastrophes because we get false positives. Like one of these radar installations thinks it sees missiles coming in or thinks it sees bombers coming in. And it causes problems, right? It's like geese or some shit. Right, right, right. All these early warning systems are flawed, you know, and that's still the case to this day, right? Right. And so it's both understandable that you'd want to have these, but also the fact that these are flawed and the fact that our strategy increasingly becomes launch on Warren moves us a lot closer to midnight, right? So by far the most influential move from an approaching the apocalypse point of view was the deployment of ICBMs.

These made it possible to launch nuclear weapons in a way that could not be recalled. There was and is no fail safe for ICBMs. The idea that we can cancel them is just disinformation. If we or anyone else launches an ICBM, they are almost impossible to stop. You can only really stop them by shooting them down and we're terrible at it, right? We have this thing, the bullet, basically, that we use to shoot them down, and it works about half the time in tests, and we have like 44 of them. Yeah, I'd want more magazines than, like 44 bullets isn't enough. If it's, that's not a lot.

You have to stop the end of the world. Here's a magazine and a half of bullets. The enemy has 3,000 missiles or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, good luck, private. Now, our first ICBM is kind of a piece of shit. The only good thing about the Atlas C, which is declared operational in September of

1959, is that it can't be kept fueled for long periods of time. It has to be fueled right before launch, something to do with the kind of fuel that they're using, right? which means that you can't have these things ready to go in a matter of minutes, you know, like you need more lead time to do that. Atlases are stored above ground also. We're starting to build hardened silos. That is the plan, but those are not constructed yet. U.S.

War planners were worried that the USSR would be able to see our arsenal because we've got these ICBMs just parked out, like, on bases and stuff, and they are. The Soviets are, they have, you know, surveillance and stuff. They are able to see them. But this also causes another near calamity because the, The Soviets don't assume that we just have these things parked in the open because we're not finished building silos. They assume we had them in the open because we plan to use them as a first strike weapon, right?

Right. So this is another thing that, like, ramps up the paranoia between everybody. Yeah. Because the Atlas was such a shit weapon system, and it is a bad ICBM, by the 1959, the U.S. was already hard at work at its replacement, the Minuteman. This was a missile with a stable fuel mixture that could be stored for long periods of time in launch ready conditions. So you can have a minute man ready to fire.

And in fact, it's called a minute man because you can literally, from the moment you get the order, you can have it in the air in a minute or less, right? Yeah. Again, they're just starting to explore this technology. This is very new and they don't have the kinks out, right? Which is a problem because they're going to be immediately putting nukes on these things and putting them underground. So there's a whole aspect if they have to figure out, none of this is immediately obvious,

right, how this is going to work, how nuclear. silos are going to work, how our warning system will work, how these things will be triggered to fire under what conditions, right? It is important, you remember, there's no locks on these missiles yet, right? So every minute man is stored launch ready. And every minute man's silo, no locks at all, right? Well, there's a lock in that in order to fire it. So you have, you have like these two-man teams in like a command bunker, and each of these two-man

teams can launch tin missiles, right, that are each held in separate size. silos that are like a decent distance from each other so you can't stop them all if you nuke them, right? If you nuke the silos, that's one of the reasons. So each two-man team, if both men turn a key at the same time, it will fire the missile, right? And then as we'll talk about it will start a process of firing all of the other missiles. So that means two guys have the ability if they both decide to turn a key to fire 10 nuclear missiles across the world into Russia, right?

Yeah, or one guy who, like, are they in the same place or the keys next to each other like in movies? Because in which case, it's like, or one guy beats up his friend. That's a great point you brought up, because the Air Force did consider this, right? This is an immediate problem as soon as they start planning this. What if a crazy person winds up in a silo? Would he just be able to start World War III on his own? And the answer is no, because the Air Force comes up with a brilliant deterrent to that

kind of behavior, Margaret. Both guys in the silo have guns, and they're separated from bullet. So they're just ready to go insane. Yeah, this way one guy can't threaten to shoot the other guy if he doesn't launch a missile, right? Like, that's literally the plan is like, we'll give him both guns and put it behind bulletproof glass. It's fine. Also, it's like, people can hotwire cars, right? This is an electrical system on some level.

Oh, it's so much worse than that, Margaret. Okay. Because I feel like you can probably figure out a way to give the positive signal over this, like. electrical wire. It's good that you bring that up. That's what we're going to be talking about a lot of the rest of this episode, because this is so much worse than you're guessing. So another issue with the Minuteman program is that because of some errors in how they

construct this thing, they basically make what is potentially an automatic doomsday device. This is not known by Air Force planners when they start putting this stuff out and constructing these silos and putting out the plans of how they're going to use it because they don't like thinking about this sort of thing. We only know about the initial problems with the Minuteman system because of a confessional that was written in 2008 by one of the architects of our nuclear war infrastructure, John H. Rubel. And Rubel is, he's both a hero and a victim in this story. He's one of these guys who may have saved all of our lives because of the story I'm about to tell. But he also is an integral part of building this system. Born in 1920 to a wealthy

Jewish German family in Chicago, Rubel moved to Los Angeles as a kid after his father died. He graduated as an engineer from Caltech in 1942. His older brother died in action fighting the Nazis, and Rubel was inspired to do his bit for the war by moving to Schenectady with his wife and becoming a junior engineer at GE. After the war, he moved back to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin. By 1956, Rubel was a successful executive at Hughes Electronics, directing their avionics business. That's Howard Hughes's company, right? He was featured in an ad by his employer, which described him as America's new kind of man. This meant he was an expert and a successful professional in a field that had not existed

just a couple years earlier, defense electronics. And from that ad, at Hughes, we have 2,700 of these men in our research and development laboratories, men like John H. Rubel brought together from all over the country to solve urgent new problems of national defense. They have already successfully carried out developments that rank among the most formidable scientific achievements of our time, and the work they have done is so basic it is already contributing vitally to the peaceful use of electronics. And Sovi's going to show you the ad just because I want everyone watching the video to see

what a 36-year-old man looked like in the mid-1950s. Look at those crow's feet. That's what you get when you're just consuming lead every day, just just huffing it right off the back of a car. It's beautiful stuff. Wow. Yeah. So anyway, three years after this photo was taken in early 1959, Rubel left Hughes aircraft

to become the assistant director of research and engineering for strategic weapons over at the Pentagon. He would receive several promotions over the next four years, becoming the sole deputy and assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering in 1961. He is a very highly placed civilian within our military research and defense infrastructure, right? This rapid advance was because he was the only guy at the Pentagon who was at all concerned about whether or not we might be about to kill the whole planet accidentally. In 1959, he starts sitting down for presentations by the Air Force, because the Air Force, as they're getting ready to deploy the Minuteman, they have this missile designed and they have these silos under construction, but they're not operational yet. And so the Air Force is sitting down with high-ranking civilian DoD employees and explaining all their different nuclear retaliation systems, including Minuteman. according to Rubel, he has conversations with a number of military officers, and he comes to realize that their primary fear is a fatal surprise attack, right?

And if an adversary, again, the logic the military has is that if an adversary thinks they can survive launching a surprise attack against us, they might do it. So the only way to avoid a nuclear war is to have, quote, first strike capability and the way to use it, aka launch on warning. quote from Rubel's piece Consider however launch on warning Almost necessitates an automated response The electronic warning signal itself in the scenario

Would trigger our first strike missiles Many of them ready to go in a minute or so The will to use the strategy Would require no high-level decision-making or intervention Now this is extremely dangerous And this is the thing that leads to the Minuteman Right and when Rubel talks about the Minuteman He's referring to both a single missile

And quote to the aggregate of more than a thousand of them, comprising a system of missiles and control centers spread across hundreds of miles of prairie lands in states like North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana, right? That's what the Minuteman system is. It's about a thousand of these missiles split up into groups of like 10 and 50 and spread out all over these kind of plain states, right? That makes sense.

Yeah. Minuteman was not yet in effect, right? That doesn't happen until 61, but two aspects of the program, the wide dispersal of missile silos and the fact that each silo is hardened to withstand anything but a direct nuclear hit came from suggestions made by rand thinkers. Rubel makes the important point that all these defense nerds and all of the high-ranking Air Force officers behind these plans are only concerned in using automation to guarantee that we would be able to fire our nukes if the government was destroyed. He writes, quote, equally important considerations such as flexibility of command

and control of these weapons, provisions to prevent unauthorized or accidental launch, design provisions to ensure the malfunction or failure of a critical component would not result in a missile launch or some comparably dreadful catastrophe were treated little or not at all, right? I was expecting that sentence to end very differently. It's unethical and wrong to even try to delay this system and make it safer because anything that you do to like make the Minuteman system less dangerous is reducing its automation, right? Which is increasing the odds that we don't fire back if we're all killed. And that's unacceptable. Right. Partly because the game theory thing is that they need to know that

even if they kill the president and whoever comes after that, they still lose too. As a result, all these officers get extremely angry when people are like, well, but like, are you not worried about maybe something going wrong and the missile's all launching accidentally? And they're like, well, that's not nearly as scary as the missile's not launching, you know? That really is how all these guys are thinking. And you know who else thinks that way, Margaret? Wow. Is it the Life Fest?

Yes. Yes. The makers of the new Life Fest. Get one today, you know? Get two. Get three. Get one for the whole family, you know? Everyone should have one of these vests.

Uh-huh. A society where everyone's wearing a suicide vest at all times is a polite society. Probably. That's what everyone says. We'll see what happens. You know? We'll see what happens. In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

The terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman. Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murder. orders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects. We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightnourish secrets. From Tenderfoot TV and IHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money.

And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever.

There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electives chair.

Listen to business history on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get it, your podcast. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car, like a Rolling Stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is shoes and identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets.

Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm I'm Ithagomershuan. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these OsterCon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way.

Bring back the OsterCon. And because we've got a very My Casa is Su Casa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. The Gulf of Mexico,

continue to be it forever and ever. It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform, they had labor rights, They had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Yeah, Margaret, how you taking this revelation? I, you know, okay, so. I can't remember if we talked about on mic or not, but we talked about the dark forest theory and the books I can't remember the name of. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, by that Chinese sci-fi author about, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the dark forest theory, folks, if you're not aware, is this.

Basically, this idea that if there's life out there, the chance that it's hostile is so high that everyone would basically be trying to either hide or fuck up other life first, right? Like, it's a bunch of hunters wandering around a dark forest is kind of where the name comes from. But it's more game theory stuff, right? But trying to imagine how aliens would think. I actually don't entirely agree with it, but whatever. No, I don't either.

And it's not shocking that it's a right-wing author. But, like, which doesn't make the opinion in it wrong necessarily, but I'm just, like, not surprised. No, no. People speak very highly of the books. I thought the show was good. Like, I don't have to agree with someone's politics to be interested in their... Yeah. Yeah. And I find it so interesting because it is so much of it is around this idea of like whoever is controlling the mutually assured destruction button, we need to make sure that they're reliable. And by reliable, we mean not thinking, not thinking about the consequences of their actions. And it's like, because to me, I clearly shouldn't be in charge of mutually assured destruction because I'm like, I would rather I die and everyone I know die than all humanity die.

Like, it just seems so obvious to me, you know? Yeah. Like, I don't, I don't, and this, I guess, is just the difference between different kind of value systems. I don't think American lives are worth more than any other kind of life. Nope. Right? Yep.

I don't think they're worth more than Russian lives or Chinese lives or Latvian lives. And I guess my, I don't want to get nuked, but my preference would be if someone's going to get nuked that not everyone gets nuked, right? That's better to me than anyway. That is not how these people think. Right. Even if the leaders of another country are my enemy, that doesn't make every single person who, whatever, anyway. Yeah.

The leaders of every country are my enemy. They're all assholes, but I still don't want nukes firing off. I know. Get them in a room. Anyway, yep. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

So one of the things that I think is valuable here to get into is Rubel talks about, when he starts realizing how this system works, he has this realization. which is that our whole nuclear deterrent system is what he describes as dangerously unstable, right? And this is valuable, just in terms of understanding how, like, military planners think and kind of the logic that this guy's going through is he's trying to deal with this problem, right? Quote from Rebel, instability arises most dangerously in the contemporary world when vast arsenals of horrendously destructive weapons end up ready to go in minutes.

If one side does go for any reason, or even for none, the other is set to respond and must respond. strategic weapons, I soon realized, could often determine policy by their very design. Military instability arises when the actions of one side will, unless countered in a timely manner, give it a decisive military advantage. It is worsened as the interval defining a timely manner shrinks to almost nothing, as it does in the missile age, right? He's describing this doomsday device that's being built, right? It's an unstable system, right? Because of how fast everything works and how destructive these weapons are. Rubel, in no uncertain terms, described the ideology behind launch on warning as, quote, flawed and terrifying, and quoted Herman Kahn.

No shit, my guy. Yeah. He quoted Herman Kahn and calling this arrangement a doomsday machine. And he discussed, he wrote about something that happened in World War I as an example for, like, why he considered all this so frightening. And I'm going to quote an extended piece here. On a visit to France in 1963, I came across the remains of a World War I catastrophe and near a small. village along the Canal de Nord northeast of Paris. There one discovers a crater about 50 feet deep and a couple of hundred feet in diameter. Postcards on sale in the village identify it as

le tonneur, a melancholy reminder of what happened in a pre-war landmark and its unfortunate human occupants. Before World War I, a small hill stood where only the crater remains. The little hill was a formidable obstacle in the path of the French on one side and the Germans on the other, each hold up in extensive trenches. Unable to see the enemy on the other side of the hill and likely to get blown away if they dared peer over the top, an obvious solution occurred to each side, mined the other side and blow it up. Each side began mining the hill. The process went on for weeks as tons of earth was excavated to form tunnels, extending under the German side dug by the French and under the French side dug by the Germans. Eventually, the tunnels were filled with T&T by each side under the

part of the hill occupied by the other. Then one day, somebody on one side or the other, nobody will ever know which side or who it was, detonated a charge that ignited all the French and all the German explosives. Who knows? Maybe it was an accident. Either way, accident or on purpose, this little mountain with hundreds of luckless humans and trenches on it, or still tunneling beneath it, was blown to kingdom come, leaving only an impressive crater to remind an occasional visitor forever what military instability can mean. It was not too early in 1959 to envision a ghastly replay of this little-known drama on a global scale. That's such a good metaphor, and it's such a shame, but it's like a, it took a lot of people dying to give us that metaphor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but, I mean, he's right here. Now, Rubel first sits down with the Minuteman Project Manager, who's a former Hughes aircraft guy named Bob Bennett in the spring of 1959. He noticed that despite their friendly relationship, Bob was squirrely and didn't like to give out information when asked basic questions. Like, how do these missiles actually fire and how many missiles fire at once? Right? At this point, the Minuteman system was being billed as a second strike system.

But there was no reason you'd need a weapon like the Minuteman for a second strike. It was clearly meant for a first strike in a launch-on-worn scenario. The Air Force was just lying to everybody, right, in order to make this seem less dangerous. Each Minuteman was to be aimed at all times at a different city in the USSR or China. We don't have good computers back then, right? So the way these things are targeted is there's a system of gyroscopes inside each of these missiles rotating on frictionless ball bearings at all times, which will guide the missiles when launched towards a specific set of coordinates.

missiles cannot be retargeted on the fly. Once you fire these, no matter who you're launching them at, no matter who starts the war, if the missiles fire, they go towards the preset targets. Are you seeing a problem, potentially? Yeah, also, I'm impressed by that method of figuring how to aim things. It's incredibly impressive. These people are very smart and very stupid at the same time. Yep, yep, 20th century engineering.

Yeah, like, there's a very high chance with this that we wind up nuking a country that has not fired at us because we're just launching all of our shit and some of it's targeted towards them, right? We'll talk more about that in the last episode. Now, this is a problem because each squadron of 50 missiles is divided into five groups of 10, and each squadron of 10 would be fired by just two guys. If two men chose to insert their keys at the same time, the launch control center they were in would be considered to have voted to launch, and all 10 missiles would fire.

If two or more centers voted yes within a short period of time, all 50 missiles and the squadron would fire. Each missile is targeted to a city. We have no way of knowing who might provoke us, which means by default, our automated response was to nuke both the USSR and China, even if one of those nations did nothing to piss us off or threaten us. Oh, my God. When did China get nukes? China detonates their first nuke in October of 1964. So they don't have it yet. But, you know, military planners at this period of time, even before China has nukes, are thinking of China and the Soviet Union as well. one unified communist block.

They are not, as Nixon will make very clear. Those countries don't like each other, really. Like, they have a fraught history. But our assumption is we got to start by nuke and them both, right? So it actually gets even worse than this, which we'll talk about in the last episode. But I think this is a good point to end here, just with the dread of how fucking dangerous this system is. Oh, my God.

God, I'm so glad that this is just in this weird nerd game that you play called Warhammer Certainly not real If this was real This would be like big news Terrifying What a nightmare

Yeah How does anyone sleep? Yeah, if this was all real And people actually tried to build a system like this We would have to throw them all in prison, right? I assume so We wouldn't let them retire with millions of dollars That would be crazy

No. All right. Well, Margaret, plugables? Yeah, I have a substack. I write about the things that I talk about on my show. And my substack, Margaret Kiljoy, you can find me on all of the various internet things that I'm on and not the ones that I'm not on. And I'm not aware of any other Margaret Kiljoy except apparently a Disney character where she, from the second Fantasia movie or something. Or she's a nag, like a misogynist character that.

Oh, boo. I actually could be able to have these characters. It might be, I might have the movie wrong. I don't know. Someone just pointed out to me recently. But I'm not a misogynist stereotype from Disney. I am instead, everyone's nightmare of, if you're transphobe, I'm your nightmare. And you could find me by Googling me.

That's what I got. Yeah, I actually am a misogynist nightmare from a Disney movie. I was the inspiration for Gaston. A lot of people don't know that. No comment. I don't have a counter argument. you in real life. Podcast is over.

All right. 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.

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