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

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Robert continues the harrowing story of the men who decided we should be ready to rain nuclear hellfire on everyone at a moments notice forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzo Media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special episodes on how we're all possibly going to die in nuclear hellfire. I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing over the course of two weeks, five episodes. We're in our second week, so you'll be getting a bonus episode this week about the sons of bitches who created the doomsday device that, again, could kill every single. person you've ever known and loved and every animal and on earth except for, you know, cockroaches and the like, uh, 15 minutes from now or, or right now, you know, we'd have no way of knowing unless you're, I don't know, in the White House at this exact moment.

Uh, Margaret Kiljoy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thanks. You thinking about nukes? Well, I got promised this is about Warhammer 40K, but I suppose we're learning about the nuclear apocalypse. Uh, I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show. Uh, that'll, oh, yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of genocide in that, too. I can be the podcast today for that, because I actually don't know anything about Warhammer. It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation poisoning, which is what we ended our last episode talking about. Our friend Louis Slotten, who was the partial father of the first atomic bomb, had his innards dissolved due to a horrible nuclear error. Oh, yeah, and he got to kind of like leave a record for science. Because he was a pretty cool guy. Like, that's badass. Like, when you know that, like, okay, well, I have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation,

and I'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable. Time to take notes. Like, fucking, that's cool. That's cool. Like, and I guess. Also, acting with agency is, like, really good way to not stress. Right. Yes.

You know? And, like, all right, I have a job. I'm just doing my job. And I'd say it takes him off the perpetrate. Like, he did help build that first nuke. But as we've discussed, there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it after. words, you know. Yeah, his come-up and tapen. I'm taking him off the list of guys I'm pissed at.

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So before we move on past World War II, we should at least linger on what guys like LeMay and General Power would have argued was the most important question of the whole war, right? which is still a question that people debate today, did the use of atomic weapons against the empire of Japan force its leaders to surrender, thus sparing both Japan and the Allies, primarily the U.S., a hideously bloody ground invasion, right? This is a question people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here.

I think it'll be pretty clear where I tend to land once we get through this, right? But this isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right? Like, I'm not going to come in and just give one side of this. Again, I have my take on the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing, even if you argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan to surrender, that the military of Japan never independently agreed to call it quits. And if the emperor of Japan had not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations, we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued supporting the war effort,

no matter how many firebombs or even additional nukes fell, right? We actually don't know that. there's also like that's a valid point there's also an argument that the view pushed after the war which is that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding a greater slaughter in japan that like if we had invaded the main island so many more people would have died that that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as a single weapon system in an article for outrider dot org jasmine power writes there is general agreement that the bombing of nagasaki did little in the way of changing the hearts and minds of the japanese military by blaming their surrender

on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet Union having a hand in the post-war reconstruction process. Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to push a communist regime onto the country. It was also very convenient for the U.S. that Japan attributed their surrender to the atomic bombings. Oh, shit. So it was a way to stay capitalist was to be like, oh, it was the nukes. The nukes did us in.

More than that, it was a way to avoid what happened to Germany, right? They're watching Germany get split up, right? That's obvious at this point. and they don't want that, you know? And surrendering now before the Soviets are in, you know, in the mix, so to speak, means that the country doesn't get split up, right? You're not going to have Tokyo divided or whatever, right? That's one argument people will make, you know?

And in this view, pretty simply, Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's not a non-factor, but they were defeated because they were defeated, viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor. It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we beat the shit of them all across the Pacific, right? Yeah. Like, which is probably, I mean, certainly a more accurate view than just saying it was the nukes, right? Like, there was a whole war.

A lot of guys had to die to finish that thing, right? And, yeah, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on record basically saying that military planners had told him that when they were looking into like what, how many people would die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of 500,000 to a million. And if you're talking about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on these other island hopping campaigns, then that would have meant both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have been higher than that, right? Now, that said, this is not a real estimate, as best as I can tell. You will encounter it often.

It comes up constantly. But it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers, that 500 to a million American casualties estimate, have any basis in reality. How many did we lose in Europe? We lost in the whole war, the United States lost about half a million people. Okay. So this would be basically doing World War II all over again for us, more or less, right? Yeah.

It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfie Cohn on kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein writes that military planners at the time put the number of American casualties between 20,000 and 14. 6,000. But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong possibility that neither an invasion nor a nuclear attack was actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is an interesting point. Because if you're saying, oh, 500,000 to a million Americans killed and injured, millions of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nuke saved lives. But if you're looking at, well, 20 to 40,000 or 50,000 American casualties, probably twice that many Japanese

casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuking the island, right? Yeah. But could they have just laid siege the whole? Because they were already sieging the whole. They were, in fact, doing that. And that's another point, as we'll get to, that's another point people will make, is that Japan would have broken on its own, right? In a good essay on the subject for his book,

You Know What They Say, The Truth About Popular Belief, Alfie Cohn gives a succinct version of what we might call the skeptics case against the necessity of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He notes that the U.S. firebombs had already incinerated Japan's six largest cities and basically the siege that we put on the home islands had blocked all oil from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was in part a desire for the emperor to retain his title. Cohn cites a 1946 report from the War Department Strategic Bombing Survey Study Group, which concluded,

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war, did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the Navy minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended, even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the survey's opinion that certainly prior to this 31st of

December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1st November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped. Even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the U.S. War Department. So that's the they were already beat theory. They were beat. They were beat. And I would say that's by far the strongest argument if you're going with a fact-based argument.

Not that it's the only one, but I think it's the strongest. You know, your feelings may vary on this. I'm not a historian, but I'm convinced pretty well. Now, there was at least one other secret intelligence assessment from the same time done by the U.S. armies planning an operations group, which reached a similar conclusion. and several prominent U.S. officers agreed. Admiral William Leahy, the president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time,

adopting, quote, an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's chief of staff to say about what? Like, Dwight Eisenhower reached a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I go with Ike on this one. Not a perfect man, but he pretty much, he knew World War II pretty well. That's why you have the I'm with Ike button. Yeah, I'm with Ike.

It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. We didn't have to do that. Now, I've allowed that there's still some room for argument here about how much the use of nukes influenced Japan's decision to surrender because the bombing campaign in general influenced their decision to surrender and the nukes were part of that, right? But what isn't arguable is this. President Truman and men in high positions within the U.S. Army, like Curtis LeMay, never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew they had a bomb, right? There was never any possibility in their minds but that they would use it.

Per Cone's article, The fearsome new weapon, was not treated as an option of last resort. It would be easier to accept the argument that he, Truman, had no choice but to drop the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power to Japanese leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender had been carefully considered. They were not. There was never a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist, Kai Erickson, put it,

using nuclear weapons was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration. We have it on the authority of virtually all the principal players that no one in a position to do anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the bombs on Japan. So it's pretty much we have a new toy. We are going to use it.

We're going to see what this thing does. Yeah. The spenometer goes up to 200. I'm going to 200, yeah. We're already planning for the next war. Like, they handed LeMay a list of Soviet cities that might be nuclear targets, right? Like, they wanted to use this thing, in part, to scare the Russians. That's not all it was, but that was part of their logic, right?

Yeah. Now, it bears emphasizing that the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people. The initial death toll was horrific enough, but it was what came after that really was the nightmare. I've spoken to a Hiroshima survivor, and she described the sight of thousands of blinded burnt people throwing themselves into rivers in a desperate attempt to quench their burning bodies, and all of these, like a huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had tossed

themselves burnt and singeing and like melting basically into the water. Like it's, it was horrible. And in the days and weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood, pulling their hair out in clumps from radiation poisoning, right? Like this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that not only does the bomb kill a shitlet of people when it goes off, but there are knock-on effects that continue killing people, right? Even though we didn't have a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best to minimize the horror of atomic weapons.

In November of 1945, General Leslie Groves, who was, again, the military head of the Manhattan Project, sat before the U.S. Senate's, Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read you a selected Q&A from that meeting. Senator Milliken, General, is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves. I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway. I always love it when people say that. The radioactive casualty can be of several classes. He can have enough so that he will be killed instantly.

He can have a smaller amount, which will cause him to die rather soon. And as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die. Oh, yeah, that's what people say about it all the time. People say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied. Pleasant. Chill. All the parts of you that tell you that you're in trouble are also destroyed.

Yeah, exactly. You're fine. You're chilling. Yeah, happens to everyone. That was a lie. That was not just Groves not knowing. That was Groves lying to try and make nukes more palatable for Americans. When he said that, the average citizen, and indeed the average senator, would not have had to dig very deep to find

at least a little countervailing evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of horrific burns and lingering sickness, far from the blast site, were available. More to the point,

you've heard about the radium girls and the like, people have been exposing themselves to different kinds of radiation for decades, and they died horribly. We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever dropped an atomic bomb. Right? Now, again, the point here is that Groves was, he was not just lying.

He was engaged in a cover-up. This is a conspiracy, and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, the campaign to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors of atomic weapons for a little while longer. We knew eventually it would get out, right? These generals all knew you can't lie about this forever, right? But the longer we lie about it, the more money we get into the,

these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the more we can centralize the U.S. military and defense apparatus around nukes, which was their goal, right? Their goal was replace as many humans as possible with atomic weapons, and they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after the war's end, they set to work launching a new kind of campaign. A media blitz targeted at convincing disqualifying disqualification.

decision-makers in the U.S. that nukes were the only future for the military that was worth caring about. Three months after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society in New York City to give a speech. He warned slash promise the men assembled that the next war, understood to be the next world war, would be fought with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television-guided missiles, and that all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster than sound and involve atomic power. So he's got a pretty clear vision of the future, our friend Curtis LeMay. And he is now trying to sell it. And, like, are there other – because, okay, we have this, like, thing where apparently

people who build bombs are obsessed with how bombs are the only thing. Yes. Right. Are there other character classes who feel, like, similar about, like – are, like, the fighter jets being like, no, all that matters is fighter jets? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, there are.

And we will talk about that. Unfortunately, most of the people who disagree with LeMay just want nukes to be used differently. But there are some people, there's a couple of decent human beings still in the military establishment in this period who are like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you out of your minds? Yeah. You know what this thing does. Yeah. I'm able to figure out, this means destroy the world.

Yeah. That seems bad. Why are we building the world killing machine? Why are we doing this? We live here. This is our world. This is the one planet that we've got. Yeah.

Back in 1921, Du Hay had argued that the invention. of the bomber craft basically rendered all other types of weaponry obsolete, and LeMay was making a similar argument, but with a nuclear weapon at the heart of this fabled air force that could finally do the whole job of war all on its own. He argued, quote, the Air Force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. There must be no ceiling, no boundaries, no limitations to our air power development. That doesn't sound at all like a crazy man. No. And it's, you know, this is a pretty bleak series of episodes, I will say one thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis LeMay tried harder than any single human ever has to end the human race. And he didn't do it. And I don't

quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived Curtis LeMay. He would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace just to like tweak him. Like, he was such a piece of shit. And they always had nukes, right? Um, quantum immortality as a species. That's all I got. It's nuts. Like, No one has ever tried harder to wipe out the human race than Curtis fucking LeMay with his fucking dead face. Oh, man, it's nuts. I wonder if, like, the villains and pulp stuff from, like, 200 years ago didn't even claim that they're going to destroy the world. Whereas, like, now we have villains who are like, I'm going to destroy the world. Like, yeah.

Yeah. Because people can now. People can now. And we have examples of people who really worked hard to try to do that, you know? And this is ultimately kind of why we are now at the point where the whole human race is, you know, 15 to 30 minutes away from annihilation at any given moment in time, which is Curtis LeMay and a bunch of guys that followed him felt the Air Force. And to them, this means the nuclear air force must be allowed to develop unhindered and unchained. I cannot emphasize enough how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio Society was just warmed up Duhay. He insisted no air attack once it is launched can be completely stopped.

this was an echo of Duhay's argument that the sky was too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right? And this hadn't proved true in World War II, but when you got nukes, it kind of is true, right? If you send 500 bombers and they each have a nuke, one of them's going to drop that fucker, you know? Yeah. Also, when people say history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Yeah. This feels a little on the nose. I actually wasn't sure.

Dumae and Lemae. Yeah. Duhay and LeMay. Yeah, it is weird. And they literally rhyme? Yeah, I hadn't even got that fuck. No, because I was struggling to remember which one was which. Yeah, Du Hay's the old Italian guy who was like in 1921, bombers of the future, all we need.

No use in having anything else. Yeah, a couple decades later, the man who rhymes says the same thing. Right. But nuke. Yeah, if anyone gets into the military whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we need to redact it immediately. So as Richard, I'm going to quote now from a piece in the New Yorker by Richard Rhodes, in which he lays out LeMay's thinking in the rest of this speech. And it all kind of follows from the basic idea that you can't stop an aerial nuclear attack.

Quote, this meant to LeMay that the United States would have to have an Air Force in being that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come. It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare to attack us if we are prepared. So in November of 1945, LeMay was already thinking in terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country.

It would only destroy the enemy's country in turn, right? And what he means by an Air Force in being is you always have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs, ready to fly. minutes away from flight and it's eventually going to mean you always have planes in the air with nukes and that's going to mean

for a period of like a couple decades there are never not nukes flying around in the air always and this is before there's no governor on these

this is not a thing today every nuke that we have you have to get like codes and shit from the nuclear football this is some guys in a plane have the ability to activate these things right

you're like oh my wife left me. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the cold war. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, what we see in this period as early as 1945 is men in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians. People were tired after World War II. Soldiers long deployed wanted to return to civilian life. The country desperately needed to stop paying for the costs of a wartime military. Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the U.S. found itself. simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments, nuclear weapons offered a solution

to what seemed like an impossible problem. And I'm going to quote from Rhodes again. In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its military forces to bare bones, shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly $90 billion to less than $15 billion, and counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter a Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war-ravaged Western Europe, right? And this is kind of the first use that we have for nuclear. after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is we can't keep all these soldiers in the field,

but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes all over the place. That way we don't need as many guys. We can just set off a shitload of nukes and we can slow these Russians down while we get our shit in gear, you know? And this works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have a bomb, right? Because they don't have anything to counter this with. Pap Arnold sent a letter in 1945, laying out, he's an Air Force General,

laying out some of the first principles, well, the Air Force doesn't exist yet, but he's an Army Air thing general, laying out some of the first principles for what would become the theory of deterrence. Quote, we must therefore secure our nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques required to pose a warning

to aggressors in order to deter them from launching a modern, devastating war. In order to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific projects the Air Force should support over the next 20 to 30 years. This resulted in 1946 in the Air Force setting up the Rand Corporation. You've heard of the Rand Corporation, right? Yeah, I did not know that they were Air Force.

Yes, that's how they start. And Rand just means R&D. Like, literally, that's why it's Rand, right? Oh, shit. Okay, I assumed it was someone's name. Yeah, it's the Rand Corporation. They're set up in Santa Monica, right on the coast, beautiful area. and a former defense engineer named James Rubell later wrote of this is the first Rand project.

Rand quickly proposed a death ray project, which the Air Force approved. So, top men, guys, everyone's super sane, not a bunch of dudes whose brains have been melted by lead and war trauma, just trying to come up with apocalypse weapons. I don't know, guys, death ray feels like a good idea. Let's get one of those fuckers. I watched War of the Worlds to hell with it. Now, and to be honest, if we'd made a death ray, that would be pretty cool. Yeah, would it be Second Amendment, you know? Yeah, I would be carrying one this exact moment, Margaret.

Yeah. I'm ready for a death ray. I think certain people should have them. You know, a death ray is a one-on-one. It's not really a major step up from bullets, you know? No, it's probably faster and less painless to get shot with. Yeah. You know?

And I bet it's, I don't know, good at, killing Martians, which we might need to do if Elon Musk ever sets up a colony on Mars. Anyway. So I think we're both pro-death-ray is what we're saying. I've come around on the Rand Corporation, Margaret. I'm going to be honest with you. Speaking of the Rand Corporation, you know who supports this podcast? Not the Rand Corporation, because we're primarily talking about how they nearly killed everyone like a million times.

We're sponsored by Death Ray International. That's why we're coming out so strong on Death Rays right now. That's right. And actually, the death ray company that sponsors us is called Life Ray, you know, because it's a death ray for personal defense, you know? Yeah, it saves lives. It saves lives. That's the Life Ray. 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 row. in Fear Creek. Terrible discoveries of Saturday. Investigators made a new discovery

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It was going to the grave with nightmarish secret. From Tenderfoot TV and IHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm I'm Ida Goliangorja. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells. called these Ostercon to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster.

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podcasts. May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Barry'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 Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry? 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 podcast. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing.

It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever.

There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses

along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back, having a good time. So right around the time the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war is over, because the normal life is starting to reassert itself, or at least the new normal,

some people have begun to question the logic with which men like Bomber Harris, Curtis LeMay, and General Power, I still can't believe his literal name was General. fucking power, approached aerial warfare. Was it really possible to break a nation's will? And General Motor, who is in charge of the motor pool? Yeah, right, yeah. Is it really possible to break a nation's will through bombing, right? This was a question that people, you know, there are guys like LeMay that are like,

obviously it is. Look at what we did. And there are more thoughtful men who are like, actually, the evidence doesn't really bear this out. And I want to read a quote here about members of the strategic bombing survey from Keeney's book 15 minutes. How did one measure a broken woman? Far more effective were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories and power plants,

the loss of which ravaged the Germans' war-making capabilities and destroyed their economy. This led to post-war air atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike, key targets that if destroyed would have an effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction. These plants were often located in major urban areas, said one Air Force General of this conundrum. I think it was sort of a shock to people when a few began to talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital, And particularly when they began to ask, what was a city but a collection of industry? And that's an important, yeah, it's hideous stuff. Where the fuck do they live?

It must be, these are suburbanites. This is because suburbanites have entered the war. Yeah, yeah, and are not running the army share. Yeah. But that term bonus effects is used a lot in nuclear war planning. And a bonus effect is the added destruction that you get while destroying the targets you're actually aiming at in atomic war. So you're trying to take out. So it's the opposite of collateral damage, but it's the same concept.

It's collateral damage, but good, right? Like, we needed to take out this tank factory, and we killed a million civilians at the same time. That's a bonus effect, baby, right? Yeah. And there's other bonus effects. Radiation poisoning causes bonus effects. Nuclear bombs, especially once we start making thermonuclear weapons, they cause firestorms, massive firestorms. Some, theoretically, some like the size of states, right?

And that's a bonus effect, you know? I mean, as they've been trying to do that since the beginning, based on what you've told me last week. And they have been, you know, a firestorm really. fucks people up. People don't like firestorms. No. The argument military leaders were making about the future for the first four years after World War II can best be summarized by a memo, General Loris Norstad, assistant chief of staff for the Army Air Forces, sent out in 1945. He laid out the need for a ready force of aircraft that could strike quickly and effectively anywhere in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives, he argued the existence of this

ready force would act as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons. So first, we need a ready force so that no one else will get nukes. If we always have planes ready to nuke people, no one else will even try to get them, right? This is their first argument, you know? Yeah, not as strong as the argument that I think is coming based on what you told me last. Right, yeah. Now, this ready force is established in March of 1946 as part of what becomes known as the Strategic Air Command.

The SAC is responsible not just for nukes, but for the Air Force's long-range bombing operations, right? when we're bombing Korea, when we're bombing Vietnam, the SACs, especially in Korea, going to be heavily involved, right? And they're not obviously using nukes in those wars. But they come to control a lot of our nukes, and they come to control our long-range missile assets. I say control.

Technically, all of our nuclear weapons at this point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right? And they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that were starting to build in the post-war period, right? But what you're going to see happen during these first four or five years after the war is we're increasingly deploying nuclear weapons around the world to have this this air force in readiness right this ready force and so basically they're kind of cashiering these nukes out and sAC is is maintaining control of them right but you know the sAC gets them from the atomic

energy commission and the i'm surprised that none of them got stolen oh they oh margaret just wait none of them got stolen maybe but we lose a lot of these fucking bombs okay uh-huh we'll get to that. But the SAC, today, one of the things that scares me about our current nuclear force is that it is the shittiest job in the Air Force, maybe in the whole military. People will argue about this, but I've talked to a couple of nukes, and they did not like it. It is not a prestigious job. It is not a fun job. It is boring. People cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a shit job. In this period of time, it is not seen as a shit job. These are seen as this is the best part of the

to be in. This is the most elite force in the military. It's certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind of pilot, right? And these are the best pilots and engineers that our entire military can put together, right? And they are tasked with a singular purpose. So it's different at this point. That is probably what you want. Now, that's the idea. It's debatable. Are they ever really that good? We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the SAC in 1948. He's not the first guy in charge of it, but he takes command, and he really, he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year, 1949, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead, terrifying members of the U.S. defense establishment. There had been a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and it, well, of course, the Soviet Union's got a good science program.

They have resources. They've got spies. They're going to get a bomb, right? They have the ability to get uranium or plutonium, all this, whatever shit they need. They've, it's, it's, there's like a fifth of the world's landmass. They have the ability to do this. Yeah, like we invented the wheel. No one else has the wheel.

No one's going to figure out the wheel. They figured out machine guns too. God damn it. No, of course they were going to do this. But there were, and it's a mix. There were plenty of people, obviously. There were a number of people in our military who knew that this was going to happen at some point. But there are a lot of people who are shocked, right?

And are terrified and like, oh my God, I can't believe the communists figured out this bomb, right? Now, is this because of that, like, spy couple? Or is that? There are several spies who play a role. And honestly, I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear weapons from being used again in war than anything else. I think once the U.S. has them, if the Soviets didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up nuking the USSR at some point, right? Yeah, that seems very likely. That's unprovable, but that's kind of where I come in, right?

Of like, well, it's kind of the gun. It's the gun thing. And do I wish, like, there were no semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in the country? That would probably be more pleasant. Am I not going to have one when the crazy-ass motherfuckers I know have them? Like, nah. Yeah. The people who want to kill me have it.

I've read enough history to know what happens after you disarm. And here's the problem. There's a logic to that. And also that leads us both to having 400 million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes, right? So it's like I understand the thought process. but it might fundamentally be what will doom us, right? So there's a degree to which, like, I have to put myself in where these guys are. And keep in mind, this is not a period of time in which all of our generals are most or many of them are dudes who just came up and have done this as like a desk job, right?

All of these. Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these guys did, right? So these dudes are fucked up and crazy at this point. These people have incinerated cities. the sky. They're not thinking the way normal people think anymore. And the same is true. The Soviets, by the way, they lost 20 million people in this war. The Soviets, we're not getting into it because I have less detail on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to

the U.S., right? Sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a little crazier. But they're also have all been completely deranged by this hideous war, right? Yeah. So I do have a little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not have gone bad, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for quite a while after the Soviets detonate their first atom bomb, the U.S. will retain a massive advantage in the number of nuclear weapons, right? That will not last forever. Eventually we reach parity. I think they do actually beat us at one point in total number of nukes, so it's a little hard to know. But from this point forward, there was no denying that nuclear deterrence would eventually be a thing, right?

And so you wind up in this. There's the 1950 to like 52, 53 is this insanely dangerous. period, really up until like the early 60s, where the Soviets have some nukes, but not all that many, and the U.S. has a lot, and we could have started and won a nuclear war. It would have been really pretty easy for us, right? There would have been casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would have mostly been over in Europe, right? Because the Soviet Union just didn't have a lot of bombs, and they didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs over here. There's no ICBMs. You're flying fucking bombers, right? Yeah. So we would have lost Alaska.

Maybe, right? Like, their long-range bombing capacity, especially in, like, 1949, 50, probably could have accomplished that, but it wasn't great, right? Right. In 1950, a year after the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly 300 nuclear weapons. The USSR had five. The newly founded Joint Chiefs of Staff in the U.S. Department of Defense, which that all gets started in this post-war period, right? We don't have the Joint Chiefs or, like, you know, in World War II, right? This is a post-war innovation, you know?

Okay. If you want to call it that. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DOD had concluded after a study that some 200 nuclear bombs would be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth, quote, leaving only the stigial remnants of man's material works. That is the Joint Chiefs. They say 200 nukes will do that, and so we build 300. 150%. Yeah, cool. Well, we'll get a lot more.

By 1951, we'll have more than 400 such weapons, right? Meanwhile, in its first three years as a nuclear power, the USSR goes from one to 50 atomic weapons of varying power. Shortly after taking over the SAC, LeMay decided that the new post-war Air Force had gotten sloppy, and he ordered a fake combat mission against Dayton, Ohio, to prove it. A massive bomber rate, I love that he's like, well, let's have him pretend to blow up Dayton. See how good they do. Poor Ohio. Yeah, fuck it. So he has this massive bombing raid over the city that's like, it's a fake.

they're not dropping real bombs, obviously, but all of the fake bombs are horribly off target. Like, they fuck up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs to save their goddamn lives, right? This is probably less on train. I mean, there's some degree of training. It's more that it's just like bombers aren't great

at hitting things precisely at this point, right? Yeah. And nukes... They're not TV guided. I remember that there were plenty of posts and TV guiding. Yeah, not quite yet. And it's a kind of, you know,

one of the benefits of nukes. it's horrible to say this, but it is a benefit from a military standpoint is that you don't have to be very accurate because it's a fucking nuke, right? Yeah, but...

It's what people say about shotguns, but real. Right, but accurate. Yes, accurate. Like, you really can be pretty far off with a nuke and still hit your target. But these guys do so badly

that even with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their intended targets. This is not an effective raid. And LeMay calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton, quote, the darkest night

in American military aviation history, because not one airplane finished, that mission is briefed. And, like, man, you were part of raids where guys died. I think that's darker. Like, where guides died and the mission wasn't really that successful? I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs just don't hit very well. I don't know.

Y'all incinerated babies. Yeah, that might be darker. Hiroshima, oh, it might be darker, arguably. Yeah. Now, this means that when the Korean War kind of starts up, it's going to be not quite the last point. Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's some shit in the, or JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's some shit in during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan, where we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary annihilation or getting nuke into the Stone Age ourselves, right?

But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict where the U.S. could have used nuclear weapons on a tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things would have, like, spiraled into global annihilation. at least at that point, right? And given that fact, given that we could have nuked North Korea and even China, and guys wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't. It's like shocking to me when I get into the history that, like, we, that it didn't happen, right? Yeah. And going into the war, some powerful men in the Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered our nuclear arsenal.

The term they used for it was a wasting asset. In other words, because we know the Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and starting to get long-range bombers and the other things they need to be able to strike us, every day we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically, he's saying we've got to use them or lose them, right? If we don't use them now, we'll never be able to use them, right? Right. And if you're playing the world like a video game, this is true, right?

If I'm a video game general, I would... I would start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game. that gives me a nuke, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, which is why gamers should not be allowed in the Department of Defense. No. Oops, all gamers, it turns out.

Under strict control by non-gamers. Right. So, at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic targets in North Korea. And they succeeded in these bombing raids on paper, right? The SAC destroys the targets assigned to them. But North Korea, if you know much about North Korea then and now, they didn't have a lot of expose. There wasn't a lot that we could really do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right?

Like, we do some damage, but that's just kind of not how their militaries wired at this point in time. And to make matters worse for the United States, we start this war using very new high-tech guided bombs, like the ASMA-1 Tarzan. But those run out immediately, which is a thing in modern warfare, too, if you look at what's happened in Ukraine, right? That's what to say, yeah. You have these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things, but also it's really hard to make them. And you need chips and stuff.

And it turns out you go through that shit real fast in a war. So, as I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the SAC in 1948, and he was the architect of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the fact that we had run through all of our most advanced munitions without ending the war as another L for team precision bombing. Basically, LeMay's like, well, look, clearly just striking strategic targets doesn't work. So he orders U.S. bombers to start playing the classics.

Colonel Riccioni in that article that he wrote describes SAC's plan as to, quote, increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing civilian targets. LeMay and the SAC used U.S. air power to kill around two million North Korean citizens over the next two years in change. Jesus, fuck. I straight up didn't know that. I know so little about the Korean War. It's between a fifth and a sixth of the population of North Korea.

We kill through primarily aerial bombing. Oh, my God. But it's also still a hideous war crime. Like, we murder two million people, and it doesn't win. Like, again, the thing that keeps happening, that has always happened, every time someone like LeMay is like, well, we just got to cause them enough pain that their morale breaks. And what happens is their morale breaks. their morale doesn't break, right?

And they're always like, forever and ever, I've just did a bunch of stuff about people defending against the Roman Empire and Gaul and things like that, right? And you start saying like, oh, well, these people, like these people, you know, the horrible druids, they sacrifice children or whatever, right? And who wasn't? I know. One who wasn't, yeah.

And even if they were, you know how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere near the evil of what, Rome did in terms of killing them. Julius Caesar does a genocide in Gaul. Yeah. And so like communism is whatever. It's the same thing as the people who are like, well, the conquistadors stopped the child sacrifice and the Americas.

Yeah, by killing all the children. You think the Spanish Inquisition didn't involve any fucking kids dying, man? Yeah, totally. Okay, bro. Totally. Yeah. Look, I'm not saying any of these, any society, any organized empire anywhere. and the Americas or elsewhere has been a nice empire.

None of them are. But if you're just being like, well, look at the bad things they did. Uh-huh. What were you guys getting up to? Huh? Yeah. Is that just about you killing two million people? Yeah.

Yeah, come on, bro. Was North Korea so bad that they all just need to die? It's the same thing as like, well, look at all these fucked up things and plenty of fucked up things. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China did, a lot of, but like, we murder millions of people from the sky repeatedly all over the world. Yeah. So, you know.

I don't know. Don't get up your own ass about your side being particularly nice. The angels. Right. The angels as you incinerate cities. Yeah. Villages largely. But yeah, once again, though, this is really important.

Actual war disproves all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off, North Korea invades, despite the fact that the U.S. has troops in South Korea, and we have an overwhelming edge in strategic bombing. Per the theories that LeMay and. Du Hay both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic bombing force, you won't get attacked, right? That's the point. It just doesn't work. It's never true. That also are the fact, we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop North Korea from fighting effectively. And none of the bombing we do doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a strong argument could be made that the Korean

war goes as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier, we really cut back on the military after World War II. And in fact, all military development outside of making the SAC stronger took a back seat. And as a result, when North Korea invades, the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained. I've talked to my grandpa about this. He was there the whole war.

And he was like, yeah, we were in shit shape when the war started. And it was because they had let, like, we, like, fucking our bazookas wouldn't fire and shit. Like, we had, like, there were serious issues with, like, the maintenance of basic equipment. And because guys like LeMay were like, all we need are bombers, bro. Trust that. All we need are bombers, you know? Yeah. Whereas they actually needed the life ray.

Right. We needed the life. A couple of life rays would have really solved this old problem. They wouldn't even tried if we had a life ray. That's what I'm saying. Now, after North Korea invades, they pushed the small U.S. garrison and the South Korean forces down the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur at the head of a U.N. amphibious landing force came aground at Incheon and pushed the North Koreans back almost to the border with. China. Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes. And suddenly the UN forces are in full retreat and they get pushed backs. It's really, it's a, it's a, it doesn't, not enough

study of, not enough people, Americans know anything about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time. Yeah, I know so little about it. It's World War II and then Vietnam. That's what I know. Right. It's a little, it's, it's, it's, it's, and Korea is kind of halfway between World War II and Vietnam in terms of like fighting tactics and all that stuff. You know, you do have a lot these big armored clashes you have dog fights and stuff but you also have more advanced these you know you have these guided missiles and stuff right early ones um so douglas macarthur as he's getting the shit hammered out of him requests tin atomic bombers with live nukes be put on standby in guam right because he wants to have the option to use them if in an emergency situation right

truman says yes to this mccArthur also wants these planes and their nukes placed under his direct control. And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may have saved a lot of people's lives. And I don't think it's for a good reason. But he steps in and he begs trim in to say no and keep the bombs under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay with the SAC, right? He wants to have control over them. But I do think he is less, I don't think he would have, I don't think he certainly was not unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested in doing it than MacArthur, right? He was not convinced it was the only path forward. And MacArthur was really convinced. it was the only way to win, right?

Right. Now, for decades, because the fact that we sent nukes to Guam during the Korean War has been well known. But if you look up any histories that are like older prior to the 21st century, it will say the SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam. We now know that this was inaccurate. And I'm going to quote from the book 15 minutes here. The first nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last B-29 accelerated down

the runway, two propellers ran away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to shut down two engines. And what would later be described as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel-laden, bomb-lated bomber into the air and managed to turn back towards the runway. But as he did, he lost altitude, and the bomber simply went into the ground. The crash was not hard, reported an aide to General LeMay, but 12 men were dead and eight were trapped in the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke. We blow up a nuke next to base housing and that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes because they just pretend this doesn't happen they lie about they cover this the fuck up right so this is like

this is drop safe a nukes are drop safe kind of the good news is that because of how nukes work they don't detonate on accident they have to be set up for in order to get the big the explosion that we all recognize as a nuclear blast you have to set off a nuke in a specific way the bad news is that even if it's not set off in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're still talking about 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives in the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it can still make, from what I've seen, because this happens a few times, it doesn't always make a dirty bomb, but it can.

You can get radiation contamination when one of these things explodes in a plane crash, right? That does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does in this case because of how much was covered up. I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians in the basehouse got rad sick. But the blast of this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt 30 miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel and it injures 181 civilians. The Air Force immediately lies and says, oh, that was just loaded with normal bombs. It was a training mission.

Sorry, guys. Not a nuke, though. Don't worry. Yeah. Unlike the nine planes next to it. Right. It was 44 years before the fact that a fucking nuke exploded was declassified. And Margaret, that's not close to.

the only nuke we lost. This is the thing I did not know. We fucking lose so many nukes. It's crazy. On November 10th of 1950, an SAC bomber encountered engine trouble and it had to drop an MK4 atom bomb set to self-destruct a hundred miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from the end of World War II to November of 1950. Five lost nukes in five years. Oh my God. And that counts as a success because we self-destruct the nuke. So it doesn't just land, right? We'll get to that. Back to the Korean War. All right. Because this is all going, right, as this is all going on, you know, MacArthur grows increasingly bullish on tactical nuclear

warfare as the situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan that would have involved dropping between 30 and 50 tactical atom bombs on enemy air bases. and depots. And then he would have followed up by a massive invasion of Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from China were to be blocked this army that he's going to have basically cut Korea off from China. They're going to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is irradiate the entire border alongside nukeing a bunch of people. That's like salty

in the earth behind you, but another level. I cannot exaggerate how fucking insane Douglas MacArthur is at this point. Like he is completely dangerously unhinged, one of the craziest men to ever command a U.S. military force. Truman refused this insane plan.

Thank fucking God. And as a result, MacArthur criticized the president publicly, which led to him being removed from command. The Korean War ended with a shitload of dead people and without a real peace, but also without additional nuclear explosions. So, you know, that's good.

It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying, you know? So civilian control of government is better than the military control of government. Yeah. Because, again, these people lose their fucking minds. And MacArthur, like Curtis LeMay is a voice of reason here. That's how crazy MacArthur is. Not much of a voice of reason, but a little bit of one. Because MacArthur is bat-shit crazy.

At the start of the Korean War, the U.S. moved almost 90 nuclear weapons into Europe. Out of fears that a wider communist invasion of the West was imminent. Now, the Soviet arsenal is really small at this stage. And, again, there's no ICBMs. Bombers still aren't super good. So time is not as much of a factor, right? We don't have to have these things ready to detonate at five minutes notice, right? And so for safety's sake, again, this is one of these, the atomic energy commission kind of comes in and is like,

we'll send the bombs over, but not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores in the U.S. so that we can airlift them over to Europe on a moment's notice. Okay, because they're smaller than the bombs themselves. Right, right. And it's safer than just having a live nuke where someone could steal it or set it off, right? You store the ammo and the gun in a different place when there's children around. This is, moments like this of just minimal sanity are so rare in the nuke story that it's

It's just like a breath of fresh air. Like, oh, somebody wasn't completely out of their goddamn mind. But you know who is out of their goddamn mind, Margaret? Is it our sponsor, Life Ray? That's right. Life Ray. Because it turns out, Life Ray is incredibly radioactive. They will fry your brain.

Even being in the same state as one is very dangerous. Buy one today. I think it's worth it. Uh-huh. For safety. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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 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 a sister. 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 IHeart Podcasts, this is La Mance Season 2, The Butcher of Mons, Available now.

Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know the shade is always Shadiest right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Jazele Brian and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives of Potomac were giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back. So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday.

I was going through a walk in my neighborhood. Out of the blue, I see this huge sign next to somebody's house. The sign says, my neighbor is a Karen. Oh, no way. I died laughing. I'm like, I have to know. You are lying. This humongous, y'all.

They had some time on their hands. Listen to reasonably shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. May 24th, 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 Rip Current, we ask, who tried to kill Judy Barry? 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. on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. We were in the car, like a Rolling Stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother. And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened.

These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, at this point, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained custody of our nuclear weapons when they were not actively in use. The DOD never likes this, and they use the opportunity to argue that the military should have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed to give strategic air command custody of these weapons in Guam, right?

This is kind of the first time that the military gets direct custody for a long period of time is in Guam during the Korean War. In 1951, the U.S. had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from 299 to 438. Twice the number of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told an internal report could destroy civilization. As I noted, the USSR has around 50 bombs. Their stockpile will go rapidly after this point, but to deal with the fact that the gap is starting to close, we start working on a bigger bomb, right? It's first known by its nickname The Super,

and this is the first thermonuclear bomb, aka the hydrogen bomb. And as a brief aside, most post-apocalyptic, post-atomic apocalypse movies and fictions, imagine a bunch of bombs kind of like the Hiroshima bomb going off. That's what Fallout does, really, because like you look at D.C. in Fallout, what is it, three or four?

I forget which one D.C. is in. I've played some. of them, but I don't remember them. If you look at DC and like a lot, most of the buildings are still relatively intact, right? Mm-hmm. That doesn't happen if you drop a thermonuclear bomb. Annie Jacobson goes over, like, if a stand, one of the standard hydrogen bombs were dropped on DC, like, and these are actively aimed at DC at all times, right?

The Russians always have some aimed at DC, you know? Just like, we've got shit aimed at Moscow. I'm not blaming them. Yeah. Like, we're both doing this crazy shit. Everyone within a mile of the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles of the blast is incinerated over the course of a few seconds, right? You're talking millions of deaths in the space of a minute or two.

Like, these are not survivable. Everything is, there's no buildings left. Everything is combusted near, like, the power of these bombs cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not an after thermonuclear war. Is it a different, it's like a fundamentally different technology? It's like a. It's the craziest thing you can imagine.

Hydrogen bombs, hydrogen weapons, like thermonuclear weapons, work on the premise. What if you set off a nuke with a nuke, right? Here's Annie Jacobson describing how these work. The super's monstrous explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction, which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion. An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people, as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York or Seoul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash. So this is, I think, it's fission versus fusion maybe or something?

Yeah, I think that's basically what's going on here. But you're setting, instead of using conventional explosives to start the nuclear reaction, you're using a nuke to set off a nuke, basically, right? Yeah, yo dog. Uh-huh. It's just the craziest thing. The prototype thermonuclear weapon was designed by a guy named Richard Garvin and had a 10.4 megaton explosive capacity that made it equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Oh my God.

Or an idea of what, that's the first one of these we make, right? Uh-huh. These things, when we start detonating them, we'll talk about it, but like we repeatedly horribly irradiate and like permanently injure huge numbers of U.S. troops because we don't get nearly far away enough because we don't realize how big they're going to be. Like one of these is like 50% larger than we'd expected it to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not to go through with testing, the first hydrogen bomb.

Quote, the fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. Don't build the torment nexus. I know. Yeah. But what if a torment nexus is built by the torment nexus? Right, right.

But Garvin wants to solve his fun problem. I love that they're like, we built the ultimate weapon. It can kill God. And people are like, not enough. Not enough. What if we use one of those to make a bigger one of those? Yeah. Truman ignores this letter from Fermi.

The first thermonuclear bomb was detonated in the Marshall Islands in November of 1952. It left behind a crater large enough to hold 15 pentagons. In her book, Annie Jacobson relies on a before and after image of the Marshall Islands to show the destructive power of this device. Sophie is going to put it up, but you can see the bomb was detonated on an island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before, there's a luge lab. It's an island. And then in the after, there's just no island. Yeah, that's just a black spot on the map.

It's gone. The island is gone. Yeah. A year or two ago, James Stout, over it could happen here, went to the Marshall Islands to report on, I mean, there's still ongoing fallout, both in the literal and figurative sense for the people of the Marshall Islands because of how many fucking nukes we set off there, right? Like, there's tremendous suffering in the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this on quote unquote. I mean, to the extent that they're uninhabited, it's because we forced people off, right? Like, this is a crime against humanity.

Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that after this series, right? I'm not going to be getting into it because he did that series. No, I listen to that. Yeah. Yeah. You can see just in the picture how catastrophic these weapons are. In the immediate wake of the Ivy Mike test, President Truman gave his farewell address.

He mourned that, quote, the war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men. Now, that's not wrong, but you're one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like, you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman. Like, come on, man. You gave the call to use the first of these fucking things. Yeah. Jacobson goes into more detail about how military planners respond, despite what Truman says,

to the existence now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, what happened after U.S. war planners saw what 10.4 megatons could instantly destroy, simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. In 1952, the United States had 841 nuclear weapons. A year before Truman left office, in 1951, a group of scientists and researchers that included Dr. Robert Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy for responding to a Soviet invasion.

They concluded that having the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead, yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead, NATO should replace manpower with low-yield tactical nuclear weapons that would evaporate advancing Soviet forces, and that could be deployed by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree to which they're trying to do a kind of noble thing here, right? The stated goal here is bring the battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't.

consume every city in Europe with atomic hellfire, right? That's what Project Vista is kind of trying to argue for, and their conclusions are supported by the U.S. Army, not because the Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces the influence of the SAC, right? The SAC has the nukes now. The Army wants some nukes of its own, right? Right. As Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would be expected, Curtis LeMay hated

the idea of low-yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of fizzile material, unlikely to be. proved decisive in battle and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can now only lessen defeat, Lemae told as commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer the SAC's top priority. Lemae now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear

facilities became SAC's primary targets. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's not completely off base here. LeMay did not advocate preventative war, an American surprise attack on the Soviet Union out of a blue. But the counter-force strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war. SAC planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal.

Offensive air power must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies, LeMay argued. This transcends all other considerations. because the price of failure might be paid with national survival, right? This is the origin of what becomes launch on warn, right? So you don't wait to get a bloody nose. You don't wait for them to hit you. You wait until you're pretty sure they're about to hit you and you hit them.

That's a really dangerous evolution strategically, right? You can understand kind of how he gets there, but that ups the possibility of a nuclear war significantly once you're now saying we won't wait to get hit right it's so interesting to because it's it's all predicated on this idea that national survival right he's very concerned about national survival like i'm much more concerned about humanity's survival not even because i'm a humanitarian but because i'm a human right like all if you destroy all life on earth the nation's gone yeah there's there's well and that's that's that's part of the craziness like the understated crazy in that paragraph is that lemae thinks tactical

nuke's are a waste of fizzile material, bro, you have four times as many nukes by 1951 as it would take to end civilization in just your country. What's wasted, bro? Are you worried you're not going to have enough of these fuckers? That's by the before they made them the God-killing machine that kills by God. Right. We need considerably less once hydrogen bombs are in the fucking mess. Now, one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first concerns when he took office would

be to bring a resolution to this conflict, right? this conflict between the Army and the Air Force via the SAC, right? After having his national security team take a new look at U.S. defense policies, Ike decided both sides were right. The U.S. needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe, but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all, in late 1953, the USSR detonated its first thermonuclear device.

By 1954, the United States had more than 1,700 nuclear weapons. By 1955, that number had climbed to nearly 2,500. We were building roughly two bombs a day. By 1959, the United States had an arsenal of more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You see just how quickly, like, there's not any conceivable use for 12,000 nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand, at least, you know, maybe less, right? Like, surprisingly, it was under Eisenhower that the Army suffered its most significant budget

cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has kind of been forgotten, but Ike does, you know, people are generally aware of, like, the military-industrial complex speech, but at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes the military budget and actually causes like kind of an eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower, because he's cutting back so much. The Army, in order to deal with this loss of ban power, starts lobbying, for more nukes of its own because that's the only thing you can get funded for now, right? That's all they're giving out, you know?

General James R. Gavin, during secret testimony before Congress, laid out the number of atomic shells, anti-aircraft missiles, and landmines the army needed. These are all nuclear, artillery, nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, and nuclear landmines. Nuclear landmines a great plan. I can't come up with any negative thought about it. Sounds good. Sounds safe. Yeah. What's crazy is how many Gavin wanted,

106,000 for battlefield use, 25,000 for air defense, and 20,000 to hand out to the rest of NATO. Jesus Christ, bro. These people are so crazy. I will say there is some, maybe the only arguably ethical weapons that we're building at this point are the air defense

nuclear weapons, because the plan of this is if you have a huge bomber fleet coming in, the only way you can stop them maybe and ensure that none of them drop a nuke on a city is you nuke them in the air because nuke's fuck up planes really bad and that's actually kind of reasonable if there's this many of these things that like is that also is only going to kill soldiers right I mean the fallout and right there will be consequences to that too but it's it's it's a defensible position as compared to everything else that they're doing right I can see how you might want to be able to just like try to blow up 500 planes in the

air with a big nuke, right? That kind of makes sense. Like, this is all crazy, but I get it, you know. What, it's so interesting because I'm under the impression our current system is the, like, shooting a bullet with a bullet approach? Yes, yep, yep. Did we move away from skeet shooting? We definitely have moved away from nuclear anti-aircraft artillery. We have the ability to use that, but also we've gotten a lot better and so have our, quote-unquote,

adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from EMP and the like. Oh, shit. It's not. I don't think it's as much. There's just not much point in defenses. The other reason is that, like, sure, you could stop some bombers, but it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and the sub-launched nukes. And you can kind of, again, we have these things called like fad batteries that could be, if we actually had any placed in the U.S., could be useful against, like, a sub-attack, right?

You could actually stop a good number of sub-based nuclear weapons, right, with these batteries. But they're all deployed overseas protecting like Israel and the like. right? We don't have any, one of the scenarios Jacobson talks about is like a North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant on the coast of California, which would cause this Atlantic environmental catastrophe. And she points out like, there are plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing, but we just, we're using them all overseas so we don't have any set up. And that's one of those things where I'm like, well, I guess I'm, if we're going to be spending money on something, I would like to spend money on more of those.

and not the bullet that shoots another bullet in the air or more nukes, I don't know. Yeah, totally. But none of this really is going to be enough if there's a full-scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best hope is that maybe it's just one or two nukes that get fires and maybe we're able to stop them, you know? Yeah.

Anyway, that's part three, Margaret. Yay. Got any plugables to plug? Well, if you like history, cool people who did cool stuff, is the opposite of the show. Although, I still have to end up talking about terrible things all the time. and you can go listen to that at cool people who did cool stuff. And you can also listen to Robert and I playing Pathfinder.

That's right. On the It Could Happen Here feed or the Cool Zone Media Book Club feed. That's right. You can check all that out. And you can check me out in the dike a day when we do the next episode. Because you're getting a bonus one this week, you lucky ducks. Anyway, assuming that, you know, we don't all die in nuclear hellfire, which is entirely possible. It could happen right now.

Oh, no, we're good. All right. Oh. Okay. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium, women began to go missing. It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized. A sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Mestre, Season 2, is available now.

Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is. The most Texas story ever. Listen to Business History on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get it. Your podcasts.

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In season two of RipCurrent, we ask, 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.

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