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

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Robert sits down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about how mankind went from building one atomic bomb to building tens of thousands of them, permanently 15 minutes or less away from ending all life on earth. (5 Part Series) Sources: https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/a-horrifying-and-believable-path-to-nuclear-war-with-north-korea/ https://mwi.westpoint.edu/inside-frighteningly-plausible-nuclear-attack-scenario/ https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10736700.2018.1513920 https://www.si.edu/media/NASM/NASM-DoomsdayDelayed.pdf https://doomsdaymachines.net/p/i-have-sought-to-slaughter-as-few https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1996/november/strategic-bombing-always-myth https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/does-strategic-bombing-work-world-war-ii-test-case-proved-it-or-not-173621 https://www.junobeach.org/canada-in-wwii/articles/rcaf-bomber-squadrons-overseas/strategic-bombing/ https://www.npr.org/2021/08/06/1025059199/fallout-tells-the-story-of-the-journalist-who-exposed-the-hiroshima-cover-up https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/bombing-because-you-can-operation https://www.amazon.com/Bombing-Win-Coercion-Cornell-Security/dp/0801483115 https://www.amazon.com/15-Minutes-General-Countdown-Annihilation/dp/1250002087 https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788 https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Scenario-Annie-Jacobsen/dp/0593476093See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzo Media I was just doing the atonal screaming for you, Robert. Well, now you fucked up the introduction, so if he doesn't feel good now, does it? Feels bad. Well done, Magpie. It's harder than it sounds, you know? You know what? Honestly, kind of fun.

I'm just hoping that the listeners here will appreciate how much work goes into my atonels screeches because to be polite, they sound a lot better than you're atonal screeches. That's all I'm saying. I absolutely agree. So give the listeners one. No, no, no. I think they've gotten enough atonal screeches. Instead, let's talk about, I don't know, I'm not, we're not on video this week, folks. I'm not feeling well. I just had a vasectomy, which, you know, I debated on, because I don't like talking about my private life on the show too much, but I also think it's a good thing to encourage. So guys out there, if you're thinking about getting the vasectomy, if you're like, should I get a vasectomy, go do it. Or do it yourself. You know, it doesn't look that hard.

Don't do that. The doctor wasn't down there very long. You could figure it out. You know? Pruners. Sure. You know, whatever it takes. Rubber band. That's how we do it on the sheep. Anyway, Margaret, Hilljoy. Yes. How are you doing? I'm good. I didn't have surgery this week. That's also good. That's better. That's better. than having surgery as a general rule. I love that for you, Magpie. I certainly prefer the weeks when I don't have surgery. Even if it's minor surgery, it's never very fun.

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Let's go. Steph Curry redefined basketball. Now he's rewriting what it means to succeed. Order your copy of the New York Times bestseller shot ready. Today at stephencurrie book.com. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me. In season two of Rip Current, we asked who tried to kill Judy Barry and why.

They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment. in the woods. She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Margaret.

How often do you think about the fact that at any given moment, we're at the most 30 minutes away from the entire planet being wiped out? Well, I've been thinking about it more recently. That was depressing. Yeah. Yeah, it's a... I watched a movie about this recently and it's back on my life. A lot of people have a lot, which is kind of why I haven't actually seen that movie yet,

but this is always on my mind. It's a special, the whole nuclear doomsday, planetary nuclear doomsday device that we largely co-created with Russia is on my mind a lot. I'm just interested in the facts of how it came together and who made it. And I'm interested in, because our subjects this week are broadly speaking, all of the people in the U.S., at least, who built that, because we don't have quite as much granular detail on their counterparts in the Soviet Union, you can generally assume a version of everything we're talking about this week happened over there, too, right? Like, they didn't not create a planetary killing doomsday device. We both just kind of built one that was heavily based on our game theory understanding of how the other side would respond in like an escalated. nuclear scenario. And the end result of that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still

today, ready at all times to wipe out more or less all of human civilization in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. That's about how long it would take. Do you ever think about quantum immortality? Sorry, I'm just going to go straight into wig that shit. That's a nice thing to think about. It's comforting at least the idea that like will never experience the worst case scenario because our consciousness doesn't persist in those moments. Except, that's, okay, that is, that is, and I think about that specifically around nuclear destruction, because I think about how often the people of the generation,

you know, I had of mine are, like, they almost seem silly how worried they were about nuclear apocalypse because it didn't happen during the Cold War. So we're like, oh, obviously humanity would never do that, but it would be impossible for me to be alive now if the world had been, destroyed. So even if nine times out of 10 we destroyed the world, we're stuck being alive in the one out of 10. So it actually makes me more fearful because I'm like, well, it might just be pure

raw luck that we didn't annihilate ourselves. Yes. And unfortunately, I think that is, if you're trying to look at this from an educated, an accurate perspective, that is the only reason we're all alive because it we nearly wiped out we like the number of times that the whole world nearly got wiped out in atomic hellfire is like I you have you have too many to count on all of our fingers and toes in this podcast combined right oh god um it happened so many times uh and and there the the amount of resistance whenever someone pointed out oh hey the way this was built could kill us all in any moment accidentally that happened so many times we'll be talking about the fucking minute men missiles and how they were initially set up. But what's interesting about

this week is that our subjects are kind of like Schrodinger's bastards, where some of these guys do have big body counts, especially the folks who were, you know, responsible for getting the new, like Leslie Groves, right, who was the general who oversaw the Manhattan Project, right? You can put a lot of deaths under his name. But most of the people who built this system never killed anybody, even indirectly really. And, but they could at any moment. Guys, In fact, guys whose last bit of work was in the 60s could 15 minutes from now, if the right things had started happening 15 minutes ago or a couple of seconds ago, 15 minutes from now, all of these guys could become the biggest murderers in world history, right? Collectively. But they won't be remembered. But they won't, no one will be. Nothing will be, right? That's the beauty of atomic hellfire.

History is written by the victors and there's no victors. There's going to be no victors of a nuclear war. Simply no history written. but they are they are interesting in that because a lot of them are not like bad and some of them are even deeply sympathetic there's a guy we're going to talk about who may have saved all of human life but also helped still did help build the machine that could at any moment end it all right because it's and I need to correct this from the start all of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has been done to make the system safer since the end of the Cold War and in fact it's significantly more dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War in part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be in a launch-on-worn situation, which is where

both Russia and the United States are today, is launch-on-worn, which means that the policy of both governments is to start shooting everything they have when they have a credible warning that they're being nuked, right? And our best-case scenario would be like one crazy country, like North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the United States, but that would still trigger a massive nuclear response. And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch with the Russian government. And as a heads up, there have been times where we've been out of touch with them for as much as 48 hours when there's been like critical things to, like that happens. The gaps and comms like that,

especially since Ukraine happened. And if we started launching missiles, the way that most of our missiles would work, a lot of them would go through or at least appear to be going towards Russian airspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of these radar systems are perfect. So there's a very good chance, even if we weren't, didn't have it set up to cross Russian or Chinese airspace, they would think that for a period of time that is longer than the amount of time they know they have to choose to launch their arsenals in response as per the way deterrence theory works. This could happen at any moment. This could have started happening seconds ago, right? So that's what we're talking about this week, is how we got to this

point, that we have not ever stepped back from. We are just as close as we were during the Cold War. That's very important for people to understand. So these next couple of weeks, we're going to talk about how this all came to be, right? Because all of the men we're talking about this week, most of whom, again, have no body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives. All of these guys put the work in to make this machine, knowing that they were building a system that, if used, would lead to planetary genocide. And they built it anyway. They built it because they knew it would work that way, right? Uh-huh.

So we're going to talk about why. We're going to talk about, because they thought they were doing the morally right thing. And up until now, you could make a case, up until the missiles fly, you could continue making a case that it was the right thing to do, which is part of one of the fucked up things about it, right? Right. So this is a complicated topic, but I do think these people are worth discussing, and part because these are all people who sat down and had conversations about like, okay, we do

this, and that'll kill about 600 million people. yeah, build it, you know? Like, these are, these are the talks that they were having. There's a joke that gets made online today a lot, a meme about a tech company building the torment nexus, an imitation of classic sci-fi novel, don't create the torment nexus. It's kind of a joke about the way a lot of tech projects feel now, where it's like, this is exactly what the sci-fi that inspired you was warning against, right? But that really is the reality of the atom bomb. And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schloser, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used as sources for these episodes.

And at the start of his book, Schlosser points out that the first person to conceive directly of an atomic bomb was H.G. Wells, who wrote a 1914 novel titled The World Set Free. I was not aware. Now, there's some other candidates, but this is like the first, I'll tell you why this is, I think, the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine an accurate, a semi-accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it, Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the backstory. of the Federation in Star Trek?

Scientists create the ultimate explosive, a radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry in a purse or suitcase, quote, an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. As Schlosser writes, these atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind, as every nation seeks to obtain them

and use them before being attacked. Millions die. The world's great capitals are destroyed, and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government. And this is Wells.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs, which shook men out of cities, shook them also out of their old established habits of thought, Wells wrote, full of hope. And, yeah, I think that's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. Yeah. Well, he also, he was really into war gaming. He also, he would have been, oh, he would have been so into Warhammer if he was alive. He genuinely was into Wargaming. Yes, I know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Him as Warhammer man. I like that idea. He would have been also another big wargaming nerd who would have been into war. Warhammer was the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin, early Napoleonic Wargamer. Anyway, hell yeah.

Wells' nukes didn't work quite like the real things. They went off slowly and they lot off huge amounts of radiation over years of time. But Wells came pretty close to foreseeing that the real thing, close enough to foreseeing the real thing that in 1929, a Hungarian physicist named Leo Sillard, S-Z-I-L-A-R-D, met with Wells to try and purchase the literary rights to publish his novel in Central Europe. This is relevant in terms of, like, who was the closest to a nuke? Because Leo Zillard is one of the fathers of the atom bomb. A decade or so after trying to buy the rights to this, this is true.

He comes to the U.S., and he becomes one of the architects of the Manhattan Project. And he's a guy, you can't really blame Sillard, right? Again, if we're talking about where does the moral blame lay, he has the most understandable reason for wanting to help the U.S. build a nuke of anybody. And it's kind of good to talk about him because it does. make the point that it's a little unfair to judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the world that formed them. Sillard was a Jewish refugee. He fled Nazi Germany and he wound up in the United States. Because he was a physicist and because he was a refugee of the Holocaust,

he knew not only the threat that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a bomb program going. Yeah. In 1939, he sends a letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears. And Einstein's like, this is the guy who sent the letter. To Einstein. And then Einstein helps him write a letter to FDR. Yeah, please. Yeah, but then they send up, like, Einstein helps him craft this letter, and he sends it to FDR, and this letter warns about bombs of a new type. And FDR takes the warning seriously that he keeps exploring the idea, which helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Like, that's Leo Zillard, and he ties directly back to the Wells idea. That's awful. That's so, the fact that we can like literally say, not only don't build the torment Nexus, but maybe don't write the Torment Nexus.

Maybe don't write about the Tourment Nexus. I mean, it's, I think Sillard probably was, I think he probably was into Wells because he, he, like, people had theorized before Wells that something like an atom bomb might be feasible, unlike the, like, physicists had. And I think Sillard was impressed that Wells had gotten something so close. And also, he clearly wanted to warn the world about this thing, which I think is why he was interested in purchasing the rights to this. And we'll talk a little bit more about him later. But it is, it is so tragic, because you, you can't. blame him. Like, he's like, his attitude is like, we need, we need to have this because Hitler might have it, right? Yeah. Which like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. But that's the same logic that like, and, you know, the USSR is not Nazi Germany. Obviously, we can, the proof of that is as simple as what happened in the Cold War, right? And to be fair, neither is the United

States. Neither country used the damn things on the scale that would have ended civilization. Right. You know, we'll talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too. But it's, I, you understand. Dan, like Sillard's motivations are deeply sympathetic, right? And a number of scientists behind the Manhattan Project, some of them are refugees, right? But the ones that aren't still get into it because they're reading the news. They're aware of how dangerous the U.S.'s enemies are during World War II. And it's a legitimate threat that Germany in particular might get the bomb before we do, right? And those stories are like half the reason this happened, because a lot of people of goodwill got involved with the Manhattan Project because they were like, well, this is probably the lesser.

it's probably better that the U.S. has this than that a fascist country is the only one with a nuke. Right. Right. Like that's their logic here. And they, they had to operate on, we know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke, right? Just based on the choice, because they didn't, right? They went in different directions. They did not make the choices ultimately that would have given them. Have you heard this thing? Maybe it's in the script, or maybe I'm like wrong about this, that there was a work slowdown of the Nazi, the Nazi bomb program where they were like, and they went. And they tried to tell their U.S. counterparts, like, hey, we're slowing down this bomb. You all need to slow it down, too. But the person that they told didn't believe them and was like, oh, shit, they're trying to lie to us. They must be, like, right about to build this bomb. Have you heard this story? No, I happen to actually. No, no, no, it's not.

Okay, I can never remember the name of the book because I found it in a trash can 20 years ago. It was about the social history of building of the bomb. and I read this and it like changed the way that I was perceiving this stuff but I've since read more about this and research more about this and I think it's like messier than that but I think again just from memory

that there was like a work slowdown in the Nazi program because it was all of these physicists who used to work with Jews because before all the Jews got kicked out of the physicists programs I don't know I don't know if that's sure or not uh neither do I um so check on that

I want to believe. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple, there's some good, there's some stories like, I mean, and espionage is heavily baked into the whole story of how this all happened, right? Yeah. And it's the spies in the U.S. who bring bomb information to the USSR are people working on a similar logic to Zillard where they're like, well, the U.S. is obviously not a good actor. And if they're the only ones with a nuke, they're going to kill everyone in the Soviet Union, right? Oh, yeah.

Like, and maybe, you know, we talked about it, plenty of guys talked about it. We had a plan to do it, you know, so you're not, and maybe by, by the way, if it's arguable that building this doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do. And a lot of people argue that to this day, then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the U.S. would have. have killed 600 or so million people. Right. Right. We know that because we talked about doing it a lot. You were really right with the like Schrodinger's bastards. Yeah, exactly. These people are heroes or bastards and we will never know.

And in half the timelines they're one and then half they're the other. I guess part of why I'm doing this is that if this happens, like 15 minutes after you finish listening to this podcast, you'll know who to be angry at in your last couple seconds of Consciousness, assuming you're not near ground zero for one of these things. You know, and you probably want to be at ground zero. It's the least painful option available. The road is optimistic in terms of like the aftermath of thermonuclear war on a planetary scale. Anyway, so those guys, but guys with that logic basically that like, well, this is a messy thing.

I don't really want to be building a giant bomb, but it might. save a lot of lives in the long run. That's like a sizable chunk of the Manhattan project, right? That's like a big amount of the logic behind the reason individual people got involved, right? The other half, though, is a military, and this is largely on the military side of things. It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is how the military thinks of these weapons, both when we're starting to plan one and then immediately after we start using them, right? And the military logic for why this is, why building this system, why getting as many of these things is possible is a good idea, is based on a military theory that starts to take hold

after the end of the First World War. And this is ultimately the theory that leads us to the system of international mutually assured destruction that we live in today, right? And there's an element of historical rhyming here that we build this global, real literal global doomsday device as a result of a theory that takes off in the end of World War I based on what happened in World War I. because World War I is itself the result of a doomsday device going off, a device that was never supposed to go off, and a device that a lot of people, if you, right up until the start of World War I, if you talked about this system of alliances and military buildup, right, and like, and arms build up, like, you've got all these munitions, refit schedules

and whatnot and interlocking alliances was meant to ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war, right? That was the people who would defend it, would say that, like, well, if everyone's really well armed, and if everybody's always, and if we have all these alliances between different powers that make it an unwinnable situation, we won't have this war, right? People would make that argument, you know. Now, obviously, the technology at the time, they didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines, so they had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf, and these do work like a machine, right?

And that is what happens, you know, you have Austria declares war on Serbia. That brings France and Germany into it. The German plan that they had built meant that like, well, the only way we can possibly win this war is we have to do this specific kind of invasion that takes us through Belgium. That brings Great Britain into the, you know, and so on and so forth. Right. And they have the Maxim gun. And they've got the, everyone's got a version of the Maxim gun. And everyone's got, everyone's also thinking, well, I just re, like, we just refurbished and upgraded our artillery. And France is, France has just upgraded this thing, but they haven't upgraded this thing, and if we go now,

they won't have the new version of this thing, and ours will still be the, like, that's a big part of the thinking, too, right? And this is like always the case. And it had been for decades prior to World War I. And prior to World War I, the fact that it would be so costly, and it was so, like, everyone's plan for victory rested on so many, like, assumptions and was sketchy enough, no one really wanted to do this, right? I mean, with the exception, of the military thinkers, who had spent their entire lives building and planning out the system of like, this is how we're going to activate our troops. This is the order at which we'll get the marching, and this is where they'll move in.

They really, so you have this mix of nobody on the civilian side of governance wants to think about this seriously, because it would be a calamity, and they know it, and everyone in the military is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start having leaders need to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to go to war. The loudest voice in the ear is this general who's thought of nothing else's entire professional life. And by the way, in the six minutes, a U.S. President would have to decide whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice in his year is going to be a guy who thinks about using the nukes nonstop. Yeah, it's like his job. It's his job.

This is like the, you know, the whole like an armed society is a polite society, logical fallacy. Yeah. You know, like, it's just so, interesting that it's this writ large where we have yeah we have data that shows that an armed society is not a polite society it sure isn't not I have pro second amendment for complicated reasons but very complicated

but like it's just not it's like you could watch all the videos of people being like you parked in my space and now they're shooting at each other yeah and they would have been punching each other in a different world yes and it's one of those things I have had I've literally had the exact situation of like

I had a situation that would have been violent but we all had guns and knew it, and so nobody started shit. And I'm also more than aware of the fact that, like, the United States is more violent than a lot of unarmed societies, right? Yeah, because if you carry a gun, you have to have an entirely different mindset

where you kind of can't... It changes everything, yeah. You actually can't stand up for yourself. You kind of have to take, possibly even the first punch, right? You just have to be... You have to do everything possible to de-escalate. to avoid violence. Including taking a couple hits.

Yeah. Because you know that you're capable of an overwhelming capacity of violence. Yeah. And it, people don't do that. Instead, they're like, isn't this sick? I've got overwhelming capacity of violence. And that's one of the worries with like the nukes is when they go from, because one thing I will say, and this is something I'll even give Nixon, basically all of our

leaders and all of the Soviet leaders, right? It's a mistake to leave them out too. This is the thing that would only have worked if both sides. were similar for all of the flaws of all of the men running both countries, the duration of the Cold War, all of them had one thing in common, which is they were guys who were like, no, that would be fucked up. Yeah. No, that'd be fucked up.

We're just not going to do that. Yeah. Right? There's some great. I mean, fucking Reagan has some really good quotes of like, oh, like, where he's like having this conscience of like, I can't believe we as human beings created this nightmare system. This is so much worse than I ever knew it was. What's wrong with people?

Reagan had those moments, right? he wants to punch people. You know, he wants that, he wants to do the lower level of violence. And there's some good, there's a good JFK quote when this all got explained to him for the first, because JFK, one of the things he did is he took away the military's control of the nukes, right, and made it. Because the military used to be, have basically, theoretically could have made the call to launch the missiles without presidential authority.

It wasn't mechanically necessary the way it is now, right? Like the way the code system works now, you mechanically have to. have the president looped in, right? Although there, we'll talk about that. It's not a perfect system either. But that became the way we do it during JFK's administration. And when he, when all of this got explained to him how this works, I think his exact quote was like, can we call ourselves the human race? Like, what the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. And they all, like, there's a lot, you get a lot of reactions like that from presidents. And that's the only reason we're all alive to this day. And that's the thing, not just with the U.S. and Russia, but with any country that gets a

nuclear power is maybe you get someone at the head of that country who can think about that and who can think about for whom it's not an unthinkable, right? And that changes everybody's calculus to a startling degree, right? This is why a lot of people, there's a good book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in a pretty unsparing term. And she provides like a theoretical. And her theoretical is North Korea's Mad King launches missiles for unclear reasons, right? And what I don't like about it is I don't really agree with the whole, the Kim family are like crazy thing.

I think they're pretty rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the same things that other countries are entirely. Yeah, and they're back to the wall. Like, I'm not trying to apologize for them, but, you know. I see a logic in what they're doing. I don't think they're crazy, right? And I don't, which is, what I think is, I don't think his book is as good, but there was another book that came out a year or two previously by another, like, a scholar interested in

the nuclear mutually assured destruction system. That was also a North Korea-US exchange hypothetical, but that didn't rely on North Korea being crazy. In fact, everyone was performing logically, right? Basically, the premise was North Korea does something that kills some South Korean civilians, right? I think they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits, which has happened before, right? North Korea has in fact killed South Korean civilians not all that long ago, right? And as a result, the North Korean president, without seeking U.S. approval, fires missiles at military targets, non-nuclear missiles at military targets in North Korea. But the leader of North Korea doesn't know that the U.S. didn't approve of the firing of missiles. And their system

can't entirely tell what's incoming and what's not. And they see once South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the U.S. starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes aware. And anyway, it's this whole cycle of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just requires. And by the way, one of the things we found it very recently is that the currently imprisoned former president of South Korea, who is being charged with, I believe, insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into North Korea illegally without,

getting U.S. approval or anything while he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically get to declare martial law, right? So like this stuff, like shit like that happens all the time and just hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple stages of a few different apocalypse as occur. This is not a crazy. This is not crazy. And it doesn't require any power, Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes to be like a mustache twirling madman. It just requires them to all be, have incomplete, imperfect information. and focused on their own survival, right? Yeah.

It's good. I love this stuff. While you're talking, I'm thinking about all the other countries that also have nukes and like their own things going on. Right. Yeah. You know, like, I mean, Israel and North Korea are like comparable entities in my mind in terms of being like small powers with better like pariah states.

Yeah. That probably aren't going to do something to get themselves. Like I actually could see personally, I could see a big state feeling. more confident to do it. Yeah. But. Yeah. Anyway, we'll keep talking about this, Margaret.

But first, here's some ads. 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. Terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery. 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.

We felt like we were in the presence of someone. It was going to the grave with nightnourish secrets. From Tenderfoot TV and IHard 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. May 24, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

In season two of Ripcurrent, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing. The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long.

Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family,

and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, practice. To the right, I'm sorry, to the left. I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For 25 years, I've explored what it means to heal, not just for myself, but alongside others. I'm Mike Delarocha. This is Sacred Lessons, a space for reflection, growth, and collective healing. What do you tell men that are hurting right now? Everything's going to be okay

on the other side, you know, just push through it. And, you know, ironically, the root of the word spirit is breath. Wow. Which is why one of the most revolutionary acts that we can do as people just breathe. Next to the wound is their gifts. You can't even find your gifts unless you go through the wound. That's the hard thing. You think, well, I'm going to get my guess. I don't want to go through all that. You got to go through the wounds you're laughing. Listening to other people's near-death experiences, and it's all they say. In conclusion, love is the answer. Listen to Sacred Lessons as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

We're back. Yeah, so we got off on a little bit of a tangent, but I wanted to get back to a point I was making, which is the historical rhyming between the, the system, The mutually assured destruction is a product of a military theory that gets born at this theory of strategic bombing that gets born at the end of World War I, right? And that theory only exists because World War I happens. And World War I is the result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go off going off, right? You have all these like treaties and stuff that basically guarantee that if one of a couple of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them, it will start a chain reaction that leads to a general European war, right? And because of the way that armies work in this period, right?

And basically all military wisdom at this point is based on the last war, as it always is. And the last war for Europe is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871. That's not literally the last conflict in Europe during this period, but it's the last big one that people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions like this. Germany versus France is the only way to have a European war as far as like. tell so. Oh, man. I mean, we have not had a good European war since those two got their shit together. And that's why I think we should start tweaking them both, you know? Just just start, see who we can make angrier at the other, you know? Germany, I hear France has been talking hell a shit, you know? Just set the ride on fire. Yeah, shit set the riot on fire. Fuck it. Let's see

what happens. Um, only France has nukes, so we should be fine. Uh, anyway, the great land powers of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Austro, Hungary, knew that the instant war was declared, there was this clock ticking, right? Because most of your army is reserves, right? The largest amount of manpower you have isn't your active duty. It's this mass of, like, reserve troops. These guys who, when they're 18 or whatever, they're basically drafted, they sometimes serve like a year. And then for a period of time, they have to do, basically they're all in the National Guard, right? That's the norm in most of these states. You have some version of that. And so it takes a period of time to call these guys up from

civilian life, to issue them their gear. to get them moved into their units and then to get them move to the front. So everyone is working not just, not only do you have this interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side knows I have to be able to get my reserves ready for active duty before the enemy can. Otherwise, they're going to invade before I have my army, which means I have a ticket, like I, once the Archduke of Austria, Hungary is assassinated and then people start to realize that general European war is in play, it's not just a matter of diplomatically, can we smooth this? It's every, all of my generals are shouting that like if we don't mobilize now, we don't know that France isn't mobilizing, right?

We can't tell. They might be mobilizing. And if they're mobilizing, we only have this period of time to start mobilizing in turn, right? That's a big part of everybody's thinking here. And that's the same with nuclear war, right? Where you don't know entirely what the other side is doing. We, the U.S., have pretty good data on when people are, because we have this nuts, insane, like, level of, like, spy satellites and shit like that, although all of it has

errors. All of it has things that can go wrong, right? None of it's perfect. Soon AI will run it. It'll be fine. Yeah. So everyone's acting off of imperfect information, and everybody has a very limited time frame, and they're being shouted at by their generals that if we don't move in time, we're fucked,

right? The whole country could be fucked. And you have X amount of time. Now, they have its days and weeks, you know, in the case of these European monitors. Right? But that's still a ticking clock, right? Anyway, we all know how World War I goes. Not great. Badly for everyone. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide. And basically all of the, one of the things that's fascinated to me, and this is the case

in a lot of wars, everyone's planning at the start of World War I is based on how the last war had gone, and everyone's planning is wrong. Germany's plan to knock France out of the war in the first couple of months doesn't work. France and Russia have this plan where like we'll both hit Germany on either side, right? If Germany starts some shit, we'll come in on both flags. and we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, well,

we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up and it'll probably be fine, right? And they realize, oh, no, actually, we're kind of, you have to have actually millions of guys with guns, you know, how fast can we draft all the coal miners? All of these, and Germany or Great Britain's plans are based in part on like, well, we've got this great Navy. That's probably all we'll need, right? Yeah, and they have a token. And they got J.R.

Tolkien somewhere in there, you know, surely we'll be okay. Anyway, everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war, and it leads to disaster. And so after the carnage, a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying what had happened to try to make predictions about what would happen in the next war, which is the same thing that had happened after 1871, and they'd made the wrong predictions. But they're sure, this time we'll get it. We're smarter than that last generation of military thinkers. We'll make conclusions from the last war that are right, you know? And one of these guys, among the most influential of these fuckers, is an Italian general named Guilio Du Hey. Now, he had been born in Caserta, Italy in 1869, but his family were refugees from Savoy, which was a former Italian possession that had been ceded to the perfidious French.

As a young man, he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer in the Italian army. He continued his formal education by studying engineering at a university in Turin. Duhay rose steadily through the ranks, and by the early 1900s, he was a member of the Italian general staff. Basically, their joint chiefs, right? That's kind of the idea. He had been an early advocate for dirigible, initially used as spotters for artillery and the like. And once the first aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for aircraft as a weapon system, right? Now, this on its own isn't noteworthy.

He was right. Obviously, aircraft are pretty important in modern war. Yeah. But very, a lot of people. It wasn't universal. there were certainly some guys being like, no, the infantry man with a rifleist would be the always be the core of any warfighting effort.

We don't need planes. There were some nuts. But most intelligent people were like, obviously planes are going to be useful, you know? Being able to have the sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict. And Duhay, but one thing that did make him noteworthy, where he was kind of seeing far ahead, was that he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of ground commanders, right?

it would effectively need to be its own kind of service, you know? And this is something, even during World War II, there's not an Air Force in the U.S. We have the Army Air Corps, right? It's a part of the Army. DeHae, ahead of times, it's like, no, the air power should be its own independent branch. It's different enough, right? It's like the Navy. In 1911, he got a chance to act on some of his theories when Italy went to war in Libya

against the Ottomans, because an awful lot of Italians had never really gotten over the Roman Empire. That's the gist of why we keep fucking. with Ethiopia. Du Hay's conclusion from this was, and this was like the first real-world use of air combat power for Italy, and his conclusion is that in the future, planes will get better, and high-altitude bombing will become the number one battlefield role of planes, right? This is not true for World War II entirely. I mean, it's debatable, right?

But there's a lot of argument that that's not entirely, that high-altitude bombing was not the number one battlefield use of air power. Yeah, it wasn't high altitude bombing more, like bombing civilian targets, but ideally. Close air support is less high altitude because you can't do it as accurately, right? Like you need to be closer to not hit your own guys as much. This is one of those things, technology has made this kind of true because like even a lot of what we'd call close air support today is still pretty high altitude. Because you can fire a missile from pretty high altitude, right? Like if like modern, like modern weapon systems, you can shoot from higher up.

But he's wrong in spirit, right? Which is that, like, this is not the way most effective combat use of air power in World War II is not high altitude bombing, right? And even if you look in the Pacific Theater, right, like, it's a lot of naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but it's not really high altitude bombing, you know? Pearl Harbor isn't high altitude bombing, right? Like, it's a different kind of use of aircraft. But Duhay is certain that high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the, not just like critical, but basically the only thing that air power will be used for, right? And he's so certain of this that he becomes kind of an asshole about it, right? Like he illegally orders the construction of bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money.

And it burns out his career. He gets forced into the infantry and he spends the early stages of World War I basically screaming that Italy can win. we can break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make the enemy harmless if we can just gain command of the air. And he calls for the construction of 500 bombers to drop 125 tons of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the stalemate of trench warfare. Now, yeah, so this is the kind of thing. It seems ahead of its time, right? Because this is sort of where military thinking went, right? Like, it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking World War II because of Duhay. But it's not correct.

ahead of its time. In part, like, Italy simply couldn't have built 500 high-altitude bombers to drop that kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have the capacity. Like the Italian industry, the Italian military, in the middle of World War I was not going to be able to do that, right? It's just not a realistic ask of the country. Yeah, they're busy not getting slaughtered in the war already. Yeah, they don't have the spare resources and also bombers aren't that good yet, right? Like, they will be by World War. War II, but Duhay is not saying this is what, I mean, he will eventually say this is how the future should work, but he is also arguing we should be trying to do this right now. And Italy just

doesn't have the resources or technical know-how to create the bomber fleet he wants in 1915 when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen. And he is such an asshole about this that he is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about how, because he's calling his superior is incompetent for not following through with this impossible plan. Like, yeah, and you don't get away with that during a war. No, they lock him up for a while, but he keeps writing about his ideas while he's in jail. And the war gets worse and worse for Italy, and he's eventually brought back and given command of the Aviation Bureau, which shows you how desperate Italy is. After the end of hostilities, he starts work on his magnum opus, a manifesto on the future of strategic air power.

In 1921, it was published under the title, The Command of the Air. Now, some of his arguments are pretty strong, right? One of the things he's saying is that, like, look at what happened in this fucking First World War. It was a shit show. Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right? You can get right over them. You can hit targets behind the trenches, like their artillery, right? And you could maybe knock infantry out of trenches.

Now, this is actually something, one of the things will be proved wrong on that is that infantry and trenches are a lot less vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be, right? Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people, especially with the kind of technology they're going to have by World War II. it's better than just shelling them endlessly, but it is not the get-out-of-trench-free card that Duhay pretends it is, right?

Now, Duhay is also, he's one of a number of growing military theorists who had learned from the last war that these huge conscript armies that everybody has moved towards, like if that's how war works, if the whole male civilian population is potentially part of the military

and the whole country is being mobilized to support the military, then you can't limit yourself to just striking troops in the field in future wars. Civilian populations do Hay's attitude as civilian populations make continued resistance possible and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure of war must be attacked, right?

Yep. Oops. You know, it's funny, whenever there are these things that are technologically developed that I just would have assumed or older, like I would have just assumed somehow that bombing civilian populations is somehow older than this as a, like, I mean, tactic, you know?

It is, like, this, Duhay is not the first military leader to be, like, civilians are a valet. This, in fact, is the norm in a lot of ancient warfare, right? Like, fucking, a lot of times in ancient Greece, one city-state goes to war against another, the one that loses does not get to keep being a city state. You annihilate them, right? Yeah. You kill the men, you rape the women, right?

Like, that's not every war, but a lot of wars in classical history go that way. I've been reading that for my show recently, and I suddenly had to realize, I was like, oh, the concept of surrender is sort of new. It's like a new technology is you actually, like, let people go home after you beat them. It's more that it had stopped being the norm to consider the whole country to be enemies. But even during World War I, right, Great Britain starves a million Germans to death by blocking ports. Germany, we know they can't grow, they don't have the ability to produce sufficient food stuffs on their own. That's part of the military effort, right?

It's not as direct as bombing civilians, but it would be, it would be very inaccurate to pretend, do hay is the first guy who is like, civilians are on the table, right? No, totally. But specifically the idea of this, like, standardizing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's meaningful. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, I think that that is important that he is the guy writing in a book. This is the, this is a logical strategy. for how modern war ought to be pursued is the systematic destruction of civilian populations through strategic bombing, right? It does matter that he's the first guy to write that out, you know?

Like, that's upon his soul. Yeah. Yeah. Which is not to say that nobody would have thought to do stuff like this if he hadn't been around, right? No, but I mean,

just because someone else will invent the torment nexus is not a reason to invent the torment nexus. No, nor does it erase your culpability in making it. Now, one of my sources for this episode is an article by Colonel Everest Rissione, who's one of the more influential pilots

in U.S. combat aviation history. He's an interesting guy. He was a key member of what became known as the fighter mafia, which is a group of guys in the Air Force who argue, and this is in like the latter half of the 20th century, they argue that like the branch's bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about the, this is like right before the birth of, I think, the F-16.

They're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt and it's lying about how well certain weapon systems work for corrupt reasons. And as a result, they have all these complaints about, like, hybrid role fighters as opposed to dedicated anti-aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not the fighter mafia was right. I'm just bringing this up because this is a guy who is a history of being on controversial sides of arguments, right?

And he wrote an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for the Air Force, right, where he is kind of laying out his thinking as to why DuHaye was wrong. And he summarizes DeHaye's arguments this way. He also believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land and at sea, and that an enemy's ability to sustain a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of enemy air power in the air and on the ground. The need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but also to destroy their eggs and their nests, Duhay wrote. Enemy aircraft production plants were to find as prime strategic targets. He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses against them were

useless. He believed that attacking populations with relatively small amounts of explosives, incendiary, and gas weapons would make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the way very influential people in military planning still think to this day. Du Hay's thinking is incredibly common, or at least a descendant, descendants of Du Hay's thinking, is incredibly common within military planners to this day. And this is the root of mutually assured destruction. It starts with these ideas, right? Particularly the idea, yeah. That people won't put up with it from their leaders. That people won't put up with it that, well, and that a powerful strategic bombing force can

deter an attack, right? Right. Okay. Because your ability, because they can't be stopped. You can't stop a bombing run, right? It's impossible. Part of his attitude is that the sky is too big, right? You can't actually stop bombers from getting to where they're going to go. So if you have a powerful enough bombing fleet, like, no one will attack you because they know they're doomed in that instance, right? And this is basically how we think about near-peer nuclear warfare to this day, right? And that knowledge deters those sort of wars. So this is part of why people will argue to, hey, round up being right, even though he did not foresee nuclear weapons, right, in any way, shape, or form. And to be clear, he's not right. Right. He was wrong about bombers, but he was right

for now about nukes? Well, this is kind of the theme of our episodes, is that a lot of people buy into Du Hay's theories and base their careers in the Air Force on believing that this is more or less right. And once nukes come around, that's the thing that makes the things they had already believed true. And as part of why they become such advocates for nuclear warfare, right? Now, I want to really emphasize how wrong DuHaye is here, because he is not making

grand predictions about the distant future, nor is he theorizing about 21st century nuclear. warfare, or even late 20th century warfare. He is discussing the war he expected to break out in the next 20 years or so. And on basically every technical point, Duhay was desperately wrong. Again, he argues the sky is so big that air power should only be offensive because air power cannot defend territory. And the only way to protect the homeland is to build an air force that can bomb the enemy into the ground before your opponent can do the same.

He makes really specific predictions, arguing in 1928 that dropping a payload of just 300 tons of bombs over a capital city and under a month would be enough to end a war. This would all be proven catastrophically wrong. But for the later period of his life, Duhay is effectively the first air power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but it becomes the Bible of how to make an air force for basically all of the men who were in charge of the air forces in World War II. Like on every side, he's super influential. And that's not entirely accurate. He has his detractors, obviously, but he's massively influential. And I'm sure Du Hay would have been thrilled to have had such an influence because everyone in World War II tries out his

ideas. But he never gets a chance to see that. Shortly after Benito Mussolini makes him the Italian chief of aviation, he dies of a heart attack in 1930. So by the way, ends his life as a fascist too. Yeah. Couldn't have happened to a worse guy. Really tragic. You know who else died of a heart attack in 1930 after being made the fascist minister of aviation by Benito Mussolini? Uh, his twin brother? Yeah, sure.

Or these sponsors. I don't know. Great. 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. 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. We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightnourish secrets. From Tenderfoot TV and IHard Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Mons, available now.

Listen for free on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May 24, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car. I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it ripped through me with just... just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe. In season two of Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Berry and why? She received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing.

The man and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry. history in the area, but more than it was the culture. It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. Episodes of RipCurrent Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did. Why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way.

And why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize. and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice. To the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. For 25 years, I've explored what it means to heal, not just for myself, but alongside others. I'm Mike Delarocha. This is sacred. lessons, a space for reflection, growth, and collective healing.

What do you tell men that are hurting right now? Everything's going to be okay on the other side, you know, just push through it. And, you know, ironically, the root of the word spirit is breath. Wow. Which is why one of the most revolutionary acts that we can do as people just breathe. Next to the wound is their gifts. You can't even find your gifts unless you go through the wound. That's the hard thing.

You think, well, I'm going to get my guess. I don't want to go through all that. You've got to go through the wounds you're laughing. Listening to other people's near-death experiences, and that's all they say. In conclusion, love is the answer. Listen to Sacred Lessons as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. I was an awkward ad pivot. I'm not going to lie, Margaret. I'm not going to lie. But I think the audience will forgive us. I think they will. I think they'll be able to find it in their heart attack to do it.

Yeah, yeah. That's actually, what I'm trying to do is make you feel better by making a terrible joke so that people have already forgotten about your bad ad pivot. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. Let's continue talking about this guy's stupid ideas about how planes work, right?

300 bombs. 300 tons of bombs. Yeah, 300 tons of bombs. All you need. That'll wipe out any city's will to fight. So German war planners influenced by DuHaye built a bomber fleet that was tailored for the attack, not operations on enemy's cities, but providing close support to their advancing infantry and armor. And this is, you could call this an adaptation of some of DuHaye.

It's certainly influenced by it, this idea that, like, air power should just be for the offense, right? Like, that's its primary purpose. And so it's kind of an adaptation, right? England also, Du Hay's attitude, have a lot of influence. on how the Royal Air Force is constructed in the interwar period, and England spins a lot of resources creating a bomber command that was meant to deter German action on the continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids, you know?

That does not exactly work out. Here's how Colonel Riccioni describes what happened next. Germany then turned to the invasion of England, in its first test of Du Hay's theories, the Battle of Britain was engaged to gain air superiority for Operation Sea Lion. Britain's bomber command had failed to deter the war and the attacks on England. but Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to its knees.

The Luftwaffe tried to gain air superiority over England. The initially frail fighter force of the Royal Air Force, under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Doubting and using the nascent technology of radar, was able to inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts. After the Battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population to its knees.

Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to a high. pitch. So from the start, Duhay is proven wrong, just immediately. On both counts about... Yes. Yeah.

But having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also, you can defend from a bombing attack, and aircraft are great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works really fucking well. It's funny because, like, this is the... Medieval warfare was a big part of medieval Europe, right? and like the development of armor until you get to guns yeah it's like really it's the development of armor that is the new technology that's changing shit you put a a fucking armored knight against anybody and they're just like yeah you kind of can't do anything unless you get a dagger to

my throat you know yeah yeah no that's like it is it is the same it takes place over a shorter period of time with air power because shit moves faster now right yeah but it is the i mean it's the it's the the red queen hypothesis right like everyone is constantly moving as fast as they can just to stay in place, you know? Like, you build up this great bomber fleet just in time to get attacked by a bomber fleet of your own and realize, actually, we probably should have had more fighters. That might have been, that might have been handier at the jump, right? Yeah.

But also, the Germans are learning. All you need is a bunch of bombers. We've got a bunch of bombers. Oh, shit. Fighter aircraft, really fuck up bombers. Oh, no. All our pilots are gone. Who would have thought Mussolini would have named a guy who wasn't actually as good at things

as he said he was? Who'd have thought the Italian fascist minister of aviation was wrong about some important points, right? Now, one of the things that is important for what will come next is it is true. Air power is great on the defensive, and it's actually very possible to interdict and damage bombers before they can hit their targets. But not a single group of bombers on any side during the war is turned back. entirely, without being able to drop any bombs. That doesn't happen, which for nuclear planning, this is, again, one of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes do hay correct on is that like, well, once you've got nukes,

if you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs, then yeah, fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers and do enough damage that it renders like, you know, the Germans will drop some bombs in response, but you can make it be more costly for the Germans than it is for Great Britain. Right. If a thousand bombers each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from hitting, and all they need is one. Right. Right.

That is an important point about this is another lesson that's being learned, right? The same time as we're learning how wrong-do-hay is, once the nuke's come into the picture, people are going to be looking at this data and seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a nuclear attack of sufficient size, even before ICBMs. Yeah. Yeah, the scale of destructiveness of a nuke is just so different. Yeah, yeah. It's, huh. Yeah. Now, I do want to really emphasize the wrongness that Dewey was, because, again, he said that

about 300 tons of explosives in a month dropped over an enemy capital would be enough to break any people's will to fight. During a single night during the Battle of Britain, May 10th to May 11th, 1941, Germany dropped more than 700 tons of high explosives on London, as well as 86,000 incendiary devices. England kept fighting. Yeah, no, they, they came over. with a whole catchy slogan about it. Yeah.

Everyone pulled together. You have socialists like Orwell, like organizing in the Home Guard. Yeah. A lot of people felt better. Yeah. Which is a fun story. Gives us punk rock that people grew up out of that. Gives us punk rock.

Sure. Yeah. But yeah, that is an important point. Again, just to how wrong do hay is. Like, yeah, we took more than twice as much, as he said, would break any city in a month in a night London did. and people don't break under bombing, you know, which is also going to influence nuclear thinkers because then the attitude becomes, well, you just have to kill all of them then.

Yeah. Yeah. So, despite the fact that Duhay is right out the gate, proven wrong, war planners on the allied side continue to give a great deal of credence to his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris, also known as bomber Harris, who became head of the RAF's bomber command. he was a huge advocate of area bombing precision bombing which is another thing people are the strategic bombing side also breaks down to a couple of broad schools and as is always the case most people are you know have

are a little take some from column a some from column B but there's you've got area bombing and precision bombing right and the idea behind precision bombing is that you can hit just the target you want that is like the factory making bombs or the factory making planes right or a barracks and not hit the high-rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is a lie, right? It's especially, it's not all that true today, but it's especially a lie in World War II, right? It's a lot, now you can kind of do it, although it never works as well as planners like to claim it does, but in World War II, it's just a fantasy, right? And so there's a lot of, that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris who are like, well, fuck precision bombing, just

bomb, saturate an area with bombing, right? You accept greater civilian casualties so that you can cripple their industrial capabilities, right? That's the public argument. In private, they're saying something different, but the public argument is that this is just the way it has to work. The first area bombings by the RAF on German cities was in 1941, in 1942. And they did not work very well, right? They're spun as winds, but on an actual strategic level, they're not huge hits. They cause some shock to the German citizenry, but they don't accommodate. the stated goal, which is to damage war production, right? And the REF suffers high casualties because German air defenses are excellent.

You know, DeHaye continues to be very wrong about air defense. It is possible. I mean, in Vietnam, North Vietnam, part of why the war goes the way it does is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air defenses, right? Yeah. Something that gets lost in the hole. It was just some farmers in the jungle that beat the U.S. No, they had an army.

Yeah. They had radar guided missiles and everything, you know? When Arthur Harris took over bomber command for Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign, Operation Millennium. On May 30th of 1942, nearly 1,100 allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some 600 acres of the city and rendering 100,000 people homeless. Harris declared the raid a success. The British press did, too, but they focused on the destruction of war industry, not the civilian cost. And this frustrated Harris, in part because it was an act, accurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent

of a month's war production. The real cost to Germany, as Bomber Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later described the purpose of bomber command, in his eyes. The aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport, and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale, both at home and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it also does the same stealing the reserve. Like, I've met someone whose family, I think it was Kohn or Kologne. I just did the asshole thing where I've been to a city, so I'm like, let me use the, whatever. Yeah. But, you know, it's like I've met someone who was like, oh, yeah, my whole family. was like staunch anti-Nazis and then 80% of the family was wiped out in one night by a by a bombing and then they all join the army and i'm like yeah they still join the nazi army so fuck

them but like also like man i couldn't tell you that anyone i've ever met would do anything that's just how people work when their family gets killed in a bombing yeah they get pissed they don't always they're not their best selves yeah yeah exactly that's that's just how people be homie i i don't know what to tell you they don't like having their families killed by bombs And there's, as we'll talk about, a lot of debate as to the influence of strategic bombing on the German civilian population. But what we can say is that it's not why they lose. However, whatever it does to morale doesn't end the war, you know? So bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude, right, as to like what would work to actually end the war.

And he doesn't, he never gets called on that because we win the war anyway. And everyone kind of thinks fuck those guys, loki. High key. But, and, you know, fuck them. But it doesn't work. That is important. Now, there's not agreement, and in fact, a huge, a lot of conflict between the U.S. and Great Britain over the strategy initially. The guys in the U.S. Army Air Command do not all agree with Harris. And in fact, we keep conducting. The Brits are doing nighttime raids, which allows you to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for a long time, which are way more dangerous, because the idea is it gives the

civilians more of a chance to get away, right? That's part of why you're doing it. It's more honorable, basically, right? Which it is, but it also means you lose a lot more guys, right? Like, it's way more dangerous. Yeah. It's a very admirable thing, I think, that we're doing for a while. We're not always going to be that way.

So, yeah, this debate really starts to erupt after this point, and on one hand, you've got these area bombing, strategic bombing advocates, saying, like, you know, I know it hasn't quite worked yet, right? Like, we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not giving up yet. But if we just get more bombers, bro, it'll work, right? And on the other side, and again, a lot of people do kind of wind up in the middle here, but the other side broadly are like, well, close air support is what's most important, right?

Air power's primary use is its ability to augment conventional forces in taking and holding territory, It is very good at that, right? It is very good at that, right? It had proved to be tantalizingly potent in North Africa, and guys in the U.S., like General Pete Cassata, were bullish about its potential in a future invasion of France. An early test for the strategic bombing advocates, on the other hand, came prior to the invasion of Sicily. There's this island called Pantillaria, which is garrisoned with about 11,000 Italian troops

that we need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy. and I'm going to quote for an article in national interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pantilleria became an experiment, one anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that bombing would ratify what up to then had been a matter of faith, but would soon offer proof through bombing alone, surrender was a certainty. All these forces were assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing more in,

then in due course of time it becomes impossible for him to defend himself, major general Jimmy Doolittle said. If bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies plan to invade the island by June 11th. In an attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, the Allies generated 5,284 sorties, dropping a total of 12.4 million pounds of bombs on Pantilleria. Jesus.

Did it work? Kind of. After a month of unopposed round-the-clock bombing, the Italian surrendered after Allied ground troops had approached the island, right? They didn't surrender on their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops came. Ben. Now, you can still say, but that still worked, right? However, there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses were remarkably intact, still, given the force deployed against

them, because nearly every bomb missed. The B-17s were most accurate with a 22-percent hit rate. That's defined as landing a bomb within 100 yards of its target. So the B-17s hit 22% of the time, and that's our best bomber. And that's within a football field. Yeah, and that's still within a football field. Yeah. And our medium bombers hit- is about 6%. Now, this is a problem because we had been claiming very different things

about the accuracy of our bombs. Back at the start of 1943, we'd had something called the Casablanca conference in which Winston Churchill sat down with the 8th Air Force commander, Ira Eker, who promised the British Prime Minister

that the B-17 Flying Fortress that's fancy new, we had these things called the Norden bomb site, which was like, this is the shit, this makes precision bombing possible. It's like a little

computerized bombing system. that, like, we can do things with bombs we never could do before. You can drop a bomb from 25,000 feet and hit a target the size of a pickle barrel, right? That's the promise Ira Eker makes Winston Churchill when he's like, they're sitting down. He's like, we can hit a pickle barrel at 25,000 feet. Now, in combat, a few months later, these things would hit within a football field, only 22% of the time. So you're getting this, this is going to be also a theme with all of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They will make all these claims about, yes, it, you know, it'll, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

this accurate and it's this safe and it can only be activated if this and this happens so it could never be accidentally fired and they're like oh wait but what if this thing happens that happens every day oh yeah that could accidentally launch all of our missiles yeah are you guys going to fix it we actually don't want to that's the story of the minute man in a nutshell but we'll talk more about that later um anyway with a fleet of these eker promised we can disembowl the german rike and destroy its industrial capacity with no need for ground forces right we can just gut the Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct experience with aerial warfare, and he does not believe

Eker, right? He doesn't believe him about the accuracy. And the other thing that Ira Eker is saying is, we don't need fighter escorts for our B-17s because they have all these guns on them that will, that'll be enough to deter attack. We can just send the bombers in a loan. Yeah, that's basically the idea behind that title. But like, yeah, because these B-17s are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to, if they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate. And that's necessary because

the bombers can fly a lot further than the fighters. So what Eker is saying is we can send these bombers into the heart of enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range of the fighters. And they'll be fine. And he's going to be wrong about that too. So one result of this, the Casablanca conference, is that the allies put together a list of military assets they want to prioritize, destroying, or disabling, a task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power. These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities, and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first of these targets was a ball-bearing production facility in Regensburg. Ball-bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and a number of other

important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by Major General Eekers' 8th Army Air Force on August 17, 1943. 376 bombers plowed deep into German territory, beyond the range of any fighters to escort them. Per the website, code names, operations of World War II. The mission inflicted heavy damage on the Regensburg target, but only a catastrophic loss to the force, and as much as 60 bombers were lost and many more damage beyond economical repair. As a result, the 8th Air Force was incapable of immediately following double strike with a second

attack that might have seriously crippled German industry. When Schweinfurt, that's the industrial facility, was attacked again two months later, the lack of long-range fighter escort still had not been addressed and losses were even higher. As a consequence, the U.S. deep penetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for five months. Could you imagine going on a thing where you're like, well, last time we did this about, you know, one and six of us died. Anyway, so we didn't change anything. Are we doing anything different? Yeah. Are we doing anything new? Yeah. No, same plan, huh? Okay. I mean, you talk to anyone who saw heavy combat and they have stories like that, where it's like, well, this

went really badly last, so we're just doing the same thing, huh? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That is how armies work. Now, this was a double failure, not just for Eager, but for De Hays' theories. Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a defending military for him inflicting severe casualties on a bomber fleet.

And that despite the damage done to the Regensburg plant, German industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. as Reich Minister of Supply Albert Speer stated after the war, no plane or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings. Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Riccioni noted in his article, the Allies failed in their choice of a target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad.

Germany was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point, and it also stopped, they had foreseen this and stockpiled pre-war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft and shit to not need as many ball bearings. This was for like a home alone style plan they had. That was actually, the stockpire was unrelated. It was, they were dropping it down the stairs. Yeah.

Did horrible damage to the third army. Yeah. So, yeah, Rissione writes, this was a failure both in target definition and target priority, worse because it was vulnerable, the 8th Air Force had become the target. Now, over in England, Arthur Harris never accepted the primary contentions of the advocates of precision strategic bombing. In October of 1943, not long after Regensburg, he was. he stated, the aim is destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption

of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport, and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale, both at home and at the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories. Bobber Harris, one thing you have to give him, he's very clear. No, no, no. this is about killing women and children and rendering them homeless. That's what

we're doing. That's the business the RAF is in. You guys need to stop pretending that you're fucking with ball bearings. I mean, there's an honesty to that that I respect. Yes. The man knows what he's about. It's killing civilians, but he's

about it. Yeah. He has made his peace with whatever he believes and he thinks that this is the lesser evil is by doing a lot of evil. And like, you know, he's not lying. Quickly. Right. Yeah. A little before the Regensburg attack, Bomber Harris had launched a nighttime raid on Hamburg. It was the opposite of a precise attempt to destroy a specific target.

Incendiaries created a firestorm that swept through the downtown area, incinerating roughly 40,000 civilians. This is like, and this is one of the, this becomes a theory, right? Like, there's a theory put into practice, but there had been this theory that by dropping incendiaries in the right place in a certain parts of a city, you can create these firestorms. that massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign, right? And this is like when it really works for the first time. This is going to be a massive part of our strategy when we're bombing the Japanese home islands, right? It's creating these hideous firestorms.

And this also, this becomes, like, I think the term is literally like bonus damage, basically. This is like a concept of nuclear war, too, is a big part of the appeal of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them is that you create these firestorms the size of states. and, like, that's really handy. It really amplifies the amount of a country you could destroy

when you create firestorms that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain. So, I has never occurred to me until this moment that the phrase firestorm, I'm aware that firestorms happen in wildfires. It has never really actually occurred to me until this moment that people artificially create them, and that's where a firestorm, like, you know, a firestorm to purify if you're into shitty hardcore music. Yeah.

Yep, okay. Yep, yep. I mean, I think most people have learned the term Firestorm from Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun Firestorm, obviously, the Tiberian Sun expansion pack that was pretty good. But some people learned it from history, I'm sure. I learned it from a shitty hardcore band. You read it from a hardcore band. I learned it from Command and Conquer. Yeah.

In November of 1943 and March of 1944, there were vast raids on Berlin, which left much of the capital in ruins. And yet, German morale continued to hold. This is the thing. Bomber Harris, he's more honest, but what he's saying will happen still doesn't happen. Yeah, he's wrong. No amount of bombing causes Germany to give up. By the time the war in Europe enters its endgame, there were very mixed conclusions to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and precision bombing.

Both ideologies had suffered failures, and both had claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success. Months earlier, Bomber Harris had considered strategic bombing the same is opening a new front, summarized in a write-up for the Juno Beach Center, quote, until D-Day, he was convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force Germany into submission without the allied casualties that were bound to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe. And in part two, we're going to talk about what happens next.

We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll start talking about the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device that we all live under right now. Like, this second, an incident could have started, maybe just because a radar station was wrong, that will in 15 to 30 minutes result in the annihilation of all organized life, human life on the planet. That could have happened, as I say this sentence.

And we mostly won't know until the bombs fall. And there's really nothing, like, one thing that maybe will comfort you is that that, like, none of the facilities we have to protect our government will work. Like, none of them are sufficient for the amount, the tonnage, the mega tonnage of explosives coming at them. That little, like, this is a good thing about Jacobson's book, Nuclear War. One thing she points out is, like, yeah, there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone will bake to death slowly as if they're in an oven. Like, we know what kind of forces will be deployed against D.C.

There's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a much worse death than the people topside will have. Well, that's good. That's good. Anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up as we roll out of part one. I appreciate this idea of, like, I hadn't put together this idea that World War I, the powder keg was intentional. Yeah. You know, that it was this mutually assured destruction concept.

And, like, seeing the through line is fascinating. It wasn't as direct, because it did kind of, a lot of this started to, like, this evolved accidentally out of stuff that it existed before. it was not constructed as consciously as nuclear mad, but it was something people were conscious of, people talked about. That's a reason why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances and, like, military armament schedules and, like, the different, like, arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device, right? Because it worked that way.

And it is really relevant to discuss that in the context of the doomstay device that we all live under right now. Yeah. Yep. Cool. Cool. All right. All right, everybody. Magpie, do you want to plug anything?

Oh, well, if you respond to the possible imminent destruction of all things by retreating a little bit into escapism, you could listen to me and Robert and some of our friends play Pathfinder where we're just pretending to be people in a fantasy world dealing with... If you don't know what Pathfinder is,

it's a tabletop game thing. Yeah. Much in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons or a number of other games. Just legally distinct. Legally distinct. And if you like Weird History, I have a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff with a totally original. The format, Robert, you got to try this format. What I do is I research a topic every week, okay?

And then I get a guest who doesn't know as much about that topic, but sometimes knows, like, kind of related things around that topic. And then I tell them what I've learned. That seems like the newest idea in podcasting. Is there a producer named Sophie there that doesn't say very much but sometimes talks a lot? Yeah, you should actually, Robert, you should use that part too, get a producer named Sophie. I'll see. I'll think about it, Margaret. I'll think about it. I'll think about it. But don't take my name. You have a decent name for behind the bastards. Mine's cool people who did cool stuff. Okay. Cool people who did cool stuff. Check out us playing Pathfinder on.

It could happen here's book club. And remember, if there is a nuclear war, all of the people who got us into it will also die unthinkable deaths. So, I don't know, try to live near the center of a city and just, you know, say the things to your loved ones that you need to say. Yeah, tell your friends you love you. Tell your friends you love them. Yeah. Bye. Bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our friends. website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio appa podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts behind the bastards is now available on youtube new episodes every wednesday and friday subscribe to our channel youtube.com slash at behind the bastards a new true crime podcast from tenderfoot tv in the city of maus 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 three decades later we've unearthed new evidence

le maestro season two is available now listen for free on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm stephen curry and this is gentleman's cut i think what makes gentlemen's cut different is me being a part of you know developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.

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It's a playbook for anyone chasing their potential. Discover stories, strategies, and over 100 never-before-seen photos. order shot ready now at stephen curry book.com don't miss stephen curry's new york times bestseller shot ready available now i knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded i felt it ripped through me in season two of rip current we ask who tried to kill judy berry and why they were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods she received death threats before the bombing she received more threats after the bombing. I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.