Radiolab - Nukes

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

In an episode first reported in 2017, we bring you a look up and down the US nuclear chain of command to find out who gets to authorize their use and who can stand in the way of Armageddon. President Richard Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people.  Such is the power of the US President over the nation’s nuclear arsenal.  But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the order?In this episode, we profile one Air Force Major who asked that question back in the 1970s and learn how the very act of asking it was so dangerous it derailed his career. We also pick up the question ourselves and pose it to veterans both high and low on the nuclear chain of command. Their responses reveal once and for all whether there are any legal checks and balances between us and a phone call for Armageddon.Special thanks to Elaine Scarry, Sam Kean, Ron Rosenbaum, Lisa Perry, Ryan Furtkamp, Robin Perry, Thom Woodroofe, Doreen de Brum, Jackie Conley, Sean Malloy, Ray Peter, Jack D’Annibale, Ryan Pettigrew at the Nixon Presidential Library and Samuel Rushay at the Truman Presidential Library.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latiff NasserProduced by - Annie McEwen and Simon Adlerwith help from - Arianne WackSignup for our newsletter! It comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, Soren here, the executive editor of Radiolab. Most of you probably already know that we launched a competition to name one of our Earth's quasi-moons, these little moon-ish but not exactly moon-like bits of rock that hang out around our planet. And we now have a winner. We got a bunch of names in, you all voted on them, and we picked one. Which means that we, well really most of you, if you submitted a name or even voted, have named a heavenly body. It's the first time anything like that has ever happened to me personally.

But to see the winner you can now go to radiolab.org slash moon, check out the name and sit in that strange dreamy feeling that we all helped to name a celestial body. Thanks for listening. Thanks for participating and enjoy the show. So, hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Soren Wheeler filling in today for Latif because he has a nasty, nasty cold and lost his voice, and a voice is a key part of making radio. But this week, here in the US,

we just inaugurated a president, a new but also not so new president. And so we, like maybe many of you, have been thinking about this big, important political moment transfer of powers and whatnot. So we wanted to re-air an episode today, is actually one we made in the first Trump presidency, all about one particular and maybe the most consequential presidential power. Now sometimes with these rewinds, we have a little update for you at the end,

but I'm just gonna give you that update now because the update is that despite numerous efforts by numerous people, the story you are about to hear, and I think this is important to know, is basically still the deal today. Anyway, here, originally aired in 2017, is our episode called Nukes. Rewind. So your name again is? Cedric. Cedric. I'm gonna write that down. And they're on the line now, so you'll be able to talk to them. So Harold, can you hear? Yeah, hello. Hi, okay. I'm Robert Krulwich. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radio Lab.

And a little while ago our producer, Latif Nasser, brought us a story about a guy. My name is Harold Herring. brought us a story about a guy. My name is Harold Herring. I used the middle initial L for Louis in honor of my father. Who asked a question. It was a pretty simple question. Maybe a dangerous question. Maybe a dangerous question. Certainly just the mere asking of it

pretty much ruined the man's life. And he never got an answer. No. But today on Radio Lab, we are going to re-ask Harold's question. And this time, we get an answer. And Ludiv today on Radio Lab we are going to re-ask Harold's question and this time... We get an answer. And Ludiv Nasser takes it from here.

Yeah, so our main guy, Harold, he's former military and he's 81 years old. I'm staying pretty active. I'm competing at the national and the world level at the duathlon competition. Wow. And right off the bat, this is the kind of guy you could tell he just does not give up. Really, I'm not supposed to be competing, because I've had both knees replaced.

But anyway. So Harold grew up in this tiny town called Browns, Illinois, from a poor family. He was the eldest of 11 kids. When he was growing up, he would always hear Air Force planes flying overhead. And that's why, from when he was growing up, he would always hear Air Force planes flying overhead. And that's why from when he was very young, he always wanted to be an Air Force pilot. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about your military background?

Well, most of my career was with the Air Rescue Service. This was in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. And if an Air Force pilot went down. Got shot down, whatever. Harold and his team would jump into their helicopters. Two Jolly Green heavy lift helicopters. Did fly them in, hover over the survivors on the ground. Lowering the hoist cable. And then a para rescue man would climb down to the forest

floor, find the injured soldier, and attach the cable to him. Yeah. And while that was happening, Harold had to hold the helicopter steady. Hold your hover, babe. Hold your hover. He had to hold his hover. Hold your hover. Hold your hover. And a lot of times, the enemy would wait until that process started before they opened fire.

Let's get the hell out. Okay, talk to me. We're coming out. I had some wonderful experiences. Probably chief among them was my crew and I. We picked up a pilot that ejected into the North Sea at night in the wintertime. Wow. Two hundred miles out to sea. We picked him up and brought him back.

So it was a super high risk, high adrenaline kind of job. And I had an outstanding record. And then well, well, he got old. How old were you around this time? Oh about 30. I was old. Pilots my age and with my experience were put into desk jobs and I wanted to be on the front line if I could. This was 1973, middle of the Cold War, so Harold decided that the way for him to be on the front lines without actually having to be on the front lines, you know, because he couldn't anymore, was to go into training to become a Missileer. Missile launch officer.

Those are the people who sit in an underground bunker and just wait to get an order to turn their key and unleash a nuclear attack. In training, I mean, the information I can remember, just virtually verbatim, is that each missile launch officer has, under his direct control, more firepower than all generals in all wars in the history of warfare. And so... Harold started his training at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Nixon was president at the time, and at the time, the prospect of nuclear war felt very real.

There's a lot of responsibility there, and there's no room for error. And so in Harold's training... We were a very small class. He learned all about the technical stuff. You know, all the mechanical stuff and emergency procedures that were involved. All the nitty-gritty details of how a missile actually launched. And then part of the time we had classroom instruction. Where he learned about the chain of command and all the different safeguards and checks. Right. So imagine that he gets an order to launch. That order has to be decoded.

So he would decode the order, and then his partner would decode the order. And then they would verify it with one another. So one guy would be like, OK, I got the order, alpha bravo 124. And then his partner would say, I confirm alpha bravo 124. And then they launch. So neither of them has the power to launch on his or her own.

And both of you were armed. You carried a sidearm with you. Why? Well, you know, it's serious business. And if you had someone that was, you know, if they threatened your life. If one of the officers wanted to just go rogue. You had a sidearm too.

Well, if I took my gun and pointed it you and said turn the key Harold. I wouldn't do it. I may go down but I'd be drawing my weapon. And these keys have to be turned simultaneously. So if I shoot you, turn my key then roll over get your key and turn your key. That's too late, right? It has to be a simultaneous. Yes. Yes. So the whole point is the system is designed so that no one person can launch a nuclear attack. I was very pleased, very satisfied with the checks and balances at the crew member level.

You know, the bottom where they're turning the keys. I was not concerned about that at all. But then a few weeks into training. There was some discussion about preemptive strike. Real quick, obviously if someone launched a nuclear attack against the U.S., we would be able to strike back, you know, in response. But a preemptive strike would be where we, for whatever reason, decided to strike first. And that raised the hair on the back of my neck a little bit. You know, it's just I thought we're receiving all of this information about all these elaborate checks and balances within the system.

But they never got any information about how things worked at the presidential level. There is a complete void or blackout at the level that the order is initiated. When you had this thought, did you say to the other classmates? No, I didn't. It wasn't my intent to try to create a scene by involving other people, students, whatever. So... Harold waits until the end of class, walks up to the front of the room, and asks the instructor a question. A very reasonable question.

He's like, just checking. There's a safety net in place if the president is making a crazy decision, right? I wanted to find out more about checks and balances at the top level. And the instructor pauses, looks at him, and says, can you put that in writing, please? Okay. And so he did. Let me find it first.

You do your best to have everything ready to go. No, no, no, take your time. Yeah. Oh, here it is. Okay. There is presently a degree of doubt in my mind as to whether I might some day be called upon to launch nuclear weapons as a result of an invalid unlawful order. This is part of the letter that Harold wrote explaining his question. I asked myself, how will I know or can I be sure I am participating in a justifiable act? In his letter, he says that if he were ordered to turn his key, he would absolutely do so.

But because he had not been told what the checks and balances are for the president, he would be doing so with a conflict of conscience. Which I've underlined. I would be required to assign blind faith values to my judgment of one man, the president, values which could ultimately include health, personality, and political considerations. This just should not be. So we've got a guy training to be the person who pulls the trigger and he's sitting there wondering, okay, there's a lot of checks on me, but who's checking the president?

And this struck us as a really kind of serious question because right now we have a president, President Trump, who is clearly interested in nuclear weapons. He talks about it constantly. You got the thing with North Korea? Yeah, escalating tensions with North Korea, Syria for Christ's sake, sort of makes you stop and think. Like, okay, if and when these decisions get made, how are they made? Is there someone else in the room? Yeah, and who? If the president is determined, if he's ready to go, is there somebody there who can turn to the president

and say, stop? That is a great question. This is historian Alex Wellerstein. He's the one who introduced us to Harold. He wrote an article in the Washington Post about this very topic. Am I at the right place? Yeah, you tend to want to be just like a fist's length away.

Yeah. Perfect. And he has spent so much time in just archives behind microfilm readers and foying documents and doing all kinds of different things to figure out the history of our relationship to this uniquely destructive weapon. And what he found was a kind of tug-of-war

between the military and the president that has gone back more than 70 years. As the nation is plunged into mourning by President Roosevelt's death, Harry S. Truman becomes president. Truman learned he had a bomb the day that Roosevelt died. This is April 1945. At this point, America has been at war with Japan

for over three years. It was impressed upon Truman that this was not just another weapon, that this was something that could be bigger and better than any other weapon before. But there's no point at which somebody says, hey, Mr. President, should we bomb Japan with this bomb? It's assumed that of course you're gonna do it. You have the bomb, you have the enemy, and in fact nobody ever goes to Truman and says, should we do this? Really? They go to him and they say, we are doing this. So Truman writes in his

journal, we're gonna use the atomic bomb but we will not use it on a civilian target, we will use it on a purely military target. That's the term. Purely military. Purely. Now, we can't get into his head to know exactly what he was thinking, but that is what he wrote in his journal at the time. And then he says, we will not be killing women and children.

So the first atomic bomb is going to be dropped by a president who thinks that he's dropping it on soldiers only. He's somewhat congratulating himself on that no women and children will be killed in this attack. The world will know that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That's part of Truman's announcement after they dropped the bomb. The day after they get casualty estimates from the Japanese and he realizes this is

not purely a military base There is reason to believe that the Japanese city of Hiroshima Approximately the size of Memphis or Seattle or Rochester, New York no longer exists The total death toll was almost two hundred thousand So there's a real switch that happens between Truman talking about the bomb and also everything he says about the bomb before he hears about the casualties is held about the greatest thing ever and this is the greatest day in history and he's so proud and so happy and then he hears about the casualties and he hears about the women and children and suddenly

it becomes a burden. Now what happens? So on August 10th he gets a message from General Groves. Nagasaki, just three days after Hiroshima... That says, we've dropped two bombs. We're gonna have a third one in a week. Just FYI. And it's not clear that Truman knew that two bombs were gonna be dropped so soon.

So he has just learned that Hiroshima is a city when he just learns that another city gets destroyed. He is not in control. Wow. And he has immediately written back to them and says, just stop, knock it off. You are not going to drop another bomb without express permission of the president of the United States. So the major theme of Truman's approach to nuclear weapons is to keep them out of the hands of the military. Why? He believes that the military, if you give

them a new weapon, they will use it. It's not a crazy idea. So they actually start to design and build these bombs to make sure the military can't launch them on its own. The nuclear parts of the bomb have to be in the possession of the civilians. The nuclear parts, so the plutonium. The plutonium, the core. And the early bombs allow you to do that.

The fronts of them actually open up and allow you to stick the core in and close it back up. Oh. So the civilians walk into the room with the explosive part, the soldiers open the lid. The civilians put the explosive part in, close the door, and now you have an active bomb. So it's like putting in a battery or something almost, like into your Walkman.

Why do I have that analogy? Am I like an 80-year-old? Where does the president put the nuclear power? They have their own vaults with their own guys with their own guns. And their job is to shoot anybody who tries to take a corps without presidential authorization.

Wow. So for the rest of his presidential term, Truman doesn't budge. The nuclear power is his and his alone. But the technology starts to make it trickier to do this. If you want a very small atomic bomb, you can't separate the pit out from that. It's just not going to happen. It's physically like glued to the explosives and things like that. So it's 1953, just a few years before Harold entered the military. President Eisenhower comes to power, and he's a former general. Right, exactly.

And so he's a little bit less concerned about who has control over these nuclear weapons, so he eases up a little bit. And he says in his administration, atomic weapons, small ones, are to be treated as basically any other kind of weapon. A nuclear-age arsenal of awesome proportions. This is archival footage from 1960 when President Eisenhower is getting a first look at some of the newest additions to the nuclear arsenal. He pulls out his binoculars to watch helicopters and foot soldiers in the field. At that time, they were getting really creative with their new nuclear weapons. That bazooka-like weapon is the red eye, a one-man operated missile launcher.

Does he continue to maintain authority over the bigger bombs? He allows them to be transferred to the military, but he says, don't drop them without my permission. Oh. But there are some cases in which he says, under really bad circumstances, you can use some of these weapons without my permission. So compared to Truman,

he's really shifting that power back to the military. Yes, but- Good evening, my fellow citizens. By the time Kennedy is the president- It is an ironic, but accurate fact. 1961, Harold is 24, he's a pilot in the Air Force. That the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation.

The Soviet capabilities are greatly increased. So- That signal means to stop whatever you are doing and get to the nearest safe place back. You get real anxieties and some of these anxieties bubble up in popular. These are kind of out there. So long, mom. I'm off to drop the bomb. So don't wait up for me.

At this point, popular culture is saturated in nuclear fear. First thing will be a white light that'll blind us, then a hot flame that'll burn us. Take it easy. I don't want to die. People are building bomb shelters. Kids in classrooms are practicing hiding under their desks. First you duck, and then you cover. At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball.

You have bombers flying from the United States and on these routes that take them near the Soviet borders. And the problem is you put up a lot of bombers. It's only a matter of time before... You'll expect one to crash or have a malfunction. A SAC B-52 carrying hydrogen munitions... And so indeed there are a bunch of accidents where Bombers crash with hydrogen bombs on board they crash in Spain and drop hydrogen bombs one of them gets dropped in Greenland It's truly airbase Greenland. They crash in the United States numerous times There's one in the south where a bomb basically lands on somebody's house and atomic bomb atomic bomb

Atomic bomb landed on someone's house? An atomic bomb breaks loose from a mounting shackle in a B-47 jet over Florence, South Carolina. Plummets to Earth. It didn't detonate. Six were injured. The home of Walter Greig was turned into a shambles. Oh my God, that would be the most terrifying thing. Imagine you're just brushing your teeth and then... Atomic bomb.

Atomic bomb. And there's a knock on the door and it's say, excuse me, we're going to remove this. So there's all these accidents. And on top of that, America is keeping a bunch of its bombs and bases all over the world. And they start to worry that some of these bases are not American bases and there aren't that many Americans on them. So for instance, some nukes are kept at a base in Turkey. Turkey's our friend, right?

Not a problem. But there are like two American guys guarding these things. They have the keys to turn these missiles on. What do you need to do if Turkey wants to become a nuclear power? Uh... They need to hit these guys over the head with a hammer and take the keys. Now Turkey's a nuclear power. Uh...

Whoa. Yeah, this is more or less what Kennedy says. Yeah. So Kennedy actually has the exact same instinct that Truman did. He issues a directive which says no weapons can be kept overseas unless they have locks on them. And the first versions of these are very crude. They're like literally combination locks. Really? Like bike locks? Yeah, they're pretty simple. So you're doing this technological enabling of this kind of

vast political metaphor that the president is in control of these nuclear weapons at all times. Mm-hmm. So it's like Truman wanted it close to the chest and then Eisenhower wanted it out there and then Kennedy now is pulling it back in. Right, exactly. At the time this felt safe. Who better to trust than the president with something so powerful like it could end the world. And even after Kennedy, the laws around this solidify. The power stays with the president. Yes.

But then you get this guy. People have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Richard Milhouse Nixon. Well, I'm not a crook. And this feeling of safety and really all trust in the presidency just starts to erode. So in the last days of his presidency there was the Watergate break-in there are all the investigations. Nixon was drinking more than the president perhaps ought to. He was under an intense amount of stress. He did a few things that made people uncomfortable.

The most infamous moment like this happened in the summer of 1974. Yes. When all the Watergate stuff was really coming to a head. He was talking with two congressmen and he was trying to impress upon them what a waste of time this quote little burglary was. And to give an example of how minor this was,

he explained that his responsibilities were huge. If he wanted to, he could go into the other room, pick up a telephone, and in 20 minutes, 60 million people would be dead. Whoa. He said this. He said this. And that's exactly the kind of situation Harold was thinking about when he asked his question.

Like since I'm the guy with my hand on the key, just kind of curious here, is there a system for making sure a president doesn't just walk into the other with my hand on the key, just kind of curious here, is there a system for making sure a president doesn't just walk into the other room, pick up the phone, and order me to kill 60 million people? There's presently a degree of doubt in my mind. So he asks this question first out loud, then he does it in writing. And then I was pulled out of training, I think it was about six days before graduation. That leads to a series of meetings with superior officers where they basically tell him.

That I need to have more faith in our leaders, you know, not to question them. And I was told that I didn't have a need to know. That leads to a trial where he has this one meeting with this military judge who basically says, here I have your question in my hand, I will tear it up and we can all forget this ever happened. But I still wanted the question answered. And then that leads to appeals and he's writing letters. I would spend days and nights virtually continuously writing.

To congressmen. Writing and writing. To the president. But it really didn't matter at all What I had to say at that point. He's basically like, okay fine I I don't want to be a launch officer anymore I asked to be you know reassigned if they weren't going to give the information but instead of reassigning him My promotional lieutenant colonel was withheld, I was removed from flight status,

so I no longer would get flight pay. I was then permanently disqualified from the Human Reliability Program, and along with that, my top secret security clearance was taken away from me, and once you have a security clearance removed and you're permanently disqualified, there's no hope for your career.

I pursued every avenue available to me to have my military record corrected and to have the findings reversed and to remain in the Air Force. Only after I exhausted all of my appeals was I ordered to be retired. What? Why? I mean, I know that like the whole military thing, you gotta stay in your lane, you don't question your superiors,

but why would they? What's the question? Such an innocent question. Why would they? What's wrong with him asking the question? Why, why would they, why, what's wrong with him asking the question? Why is it such a threat? Well, I'll tell you right after we take a break. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krollwitz. This is Radio Lab. And so Latif, why was Harold's question such a threat? Well, here's how it was put to me. You know, the other side has to know the only reason, the only way that, let me phrase it this way. Sure. The whole premise is deterrence. That has been our founding philosophy since we developed these things. This is Dr. Sonia McMullen. And I'm a former Air Force Missileer. She had her hand on the nuclear keys from 1997 to 2001. And by deterrence, she means,

There is only world peace where there is power to preserve order among nations. We keep other countries from nuking us B-52s represent a shield. By making clear that if they do, The missiles are ready. We'll nuke them right back. But if the other side doesn't believe that you will respond in kind, then it doesn't work. You have to believe my threat is legit.

I have to be credible. So if you're the guy whose hand is on the key, when the order comes down to launch, there can't be any doubt that you will do what you were ordered to do. Exactly. So the problem with somebody like Harold is that if you start allowing people to at the bottom to start making up their mind, then it's not a credible threat. So do you understand in your own mind why they had to have a committee to sit in judgment on him

and review some sort of facts? I don't know what I'm in the blind. It's hard to know. I haven't seen their side of it. I'm filing to get access to that side. We'll see how that goes. Oh great. So I found this, I actually just, we got this this morning. So we actually ended up finding a statement

by the Commander in Chief of Strategic Air Command, General Russ Doherty. I don't know if you have seen it, Harold, but it's... And to be fair, we thought we should let Harold respond to it. Do you know what I'm talking about? Uh, no, but he was the, uh, CINCAC, Commander in Chief of Strategic Air Command. Right, right, right.

And so let me just read to you what he said. Sure. The Major's hesitation initiated extensive hearings and administrative procedures. Later he professed that he really would turn keys, and that his hesitation had been misunderstood. I examined the record thoroughly and discovered that, for a fact, he had repeated several times in the record that he would readily turn keys. Then in each instance, his affirmative assertion was followed immediately by a personal subjective qualification.

Yes, he would turn keys upon receipt of an authentic order from proper authority if he thought the order was legal, if he thought the circumstances necessitated an ICBM launch, if he was convinced that it was a rational moral necessity, and so on. Every affirmative answer was qualified by a subjective condition No, no, no, no, okay. I did not say that anywhere Nowhere, did I say that? nowhere, did I use those words and I'm sorry, but that's just that's just false

That doesn't surprise me according to Harold. He never wanted to doubt an order coming from the president. I assumed that there had to be some sort of check and balance so that one man couldn't just on a whim order the launch of nuclear weapons. He just wanted to be told that something like that existed so that he and his fellow launch officers would not have to have a conflict of conscience. And that we not put anybody in a position where they're just following orders and throwing their conscience to the four winds. I think it's an affront to play the game of you don't have the need to know of someone that's doing one

of the most serious, grave jobs that there is in the armed forces. And so, since Harold never got an answer to his question, we decided to make it our question. Where do you get somebody who's allowed to question the president? Because we know that by the time you get to the bottom, there's no way that that's possible. So what about the guy above them? Let's say there's an officer who's one more up the tier. Is he going to question the order? Well, I don't know. He's getting it from the generals who coordinate all of the nuclear attacks.

If it got to him, it must be a legitimate order, right? Maybe those top-level major heads of the military branches, maybe they get to. I don't know. And so my question is, where, if anywhere, if the president issues an order, can they, will they say no? After a lot of digging around, Alex says that he thinks— My guess is you're not allowed to question the president more than a couple steps down from the very top.

If you're allowed to question the president at all, maybe the Secretary of Defense can do it. And when we talked to Sonia McMullin, our missileeer, she also thought that the Secretary of Defense could probably provide a check. The Secretary of Defense is the first person to say, hey, let's think about this. Let's think about this in detail. All right, we're ready. Okay.

This is Bill Perry, formerly Secretary of Defense, 19th Secretary of Defense of the United States. So we decided to ask an actual Secretary of Defense. William Perry served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997. Yeah. Let's just pretend for a moment that the president issues you an order that you disagree with because you don't think the president is of right mind or sober or whatever.

What authority do you have as Secretary of Defense, if any? Well, the system is set up so that only the president has the authority to order a nuclear war. Nobody has the right to countermand that decision. He might choose to call the secretary of defense or the secretary of state or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get his advice or his counsel, but even if he does that, he may or may not accept that council. If you as Secretary of Defense say to the president, he says, let's go, and you say, let's not.

First of all, if he calls me, and then if I say, Mr. President, that would be a very serious mistake. Don't do that. He might or might not accept my advice. Are you necessary to launch? No. No. Suppose everybody in the room thought that it was a bad idea. Would he still be able to do it? Yes. He has the call directly to the strategic air command to do the launching, and they

will respond to his orders. They don't call the secretary of defense or the chairman and say, should I do this? They do it. Yeah. So in our training, we were conditioned almost like a Pavlovian talk. This is Dr. Bruce Blair. He was a missile launch officer at the exact time that Harold was training to become one. And ever since then, he basically spent the whole rest of his career studying nuclear command and control. I wrote studies so classified that the Pentagon demanded that I not be allowed to read them

anymore. And we asked him, like, why does it work like this? Why would we give one person that much power? It's always been set up that way. Why would that be? What's the reason? and that much power. It's always been set up that way. Why would that be? It came out of the Cold War in the 1960s. I don't know.

By the 1960s, the US and the Soviet Union were building ICBMs, which are these nuclear missiles that could go from a silo in one country to a target in the other in a matter of minutes. So if the Soviets ever launched their missiles at us. If we're under a missile attack, there's very little time to assess the attack, to brief the president on his options. Because the assumption was that the Soviets would target our missiles. Our ICBMs, and they would be the first to go. And so therefore, the president has to decide

whether to launch your ICBMs before the other missiles land. For any incoming missiles could destroy the command and control system. And that forces the president to make a decision on how to respond immediately because missiles are flying in at four miles per second. He has about six or seven minutes to make that decision. Six minutes? The decision process just is too short.

For any kind of thoughtful or serious deliberation. And the pressure is intense. And there I think you would find that different presidents would respond differently. And their character, their temperament, are they thinking people or are they intuitive people who respond instinctively and so you know you would see a lot of variation in the way presidents react to a nuclear emergency. The president of the United States now for 50 years has followed at all times, 24 hours a day by a military aide carrying a football. This is then Vice President Dick Cheney, also a former Secretary of Defense, talking on

Fox News Sunday back in 2008. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in. It bothers me immensely that the only area that there is not a check and balance is the one that can literally result in the end of the world.

That seems strange to me. Have you thought about this at all and wondered whether there's a better way to do this? Yes, I have. What would you suggest? I have specifically proposed and continue to propose unsuccessfully. Again, former Secretary of Defense William Perry. We phase out our ICBMs and to the extent we have to have a nuclear deterrence, we limit it to submarines and airplanes because they don't have to launch in five minutes,

or six minutes, or seven minutes. And when it comes to preemptive strikes, he says... We have before the Congress now a bill making a modification which says unless the United States has been verifiably attacked, then the president has, before he launches his nuclear weapons has to go to Congress for permission. So our bill is very simple. This is Congressman Ted Lew and he and Senator Ed Markey are the guys who authored the bill. It basically

says before the president can launch a nuclear first strike, the president must first get a declaration of war from Congress. I believe that you introduced this bill before the election. Is that right? Absolutely. Senator Mark and I believe we need a structural fix. We believe actually Hillary Clinton was going to be president, so this bill would have applied to her. And that's because the fate of humanity in our world should not rest on one person.

And wait, so are you seeing this as just as you sizing this up, is this a systemic problem? Or is this a problem with one person who just happens to have the office right now? It's absolutely a systemic problem. And it's also a problem with the current person in the office of the president. But you can see future presidents, right? That could be elected with judgment or temperament issues, or maybe they simply go to advanced age and get Alzheimer's, right? Or some other sort of issue.

That's why we can't have a system where there's so little checks and balances. Do you know about this bill or have you heard of it? No, actually I don't. And that's interesting. That is a very interesting bill. That let me say it this way. On one hand, I agree, because again,

I always like to have checks and balances. On the other hand, I also think that it says to a potential adversary, now there's doubt. So there are two sort of values here. One is your humane interest in making sure that the end of the world, if it comes to that, is happening for a good reason and a just reason, as best you can define it. And the ongoing hope that by making this art system credible, that we will never have an end of the world.

So my question to you is like, how do you weigh those together? Yeah. Well, and it's, that's a dilemma. Yeah. You know, that's a dilemma. Yeah. You retire, he became a truck driver. And once I got that job, I made up my mind that I was going to devote my time to making a living for my family and to that company, and I wasn't going to be off dealing with this subject anymore.

And eventually he started doing addiction counseling at the Salvation Army, mostly with homeless people. What's your sort of emotional state around all this right now? How often is this something you still think about? How do you feel right now? Well, I'm just, I think that common sense, I think the goodness in human beings begs for a resolution of this. I just think that the need for that is at least as great now as it's ever been in the history of our Republic. And I might add

on a personal level that I had, I mean I was really committed to the military, to the Air Force, volunteered several times, you know, to do my duty with respect to the Vietnam War. And I just felt that I had asked a very reasonable question that deserved an answer, and it was not for me alone, it was for all of us. I I keep thinking about those six minutes. Not a long time. Big props to reporter Latif Nasser. This story was produced by Anna McEwen with production help from Simon Adler. And a big thank you to historian and reporter Ron Rosenbaum, whose research we relied on in some part for this story.

And to our special consulting researcher Alex Wellstein, who is by day a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. And to the US Air Force, to Captain Chris Mesnard and to Carla Pampi and to Lieutenant Esther Willett and to Lieutenant Veronica Perez. Also thanks to Elaine Scarry, Ryan Pettigrew at the Nixon Presidential Library, Ryan Furkamp, Robin Berry and Lisa Berry, Tom Woodruff, Doreen de Broome and Ray Peter. Soren here again, just with a quick note. Since we first aired this episode, Bruce Blair, the missile launch officer who wrote those classified studies has actually passed away. And also we should mention the passing of Tony DeBroom, who if you are a patient or maybe just meditative listener, you'll hear

from in a little bit. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Kralbich. Thanks for listening. Hey, I'm Lemon, and I'm from Richmond, Indiana, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and LotsofNasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyan Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandback, Anisa Vitsa, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a Okay. Okay. So Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So Okay. Okay. I'll be happy to share whatever I may remember. Remember this took place early in the morning of March 1st, 1954. So it's been a while. So a couple weeks back, the writer Sam Kean put us in touch with this guy.

But it was quite traumatic and hard to forget. How old were you on that day? In 1954, I was nine years old. Nine years old, okay, good, all right. His name is Tony DeBroom. He is an ambassador for the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific. And he tells this story about a particular moment

that happened when he was nine on a day very early in the morning. At that moment, in that early morning hours, I was out fishing with my grandfather. It was customary, a village that we lived in, to go net fishing, throw net fishing for scads. Tony says he and his grandpa were out on the beach before the sun had risen, and they waded through the water tossing their net, pulling it back, tossing it out, pulling it back. And after they'd done

that for a while... The sun was beginning to rise from the east and I was carrying the basket he was throwing the net when the flash went off. when the flash went off. We were temporarily blinded by the flash. It was as if someone had walked up to you with a flash camera and took a shot right inches from your eyes. I cannot with any certainty tell you how many seconds passed, but we felt a shock. It was like a real heavy burst of wind going through the land. He says he turned away from the light and back towards the shore.

You can see the vegetation move. It's indescribable. I thought it was the end of the world. What Tony didn't know is that 300 miles away, the U.S US had just tested a bomb they called Castle Bravo It was a hydrogen bomb about a thousand times as strong as the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima and then the

The rumble and roar and the thunder of the sound of the explosion and the roar and the thunder of the sound of the explosion. Because it was not one big explosion that goes just boom and that's it. The chain reaction caused it to roll like thunder. And then, he says the sky erupted. Everything turned red. The sky turned red. The ocean was red. The sand was red. My grandfather was red and the fish we caught were red. The whole atmosphere, the whole hemisphere, the effect was like you're standing under a glass bowl and somebody poured blood under a glass bowl and somebody poured blood over it.

We were terrified. That explosion, and the many others like it, would poison the Marshall Islands, poison its people. But in that moment, Tony says, he and his grandpa just stood there, listening to the explosions and staring at the blood-red sky. It seemed to have lasted for what seemed like hours. I am now 72 years old, and every time I speak about this my skin still crawls and I still get goosebumps. Hi, my name is Treza, I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and

Betsy Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seymans Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.