It Could Happen Here - Fear of a Nuclear January 6th

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Robert lays out his theory for how a "nuclear January 6" - the accidental or intentional limited deployment of a nuclear weapon for incredibly stupid reasons, is more likely than you might think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw.

White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when romance gets a little monstrous? On Radio 831, a romance podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall as we host our own monster romance extravaganza. We're joined by the villain edit author Rosie Dannen and Sentient Object Romance,

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Each Thursday, we're re-watching an episode of the show that changed our lives, a different world. We're sharing never before her stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. Listen to a different worldview with Daryl and Kedim every Thursday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Robert Evans. We all know what happened at the U.S. on January 6th, 2021. Those events were so consequential and infamous that I fear people have forgotten

how they felt about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol by a mob of citizens on January 5th. That's not something I can forget, as I spent my first days of January that year, digging through thousands of comments on social media and MAGA-focused message boards. I came away from my research convinced an attack on the Capitol was possible, and I tried to warn people. I was not the only researcher who wrote about the possibility of an attack on the Capitol before January 6th. None of our warnings were heated, in part because the authorities, like most people, considered the odds of a mob successfully occupying the capital to be right around 0%. The United States is the most powerful nation in history. The argument went, and the Capitol building and nearby government facilities are some of the most hardened targets on Earth.

There's no way a mob of mostly unarmed protesters could just storm them, like the winter. her palace and put lawmakers' lives at risk. Your fears are a fantasy. You're just trying to scare people. Shut up. Well, we were correct about January 6th, and over the last few years, I've begun to worry about something new. The name I've given this fear is nuclear January 6th. Now, I'm not talking about an all-out nuclear war here, and I'm certainly not talking about a nuclear strike on the U.S. Capitol, although that's one possible way this could occur. You're all readily familiar with the possibility and consequences of atomic holocaust. And I'm not using that term for the possibility of a terrorist organization or non-state actor acquiring a nuke or dirty bomb, which remains possible, but let's say

unlikely. A nuclear January 6th would be a lot like its namesake, a catastrophic event that would have seemed impossible, even laughably so, before it occurred and involves the use of a nuclear weapon. A nuclear January 6th, then, would be a fuck-up, either a disastrous nuclear error caused by incompetence or a limited nuclear deployment inspired by incompetence. Either way, the scenario I'm envisioning doesn't mean the end of the world. It means one or at most a small number of warheads are detonated for a very stupid reason, and we're all left to move forward in a world that is now permanently less safe. In 1989, American political scientist Robert Jervis published a book titled,

The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Statecraft and the prospect of Armageddon. booking out at the international situation at the tail end of the Cold War, Jervis argued that war between nuclear powers was now unthinkable. Within the context of that conflict, he was correct. Both the U.S. and the USSR, despite their separate battalions of war hawks and substantial doses of paranoia, avoided stepping over the nuclear brink. The men who ran both nations clearly considered nuclear war unthinkable. In the decades since the Cold War's end, the nations of the world have continued to

avoid nuking us all into Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But there is an unfortunate amount of evidence that some of the people in charge of the great powers of our time no longer find deploying a nuke to be unthinkable, even against other nuclear powers. The clearest example of this comes from the Russian Federation and its activities in Ukraine. Back in January, the Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported on building support in the Kremlin for the battlefield use of a tactical nuclear weapon. This was thought to most likely occur over.

or Crimea. A 2022 U.S. Intel assessment independently estimated estimated 50% odds that Putin would order a nuclear strike if the defenses around Crimea began to fail. Russian nuclear doctrine today supports the use of atomic weapons against an existential threat. And as Kieran Monk's rights in a piece for Ainuz, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Rybakov, said this morning this meant encroachments on Russia or its territorial integrity by aggressors, including those who may possess such weapons could prompt us to use these weapons in the worst-case scenario. The loss of Crimea, which Putin calls an inseparable part of Russia, could technically reach that threshold, said Dr. Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher and specialist on Russia's nuclear

forces at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Now, my understanding of the situation in Ukraine is that Crimea is not under imminent danger of being retaken by Ukrainian forces, somewhat unfortunately. However, the vagueness of Russia's nuclear line being, an existential threat, means that they might well decide one day that diesel refining facilities count, given the centrality of oil exports to their economy. Sergei Karganov, head of a defense industry think tank in Moscow and former advisor to Putin, is among Russia's largest nuclear hawks. He has recently argued for limited nuclear strikes on Ukraine's European allies. I bring this up not because that's a scenario I'm discussing

today, if Russia nuked a NATO country, that would be a de facto strike on a nuclear power and would likely end up being much worse than my nuclear January 6th theory. I bring this up because comments like this from Russia have contributed to an unfortunate trend in U.S. defense circles. Serious discussion about the need for expanded low-yield tactical nuclear options. And folks remember, when we're saying low-yield nuclear weapons, we're still often talking about stuff at least on par with the Hiroshima and Nagasovki bombs, if not still considerably more powerful.

Those count as low-yield weapons today. For most of our lifetimes, the U.S. has focused its nuclear research and build up on what we might call big civilization-ending doomsday nukes. I'm using a little hyperbole there, but not much. Most of our standing nuclear weapons are strategic in nature. That means they're very big, and they're meant to deter an enemy from launching a full-scale nuclear attack on us. A bulletin of atomic scientists estimates that about 94% of all actively deployed U.S. warheads are long-range strategic weapons. As Gabriel Hunrata noted in an article for Asia Times, this makes tactical nukes a, quote, small, specialized component of overall U.S. nuclear posture.

You and I might consider that a good thing because any nuke small enough to use safely is likelyer to get used. However, when defense planners here, the U.S. has very few tactical nukes alongside news articles about Russia threatening to use small tactical nukes, a funny thing happens. They begin to worry about a gap between our capability and that of an adversary. Fears of that gap have been further exacerbated by recent significant modernization of China's nuclear arsenal. In the last few years, the Chinese military has massively increased the quality of their nuclear weapons and the related equipment, the delivery devices and such. I'm not going to go into a nerdy, fearmongery deep dive about the exact capabilities of these new tools.

That doesn't really matter today. What does matter is that in August of 26, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby initiated a policy review of the nation's nuclear posture. The stated goal of this review is, per coverage by breaking defense, quote, focused on providing more options for the White House. Under Secretary Colby expressed the need

for what he called rational nuclear options to deal with the changing threats from China and Russia. And, as Honrata wrote in his article, The policy review comes amid long-standing U.S. DoD concerns over foreign deployments in low-yield warheads, which risk leaving the U.S. without proportional non-strategic responses. An expansion in the number of, and potentially the in-theater deployment of, low-yield nuclear

weapons does not guarantee their use. Low-yield nukes have been deployed to hot zones or potential hot zones before, albeit decades ago during the height of the Cold War. But I have trouble looking at this current administration in the U.S. and so much of the bombastic, kill-obsessed rhetoric that comes out of the Department of War these days, and believing that the terms low-yield and tactical won't be interpreted as safe to use. In fact, there's a real chance that just by accepting the need for more of these weapons and deploying some near-conflict regions, we'll start a countdown

whereby some of our current defense thinkers convince themselves there's a ticking clock and they need to find a target for a low-yield nuclear strike to prove we've got the guts to use this thing. If that sounds far-fetched, I want you to think back to April of 2017 when the U.S. conducted an air strike in Afghanistan using the largest non-nuclear weapon we've got, the Moab. There were some logical reasons for such a strike. ISIS fighters were using a tunnel network and the Moab is meant to penetrate and take out

such underground targets. That said, there's no evidence this facility or the 36-ish ISIS fighters killed in the blast represented a threat to U.S. interests in the region necessitating such a dramatic response. Many pundits suspected the real reason we dropped this big bomb had more to do with Trump's campaign promise to bomb the shit out of ISIS. Faisal Pervez, an analyst for the military intelligence. form Stratfor told Vice his suspicions. Will you drop a bomb that weighs 21,000 pounds? That's so big. I think a part of it or some part of it is the messaging and the symbolic significance that the U.S.

is sending out to countries such as Russia, that we are the premier military in the world. We are the biggest power. We have the tools and weapons to show you that this is the case. Well, the same man who dropped that bomb is back in power now. We are fighting a losing war with Iran that has endangered his power. Back in April of 26, President Trump, Trump threatened Iran by saying, a whole civilization will die tonight if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. More recently, he's mused that Iran might take out Los Angeles or San Diego with a nuclear weapon someday, which he viewed as a small price to pay for the permission that would give the U.S. to annihilate Iran in return. We'll keep talking about this, but first, here's some ads.

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If more low-yield nuclear weapons are built and deployed, they will become in startlingly short time, just another option on the menu for military planners. We might expect decades-standing traditions against using such weapons to count for something, but as you're aware, Pete Hegseth has purged a huge number of veteran leaders from the Department of Defense. Similar brain drains have occurred across all of our primary national security institutions.

There are fewer cooler heads to prevail. Hegset has also made lethality and kill count into our military's primary measure of operational success. More to my point today, the entire Trump administration runs on social media. Truth, social, Twitter, and Tech Talk aren't just organs the regime uses to disseminate propaganda. They are where Donald Trump and his advisors go for information and to take the pulse of the nation. Let's consider one possible chain of events. Some months from now, Trump orders a tactical nuke deployed with our forces. attacking Iran. The plan isn't to use it, but to threaten the enemy and generate a groundswell

of rage among Trump's domestic enemies, which is always something he thinks about. Soon after the weapon arrives, Iranian forces score a major hit. Maybe one of their ballistic missile strikes and damages a naval vessel killing soldiers. Maybe they hit a base and cause an unprecedented loss of lives and material. Such a strike is not impossible. It could happen tomorrow, and it would not need to debilitate or cripple our military forces long-term to provoke Donald Trump into a nuclear response. All it would need to do is embarrass him. At his footage spreads of fire raging atop an aircraft carrier or a burning frigate listing at sea or wounded and dying U.S. soldiers near a base, Trump's followers begin howling for blood on social media. One cry sounds out louder

than all the others. Newk the bastards. Trump might. Such a strike would be unlikely to cause an immediate apocalyptic cascade into nuclear war. There would be international outrage, but not outright retaliation. Even so, in a stroke, Trump would have dissolved any remaining stigma against the use of nuclear weapons and war. This would make Russia much likelier to use a tactical nuke in Ukraine. It might change Chinese calculations, R-E Taiwan, but what it would, inarguably do is make nuclear weapons a normal, conceivable, usable tool of conventional war. I don't know how long it would take the breaking of that taboo to generate a larger nuclear war, but I believe after this point, such a future would become almost inevitable. It is still quite possible, even likelier,

that Russia would be the first nation state to break the taboo and use a tactical nuke for the reasons I've just outlined. This might lead to a similar outcome worldwide, although I'm less certain of that, Russia is considered an international pariah to many in ways that the United States still isn't quite. That said, I have no doubt that the ultimate chain of events leading to such a deployment would be just as stupid as they would be in the United States. China feels less likely to be the direct cause of such a deployment. Their nuclear policy originated from Mao Zedong. He did not love nuclear weapons, calling them a paper tiger and talking shit on the U.S. and USSR for building so many of the damn things. When China became a nuclear state in 1964, Mao stated the only use for

this thing, his term for the bomb, was to deter other nuclear-armed countries. As a result, China has always had an official no-first-use policy with their nuclear arsenal. This differs from the U.S. and Russia, who operate by launch-on-worn. In other words, if we think you're going to nuke us, we will nuke you. China's official policy is minimum deterrence. That's generally translated to mean, we keep our arsenal at the minimum level necessary to deter our adversaries. However, in an article on the evolution of China's nuclear posture, the website DefCon Warning System notes. This declaratory posture also embodies China's strategic ambiguity.

For one, minimum deterrence remains undefined. Chinese officials have never quantified what a minimum nuclear capability means in practice. Is it a few dozen warheads able to strike back? A few hundred? As China's arsenal grows, the goalposts appear to shift. Similarly, what constitutes an arms race is left vague. Beijing's current build-up by far its largest and fastest ever, ostensibly does not violate its pledge to avoid arms racing, at least in its own view. Crucially, China's nuclear doctrine has begun to stress achieving strategic counterbalance with other powers,

though not officially defined, this phrase suggests Beijing sees its nuclear forces as vital to shaping the global power equilibrium. It implies a more assertive role for nukes, not merely to deter an attack on China, but to offset the overall military might of rivals, particularly the United States. This nuanced shift in language contributes to uncertainty. Does counterbalance mean China seeks nuclear parity with the U.S.? Or simply a survivable second strike? The lack of clarity keeps observers guessing. Now, I don't bring any of this up with the interest of fearmongering over China, but because the questions and ambiguities outlined in that segment are a real cause for concern to the defense analysts who study China, not just for the U.S. government, but over a New Delhi. The Indian state is locked in a continuous low-level border conflict with China, alongside their border

conflict with Pakistan, also a nuclear-armed state. Both China and India have been extremely careful to avoid bringing nuclear threats to the table, but that only underlines how much leaders in both nations fear the possibility. And over on their border with Pakistan, nuclear threats have come up recently. 2025 saw a large skirmish between India and Pakistan that included cross-border aerial raids. after several days of this, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary issued a statement on May 28th. We will not hesitate to use any weapon in our arsenal to defend our territorial integrity. This was interpreted as a nuclear threat and caused a massive international ruckus, which prompted a spokesman for Pakistan's government to clarify that that was not the intent.

We all lucked out that the May 2025 conflict did not occur at the same time as another uptick and hostility between Beijing and New Delhi, but it's easy to imagine something like that might occur. In the event of such a conflict, Pakistan would rely heavily on their naval forces, armed with nuclear weapons to complete the third leg of their nuclear triad. Having a nuclear triad, which means having separate land-sea and air-based weapon systems that can deploy nuclear weapons,

is considered the gold standard for nuclear deterrence. Most nations that have one fulfill the third leg of the triad with nuclear-armed attack submarines. The most advanced of these arms, are, inarguably, the deadliest weapon systems ever devised by man. Pakistan is generally considered to be the nuclear power with the least reliable protections for their arsenal. These have long-inspired fear that Pakistan might lose control of a weapon, or that rogue

elements of their security services might give one to a terrorist group. That's not my concern here. One of my sources for these episodes was an article in the Defense and Security Analysis Journal. Its authors point out that in recent years, Pakistan has done a decent job of sealing some of the former security holes in their nuclear weapons systems. However, as one researcher noted in 2014, parts of Pakistan's nuclear management system, like its command element, have been reasonably transparent. Other parts like the physical security and surety human reliability elements have been

at best translucent. In many areas, there are only bald assertions that programs and methods have been put into place with very few details provided. One of the parts of their management system we know least about is the rules under which shipboard nuclear weapons operate. In theory, any nuclear weapons used by Pakistani forces would have to be authorized by a special 10-man committee. It's believed, but not known, that some systems require both a civilian and military key to be provided in order for the weapons to become operable. This is because Pakistan's military has a long history of outright running the shop. Today, civilian leadership is meant to have much more oversight. One example of this is the fact that all air and land-based nuclear weapons in Pakistan are stored separate from their delivery.

delivery systems. This makes them harder to steal and makes it more complex for, say, rogue military leaders to get a hold of a piece of the arsenal. But we already know that Pakistan's naval nukes do not work exactly the same way. Per that journal article, quote, little information is available for the naval leg of Pakistan's deterrent, currently based on the Bobber 3 submarine-launched cruise missile. First test fired in 2017 and described by Pakistan's inter-services public relations as a second-strike capability because of its naval requirements, the Bobber 3 is assumed to be pre-mated and contained within a vertical launch system or similar canisterized device. Procedures meant to inhibit the use of nuclear weapons

outside authorized uses are called negative controls. We do not know what negative controls Pakistan has for their naval weapons. It is entirely possible the military remains in total control here and justifies that as necessary for guaranteeing their ability to launch retaliatory strikes against India. I want you to think right now about a fun new development in technology that we've all witnessed, the growth of generative AI tools that can convincingly mimic both human posters on social media and create believable fake videos, including fake news videos. These and similar tools make it possible to flood any region with targeted disinformation and make it seem legitimate, at least for a short span of time.

Earlier this year, in March of 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a theoretical article by Herbert Lynn. He's a Stanford Fellow, an expert on cyber warfare operations who in 2016 worked for the Obama administration. Back in the 1980s, he was a staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee,

so he's a guy with some knowledge of this area. The article he put together envisioned several scenarios in which AI tools might help cause or exacerbate a nuclear conflict. None of his scenarios involved anything like Skynet. The dangers he foresees from AI come not from its intelligence so much as its ability to automate the production of targeted bullshit and influence the decisions of political leaders. And speaking of targeted bullshit, here's some ads.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her. Safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast.

The True Crime Comedy Podcasts all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on incredible guests like Conan O'Brien, Iowa Debrie, Lamorne Morris, and Nicole Byer. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job.

And the scams run the gamut. I'm talking about scams from the 1800s all the way up to today. I also warn you and keep you safe against scammers. Call your grandparents. Tell your parents to stop clicking on links, please. And now you can catch. full episodes of my show on YouTube. If there's a scam, I'm here

to protect you, and I'm also here to laugh with you. So if you like fun, if you like comedy, and you like learning and protecting yourself from criminals, start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Didn't catch the latest

Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have No power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest

and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

Twelve seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And I was talking about an article for the bulletin of the atomic scientist written by Herbert Lynn. One of his scenarios envisioned a blockade of Taiwan in which the Chinese military deployed an army of AI chatbots to lie about military maneuvers in order to create the impression of high military readiness to deter U.S. intervention.

I don't consider this specific scenario very likely, but I do think he's on to something with passages like this. The accounts adopt personas of professionals or students isolated by the crisis and connect with foreigners through the full suite of channels described above. These spaces attract not only their regular users but also journalists, analysts, and even mid-level Pentagon staffers looking for unfiltered intelligence. In one instance, a bot mimicking a 28-year-old engineer named Lee Way claims, I saw convoys with TELs heading east, DF26 is probably, referring to mobile transporter or rector launchers used to launch ballistic missiles and land-based dual-capable DF26 intermediate range ballistic missiles, before adding, sirens everywhere, evacuation starting.

Then screenshots start flooding the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, amplified by coordinated sock puppets. The bots adapt seamlessly to queries, cross-referencing real-time U.S. open source chatter for added plausibility. A user of Tinder, a dating app in Washington, D.C., matched with Wang Mei, a fabricated nurse in Zemin, who relays her alleged eyewitness panic about explosions near the port and prepping of hypersonic weapons, which aligns with the partial satellite imagery glitches caused by Chinese jamming and begins to see doubt in U.S. intelligence assessments. State media subtly echoes these

stories, framing them as grassroots outrage at U.S. provocation. In the United States, some of this material migrates into expert discourse. Open source intelligence analysts, journalists, and think tank experts incorporate screenshots and chat logs into maps, timelines, and situation reports, and present them on cable news and in policy briefs as independent confirmations of missile movements. Congressional staffers and allied governments cite these products in their own assessments, generating a feedback loop in which fabricated chats appear as triangulated multi-source evidence. I think the only weakness of Lynn's article is his focus on scenarios that lead to mass nuclear exchange, and in his insistence on considering nation states as the only relevant

actors in most of these escalation cycles. But the basic process he outlined there, a bad actor flooding regional social media with disinformation designed to look like OSENT that suggests an imminent attack, that's entirely possible. And you wouldn't need a nation-state-level actor to pull it off. Let's say you have a well-funded non-state group of ideological hardliners. Let's imagine them as partisans of India or Pakistan, right? You could also imagine they're just trolls, eager to add confusion for the lulls. Or more insidiously, you could imagine them as motivated to pull off a massive score gambling on world events by betting on a limited nuclear attack and then making one happen. Returning to our hypothetical border conflict between India and

Pakistan. Let's imagine another outbreak of actual shooting, like May of 2025. Imagine whichever of those hypothetical non-state groups you like to pick floods the region with reports of Indian nuclear forces mobilizing or even weapons inbound. This would occur alongside the already nightmarish disruption of communication and command of control that will occur during such times of conflict. Is it so crazy to imagine that one of those Pakistani ships chooses to fire its payload? There's a very good reason why most nuclear armed nations do not give military leaders direct control over how and when to fire these weapons. We don't know how Pakistan governs the use of their naval nukes, not really, and that means we cannot discount

such a possibility. The kind of decisions made in nuclear war planning tend to come with a timer of less than a half hour. New weapon systems like hypersonic missiles have shortened that even further. This means any decision about when to deploy nuclear weapons is likely going to made on a very short time frame by frightened people. Another equally terrifying vision of that scenario could lead China, Pakistan, and India to each conclude, based on a mix of real movements by neighboring forces and a flood of AI disinformation, to activate and position their nuclear arsenals just in case. Once you have nuclear weapons assembled, deployed, and aimed, the odds rise exponentially

that something might go wrong, even if no one chooses to fire them. And the same sort of concerted digital disinformation attack executed by a state or non-state actor could happen today during literally any tense international situation with a potential for nuclear escalation. As I said, my interest here is not an apocalypse narrative, but in the possibility of a limited nuclear fuck-up. Let me propose another that might occur in this situation. In the U.S., all nuclear weapons are built to be what's called one point safe. This means the weapon has a probability of less than one in a million of causing a nuclear detonation if the weapon explodes unintentionally. We have had nuclear weapons destroyed in plane crashes, and so far they have never detonated in a proper nuclear explosion on accident because they're one point safe.

Other nations do not necessarily abide by the same safety rules in their nuclear weapons, and we simply do not know if Pakistan's nukes are safe in the same way. imagine then, as the border conflict heats up, Pakistan's military assembles their arsenal and begins flying it in theater. A plane crashes or gets shot down, and the weapon inside detonates in a proper nuclear fireball. Every one of my nuclear fuck-up scenarios relies on terrible decision-making. Clear-thinking civilian and military leaders do not take the kind of risks that would lead to a nuclear January 6th. Alas, clear-thinking civilian and military leaders are thin on the ground these days.

especially where I live. As I noted earlier, the decision makers in any of these situations, regardless of national identity, might have only minutes to make their decisions. They'll be frightened and probably sleep deprived. And what do frighten sleep-deprived people turn to these days when they need to get work done? That's right. AI. In a CNN article from earlier this year, Katie Lillis and Zachary Cohen write,

across the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work from analyzing the huge volume of raw intelligence the U.S. collects and selecting targets for strikes to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics, and supply chains. Just a few months ago, back in the spring of 26, one member of the intel community, an analyst, asked one of these chatbots to analyze intelligence around a Chinese vessel sailing to the Middle East. The bot was likely an internal tool, but as one senior U.S. official told CNN, the internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick. Said bot did what bots do best. It makes a lot. It makes a lot of

mixed a bunch of different sources together to create a product for its user. This analysis, based on a mix of Ocent and secret intel, concluded that the Chinese ship was carrying components used in the production of nuclear weaponry. The analyst asked his AI tool to take its finding and produce an intelligence report, which was sent up the chain of command. Since the vessel was headed in the general direction of Iran, and since China does sell conventional weapons to Iran, this sparked a panic. Per that CNN article,

the U.S. military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the U.S. military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air. One of these sources and another source familiar with the incident said. There was only one issue. The AI chatbot that analyst used had hallucinated. Every piece of that report was wrong. China was not sending nuclear weapons equipment to Iran or anywhere else because of fucking course they weren't. But we came calamitously close to a hacking a Chinese ship with military force due to that hallucination. In January, Pete Hegseth gave a speech outlining our Department of Defense's new AI strategy. He insisted, we will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. All that says to me is that these tools will only become more critical to the production of intelligence products than ever before, and we know they'll continue to hallucinate, too. This change isn't just happening in the United States. It's occurring in governments and militaries all

across the world, and it's happening at the same time as some nuclear-armed nations seek to expand their low-yield stockpiles. Simultaneously, the U.S. war against Iran and the ongoing war in Ukraine have made it clear to every nation-state actor that the only real guarantee of national sovereignty is a nuclear arsenal. More nations will work to acquire nukes in the near future. This means more nuclear weapons and more conflicts where they might get used, alongside an even wider proliferation, of tools like the ones I just described. I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here, because again, that's not really the immediate worry.

The worry is that a mix of increasing acceptance that it's okay to use small nukes and increasing reliance on these AI tools, alongside the conflicts that we have always had between nations, will lead to a situation in which a very limited nuclear fuck-up not only is disastrous to people on the ground near wherever it occurs, but changes the very nature and all of the decision-making calculation.

in the world that we live in. I hope it doesn't happen, but what I'm thinking about these days. That's everything for today. We'll be back tomorrow. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job.

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