Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 199: Damascus Titan II Missile Explosion

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

i dropped... i dropped the socket follow scooter on the butterfly site: https://bsky.app/profile/angryscooter77.bsky.social check out somehow you didn't die on the way to work with roz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxaVNVX9N3U donate to help buy liam's coworker's grandson a mobility van: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ check out Public Rail Now: https://publicrailnow.org/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Do you like body horror? Read various roll-dowl books. I'm insane. Charlie and Chocolate Fack. No. Willie Wonka in the Chocolate Factory is so far superior to the book it's based on. That's always one that always gets me.

That's just because you love Gene Wilder, man. We have to sync the audio. We have to sync the audio. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to say 3-21, Mark. three, two, one. Mark, okay, good enough.

Yes. Yeah, no, I do enjoy Gene Wilder's performance as Willie Walker. I think it's, it's fantastic. I love, I love watching it. You know the sequel that Roaldahl wrote to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that was too racist to film? Glass Elevator? I don't, I haven't read it in a very long time.

Yeah, Charlie and the Glass Elevator. I don't, I don't want to read it. read it because I'm scared of the vermicious canids. Well, you should be scared of those and also be scared of the guide kind of working in some racist bits. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I could see that. That guy, that guy, you know, you needed a good director and you needed Gene Wilder

to save that, to save that entire concept. Now it's a beloved thing. you know that and I don't know I saw the James in the giant teach movie a long time ago which was weird aren't they rebooting with Timothy Shalamaboo oh my god

they're trying I hate that fucking guy man I hate Tuduette Chalabai why do you need to reboot Willy Wonka because Tuduiz Salame has to give you a haunting performance because Johnny Depp wasn't fucking weird enough I guess they did it right the first time

they got it right the first time they don't have to do it again This is like Bed Affleck trying to remake Casablanca. At some point, you should be shot. New movies. I just need you to know. I just need you to know. I listened to the episode,

the free episode that you did without me. I'm sorry I was doing live shows and then I got COVID, but I'm back now. And people were like, well, we miss November, which thank you. I appreciate. But wow, this was the quickest they got to the point ever. Like, they started the show like that. And for some reason,

My presence is a kind of talisman that causes each of us to become distracted and start talking about role-dahl movies. That's true. Yes. Yes. Well, no, we shouldn't have to talk about them, because again, they got it right the first time. They don't have to make any more of them. Yeah.

Make new movie. Yeah. Yeah. Willie Walker the Chocolate Factory, as produced by Mumar Gaddafi, of course. Oh. Oh, that's that the umpalupa's singing about their armolites, yeah. No, that, that wouldn't work. The umpalumpas are orange.

There's a bad guy. I am trying to go to Ireland in less than a week. You are going to get me turned away at the fucking border. No, we got that. Yes, we got this. Delay doesn't tell she's in. Yeah, exactly. This is not going to come out until Nova is back from Ireland and we'll never be welcome there again. We could prevent her from getting back home.

Yeah, she's stateless like that guy in the terminal. Yeah. Welcome to Kill James Bond, a podcast about movies. Recording this podcast, we have to think about our girls on Hunger Strike in the prisons of Belfast. I so like because I was going to Dublin and because I'm like interested in the history and the like culture and stuff I was like and I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong and I'm sorry I wanted to see Kilmainham jail right which is where they uh where we the British right executed a bunch of the leaders of the Easter Rising he was tied to a chair and you shot him I know I know on the on the plus side of this is never Kelly personally yeah this is I personally shot James Connelly I'm sorry that I did it but on the plus side it did lead to the collapse of British colonialism in the south of Ireland. But I wanted to go. And the thing is, it is sold out and booked up for the whole month.

So Ireland is so woke that they won't let trans women into prison. Wow. I'm rattling the gates from the outside. Let me in. Let me in. Let me in. All right, we have to start this podcast at some point. Hold on. Let me see if I remember how to do this. Yeah, I still don't have the drops. Nate's gonna send me the replacement mixer

at some point. On the note of that, all I remember, uh, speaking of like, going on vacation to countries where the troubles were a thing, because I had to keep reminding my wife to please stop singing IRA songs while we were in the UK. I did do them with my dad too, yeah. It's fine. My grandma used to blast them out the way. of the flat when my mom was growing up, it's fine. My dad pointed to Lord Nelson's column in front of like whatever your cops are and said, the IRA never got that one and that was a legitimate military target and they stopped and stared at this for a mighty long time yesterday.

But because there was a Nelson's column in Dublin, right? And it's currently, it's currently the spire, which is just like the most, we felt like we had to put something here thing. because it was blown up by the IRA. And when it was Dev, Amid de Valera, not Devon, no relation, as far as I know, suggested the headline to the Irish Times,

British Admiral leaves Dublin by air. Speaking of leaving by air. What? Hello. And welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. Oh, it's been a hot minute. I hope I can still remember how to do this. I am November Kelly. I'm the person who's speaking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

Hi, I hope this is not too crunchy. Sorry if it is. No, no. I heard the episode you recorded without me, so let me do this one. Hi, my name's Liam McAnneson. my pronouns are he and him. See how you like it. Wow.

You want to introduce Victoria? You want to just cut it there. No, go ahead. I'm Victoria Scott. I'm pronoun she and her. And we have a guest. We have a guest. I'm back.

Hi, I'm Angry Scooter. My pronouns are he, they. And I'm the person talking right now. And let's do this. Do you want to do the normal thing where you disavow your employer or are you good on this one? No, no, no, I'm good on this one. Your employer avows everything. Like, everything that you're about to say is their opinion.

Company policy. What you can't see here, but this is actually a Rail Exco. Yeah, they're going to deal on it. Yeah. I mean, later in the podcast, I do compare it to my job. So, uh-oh. We did try, we did once. Okay, real quick.

We did want to try buying a nuclear missile. Well, who hasn't? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. There was the one in Randtool, Illinois. No, there was this one in Randtool, Illinois that's the display for the old Air Force base that got, got, it's gone. but it went up on Gov deals and both of us were like come on

and then they took it on Guil's nuclear missile how much could it cost? This is how I ended up with my nine foot tall Soviet rocket ship model as I was like well I mean I might as well put in a bid for a lark but she who has never put an unwise bid on an auction site cast the first pods we spent the first physics package we spent the same amount on that stupid A class we had that we sold to Roxy as that missile was going for

and that would have looked so much cooler in our yard. Honestly, yeah, like the A class is one of those things that is sicko. Also, shit, I didn't realize that went from you to Roxy. I'm redrawing the lineage of this car in my mind. Anyway, that... I don't know what that is. Oh, it's the little Mercedes. Yeah, do you want the best Mercedes ever made?

The small Mercedes? Yeah. Do you want that or a nuclear missile? Oh, you'd have the polar opposite of vehicles, like the enormous rail excote truck and then the very small rail exgo sports car. You didn't even get to drive it in the big rail exco truck. That truck was so huge, Scooter. That was the hugest truck I've ever been in. That is a normal 15.

I have a 3,500. 3500 are... I just love the idea of the... I want a 3,500 with dulys. The Rail Xco Technical, which is in A-class with an ICBM strapped to the top of it. On the trailer behind it. Line a bunch of those up, like a North Korean parade. This is the world different...

Who's low bidding who now? Who now? This is our future where every single person has to buy their own ICBM, less Donald Trump shut down their primary waterways. If you have a stream in your backyard, you want to float paper boats down. You have to have an ICBM to keep it clear. Oh, yes. There's no offense like defense.

Will we? For the lore, you know, we point the ICBM at Amtrak and demand another turbo liner. But, yes. We want more places to drop private cars. Justin Rosniak has paid us to hold you ransom. What we see on the screen before us is an accessory for a Mercedes-Benz A-class. This is dealer installed, actually. It's why does that say Verger von Braun did nothing wrong?

So anyway, I do have a disclaimer. It's two things about this presentation because, number one, this story is told over an hour and a half in a movie and 20 hours in a book, and then another 11 hours in another book. It has to be condensed at some point. I'm sorry if our four-hour presentation's too fucking short for you. Go watch the movie.

And second, because I did a lot of interviews for this, I actually did like real research, which, wow, I know, right? Unbelievable. Never happens on this podcast. A couple people ask to put a, to say that even though it's a comedy podcast, we're going to make a bunch of jokes here, the people involved took their jobs very seriously. and for very good reason because of what they handled, the only people at fault, as far as I'm concerned

and hopefully everybody makes their own opinion, are the motherfuckers that made the decisions and not the motherfuckers that did this as their job. So we're going to clown on everybody, but remember who the real clowns are. I hate when I want to put my Mercedes into, like, I sort of, I hate when I want to make my Mercedes. these go fast and I have to put it into race mode.

I had to put a, I have to put a Titan 2 rocket on top of it, you know, to make it go fast. Like the, uh, what was that that stunt on, uh, MythBusters? The Raider Rocket. The Jada Rocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're actually going to do this to realize that. The A and A class stands for assisted.

So yeah, today's episode, we will be talking about the, uh, Damascus, Alabama Alabama, Titan 2, rocket explosion. Arkansas. Arkansas. Arkansas. Excuse me. Alabama, Arkansas. I sure love my mom, pa.

These things. I should love my mom, Paul. Yeah. I, okay, okay, I'm doing great. This is why I had to go get some coffee. I've got a white monster. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Do do do do

We don't have the thing Nate is going to send me the replacement mixer very soon He assures me I am assured of this So Remember how we just did an episode About the Union Pacific Norfolk Southern merger

Yeah Uncle Charlie's fucking no Uncle Pete is fucking a horse Is marrying the horse Fucking the horse yes I'm here to fuck the train I know The day after we recorded it, the new documents were submitted to the Surface Transportation Board. That's real one of your problem.

The co-ling is the timeliest podcast ever. Yes. So, yeah, I don't know how to summarize this other than, okay, they've decided they're going to do less investment in infrastructure than they said they were going to do. previously. How was that even possible? Yeah, well, they're going to do major improvements to one of the old Wabash

lines and that's about it. No, they won't. Yeah, that's called line. Yeah, they do it a lot. Something, there's like 400 pages or whatever about intermodal lanes, new ones.

The big news is they're trying to sort of extort the surface transportation board by saying, look, if you grant anyone trackage rights or like dibs on branch line sales, we're not going to do the merger. We're going to look bad for commerce because obviously everyone loves these mergers, right? It'll look bad if you don't do them. Victory to Dan Rosniak, victory for 1,000 years.

Honestly, though, yeah, yeah. I mean, that that is the thing about this is it's like, the most relevant industries out there all hate this shit. But I don't know, they're going to let Trump drive the big boy or something. Yeah, a pox on both their houses. And speaking of pox. Speaking of pox, yeah, I hate everything. You have pantavirus.

I mean, listen, I don't want to. We probably have too many hypochondrials. reacts to me to do that joke. No, it's, so there was this cruise ship with- You already have Hanta virus. I'm sorry. You're dying. I mean, based on the spread of COVID, back when everyone was following the like, huh, seems like some shit was happening in like a wet market in Wuhan and everyone reading it already had COVID. I don't know, but so there's this cruise ship that was going from Argentina to Cape Verde, I want to say.

And this Dutch couple got hanta virus, hantavirus, which is a very nasty class of viruses that you get mostly off of like rodents. And the husband died. The wife was transporting his body to South Africa and then died. And they think that there's like human to human transmission. There's some cases. But everyone stuck on this boat, which they're now, everyone is arguing about where to send it. It's like it might be the Canary Islands.

But in the meantime, everyone is self-isolating in the worst phase of all, because they are stuck on board with Hunter virus and not one but two travel YouTubers. Oh, God. Shoot me dead. No, that's, yeah, no. That is. It's way worse than the. One of the YouTubers is getting mad at the other one because he's like being inflammatory and the content that he's posting. So the YouTubers are now beefing.

And at this point, I sort of start thinking about ways I could like throw myself overboard without my body washing up and giving anybody a hanta virus. I'm going to be honest. I feel like this is kind of, I don't think this is a huge like, well, unless you're on the ship, obviously, it's very bad. I don't think this is a huge deal. This is apparently like a strain of the hanta virus, which is already endemic in Argentina. you know, it does occasionally transmit person to person,

but it's not very common. And, you know, it doesn't tend to spread because, well, it kills people so quick. Yeah, it's not a very, you need a lot of like close contact as well. But like the thing is, well, exactly, right? Rationally, I'm like, this is nothing. We're just filling out the news section. And then I flash back to the news sections we were making in 2019 and 2020. and no, it's fine, it's fine.

Everything's going to be fine, and I'm not going to ruin it if I say that everything's going to be fine. No, this is fine. The next slide is what's going to be our COVID moment. Yeah, no, I, this does not give me anywhere close to the same vibes as COVID. This is like a 38% fatality rate, I think I read, and like you just can't, like, virus transmission just doesn't work very well at that scale of death. And, yeah, like, it requires such sustained contact that, like, I think that the,

only place you could really get this cruise ship rather than like, you know, any kind of normal day to day life. The next one, though, is going to be like, this is going to be the crisis. Like, incubators of everything bad. Okay. I fully admit also. All right here, folks, if they have Hatha virus, don't fuck them. Yeah.

Thanks. Thank you. A new form of VD. None of the doctors have never seen before. They're coughing up blood. It doesn't matter how sexually they're doing. doing it. Do not have sex with them. I will say, sort of Victorian, you know, they're dying of tuberculosis.

Oh, yeah. You lay them down one more time. Yeah, and then you get anti-virus. Good job, Ross. Yeah, exactly. That's not gone well. Well, now I have the Victorian like coughing up blood disease. She's right there, man. I'm just getting better from the Victoria coughing up blood disease. Also, my favorite thing that we said in the segment is Victoria's.

where you, you ever notice how someone is like so obviously anxious in general that they have become an epidemiologist out of anxiety? Where it's just like casually like, oh yeah, I know a lot about disease vectors because I'm scared all the time. I also am like this. I am saluting. This is how I feel about the oil market. I wanted to be an autojournalist and so I learned a little bit about how the oil market. Get the oil market. Do we still have that? I learned... I have one question before we go to the next one.

I learned a little bit about how gasoline makes it from the ground to my door. And now I'm like, oh my God, this is the worst thing I've ever learned in my life. It's sort of like deciding to read the society, the spectacle at the age of 21, and being like, oh, fuck. I have one question. I have one question. Before we move to the next slide. Yes. It's about the Chiron.

What the hell is this Northern Lion thing I keep here? I don't know what this is. I like to put in the Chirons and then not explain them. Just as a little bonus for the people who only watch on YouTube. But if you don't, the Chiron that I put in says Northern Lion now second worst cruise organizer of 2026. This is a little bit of a cheap shot because a Canadian Twitch streamer called Northern Lion, who my wife likes a lot, along with seemingly every other trans woman in the world, tried to

organize like a fan cruise, which then collapsed within, I would say, a week. But no one got a hunter virus. Damn, it's a good thing we didn't follow through with those guys who contacted us. Yeah, yeah. They were asking everybody, huh? They got through with Northern Line, and they got to us. And they were like, oh boy, you guys want to organize a cruise? And I will not be, I will not be on the wiki of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea.

I have made this very abundantly clear to my wife. If we organize a cruise, you would be on the wiki of people who died ironically if that ship sinks. How do you think I feel like getting on a plane for the first time in like 10 years? Getting on a plane for the first time since I started this podcast in less than a week. They don't have a boat? The, I mean, not really, but mostly it's just like, the easiest way to get. Anyway, the magical thinking is fucking getting to me. So, you know, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna be plummeting, plummeting down towards the ground being like,

oh shit, I think I have hunter virus. I mean, if it helps it all though, but if you're gonna die in a plane crash, we all know that'll probably happen during takeoff and landing. You won't even really have that long to plummet to the ground. Yeah, and I'm flying on a max nine. Like, I already flew on one this year. I'm gonna fly on one in a couple weeks. Are you flying out? This is a max 8, so I No, I had a I had a moment of personal growth

which is I realized I'm going to transfer at O'Hare anyway, I can fly out of Philadelphia International Airport and not New York. You're learning at age. How are you 33? 33. I'm still flying United.

I know you are. I'm still thinking I'm dying in a car crash because I feel like that would maximize the amount of iron for me. Oh, that's a piece of news we should have put in. This will also be my first time flying since transition, right? It's one of the big reasons why I haven't. So it's going to be really funny if my experience is I go to the airport for the first

time in 10 years. A guy grabs my dick, misgenders me. I get Hunter virus and then the plane crashes. I don't, statistically, I think you'll be fine. I do look forward to the airport workers saying, of course, Ms. Kelly, right this way, Ms. Kelly, just to screw with you. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to have to go phone up to guys at Glasgow Airport and say, this is my friend November. You have to treat her very nicely.

I was like a very nervous horse. I will say, UK airport security was much, much nicer to me than U.S. airport security ever was. and I handed them like a seven-pound bag of film. They had every reason to be like, oh, great, this bitch. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. In other news.

Oh yeah, unless it's been defensive for being gentle, then it won't be fine. Yeah, so about it being fine, they're probably gonna, you know what else is gonna happen? Is I'm gonna go to the airport. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get my dick sort of groves, and then they're gonna put me on the plane, I'm going to get Hanta virus.

The plane is going to crash. And as it's crashing, I'm going to be coughing up along being like, oh, shit, they canceled my flight back because they ran out of jet fuel. Yes. Yes. That's, you know, this is a total Delta Airlines victory because they refine their own fuel. Yeah, and they're also getting rid of snack service. So go fuck yourself. Oh, God.

No, I don't fly Delta. I don't fly Delta. I don't fly Delta because I'm not a bitch. Yeah, exactly. If we have an illicit fly Delta, fuck you. I used to fly Delta. Yeah, and fuck you. The Kirol on this one just says,

just says that the war is maybe, is maybe back on, unless it's off, in which case it might still be on, unless it's off, maybe. Because at time of recording it, at this point I think Dev's going to need to put in not just a date stamp, but a timestamp. At time of recording, Trump has abandoned Project Freedom of Trump. trying to like, you know, escort ships through the strait, but is now attacking Iranian shipping through the strait. And meanwhile, the Iranians have bombed Fujaira, which is on the, like, eastern seaboard of the Emirates, which is kind of like shutting the back door on the

straight. So it's all going just wonderfully, I think. You know, either there's going to be a deal and I will get back from Dublin, or there will not be a deal and I will have to apply for asylum in Ireland and live there, I'd live out the rest of my days in exile there. You're going to have to get on a sailing ship. Have you ever to listen to excurs around the bay? Sounds pretty good.

Yeah, that's also pretty good. You live on an island. Yeah. You're on the island. Oh, this is the island of the island. I mean, I live on an island with a rail link, right? Ireland is not an island with a rail link off of it unless we build the Dunnell, the

Dublin tunnel, which we should do. I think that would be a good idea. Donald. Donald. Yeah. Apparently, according to President Trump, as of right now, the United States has quote won the war in Iran. Or we just, that's good news, I guess. He said, we're in good shape and now we're doing well. And we have to get what we have to get.

Folks, gas is 85 cents again. Go to bed, Grandpa. It's like the third, fourth time that the U.S. has won the war. So, you know, that's pretty huge, I guess. They said, he said you'll get tired of winning. I am. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, what we should just do is, like,

we should just keep like a victory counter, like a running total, and we can just increment that anytime the U.S. wins the war. Now, I would like it noted for the record. Obviously, there are a lot of other effects that are way more pertinent, but I will note that the average American drives 40 miles a day at the average price of gas in Seattle like $6.50 a gallon. How do you drive 40 miles? The average American does.

That is the average. If you take million miles traveled and divide it by the American population, the average American drives 40 miles a day. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why? That's a lot of driving. You don't have roads that are pleasant to drive on. No, yeah, but...

No, it's hell. But scooter, you have a really big truck, so it's like comfy. I'll draw my Sierra 1500. I drive a civet to the shop. You drive 40 miles a day, but it's the distance from like the front wheels to the rear wheels. Would you like a high mileage alpha Julia quadropholia? Oh, yeah. Oh.

Company car. Company car. Crazy, crazy crossover with the Liam cinematic universe with the Transgarylismo episode you were on. But the exact Viper I pointed out in the episode that I wanted is for sale currently.

Send me a link. I will. Thank you. Anyway, so, oh, yeah. Go ahead. I'm done. I just wanted to tell Leo about the Viper.

I'm just, I guess, I guess, okay, we won the war. So let me just cross this out gas is going to be

85 cents a gallon again we do not need to carry oil with truck by land we're good okay right well done us thank you President Trump

I'm excited for term three speaking of term three that was the goddamn news If I have to deal with this guy stealing another decade of my fucking life for me, I'm going to do things that I can't say on a podcast. Sure you can't.

Definitely bleep about. Oh, you want to be optimistic and make it a decade, huh? Oh, my God. So, I think it would be useful to start this program with some context, starting with the Cold War, right? Yeah, because I got booed really bad for the last time I talked about it. So, basically,

the United States and the Soviet Union fought the Germans and defeated them and killed Hitler and so on and so forth. Yeah, there was also one weird-looking baby-type guy involved seen here on the left, which he wasn't. about him. But I think we can safely discount him and his contributions. Can you cross him out? Yeah, no, ignore this guy. I don't want to deal with him. Yeah, let's talk about the Siege of Gallipoli.

Some real American heroes here. It's like, you know, one guy from New England, one guy from Georgia, which makes it a real sort of like heartwarming north-south friendship story. Exactly, exactly, yeah. No, when we were in World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin apparently got along like a house on fire. Like, they were good buddies. And that house was named Poland. I still think there's potential for a FDR Stalin buddy comedy film. I think that would be a...

Oh, yeah. You know, yeah. Death of Stalin prequel? yes exactly exactly the life of Stalin but uh FDR unfortunately had it was very it was very unfortunate

he died only in his fourth term as president so did he get anti-pirator? He I don't know he might have been vaxed it wasn't vaxed no that was kind of a big thing His final fireside chat announcing that he was going to go bird watching in Argentina.

So after World War II, we had to be really mad at the Soviet Union because of the godless communists and so on and so forth. And that remained the case for, I had to 40 years or so, which means we need... That's the summer. Yeah, that's the short, short version. Which means we have strategic air command. Oh boy, these fucking weirdos. We have developed nuclear weapons, which are weapons. Good actually.

Which are nuclear. Yeah, and because of the experience of the Second World War, you have an instance of have an institutional memory of, you know, the Janine Piro clip where she's like, bomb them, bomb them, keep bombing them. You just have that irrespective of its utility, and you gave those guys nukes, which was an interesting decision. Bombing to win. So you have this sort of, theoretically, nuclear weapons are under civilian control, but, you know, They're the people who are developing the strategies and tactics of how to use them.

They're in strategic air command. And they're constantly in a race with the Soviet Union or their imagined version of the Soviet Union to figure out how do we get our special gift over there quicker than they can get theirs over to us? when international Friends Day finally comes. Yeah, well, so like back in the day, the sort of only friends packages, when the only gifts that you had were like air dropped, right? It meant that you had to get a bunch of planes and fly them in really fast,

either really high or really low to avoid the Soviet Union's best friends radar, their best friends defense system, so that you could give them their gift It's really quickly. Really quickly. Yeah, this is a B-47- And you might have to give them gifts any time. So like, you have to have these guys ready to go sitting by the planes.

You had to be very conscientious. You had to be- By the planes, or as we found out last time, you had to have them in the air all Possibly in the air, right? Yep. You know, and there's various psychopaths that came up with those ideas. Like, all of them. Everyone in the Strategic Air Command was crazy. Yeah, I looked to relax, but I'm actually incredibly tense at all times.

Yeah, Curtis LeMay, the inventor of the Dennis system. Was it an absolutely terrible problem? policy that, you know, spent millions of the millions and billions of dollars on a complete waste of resources to destroy half the globe at a moment's notice. Yes, but it did also give us the Afro Vulcan, which is pretty good. Yes, this is true. I'm not one of those the other day. It's a really good-looking airport.

So. I like it when we do it. I think we had a bit more panache and a bit more elan when we did it, as opposed to you fucking pig-fucking yokels. So, you know, okay, but... Listen, we did it with a Delta wing, so like it's good, actually. Yeah, but the plane only had to fly, like, 15 miles. I missed you all too.

So, you know, this culminates in a policy of we need aircraft in the air with live nuclear weapons at all times, and we need to strap fucking... rockets to the back of B-47s so they can get in the air more quickly and, you know, all this kind of crap. And eventually we get better at rocketry thanks to, you know, a guy who may or may not have, you know, done some stuff in World War II. And we get the intercontinental ballistic missile, right? Yeah, what if we had like stuff like hypergolic fuels?

What if we had, what if we, honestly, what? One of the biggest, like, innovations here is truck. What if we had a big truck? What if we had a TEL that can do this? And downstream of that is me playing Snow Run. So thank you for not ending the world and letting me play with the civilian version of these. Well, this is a weird one because usually you would think this would be the different one, but Russia had big truck.

But I think it was only the United States. We never got big truck. We did have big train. No. We tried big train. We almost got big train in 91. We tried big truck. It was too damn expensive because it was, again, psycho.

It's a cold war. We have a limited money for this bullshit. It was $9.1. It was too expensive for the American defense industrial. The entirety of the Southwest and put silos like every, five or six miles apart from each other and thousands of these and then have trucks move the missiles silo to silo like every few hours to keep the the Soviets from knowing where they were and we're talking like hundreds of missiles moving at the same time and for some reason the

Carter administration deemed this too expensive that's just a ballet for assholes The thing about the car with this like realistic ideas that would work. The thing about the Soviet Union is that there was a lot of it and there was a lot of it with not a lot of people where you could just pop one of these things out of a peat bog and fire the missile that like destroys DC. So it's kind of easier. Plus also you have the engineering base for a lot of like heavy trucking and like Belarus and stuff.

So yeah. So anyway, in short. What is an intercontinental ballistic missile? It is a ballistic missile that goes between continents. So again, when International Friends Day comes, you can strap your thoughtful gift to your friend on another continent to the missile and send it to them very quickly. So it's a surprise before they send their, again,

very thoughtful and conscientious gift to you. right? Because you want it to be a surprise, right? You want to really brighten up their day, you know? So to speak. Yeah, brighten up their day by several millions of lumen. Yeah, I've bought flashlights off of Amazon too. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, this also, because we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, of course, you don't need to have, you know, all these B-52s or B-47s or whatever with, atomic weapons in them flying around in the sky constantly all the time to achieve your, you know, um,

deterrence, I guess. Yeah, put it put a lot of good psychos out of work at the psycho. I was about to say, yeah, but you can't believe. You can't believe. You can't believe. You need to have all those presents ready.

Henry Kissinger put so many psychos out of work with many mutually sure destruction. No, you just keep those planes around because of course you do. You gotta have extra presents. We're gonna spend the money. Yeah, that's true. In case the first present doesn't do enough to make... Surprise. Such a hoarding problem.

My pet belief... Talk to me about my flex server, yep. 27-hundred is still around. My pet belief is that the end of Strategic Air Command is actually what called the serial killer boom in the 70s, it wasn't the lead in the paint. Because all those guys just didn't have jobs anymore. The Zodiac killer was wearing wing walkers. They all got laid off by Kissinger.

Okay. So there's one particular intercontinental ballistic missile we're going to talk about today. I'm handing it off the scooter now. We'll get there. Yeah. So ICBMs weren't a thing. until the late 50s, because up until the late 50s, we had bomber generals running the Strategic Air Command.

I'd say again, psychos. And they had a heart on for their planes because that's what they liked doing, was flying. So there was a command problem where they just didn't think that missiles would really be worth it at any time. That sounds fake. No psycho on board. Yeah. to do what you want.

Exactly. So in the late 50s... I need to dream the humanity from someone to feel alive. So in the late 50s, they're kind of like... Doing the chesty puller thing of like, looking at the miss on being like, where do you put the guy with a cowboy hat? On top, clearly. Oh, we'll get to that.

Sorry. But they kind of dragged their feet a lot harder than they should have. So in the late 50s, they find out the Russians are doing things with their missiles, but they still think they're ahead. So they have one missile that's like the one, and it's called the Atlas. And it's kind of the, we know this works. It's better than the V2, and we can make it intercontinental. So we'll go with this and they just focused on it because they thought they could get done the fastest.

it's the one on the left. So it was like a balloon tank. It was just like if it didn't have its fuel in it, it would just collapse on itself if it was standing up or if it was put under any load. This was something that fascinated me from the commanded control book was just how thin the skin on these missiles are. That it was like, no, if they weren't fueled up,

they just fall apart under their own weight. Yeah, yeah, and this one was like really bad. It was like the thickness of a dime was the outer skin. But the big thing about it was- See, back in the day, you could just plow shares the shit out of stuff by just getting on base with a screwdriver and just like poking through this. Well, the subject of today's episode, God, this is why I should learn to read the heads.

no accidents I know of had Atlas have that problem though Atlas just had a problem of exploding on the pad because it was new it's a really thin coal primarily so what's special about it or different about it I should say is that at the bottom there. So it has three motors and the outside two fall off in flight and the center one keeps running all the way up to Apogee. Well, not all the way, but close to the top of its flight plan and then it drops the reentry vehicle down for presence to be delivered to Moscow. But that was how we knew technology. We knew we could launch a missile and the rocket motor

stay ignited, we didn't know if one could ignite outside the atmosphere. So in 195, the Air Force bid out a second contract for the Titan 1. And the Titan 1 was the, okay, if the Atlas fucks up in development, we'll have this undevelopment as well. And it was a two-stage rocket, or missile. I'm going to get yelled at because I'm going to interchangeable. those this whole time. It was a two-stage missile, so you would have your first take you up into the atmosphere, and then the second take you through the outside the atmosphere portion to deliver the reentry vehicle, which means you could lift heavier loads, because you'd lose the second half of your missile.

Both presents like Costco. Oh, yeah, big, big, very, very, very, more presents. Very large presence. More presents, plus the, the presents are like ideally moving even faster, you know. We are going to be so good at surprises. My take on the whole rockets versus missiles distinction is that rockets are just missiles with better PR. Yes. It's the tyranny of the Santa's sleigh equation.

Sounds like you're just using reindeer to bring up reindeer. So the big thing about Titan, the Titan 1 was the idea that it would be fueled in the silo so that it, the atlases were all quickly rushed into production and into delivery to where they were like, the one on the left is in a coffin above ground. So if you get surprised with your present early, the missile, the coffin, and everything gets wiped off the face of the earth before you can see. send the missile back to deliver your present.

But the idea with Titan was you could fuel it on the stand and then raise it out of the silo and then launch it once it's out of the silo. The advantage of this being that it's a bit hardened, I suppose. Very hardened, yeah. Okay. The difference being... If I want to throw my present at this in order to like stop you from using it to launch a present at me because of how much I love you.

then you would have a harder time, and maybe we'll both get present. So I wanted to point out two things with the Titan one, is one of the most famous shots of a rocket exploding, a missile exploding, is that the Titan one at Cape Canaveral seen on the right, well, that's not Cape Canaveral, but the missile on the right is on the stand, it fires its motors,

lifts off about two feet, and then collapses back onto the pad because the motors shut down because one of the umbilicals for the electrical connections didn't detach. So it was like, oh shit, it's actually not time to go and shut down the motors. Yeah, this is kind of what it's like when I like try to get out of a chair. Listen, I get a creaky noise, just a really loud. I've started going to talk therapy and, you know, I've been working on executive dysfunction,

so I understand this missiles problem. So I also wanted to point out, so they took these and they put them in underground hardened silos, but because they were liquid oxygen-fueled, they were like your standard NASA rocket, for those of you that don't know anything about this. It's like your NASA-style rockets where it's liquidite, oxygen, and fuel.

So you had to fuel it on the pad in the silo and then lift it out, which took about 15 minutes. You couldn't store the propellants on board the missile. So they would leave it in the hole, raise it, and then fire it after it was fueled. So it was on an elevator, right? The problem with that is that had to lift the fully fueled missile out of the hole,

to launch it. Should have built a missile escalator. On the first attempt to test that elevator, they fuel it, bring it out of the silo, everything's great. They go to put it back down, and the brakes fail. So the missile goes careening back down

to the bottom of the silo. It hits the bottom. Kind of like me trying to climb a flight of stats. You'd think during Operation Paperclip we would have grabbed a couple of the German elevator guys. Yeah. Tyson Crop.

I'm looking at Otis would be ashamed. Look, I just say it. This is very basic. So it blows up, obviously,

it blows up, and it launches the service tower there on the left, a hundred feet in the air, out of the silo, and that goes right back down into the hole, I'm told.

So like, self-contained. Does it get one of those hole-in-one minigolf celebrations and you get a free round? Technically winning a game of cabot toss with a nuclear weapon. That would be an entertaining subject for a, you know, a bowling alley, you know, strike animation. So do you think the service tower getting into the air was like sort of having the like anglerfish dying on the beach, I might never have known the thing of being the only one of its kind to see from above a hundred meters in the air.

I think if I had watched that happen live, like if I were there on the site watching it, I would have burst out into so much hysterics, I would have been fired on the spot. Yeah. You would have been a podcaster. All of these tests, I would have been the same way. We have even more to talk about. So I just wanted to point out, if you could have been a podcast. you've driven down I-75

through Georgia in Cordial, you have seen one of these. There's one sitting to the right of the highway because the local rotary club wanted one in the 60s. And they just got one. That's funny. Sure, man. I'm mad.

I didn't get one, but the fucking town of Cordial Georgia got one. It's not fair. All right. What is what is your home field trip? We're going to go steal a missile boy. This will show. I love the idea. of a nuclear-armed rotary. If you had told me a couple of years ago, or even a couple of minutes ago, that we would be

plotting an expedition into Georgia to steal a town's monument and take it down, I would not have guessed it would be a nuclear missile. I just want to know. Statues of Sherman to just like hold this L engraved and beautiful script. What is a crystal with a K and is it good? White Castle and... It looks like it's in the supreme font. William T. Sherman would have loved nuclear weapons.

I think we can be clear about that. He would have lit one of those off as soon as look at one. The South would have risen again in a mushroom cloud. Yeah, it would have risen several thousand feet in the air and come down as a fine powder, yes. Oh, we should have noot Lee. I think it's important to articulate William T. Sherman, within a grand, American military tradition of psychos. And yeah, he would have done it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Savannah would have been rendered into, how do I say, fine mist.

All right. So the Titan one was rushed and it only lasted in its alert life for three years. They built a bunch of these silos, put the missiles in them. And from 1962 to 1965, they worked. They sat there. Why so short, you say? Well, that's because of next slide, please.

During development of the Titan 1, like early in development, the designers were like, well, why don't we just use a propellant that can be stored, and then we can put it in the silo and just launch it from the silo. if it'll survive. I don't. What if we had a shelf stable missile?

See, exactly. Okay, that actually is really helpful for me. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We go from coffee can to coffee can full of bacon fat. Yes. Are we not supposed to be pouring that down the drain? No, you like a good Southern cook.

You have a coffee can. Yeah, probably from... This is my nuclear missile. It runs on grease fires. Yeah, exactly. That's where you put the bacon fat, you store it on top of the stove. Excuse me, in transsexual households, we use a pickle jar. Average Moscow civilian year 1965 being like, what smells so good, atomize?

Oh, it's just peppers and onions. So we get the Titan 2, the LGM-25C, which is where we get the Titan 2, the LGM-25C, which is where what the development, the deployed version was. It went in service in 1962. Why do you say that this went in service? Does that display behind it call it a sentinel of freedom? Jesus fucking Christ. Probably.

Yeah. Almost certainly. Yeah. Welcome to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Oh shit, that is the missile I've seen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. It is time for me to go to the Psycho Music. Oh, it's horrifying. I love it. I used to volunteer there. I don't think I'll be allowed back.

Victoria knows this. I love a machine of evil, right? Like, because she has seen me at the National Museum of Flight, in fact, it's supposed to a photo of me at the National Museum of Flight with an Avrovolcan holding a plushy Avrovolcan. So, I... That's adorable. It was really cute. I'm willing to commit.

It was so funny because like Nova and I were both like, oh my God, this is the sexiest killing machine ever devised. And my wife is looking at me like, you're both sociopaths. What the hell is wrong with you? That's a weird way to talk about the

10 warthog. You either have the psycho gene or you don't, right? Like my wife notably doesn't and so she was there with Antigone as well being like, what the fuck are you talking about? Why do you? Why are you looking at this machine whose job was to deliver presence to Moscow really quickly under the Russian air defense system and saying gender, or this is me actually, or real,

or things of that nature? Because you are a conscientious person who wants to deliver thoughtful gifts to your friends very quickly. Yeah, that's so true. Anyway, you would, you would, okay, just as a quick sidebar, the, the museum of the United States Air Force is like one of those museums that is completely unaware of how evil it is. It's kind of like, it's another level from even like the British museums in London where they're, instead of being like, yeah, we got this stuff. What about it? They're like, check it out.

This is box car. This plane killed 80,000 people. This shit's so cool with like, bald. Eagles on the infographic and you're just like, oh my God. They got American flagged truck nuts hanging off box car. Yeah, it's insane. Courtesy of the red, white, and blue just blare left and right. I went there when I was like 15 years old and this is before I had developed any ideology

and I was still fully a homeschooled altar boy. And I was like, this seems a little off to me. That's before they made a place. I have a vision of the Museum of the Air Force where you go in and it just has in 14-foot-high engraved letters on a face of granite bombing is an effective means of effectuating political change on the ground

and no one has done anything about that for years. Oh, God, yeah. This is what USAF officers actually believe. Can we do like a live show there, you think? You can rent the space. There we go. The foundation is willing to do anything for money. Oh, we got to do anything for money.

We got to do the National Army Museum in London because that's one of the only military museums in London that's like actively chudded. We can do a live show under the Lynx helicopter that's like a balanced and looks like it's going to drop onto all of us like a hitman. I want to do one at the Virginia Science. Museum under the SR-71 they have hanging there precarious. Actually, this is a great time to ask both Liam and Raz. You're coming with me to the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.

to do a live show there. Unfortunately, probably going to the Freedom 250 Grand Prix. You can get a plush ESR-71. Oh, yeah. And I am. Oh, yeah. Purchasing. 2499.

You have a job to do. Hey, hey, get off you back. Hey, look at me. Liam? Yes, Liam. Yes, ma'am. Victoria told me that when you were on Tran Gellismo, you were listening to the baseball game at the same time.

No, no, no. It was a basketball game, and it was our own bonus episode. The Sixers are having a hell of a run right now. They are! Okay, well, I'm still buying this SR-17. Yeah, no, that's fine. There's like five people on this podcast, it doesn't matter. We have fail safes.

We can deliver gifts to anyone at any time. Look at Scooter States right now. We have 29 more slides to guess. It does not matter. Buck and you, Bud. I got it like six. I got all night. Sixers aren't on until seven.

I'm going to watch it on you. I don't give a fuck. I think it's probably fine for me to spend as long as I want recording this. Okay. So the Titan 1 was used to test the Titan 2 silo launch concept.

So they stuck one in a silo launched it, didn't destroy the fucker, so they decided to build the Titan 2. It went in service in 1962 alongside the Titan 1 because we're psychopaths and we had to have as many missiles as possible in the Cold War. I don't understand this logic.

It's just like we had this, we had this ready to go, but we just like just more is more. We cannot allow a bomber gap. Right. We couldn't have a missile gap. All right. Henry Kissinger, Ross?

Post-1957, we couldn't have a missile gap, so why not have more? The only thing that stopped it was Robert McNamara. He came in, said it's just too damn expensive to have both these online. It's the Cold War. How is anything too expensive? Again, it's mind-boggling when you read about this shit, and you hear the word too expensive and not enough in the same sentence. but whatever.

They took the Titan ones offline because they could have 54 of these and then all of the Minuteman missiles and when I say all, I mean a thousand of which are solid fuel up in the north and then they put these out in the desert for the, not the desert,

but the central U.S. because we'll talk about later everything had to be kept the same temperature, liquid fuel. This was the large, largest missile we ever fielded at nine megatons with the W53 warhead. Last episode, we talked about the B-53 warhead, which was the one that went down Cumberland, Maryland, and the sheriff stood on to look at the wreck site.

Even though the Titan 2 was liquid-fueled and harder to operate, it was kept online because it was a third of the megatonage of all of our weapons, all of our missile systems. So it was 54 missiles out of 1,000, but it was a third of the power we had. Funny story, when they were building it, they couldn't figure out how to weld the aluminum. So they came up with a process in Baltimore and brought it over to Colorado where they were building these. it's one of those I really think the bug company should have been involved because they've learned to weld anything

but they figured out how to do the impossible to weld aluminum aluminum is very annoying to weld having done it unsuccessfully two or three times absolutely and a weird aluminum's even harder well no pressure though because it's only on a missile

it's only an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nine megaton warad on top. Yeah. Don't worry about that. And hypergolic fuels holding it all together. Yeah. So another thing about it is it has an AC spark plug internal guidance system. So General Motors put OnStar on it.

This reminds me of when my girlfriend got one of those cube Macs. And I found out one of the last like, water-cooled ones and she cracked it open and it had a Delphi part sticker on it. I was like, what the fuck? Well, Delco built the second guidance system but you know what's crazy is the one they put in in 1978

was also the guidance system used on the 747. Wow, what? Yep. The only difference between the two is you would leave the one on the missile on all the time. We're obviously the one on the aircraft would get turned off. But it was the same thing. You know, I mean, if it works, it works.

If it works, exactly. Yeah. Does this, does this, does this mean that the Soviets were justified for Korean Airlines flight 007? Why not? Sure. That is not a serious viewpoint. Don't yell at me.

It's a take we could start having for fun, I'm sure. Yeah, because James Bond was on it. I thought, General Melt our target. So it had an LR 87 stage 1 motor, which is that two double bell one that we'll see more of. And then LR. 91 stage 2 motor, which all Titans had. Just a little fun fact. And also it had three target. You could target it for three locations and three locations only.

So you had three buttons and you get told by Strategic Air Command, which push in the silo. And that's it. You just let it roll after that. What if you have a friend in a fourth location? Fuck them. It needs a gift. Don't worry about it. They're going to be a left out.

Sucks to suck. No presents for you. Hopefully one of your compatriots in a different silo will send them a present. Yeah, you have to have pre-planned all of your gifting, which, again, as we know, is a real problem. People were really thoughtful back then. I mean, this is a lot of work. This would make Christmas with a polycule so much easier. I mean, I mean, like,

for giving gifts, like, put me in the warhead of one of these. I could get to the pollicule way faster, you know? I'm here. Instead. And then since a lot of this often. In some ways, I feel more relaxed about the prospect of getting gravity's rainbowed to the polycule than I do flying commercial. That makes sense.

That, yeah. because we don't have high-speed rail and can't pick trains to lesbians in other states, we've had to develop an interstate ballistic missile system to launch Twitter lesbians at each other. Next slide, please. So you've seen this before. This is probably the most famous missile, in my opinion. It's been on Fallout 76, War Games, the movie with Matthew Brown. Roderick where scary shit happens.

Half-life. In I think all of the half-lifes, they just, the model for it's really shitty in the first one. You've got Gemini Titan, which is what sent astronauts into orbit to do the tests for the Apollo program. And my favorite is Venture Brothers. They use the model for what goes down must come up.

Rusty rides it. Yes. God, I love that show. I was making this. I was making this presentation and this slide was made. And I was watching the episode and had the like Leonardo DiCaprio like moment. So I had to change everything in this slide to fit it. And also I think that screencaprile.

I'm not illegal, but don't ask. So, but yeah, it's been in everything, and I'm sure I'm missing 20 different uses. So. Yeah, catch me bouncing around the divide in New Vegas, Lonesome Road, lighting off warheads off of this thing. That's one I missed. They use the same model. That's, it's that one too. Yeah, of course I do.

Because of the economy or whatever. It's all Titan twos. It's forever. It's the best rocket. We made it. We don't want to make it again. Fuck off. It's a Titan 2.

Next slide. So how does it get in the air? And Roz, you might have to help me with how this works, because I didn't do chemistry. I didn't like chemistry. It has stable liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, which is what Minuteman uses. Or cryogenic liquid fuel, which is what the Titan, one, the Atlas used. used. It used Aerozine 50 as a fuel and then unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrogene. Dymethylhydrazine. Thank you.

Oh, okay. What if hydrazine was worse? Yeah, if hydrogen was worse for you. Let's add two metals to the hydrazine, obviously, right? That's, sorry, that's what Aerosene 50 was, was hydrogen and Dinozene. methylhydrazine. The oxidizer. It's better and better. Hell yeah.

I can't wait to deliver my petrochemical gifts to my. I was going to say that the cloud. It breaks well on this slide. The launch cloud there looks delightfully yummy to breathe in. Oh, yeah. Bright orange smoke is turning you to Swiss cheese. Your lungs are going to look. That

three seconds of that is equivalent to a lifetime of American spirit turquoises I smoke reds yeah well I smoke stable liquid fuel Smoking Moulbara orange Smoking Marlborough red fuming The orange comes from the nitrogen

Texotroxide That one Yeah so this is Oxidizer I guess the idea here is, okay, so combustion, right, as a concept, you are taking some kind of organic molecule that you might find in, I don't know, wood or, you know, in like, what's another thing that burns? Coal. Toast. Toast.

Yes. You have a stroke. And it has, it, combustion is when it, with the presence of heat, it reacts with something with oxygen, right, such as the air, right? And it produces CO2, carbon dioxide, and it produces H2O, which is water, right? So when I'm, you know, and also produces, of course, energy. Now, so when I have a rocket, a missile, right, I want to do toast, but a lot more, right? So I need, my bread, my bread is the fuel, right? You know, in this case, I don't know what hydrogen is offhand, something terrible, I'm sure.

horrible, yeah. But then I have, you know, the air is not enough. Number one, because it's a rocket, it's going outside the atmosphere, but number two, even then, it's still not enough. So I have nitrogen tetroxide, which I didn't look this up, but I'm going to assume that's a nitrogen with four oxygens on it, with some kind of horrible bond on it, really difficult to achieve chemically. But that's like, you know, that as an oxidizer, that's way more efficient than just oxygen.

This is something, this is a molecule that wants to die. And if given the opportunity in the presence of, you know, your horrible fuel, it will go off with a bang. So, yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. This is a hypergolic fuel. You don't need to ignite it. It goes off spontaneously in contact.

Yep. But the fuel is explosive at 2% concentration. So it's like... That's not a lot of percent. Very spicy shit. I would say that's the second smallest number of percent there is. That's okay as long as you have more than that. Just displace the oxygen, you're fine.

So there's in the first stage 163,000 pounds of Aerosene 50 and 85,000 pounds of the oxidizer, because I can actually say that. And then the second stage has 28,000 pounds of fuel and 49,000 pounds of oxidizer. That's straight from the book. I've checked it twice. If that's error, my bad. No, that would be the book's bad. Here's a fun fact about hydrazine I just discovered.

Don't like this. So the recommended exposure limit is 0.03 parts per million in two hours. The odor threshold is 3.7. So. Oh, tasty. Actually, not spicy. Hmm. No.

If it becomes spicy, then you're already having a best time. Yeah, you've already, yeah. Yeah, you already die. Yeah, you're already dead. What is the Scoville rating of Hydrazine? Doesn't even have the decency to clear the sinuses before you die horribly. Keeping a small bottle of Hydrazine in my purse in case the food doesn't come out sizzling enough.

I like to put it on my fajitas. That's what they call the... When the phyedipators come out hypergolic, and it's just a photo of you being blunding. You're familiar with buffalo wings, correct? Oh, of course. The hydrogen special is the, that's a love canal wings. That's why the Mexican restaurant is called Mipueblo number three, because number one and number two were blown up by hydrogen explosions.

Yeah. Yeah, if you're ever in, if you're ever in a, where the fuck were we? Springfield, Kentucky? Springfield, Kentucky, yeah. Yeah, highly recommend me Pueblo. number three. Well, howdy, Sheriff? Howdy, Sheriff?

We don't need to tell that story all day. I keep it moving. So they did test launches at Cape Canaveral, and then they moved them to Vandenberg Air Force Base for integrating with the silo. Fun fact, in 1976, they launched the last one of these because they had run out of missiles. Wow. They were all the last remaining were part of the recycling program and in the silos. They stopped making them in the 60s and stopped making the parts in the 70s.

This becomes important later. This is a parts missile actually. So I included this slide just to give us an overview of the size. Project missile ran when parked. This was something I didn't really understand from the command and control book was the actual layout of the missile silo. Does it make a little more sense now? I haven't had time to read all the labels. There's a lot of leaders on here.

Fair. But the big thing, and we'll see it in other slides, is you have a doorway in the middle that goes downstairs. and then goes to a split hallway with two blast doors. Go the right, you go into the missile silo. Go to the left, you go into the command center. I love to go into the rejuvenation area. The only thing I can think of looking at this diagram is under most U.S. zoning laws, this kind of mixed use walkable or...

It's illegal. It's such a problem that bunkers are such a pain in the dick to maintain. Like, man was not meant to live under the ground, at least because like, do you know how like a toilet works, for one thing? Like, because I would love to live in a bunker. I would love to live beneath the ground, you know? And we decommissioned a bunch of these. This is, this looks like such a cool like hangout spot.

Like movie night with the girls here would just hit different. You could start, you could stuff this thing with a pollicule and like, it would be cool. You could stuff this thing with a polycule as just a hell of a sentence. Yeah. I said stuff. Oh, I don't know. Donald Fagan recorded a track about this, yeah. I look at the pollucal staff.

The pollucal moves in and we have to add one extra label that says chore wheel. Where's the Plex server go? Oh my God, Luna, I told you it was your turn to clean the fucking rejuvenation area. Who has custody of the keys, that's the real question. The dubs, obviously. The two people who hate each other the most, that means... Oh. Actually, that might not work.

They might, you know, they might mutually decide to end it all. Oh, fuck this. I'm out. And that's what you get for Dante, get the trash, maybe. The good news is that there's an escape hatch, which I think really lends itself to any habitation. I love when my house has one of those. of those? Oh, that becomes relevant later, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh. Very relevant. Yeah. Does the rejuvenation area become relevant? Yeah. I'm still not seeing this rejuvenation area.

So it's, if you go dead center, uh, beneath platform two decontamination shower decontamination area, rejuvenation area. So it's like, it's like, it's like a barotry, like you get out, you decontaminate and then you rejuvenate. You rejuvenate. Okay. Yeah. Sims.

I would have played the fuck out of the Sims like Titan silo D.L.C. So I have three friends, okay, maybe not friends, but three people I know. You have three friends? My God. I know three people that have silos. One has a Titan one, one has an Atlas, and one has a Titan two command center. One of them let me in to take pictures. I'm sure I could get the non-hyper-Republican one to do it.

Yeah, that's fair. That probably be a problem for me. Yeah, the ones for sale for like 900,000. So podcasting. I don't have that though. Can you imagine the audio quality though? Five years. So I mean, they might take lower offers.

Yeah. I have, I have, um, on me like 25 pounds. Well, we know that you have 25 less dollars because you bought the plushy S-R-71 earlier in the episode. So you could have been the difference. This is got financially ruin me. Are you aware that on alleyexpress.com you can buy a 120 centimeter tall Dongfang 5C and ICBM plushy? Ooh. I need you to drop the link for that right now.

You get a choice of a dongfeng 61 or a dongfeng 5c. I don't know my dongfengs that well, so this doesn't really help me very much. Is this what it sounds like when I talk about cars? Here is the thing I am looking at. Here in the silo, right? We have the missile fuel tank right next to the missile. Oh my God. I don't know what happens when that launches.

And then behind it. It doesn't matter. Yeah, I guess so. We also have the diesel fuel slop tank, which is, I assume, another name for our podcast. So there's 54 of these built for hundreds and hundreds of millions of $1960 per silo in Kansas, Arkansas, and Arizona. The one we're focusing on today, well, ones, there's multiple, are the Arkansas and Kansas. silos. So, very mid-west.

It's cool that in order to like stuff one of these, you have to be deployed to some of those miserable places on Earth. Yep. A lot of the people- Did they have one in Minow? Mine not. Oh yeah. I've only read it on an Amtrak sign. Canada must capture North Dakota in order to rename it and re-pronounce it.

That's where all the Minut-Mans are instead of these. actually pronounced Minuteman. Throw myself off my third story house. But the funny, funny story, the guys that operated the Titan 2 is called the Minuteman Missiles Beebees because they're low yield and the Titan 2's cannonballs. That's grim, I like that. I like the idea of a cannonball run as the long. I would be cool. We should do a, we should organize a road rally where you just drive to

every extant Titan missile launch site. Should be cool. Go to go to all the Minuteman ones in North Dakota and have the security forces chasing you the whole way. Yeah. Yeah. Volkswagen GTI. Try trying to do the Scientology run thing. Now hold on just a goddamn second. Because I'm on the next slide, right? And if we go to this, I need to know why the blast doors above this silo have the fucking open AI logo. That's not the open AI logo.

That's the bicentennial flower from 1976. Yep. For some, in all my research, I couldn't find why they did this on this silo, but they put the flower. Because it was the bicentennial. Sure. NASA did it to the building, did to the vehicle assembly building, so why not we put it on the silo? Perfect.

My country, Tis in the sweet land of Lendry of the I say. Mirror my God to thee, but it's just like, look at the flower. So this is your top side of the complex, of the silo specifically. And you have trailers outside, which are called hard, they're on the hard stands, which is concrete pads that you pull up the trailers full of the evil bad shit. So you have one for fuel to like go stand in the middle of the open AI logo and know that you are at like on the crosshairs of where another ICBM is aimed. Because like you can't really know for sure many other places exactly. But this one, you just be like, yeah, I'm going to go like, this is the gift portal, yes.

I'm excited. I'm excited for the present. They might give me something nice. You know, a first edition. Now that I'm getting older, I'm like excited for like socks and underwear and things like that, you know? If it's a Minuteman silo, it's like the fastest ride in the country because of the door getting flung off the top before the missile comes out. Actually, we'll get to that later. never mind.

I shouldn't talk about that. But anyway, there's trailers topside for extra fuel, extra oxidizer that are connected down to hard tanks down to the missile. In 1978,

so this is 16 years after the first Titan 2 was put on online. The Damascus site, 37-37-37-7, which is the site we're talking about today, had an oxidizer leak from a topside trailer. So one of these guys, because the heater got stuck on and boiled the oxidizer, creating a big plume when the vent went off,

killed a bunch of cattle, makes the local sheriff sick because he was trying to evacuate people because the Air Force didn't say ship to him. he just saw the cloud and was like, Orange Cloud, bad, probably should solve that. And made everybody nearby not really think the Air Force had their shit together

since they didn't say anything about it. Very, very funny to like establish sort of local rapport by poisoning the sheriff. Yep. Yeah, a hell of a job to make the, make rural Arkansas not trust the military. Yeah, I'm kind of impressed because this is the kind of shit we usually do

to other countries to put our military bases in. Doing it domestically is like, kind of impressive. A Cold War speed run, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a nuclear missile has never killed a single foreign national, but it's killed a hell of a lot of Americans. So, on that note, next slide, please.

That's a beautiful statistic and one that could invert instantly. Yes. This should be the funniest slash worst devon text update. for when this episode was recorded we've ever done. Hold on, I've got to use the restroom. I'll be right back. You know, this is not a show to do

if you have an anxiety disorder or OCD. That's crazy because I think every host has an anxiety disorder. Yeah. Yeah, well, maybe we shouldn't for a living do the podcast that makes you feel bad. Well, see, here's the thing, right? I started a podcast that was supposed to make me feel better,

and then it turns out everything so bad that I can feel bad. Like, this is a total, like, you know, non-sequitur or whatever, but I've been talking about that stupid IndyCar race they're doing in Washington, D.C. As, like, a joke. And then today they released a bunch of white nationalist propaganda with the official IndyCar store. And it's, like, damn, it sure feels like, Like my personal has become political or vice versa.

It does, it does kind of, it is, it is sometimes that bad. Yeah. But I worry that that's giving me a kind of, it's really, it's really, it's really a good bit to be like a car enthusiast and be like, who, finally, a contextless thing for me to focus on as an American, first of all. But that also at the same time has gas, seven dollars a gallon, scooter your puritive, like, well, I'm not sure what you're doing. The Titan Missile Museum just got back to me right now. Oh shit. About this podcast.

It is simply time for all of us to go to North Dakota. Tucson, Arizona, but that's not the thing. I have got to thank this guy. I have been looking for, ever since Roz and I talked about doing this, months, literal months. I posted on Twitter. I've just everywhere trying to find the size of the socket that is the focus of today's podcast. Time elevator.

That was going to be the joke until I got it. But everything says 8.75 pounds. Everything. Every book, every person I asked multiple people I interviewed. And the ones that remembered were like, yeah, it's 8.7. 75 pounds. I'm like, that is not a socket size. That is a weight.

You're right there, bud? I'm back with more coffee. Roz, Roz, they got back to me. I got the size of the socket. Really? Yeah, I just got the email like now. Oh my God. Thank God.

Yeah. That's the most important piece of information in the podcast. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put this, this photo in the Discord here. Oh. Oh. I love that. I'm actually gonna buy that plushy missile to go with my plushy, roll with my back with my not plushy Duran.

This is like an advanced blahage. This is what all the trans girls who work at Lockheed cuddle with the sleep. Oh, God. We see you our very specific audience. Yeah. Yeah, that comedian can't make fun of you. Only we can make fun of you. That's true.

That is, this is what I believe, yes. All right, so now that Rob's is back, can we continue on? Yes. No. Damn it. No, we're stuck here forever. So the silo is pictured. There you go.

That's what looks like when it's about to ship your presence to your friends. It's a hole in the ground. It's a butthole. It's a hole in the ground with rails. Is that how your butthole? That's how your butthole works. He has a big, like, cover that slides off. Yeah.

It's like, I'm constantly wearing a pair of footy pajamas, man. And it's got the bicentennial flower on it. Yeah. You know those those bling butts they sell for cats that you can put on their tail and it covers or butthole like a sparkly thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that.

What the fuck are you talking about? You've never seen that? No. No, it's so stupid. It's so good, though. It's a little sparkly thing for your cat's butthole. What does the cat think of that? What do you care?

It's cat. It's cat. mad because I said that. Hinged butt plug is not a thing I thought I would ever come up with, but like this. Lambo doors. Oh my. So anyway, the silo door is on rails that's lifted up by hydraulics and then pushed over.

Unlike Minutemen that launched the door out of the way and just fling it because, you know, use once for obvious reasons, I hope. I argue that that makes the Titan 2 an EMD because it's got General Motors guidance system and it's on rails. It's a train. Yeah, it's a train, yeah. It's a train.

So while we're on this slide... Consult Garish chart. While we're on this slide, there's two other incidents we need to talk about with the Titan 2's history. In 1966- Remember when they designated the gadget barn at Trinity.

Too far back. In 1965, while they were upgrading a silo with the missile still in it, fueled, but the warhead removed because there were civilians on site, they were welding, is what the Air Force says, but not welding, if you asked the guy that was in the silo. And a hydraulic line burst and or got sprayed with sparks and set the missile silo on fire. Two people survived finding their way out by luck, I guess, is the best way I put, while 53 guys died. Jesus Christ. Mainly of smoke inhalation, but some were like burned into the silo.

That's no way to die in a hole in the ground, and the sort of ending the earth by the No, it's completely undignified. It's awful. But the missile that was in the silo at the time was missile 62 triple six. This becomes important. Oh, Satan. Or triple zero six, my bad. You know Satan is the code name of a Soviet ICBM?

That was the reporting name. So. Yeah, NATO just gave those. They were just handled out whatever they felt like. It's like, yeah, this one's really bad. Yeah, coeratively assigned reporting name. Yeah. Yeah.

Once again, somebody else deciding for me, they'd be called me a faggot. Anyway. Victoria. Jesus. I only know the civilian airliner ones. Good. Good. Yeah.

Maintain your innocence. No cis people are allowed to refer to the Ming-15. One of the helicopter ones is the hormone, which I approve of. Ooh. Ooh, that'd be a good, that'd be a good next tattoo. I identify a- I've literally suggested this to you before. I think you may have, yeah.

All right, well, next time we hang out, let's just go get tattoos together. We'll get matching Soviet aircraft. Hell yeah. Oh, that, I want to go. Oh, that rules. Especially since it's a cam off KA. 25, which is one of the cool, like, bug-looking Navy ones. Ooh. Yeah. So to ruin the mood, the silo was put back in service within a year, but a lot of the burns were still there.

They didn't paint over all of them. Oh, there's just, like, a guy silhouette. Yeah. The guy-sized hole in the wall. Yeah. This is my hole. It was made for me. This is ruining the rejuvenation. Juvenation area. So later on in

1970s. It's not working. That guy's still dead. Jesus. In 1976, we go back to Complex 374-7. Mechanical maintenance team was sent into the silo to clean hydraulic fluid off a missile from a burst hydraulic line. To do that, they use the industry standard, as I've come to find out,

Freon 1-13. They'd spray it on a rag and wipe it down. Hell yeah. What is now probably like $1,000 to $2,000 a jug. They were just spraying on rags and wiping the aluminum down. But they were taking the rags they were wiping everything with and just dropping them down to the bottom of the silo where the launch duct was that vents the gas is out. That's a downstairs problem.

Well, that's somebody else's problem. No, because one of those guys had to go get it, right? So he goes down in the very bottom of the silo where there's fairly low air movement because it's a nuclear missile silo and just falls to the ground. Gone. Oh, Jesus. Ooh. Okay.

The other guy goes down and starts smelling fumes and leaves. What happened was it was fucking Freon in an enclosed space. Yep, that sounds about right. Guy inhaled it, ran out of oxygen, died. The investigation shows they had used 2.5 gallons of Frion. Jesus Christ. I'm beginning to, I think I'm beginning to understand how the hole in the ozone layer maybe got there.

Uh-huh. Yeah, I found out this is how they cleaned dark spots off of trains too. This is, so. I gotta say in terms of beast kinds of incidents, the fact that the second guy wasn't like, I'm gonna go save that guy. He definitely saved some lives. Yeah. Oh yeah, and then was like, whoa.

with his own. Yeah, yeah, usually, usually three or four guys go in before someone gets the picture. Do not enter the confined space to rescue someone, the life you say, maybe your own. You want to know how they fix this? They were to log the use of how much Fri-on they used when they were cleaning, and we're told not to throw rags in the launch dock anymore. Good enough. That would fix it.

You should probably probably be using something else. You have to stop, you have to stop saying Kobe when you throw the rags coated and free on. But this wouldn't even like have been Kobe at the time. It would have been like a guy you've never heard of. It would have been like the threat about the old guy at the YMCA basketball game who's doing bank shots off your soul. Bob Cooset. Yeah. Will Chamberlain, right?

I've heard of him, and I'm not a big best. A son, a woman say, Kobe is very funny to me. Comey. It's a very, one of my favorite pronunciations you brought us. Okay, next slide. I'm sorry. Maybe if I listened to the basketball games during the recordings, I would be better at

pronouncing the names. I meant it in a charming way. I was a Kobe beef. Yeah, Kobe beef. Yeah. I was maybe confusing him with the beef. I'm sorry.

That's okay. He's, I think, named after the region of Japan, but I may have that wrong. I may have to drop Corinne's having an allergic reaction. So if I just go dark,

just... Oh, God. Yeah, no, of course. Yeah. Yeah. She's, she had allergy shots. That's today. I don't want to. Yeah. So we're going to go as long as I can.

Yeah. Roll tide, buddy. Well, hopefully it gets better. That's awful. I hate when mine comes to. Yeah. Okay. Let's roll. And then if I need to drop, I'd need a drop. Understood. Okay. So we have gone to the beautiful small town of Damascus, Arkansas. Population small. There's a grocery store and not much else. And I'm not talking then. I'm talking today.

Just north of that, about where the flag is on the map there, is Site 374-7. We've talked about it. 382 people. Come to Damascus, see the scenic site 374-7. This sounds like the type of town that doesn't even have a restaurant where they do things a little differently. Yeah. They do they have

Oh we got both kinds of music Country and Western Dude they have a restaurant called Amigo Loco Amigo loco Yeah Amigo Loco Mexican restaurant

I bet this fucks I bet that's really good actually It is either the best It is either the best restaurant You could possibly go to Or the absolute worst Oh this is Having eaten at the one Mexican restaurant

about keeping a small bottle of hydrazine in my purse to put on the phaetus. Good news. There's Damascus liquor right next to sun gas propane. Oh, yeah. Just the key the quick way out. Oh, yeah. Well, I ran through Damascus right before this, and I was dark, so I didn't see any of this shit. And that's unfortunate. I would have totally gone to the Mexican restaurant. Anyway, focus. So Damascus is just north of Little Rock, Arkansas,

and at Little Rock is where the 308 strategic missile wing is based, which is the reporting base for all the missile crew. So you'd be base there and then you get sent out to the whole. I always forget that they don't have like, they're geographically dispersed by design, but it's not like on the grounds of one big base. It's like there is a base, and then they just send out just some guys, you know? Yeah, it's like a three,

the silo is like a three acre property with a fence around it, and that's it. You got to drive there in your car. Yeah, well, that's what they did. They drove out like Suburvans and shit with said Air Force on them. I want one really bad. Like a blue suburban with yellow lettering on the side from like 1976. Ooh, okay, okay.

Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Blue lights on top. God. That was the world's hugest car back then and now it's barely the size of the money. Still get seven miles

to the gallon though. Hell yeah. Oh yeah. My most, my most macho vehicle I ever had was a suburban with the 454 in it and unfortunately

for his, for his blue-haired and pronoun as I am, that thing fucking ripped. That got nine miles a gallon whether you were idling in traffic or pulling like an entire like super yacht behind you.

It's awesome. It's like a gas turbine. You either have the psycho gene or you don't. The Avrovolcan of domestic SUVs. Yeah. Speaking of having the psycho gene, next slide, please. Oh, here we are. Oh, man, that guy sitting at the computers where it got the operator glasses.

Yeah, this is the combat crew. It does, yeah. This is not the combat crew for a silo, but this is like one of the class pictures of the guys that turn the keys and launch the missile. Crew consists of four men. To call that combat makes some deep sort of part of my soul revolt, you know? I mean, when they turn the keys, it is combat. They are going into war. Yeah, sure, I guess.

They are going to be evaporated right after they turn the key. This, this to me is an American. Americanism. What you're doing is not, it's not combat. It's something different. What exactly were you supposed to do after you turn the key? Like,

what was the protocol then? Return to base. They let you have a cigarette. No, I talked to a guy. You were supposed to turn the key, missile go off, standby for orders, but most of them had talked with upper management. And it was,

it was you were going to return to base and then get reassigned to another location. because we were at war. The thought of returning to the nuclear missile race. Yeah, I don't know, guys. I might give this a few minutes. Let's see what happens.

We can take a break. It's fine. Yeah. All right, let's take a 30 minute break, everyone. Nova, to your point, this is still more skin in the game that the average drone pilot has. So, like, I don't know what that says

about modern America. So it's a four-man team, a commander, deputy commander, ballistic missile analyst technician, and a facility maintenance technician. So the last two guys, one knows about the missile and what the fuck it's doing and making sure it's ready to go. Oh, and the other one knows where it is. I know this. Bingo. The other one knows about the facility it's in and make sure it works. And that's it.

That's all they do. So, oh shit, that is a really nice suburban. Sorry, I just found it. Hold on, hold on. Put the link in the thingy. Oh, yeah, don't worry. Four guys driving one of these to work. Yeah, it's pretty good.

There you go. It's in the Discord. Oh, it's in the Discord. Okay. We're going to have to start, you're going to start doing the Transgirlies mode. Yes. We put all of the images you refer to in the show in the show notes.

That that does fuck. Yeah. Yeah. This thing is that this this this whips. This this this this this this this this. Just imagine rolling up to a live show all of us in that. Oh yeah. Lights on.

Lights on. Two people jump out the back. Oh God. We all inexplicably have DOE carbines for some reason. We're dressed. We're all dressed. dressed in RFCO suits. If you told me I could get a DOE carbine out of it, I would come to America tomorrow.

I got a buddy, but anyway. So the launch procedure is really simple. You have two guys at two consoles, far enough away from each other that they can't, one person can't turn the keys. You turn the keys, the batteries get charged. There's a maximum arm length to be an essay. Just like holding each other back. Like not touching,

can't get mad. But the batteries charge, the door opens and the missile ignites its engines, sits for a second, builds up power, and then comes out of the silo, takes about 58 seconds. Once the keys turn,

it's gone whether you want to be or not. Later on, we're going to hear a story about what happens when that, when that procedure starts. But that's at the end. You want to talk about jobs that are bad for people with anxiety and or OCD. So watching the documentary, the guy in one of the guys in this picture is just like the most nervous man I've ever seen.

Now he went through this disaster, but like I can't imagine him having to turn that key. He's like, I would have done it. It's for our country. I'm like, dude, you couldn't have stood up to do it. You look nervous. And I doubt he was different then. Can I just ask real quick? Yeah.

What's the fuck-ass turtlenecks? That was the uniform. That was a strategic air command combat uniform. Keeps you warm in the event of nuclear winter. I thought those were neckerchiefs, my God. No, it's, I think it is neckerchiefs. Yeah. It's a scarf.

Ridiculous. Americans are so cool. Dandies. I love it. about to annihilate the entire player. You don't have to hand it to us. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. No, I don't. Give it to me.

Next slide. We're the, we're the Boy Scouts who are going to kill everyone. I do sweat. Chicago's our friend. Do you want some donuts after church? Visual all the gags, maybe. So, oh, hey, I remember this

motherfucker from Lonesome Road. Yeah. Same missile. So they would change these missiles out on a regular basis. Well, you know, like every, I think it was two years. The one guy told me, I couldn't find it in a book. They would change these out just to recycle them, go through components, make sure the electronics were fresh, the batteries were fresh, etc.

Oh, it's new missile day. It's new missile day. Still got that new missile smell? you have been exposed to three PPM of high reason. This is the time before, like, we had the cool transporter truck that was built out for all this shit. They just put it on a fucking flatbed semi and hauled it through the Midwest, which is wild. It's before, like, the interstate was finished, so it's just going down some, the main street is some town. Yeah, there's pictures of it.

It was really hard. River City, Iowa. You like this, you cousin, fuck. But yeah, they just brought a crane out and just like, down in the silo you go. Plop. But so the complex we're at 374-7. So we're going to call it 4-7 from now on, so I don't have to say that every time. Can we just?

4-7. 4-7. It had just completed a recycle three weeks before the date we're coming up on getting missile 62-0-006 The same missile killed like 50 people The missile didn't do it, but it was in the silo it watched The missile that has seen men killed The missile knows where it is

is because it knows who it's killed. So there's a site in Rock, Kansas that had just gone through a recycle in 1978. And when they went to go redo, refill the missile with oxidizer,

the hose that you put on the oxidizer plug shot off and started unloading oxidizer into the silo. The guys that were doing this work wore what are called Refco's, and we'll get to a slide that has them next. And that is a rocket fuel handler's cover outfit.

I, fuck, I need to look at the other slide. Cover all outfit, Refco. It's a spaceman suit with a plastic visor. It's your PPE for handling oxidizer and other horrible chemicals. and and aerosine 50. Yeah. Yeah. But.

Oh, wow. That fully is just like a space suit. Yeah. Cool. So these guys like go running out of the silo and it's a whole story we don't have time for. Other guys die because they were left in it and then they drug them back out. Another guy dies because he did that.

I just want to point out the sentence. We don't have time for that an hour, 55 minutes, not yet through half this slide. I'm working on it. But anyway, they run out, go through the command center, and go up the escape hatch in their Refco suits. This becomes important later. So our disaster starts here. Yep, here we are, folks. September 18th, 1980, the combat crew arrives that we saw earlier, and they're told that the stage two oxidizer tank has been fluctuating.

is now low, which means the missile will have to be taken offline and not be able to go deliver presents in a hurry, which is bad. Strategic Air Command doesn't like that. You never know when you have to, you know, your friend might be depressed and you have to give them a present. Really surprised them, yeah. Yeah. If you're ever not ready to deliver a present, then the real psychos at SAC get really mad at. Yeah, actually. And with Ronald, Reagan, about to assume power. They had to be like, we got to keep the missiles online

or otherwise he'll cut our funding to do Star Wars instead. Yep. Yeah. Actually, though. So also, they have to do a walk around the silo just to like inspect everything when they do a changeout.

And they notice that in the hard water tank, which is the fire suppression system's water tank, the tank float switch is stuck open. So somebody has turned the fill for the hard hard water tank off. So they add that to the maintenance checklist. This also becomes important later. Next slide.

So now we get to the PTS team. This is the propellant transfer systems team. They're the guys that wear the refco suits, go out to the missile and do the most dangerous job I could fucking think of working for the Air Force. Because spicy, very spicy fuel to play with. Um, these guys are like, looking at the kind of sweat on the inside of that guy's visor, this looks like one of the most miserable jobs in the Air Force as well.

Yeah. These are the suits they wear to go into the backrooms. Yes. This is like all-time level of like recruiter trick-knowledge, right? Is to go and do almost anything in the Air Force, smash cut to you are inside the fucking astronaut diaper suit, shielded again by like a millimeter of plastic from the chemical that kills you instantly, and you are in Arkansas. Oh for four.

So it is an Arkansas summer, and you are in this thing with no air conditioning. Oh, you are about to get the purple heart for like, like, like jockstrap, it. The Ozarks, yep. So, like, these guys, like, got fucked when they got in, but once they got in, they would all be, like, super, super close. Like, these guys were all crazy, but, like, stuck with each other really hard. Special brand of psychos. Oh, yeah. This is, this is, like, the, this is, like, the, the sort of, like, garrison of, like, a French foreign Legion fought in the 1890s in, like, uh, fucking Mauritania, you know?

So these guys are the special group of psychos because one of their favorite things to do as a prank would be to take a ping pong ball full of oxidizer and throw it into a bucket of fuel and watch the bucket explode while they were waiting to do shit. Just guys being dudes. What's better than this? Also, if they had a guy they didn't like, he'd get like in his refco suit, which is just like plastic. Like, I've seen them at the Air Force Museum, and the one there, I wanted to get a picture, but I forgot to when I was there for the last presentation, has like taped all the fuck over it. Like, that thing must have ripped all the fucking time.

At this point, I realized that the minimum age limit for enlisting in the United States Air Force is 17 years old. Oh, that becomes a factor soon. So one of the other things they would do You can't trust a 17 year old with a nuclear missile Who can you trust? That's true. Yeah.

One of the other things they would do is take a hose Once the guy they hated got in his suit Stick the hose in them and then slap his helmet on So he couldn't get out. What the fuck? That's just that's That's fraternity level torture. That's fraternity torture.

Yeah. Less hazing, more drowning. Yeah. Rushed pailam, I guess. So to do any fuel work, you were supposed to go category one, which meant two guys in Repco suits going into the silo, and then two guys standing by outside the silo, and then three guys topside doing all the work with the trailers and one crew committee. Which of them were like throwing ping pong balls full of explosives into buckets of

explosives? The three guys up top. And you just dodging them like You just Yeah Dunkin weed baby So we're at the site The oxidizer needs refueled

Or re-upped with nitrogen So that the tanks at the right pressure So one of these teams PTS teams goes out And the two guys that are picked to go downstairs Are David Powell Who's 21 years old and he's one of the two, one of the two that are going category one, he's been on the job for three years.

So he's been doing this since he was 19. 18, sorry. So the other guy that's going down with him is Jeffrey Plum, 19 years old, who is doing his on-the-job training. Oh my God. In the space. Yeah, get the apprentice to do it. Are we the baddies? A tale is, a tale as old as time.

Get in there, pledge. So it's September 18. I probably could have handled that at 19 years old. It's September 18th, 1980, 3 p.m. Everyone think about how you were at 19 years old. I was drunk. No. I was drunk.

I don't remember. I don't remember because of the gender. Because of woke is why. So it's 3 p.m. Quite literally, yes. I was doing a redacted speed. my dad's Honda Civic I was borrowing. I did not have the like frontal lobe development yet to adequately repair a missile.

Nuclear or otherwise. At the age of 19, I was, at the age of 19, I was a pair of twink legs sticking out of a cloud of Marlborough smoke. Yep. Yep. Yep. Not really a twink, but yeah. That has... Marlboro smoking.

So it's 3 p.m. They've been on the job because they were at a different site first. So they've been on the job for like I think is six hours at this point. They get to the silo and the back force. I'm very sorry to interrupt. Oh, God. I'm very sorry. It's time. It's time. Yes, yes. It's time.

I was about to do it. I was about to do it. Yes. my beloved wife's birthday. So happy, Happy birthday, Nova! Happy birthday! Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday. Why are we doing like a dirt? Happy birthday, dear Nova. Happy birthday. Day to you. Thank you so much. I'm old now.

No, you're not. I just sent the present. You'll get it in about 30 minutes. This will be, of course, dating the episode on account of, you know. We'll put a literal timestamp on that. Thank you. Thank you for hijacking my work to celebrate me being old. I am not in the remotest bit, sorry.

Uh-huh. I love you so much. I love you too. Happy. I can't say that on YouTube for it. Thank you. I love all of you too. Thank you for, thank you for, yeah,

thank you for helping me celebrate my 20th birthday in style. I love doing the podcast. You know, it's, it's, they, they, they, they, they say 20 is the new 10. Do they, do they say that? I met the sky. No, no, no, no, no. We can't be pedophiles. Oh, happy birthday.

What did you get me? Oh, we got us the entire podcast canceled, and your single largest source of income zeroed out overnight. I should be very clear and say that we are not pedophiles. Yes. Thank you, Lynn. I got you. Official stance of the podcast.

Oh, God, damn. If this is what being 35 is like, it's fucking sucks. Jesus, take me back. Nope, nope, and the big hook comes out. Now. Oh, good. We're, what are we about halfway through? Yeah.

All right. You know, tell me about this taking long. It's not my fault. I'm so, this episode is so long that I was a year younger when we started. Boom. Boom. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is, you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes,

so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Okay. All right. September 18th, 3 p.m. at 1980. the platforms won't lower in the silo so they have to get the hydraulics text out first

so these guys have to wait even longer to go into the silo their birthdays are coming up they want to get the fuck home exactly yeah so finally the crew comes out on a helicopter with the parts to do it they get the platforms to lower and they get these

plum and pal into the cableway of the silo to go pressurize it. Now, normally you're supposed to use a torque wrench by the new technical order, which I'm not going to read, you have to use a torque wrench. That changed from using a ratchet and a socket

that were inside the cableway that was part of the go kit, essentially, in case you need to go into the silo and tighten something or do something out. The torque something. The torque The torque wrench

and the ratchet both have one of those little knobs that come out to hold the socket on. Same. Except on the ratchet that they're using, it won't lock. So they're not supposed to use

this ratchet in the first place, but they do anyway because they've been out there forever. And at 6 o'clock-ish, they work their way towards the silo or the missile to take a dust cap on. To then be able to put the hose on, to put nitrogen in the tank. I love precision machinery where it's like, yeah, the dust cap needs a precision torque. Yes. Because if you torque it more than 160 pounds, you rip the skin off the missile apparently.

Ah, well, you know. Yeah, fun little. Is that kind of like delicate and really welded aluminium? Yep. Yeah, the Atlas had a dime thick skin. Apparently this had nickel thick skin. I know that doesn't mean anything to you. I don't.

Yeah, sure. Explain this to me in real money. Thicker by, thicker by a little bit more. That's about it. What is that in Pence? Yeah. Yeah. Fuck if I know.

Dime thickness. That you're asking the same person that doesn't like that. I like to think that I have some dime thickness personally myself, but you know, it's whatever. I would say it's a 16th of an inch versus an eighth of an inch, but you also don't use freedom units. So I don't know what the fuck to do here. 1.35 millimeters. Okay.

So UK coin thicknesses. This is riveting content, right? Actually, it's torque wrenched. Yes, yes. And you wonder why it takes so fucking long. Exactly 160 foot paths. That is thinner than any coin currently in, like, issued in the UK. Wow.

That's crazy. Put them on rail tracks. That's why your money is worth more. Yeah. All right. So next slide. What? Roz, if you do the, do the honors of reading the time.

So it's September 18th, 1980, at 6.30 p.m. They're taking the dust cap off with the ratchet. One guy is holding the socket with his hand while the other is holding the ratchet on and pulling the lever. Powell pulls the ratchet off and the socket falls off the end of the ratchet. It hits the platform, rolls, and goes right between the missile and the platform. straight down. I love the photo where the guys are posed looking exactly like they're both like, oh, dang.

Powell says over the silo radio, oh no. And that's the last thing he says until they get back in the command center. Oh, well, at least there's a subordinate clause there, you know? I like how the riveting on the side is like Gothic cathedral windows. So about that socket, it's not a 10 millimeter. It is three. So they would never have found it then. Three inches and one-eighth size socket, aka 8.75 pounds.

This is a big motherfucker. Next slide, please. Roz, do you know what's funny? What? The socket I picked out for this picture is the same size. I got a 3.1.8s. That's a big socket. It's a big motherfucker.

That's a big fucking socket. Yeah. I wouldn't want to fuck with that. Yeah. And they drop that down 80 feet. It hits the thrust mount and hits the side of the mess. Bounces up and hits the side of the missile. Oops.

Big oops. Uh-oh. Previous slide, please. So the, The ring is the thing about the suits is any kind of suit like that, great opportunity for physical comedy. Because even just the guy like bending over and looking down is just getting me in hysterics, kind of. Just be like, oh, that's that's not gone well. No. The picture in the center there is the actual, not the one that did the oopsie, because it probably

is gone gone. But this is the same size. at the Titan Missile Museum. So, old big motherfucker. Pre-impact socket, you know. Yeah, because they could take the uga-dug-dug-to-this?

Bad idea. Supposed to use a torque wrench for a reason. Ah, tight's tight. Yeah, tight-st-tight. So next two slides, please. Sorry. So they, The commanders are in the control center, and all of a sudden, the claxon goes off, all the lights on the command console light up.

Everything goes haywire. So they press the reset button, because when you're doing this kind of operation, you might let a little oxidizer out and the sensors pick it up. No big deal. They reset it, and it all just comes right back on. And what's wild is, what's wild is, as. this fuel spraying out of the side of the missile from this impact, the fuel warning comes on, fuel in launch duct, and also the oxidizer in launch duct warning comes on, which... Oh, but those two things react to each other, they're close.

You can't, yeah, you can't do that. So they're like, hey, guys, what's going on out there? And they're like, hey, we see a white cloud in here without saying what happened. I didn't do it. Well, they don't say anything. 19-year-old move. Exactly, though. Yeah, it just sort of happened.

I just did that. I don't know. It just did that. So they come back into the, they get told to come back into the command center, and that's when they tell the commanders that, oh, yeah, I dropped the socket. Oops, sorry.

Yeah. What happened? What? I drop the socket. What? I drop. I drop the socket. Using the senior Avon's full name so he knows he's in trouble.

Yeah. What did you? I dropped the socket. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So the fire also kicks on. The fire warning kicks on. This is important because vent fans won't run if the fire alarm's going off.

and if there's vapor, or sorry, if the fire alarms go off, the water suppression system goes off, which then turns the vapor alarms off because you don't want to get water in the vapor detectors. So the fire suppression goes off, which means water is mixing with the fuel, which is diluting it, which is helping the situation currently. the combat crew commander is so pissed off that he didn't find out until about 30 minutes after this happened that when they go to tell Strategic Air Command and the local commander, that he does a very catty thing and puts Powell on the phone instead just telling them what happened. Oh, that's rough.

Like you're like captain or your major or whatever puts the scene. senior airman on the phone and it was like, tell them what you did. Tell them what you did. Is Powell the one who's 19? No, pal's the 21-year-old. Oh, okay. Well, at least this one can have a drink afterward. You just went to your dad gets home. So at 7 p.m., the fuel tank pressure for stage one, which is the one leaking, is at 2.6 PSI. the oxidizer tank is at 18 PSI.

Now, I read off both because the fuel tank is currently going down and is going to approach the negatives. That's bad because the missile can collapse. The oxidizer pressure is rising because temperature is going up because of the fuel in the silo, which means the oxidizer tank could potentially explode. Or pop the poppet valve, or pop the poppet valve, which is. the emergency vent in case it gets too hot, touch the fuel vapor, and explode. So because this is a giant cluster fuck with the missile, the missile potential hazard team is formed, and that's next slide.

The missile, big oopsie reaction force. This consists of Colonel John Mosier. I dropped the socket. Just one guy is still wearing the fucking astronaut suit, having to take this socketless wrench into more and bigger offices, just traipsing sadly down a corridor until he gets to this conference room, which is full of guys with stars on their shoulders. What did you do, son? I dropped this talk, yeah.

I dropped it. I'm sorry. Oh, you're gonna cut to super Guantanamo. That like, that like junior enlisted have had some bad days at work. I don't know that they can be a lot worse than this. So this, please let me take the suit off. I got the fucking. No, the suit stays on during sex.

Just imagining him outside sitting his Dodge calendar like, ripet the same, he's fucking grumbling at the ground, still sitting in the space suit. I dropped it. Just like trying to get the Marlborough red to the face, but the visor keeps getting in the way. Six hours later, he finally gets to take the soos off, and there's like a sort of a bucket's worth of piss and tear a sweat coming out of my first. Smells like dog surgery as soon as you hit the zip. Why is that's just sloshing? That's just a normal 19-year-old smell.

Oh, yeah, get the airmen in here. Slush, slosh, slosh. Sounds like he's wading through a river, which functionally he kind of is. I love my job. I drop the socket. Oh, the saddest spaceman in the world. You're on control the Major Tom, dude's just pissing. Well, the good news, son, is you're going to get to wear a space suit.

Ooh, you're not going to go up, though. Quite the opposite, really. So the missile potential hazard team is formed. And that is the commander of the 308, which is their Little Rock. this is now his problem to deal with. And he has to call everybody that has ever touched a Titan to to try and figure out what to do because the command team has found out as they've been going through the checklist

to figure out how to stop a fuel leak, that there is no checklist to stop a fuel week. So the hazard teams formed and you have Colonel John Mosier, who's been on the job for three months, and has never touched a Titan 2. He was a Minuteman Colonel. He was a Minuteman officer,

so he understood the Minuteman system. You then also have Colonel Ben Scallorn, who's Deputy Chief of Titan Missiles for the Eighth Air Force. So this guy is, he was there when they were building the silos. He's been in the Refco suits, working on the missiles,

and now he is the guy that understands them. This becomes important later, because he's not happy during this whole ordeal. No, I would also not be happy. You also have Martin Marietta who built the missile, and they're in Colorado with their, they call in their executive team and also their technicians to try and figure out what's going on.

The executive team is surprisingly candid throughout this. I just want to remind everybody. Now, the guy that's not candid is Lieutenant General Lloyd Dick, Levitt, Strategic Air Commanders of Vice Command. How do you get the nickname Dick when your name is Lloyd? And I know the answer. His middle name's Richard, but... No, that's stupid.

Lieutenant General Lloyd asshole Levitt. Well... And his brother, fuckface! Again, I'm just thinking, you are a space-suited, piss-coated senior em who has just become the problem of two colonels and a lieutenant general. I dropped the socket. And some multi-millionaire executives in Colorado. Now, I would really, really, really like us to sell a shirt with a sad space man, and I dropped the socket on it.

It is like this. anyone else. If you want to draw us, if you want to draw us a sad space man with half a socket, right? Oh, get in touch. Mark Marietta, I dropped the socket. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, Leavitt is a fighter general. He was only in planes.

Oh, asshole. To the top of Strategic Air Command because he was a... was a decorated fighter pilot and then fighter command. I see this asshole in his long pocket badge. I don't know. No. No. Yep.

Like, yeah, he's the guy in the middle, right? Yeah, he's the guy in the middle. I couldn't find, yeah, my bad on that. Pictures that weren't that were available for the other two guys except from their IMDB page. So I just use those. What? It's, they're in the documentary.

Oh, that makes sense. Anyway, so these- I was gonna say least cloud-chasing Air Force officer, but go off. Yeah. This team gets formed also with the entire team of the PTS teams get all called in to help with this situation. All right, everybody has to suit up because this asshole dropped the socket. Yes.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Lowering a lieutenant colonel into the piss stained, shit-stained suit, because they've only got one. All right. Into the Skidmark special, you go, my guy. We do a lot of body humor on this podcast. So they pulled together what they call the K-K. Talk about poop.

They pulled together what's called the K-crew. That's everybody that's involved. try and get this thing solved. That includes a Colonel Morris who's in charge of all of the 308s maintenance teams and Sergeant Jeff Kennedy, who's going to come up later, but he is the guy at the 308 that understands the missing. He was a team chief. He's now an inspector, so he understands it.

So they get all these people together. They get Morris and Kennedy out on a helicopter to get them out to the silo. and then they come up with plan A. Plan A, let's go. Send the second group of guys, the PTSD team that was in the blast lock in, in their refco suits. They had ready to go, vent the fuel tank, then vent the silo, then stabilize the missile. Immediately they're told this won't work because when all the guys left to get into the command center, they left their refcos in the blast lock,

which is now has fuel vapor in it from the silo. So now they can't get space suits to go in the PPE and the Hydrazine cloud. Yeah, okay. Whoops. There would be three guys up top, right? And all their... I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I dropped the socket and I left the suit.

I'm so sorry. You're going to there in your box or sock. There's three guys up top, right? Well, they were told to evacuate as soon as they found out it was a fuel leak in case it spread up topside. So they're off-site now and unreachable. Yeah, those guys are in the nuclear suburban flooring it to Amigo Loco right now. So it's 8 o'clock. The fuel PSI is at 0.4.

The oxidizer is at 20 PSI, and the silo temperature has risen from 60 degrees. to 80 degrees, and I have no idea why it got so bright. What the fuck? Oh, okay. It's time for your close-up, scooter. Yeah, I was about to say that someone just deliver a present. I was supposed to go to November.

It would be there in about seven minutes. All right, next slide, please. So, the potential hazard team, tells everybody in the command center to evacuate because they're afraid the blast doors won't hold if the missile blows up. So the team leaves the phone off the hook so that they can listen for alarms and make sure the power stays on at the site to be able to deal with this. And that's when they go out the hatch, the hole made for these guys. Nobody had ever been in it. Apparently this is like hell at a at a

missile site. They had never, nobody ever used it. It was hard to get the bolts open to get this hatch open. And there's supposed to be a single lightball at the top of this 40 foot shaft and it's out. This is almost worse than the anesthesia special. That's the mental image. This is killing me with this horror. I am too. Yeah. So they evacuated this ladder in the dark or die. Good luck. Asshole. Should have dropped. drop the socket, asshole. Why did we make it so small? And one of you is doing it in a space suit in the full knowledge that the full weight of

the US Air Force is about to land on your head. No, they strip- If I went through- If I went through this escape hatch, I would just perfectly seal it like a plug, and and everyone would die. So they strip the guy of the space suit because they don't think it'll fit. So. Oh.

Oh, God. That's so much worse. Oh, yeah. And you're skimmy. Yes. But the thing is, is in our previous. At least you're not sloshing anymore. At the rock stock, and now you're making me go in the hole.

I deserve to be in the hole. at the Rock Kansas incident they did evacuate in their PTSD suits so this becomes important later that's why I'm bringing it up so they get out they go through a breakway panel in the fence and out the backside

and then run to the front where the gate is where the other PTSD teams are starting to show up since they've been dispatched Jeff Kennedy shows up on his helicopter and must be not

The helicopter almost crashes because it almost hits power lines. And the crew has to wave them off at the last minute. I'm telling you, this site and this missile are cursed. Why we just gave a bunch of 19-year-olds apocalyptic weapons and they're doing exactly what you'd expect? I do want to apologize in advance. The Sixers are on and winning. And Corin is kind of yelling at the television.

I'm not going to mute myself. You're just going to deal with it. Go Sixers Sky. Oh, no. Listen, let me be clear. I respect when Corinne does it. Way. Fuck you.

Fuck you. No, you're beautiful. I'm yelling at Nova. You have to be nice to me. It's my birthday. No. She respects when you watch basketball games while you're recording, and she doesn't respect me when I do it.

Getting roasted from all sides. This is delightful. I love to be in my piss-feminism, Leah. Piss-soaked astronaut suit shitting my pants. I dropped the socket. Yeah. But drop my nuts on your face. What about it?

In my head, this guy under the space suit had heart print boxes. Yeah. Yeah. So Kennedy arrives on site and Kennedy's piss that the control center had been evacuated because now they can't figure out what the pressures in the missile are, which are important because the fucking thing's going to collapse. Now this pal who dropped the socket walks up to him and goes, Kennedy, I fucked up like you wouldn't believe.

I dropped the sock. That's not what he says. This sounds like that happened. Just in floods of tears. This poor fucking kid. So, also about the same time, the fire suppression system runs out of water due to that broken float we talked about

from them shutting the valve off so the tank doesn't overflow. So now there's nothing to dilute the fuel going into the silo. It's a problem. It's going to get hot very quickly. One other fun fact about this time, is next door, there's a man named Sam Hutto, who runs a cattle farm. Nine months earlier, he had synchronized all of his cattle to have birth on this night.

So he of, well, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, no, go. I'm not, go away. What in the fucking what's saying? What is they gone in the club? What did this motherfucker do to his cows? People do all kinds of fucked up shit with cows. You synchronize them so they have caps all the same time.

Yeah. How do you sync? What do you synchronize? Stop fucking. Just on a military operation, like, all right, everyone's synchronized cows? It's just artificial insemination. You just make them all pregnant at the same time, so that they all have birth at the same time. So he had a bunch of like turkey basters laid out in a line like a Calliope.

Yes. Yeah. I think there was a Jordan Peterson tweet about. about this. I only put this in here because he's avoiding the Air Force guys like the plague because they're starting to put a cordon off around the area. And he keeps dodging them. And half of what we know what goes on is from his accounts.

Wow. So because he's dodging them to go give birth to like 100 cattle. So I found it funny. No, it's funny. It's just real fucked up. It's fucked up, but it's funny. Which is kind of the premise of the show, actually. That's how you get your fucking hamburger, all right?

Doing some kind of weird Busby Berkeley turkey-based a shit to impregnate a bunch of cows at the same time and being like, well, I think I'm busy now, but I'm gonna be busy in nine months' time. Next slide. Explaining a nuclear disaster to an American. Imagine the hamburger. Imagine ingredients to a burger. All right.

It's 915. age. Jeff Kennedy goes up to Morris and says, we need to know the pressures of those tanks

so that we can build a plan. Morris is like, we're not supposed to do anything without getting told. Kennedy goes, okay, well,

we're going to go inspect the site. Remember, he's the sergeant that knows the most about this of anybody at the 308. So he grabs

Powell and they run around the fence and go in the back and then he tells Powell to wait for him. Instead of going through the center and the entrapment area, he decides to go through the escape hatch and back down into the command center to read the pressures off the PTPMU, the propellant tank pressure monitoring.

You fucked up so bad. And meanwhile, the guy who came to, like, rescue you from it is like, no, I'm just going to climb down this totally dark ladder. The fuck it beats this. The problem with him doing that is Strategic Air Command has a two-man rule anytime you're on a missile site or around nuclear weapons and him telling Powell to wait

violates that two-man rule. Now, between you and me, the Air Force has a rule that if it's an emergency, it can be violated, but they only apply that when they want to. So he goes down into the command center, looks at the PTPMU, and realizes and says, we're in some serious shit. Now, a guy I interviewed said that he heard that over the phone that was off the hook. So he's talking to himself, which means it's really bad.

The fuel tank pressure was at negative two. Well, maybe he was just like stepping over the remains of the Rafco suit. recently liquidated. So the fuel tank pressures at negative 2 because there's no way, there's nothing venting it, so it's actually pulling down as the level goes all the way of the bottom of the pain. What they had always talked about was the expected collapse

was between negative 2 and negative 3. Oxidizer stage 1 is at 29 PSI, stage 2 is at 41.6 PSI. the expected burst for that burstness for the vent is at 50 PSI. So clock's ticking. So Kennedy comes out of the escape hatch, meets back up with Powell, and goes back to Morris, who's the colonel they're reporting to. Kennedy tells Morris the pressures, and then Powell speaks up and goes, Kennedy went into the silo without me.

I know I dropped the socket But he went in by himself I'm not the only guy I pulled here And he tells And Morris Morris crashes out He starts losing no shit on Kennedy For going in alone

And violating the two-man rule So Morris reports it back to the Missile Potential Hazard team That Kennedy had gone in without a second person. And they all lose their... This is way worse than just a cursed missile.

Five minutes away from blowing up Little Rock. Yeah, this is way worse than a cursed missile in military terms. This is like a... This missile is an NJP magnet. This is like, this isn't cursed in the sense that it blows up. This is cursed in the sense that it blows up your career. Yep. Yes.

We're getting there. So Kennedy has a plan. And Kennedy's plan, they tell us to me. Morris is to head in through the escape hatch, open the silo door to vent from the command center to reduce the heat, then drop the platforms to hold the missile upright in case it collapses, and then send the spare PTS team down to fill the fuel tank with nitrogen to keep the pressure from going into the negatives. Morris refuel this wobbly tube of explosives in the room full of explosives.

But possibly both. It's actually not the worst plan. Yeah. Yeah. The problem is he tells Morris, and Morris tries to tell the potential hazard team, and he gets told to shut the hell up, nothing will be done on the site without strategic air commands direct approved. So now Levitt's in charge.

You see, you put here in the notes, nobody does anything unless it comes straight from Omaha. I'm like, why does Union Pacific have a say in this? Uncle Pete, you son of a person. bitch. Oh, that's where I'm going to point my, my missile when we're done because the fuck you see. So it's next slide, please. 9.45 PM and the missile potential hazard team

decides they have a plan. They want to enter the silo, vent the fuel tank, if required, remove the cap with flyers. Okay. The socket cap because they all know it's been removed. and then pop the tank pop it with a broom handle. Great, let's go. I will also say that like the four different plans from five different sources

and everybody keeps like accidentally breaking rules actually does imply to me that there already was a poly-fueled missile silo. So Levitt shuts down all the discussion. I think now is the point to emphasize that the U.S. Air Force is the organization that came up with the concept of the Uda loop. This is sort of- And what we see here is an OO-D-LOOLU. Well, so far there's no D or A, so it's just an OO-LOOP.

I don't know what that is. It's a, it doesn't matter. Okay. So Levitt shuts down all discussion between everybody and demands that the door not be opened, the missile silo door not be open for fear of flinging the warhead out in case the missile explodes. This is his largest consideration over everything, and he says it. Just imagining the farmer next door, 60 cows deep.

The New Warhead lands on this yard. Well, hold that thought. One of those Steam Idol, one of those Steam Clicker games where you have to like assist with the delivery of 100 calves before you get a warhead flung at you? So while they're discussing Martin Marietta is just taking wild guesses at what stage, what pressure

the stage will collapse. Like they're just like, it might be like negative three, uh, the tech guys say maybe negative five. You might get lucky, but not, they're like literally wild guessing at the whole way. It just might legally be a tonteen. And that's number weighing. So,

at this point, at this point, PTSD Team B shows up and this is like the second force that's coming in with the disaster response team, which is all the lawyers for the Air Force base that go around if something happens. They're not allowed to do anything because there has been no disaster yet.

It's only the PTSD guys that can do anything. They bring in like bulldozers and light all units. and all kinds of shit and plenty of the refcos and guys willing to go into the silo, they're all volunteers. It's really, really funny to me. If you're just like sort of neck deep in cattle and like an Air Force lawyer in a space suit hops the fence and just comes up, hands you some papers, and runs away.

Yeah. So. And meanwhile, you got a bunch of these guys lining up like I served the Soviet Union. Next slide. I included this because it's important to bring Bill Clinton into this story. Yes. So story about Little Rock mentioned. Everybody should be asking, where's Bill Clinton?

Where's Bill Clinton? At the Democratic National Convention in Hot Springs, Arkansas. With Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor? Oh shit, I should have put his first name. Yeah, I didn't know Richard Pryor was a senator. Me either. You'd think after the crack it would have been

so kind of hard to get elected, but who knows? I told him to Marion Barrow. David Pryor. David Pryor, my bad. Anyway, so they're in Hot Springs at DNC, while one of the Pryor's staffers, Skiff Rutherford, is back in Little Rock. he gets a phone call from two Air Force men that wish to remain unnamed, to him and prior,

that there's an incident at the Titan Silo, and it's about to go horribly wrong. These same two men- He's getting a phone call and someone just calls you up and says, yeah, he dropped the socket. He dropped the socket. He's very sorry. He's very sorry. One guy drops the socket, the entire Air Force command tries to look for different people to tattle onto each other.

I dropped the socket and I had to apologize to the president. He wasn't the president yet, but he would be. These same two guys had warned prior earlier in 1979 that the Titans were leaving prior warning. That they were unsafe, that the PTSD crews were. were untrained and too young, and that there had been multiple oxidizer and fuel leaks topside that they had not been told about. So he goes to a silo as a visit as a senator, and while he's there, they had turned the vapor detectors off because they were broken.

And he finds out about that after the fact. So he demands an investigation. and to put an amendment to put warning sirens on top all Titan sites. This amendment and investigation was approved on September 16th, 1980, two days before our incident. It's important that Vice President Walter Mondale's at this because he's close enough to see the explosion if he wants to, if this thing goes nuclear. So I included the, oh, shit nap. You drop the socket. The colonels are there.

The general is there. The vice president is there now. The vice president is there. So I included the map to give you an idea of how big the explosion would be if it like went full nuclear in like your worst case scenario to show how close they were. Like Mondale would have seen it with his own eyes, but not been affected. You'd have to, I- I-

I think he might have been a- Well, he's in hot-train. He's not win. But it's important later, so I wanted to include it. He also... He also calls into the Strategic Air Command who says everything is fine. To the Vice President.

Okay, okay, good. Okay, good. Okay, and taking off the phone, no service to Vice President, nobody dropped a socket. Unprompted. I can either confirm nor deny as an issue. We're going to write them up. We're going to write them up. It's going to go on his permanent record.

We're going to give him attention. It seems like this is just like more and more humiliation is being added first. Like I half expect this guy's mom to be there. We call this parents. He's going to be suspended. Three day in school suspension. Your high school crush heard that you dropped the sock. No.

Oh, fuck. Yeah, just fucking kill me, man. Sitting bolt upright in bed 30 years later. Oh my God, I just had a dream where I dropped the socket. So the X, you're not over. Heard you dropped the socket. In the documentary, he says he can close his eyes at any time and see that socket falling. 45 years later.

I bet he can. Oh, God. Yeah. I feel bad for making fun of them now. I'm going to keep doing it, but... I feel bad about it. I've thought you watched the documentary. I'm sorry.

Watch it. It's very good if you haven't. For episodes I don't write? I come in blind that I'm funny. Well, that's what I'm here for, I guess. All right, next slide. Yeah, this show is advertising. Serial. One person has the information, the other X number try to prevent them from telling

it. Yeah, I know. Oh, salty sound. Someone was like a body, but for interruptions. Yeah. Okay, so. Thanks, Corinne. I think she was laughing at the Knicks.

Well, that's also valid. So we're on plan I. Question, question. Question hard question mark. It's 11 p.m. And the missile potential hazard team has come up with this. They will have an airman in a refco suit, go to one of the silos vents, and check the fuel vapor.

If the fuel vapor is lower than 200 parts per million, two PTSD team will enter the entrapment area and break into the silo. Nobody thought that somebody in a refco suit can make it through the escape hatch. remember Rock Kansas? Yeah, well, we don't remember that. So if it's good, they're going to open the blast door six, which is the one that goes, blast door six and seven to go into the command center

with a hydraulic pump to get the blast doors open since, you know, they're blast doors. And then they're going to check the MSA, which is the vapor detector. If it's below 200 parts per million, they'll enter the silo and vent the fuel tank in any way they can. Colonel Ben Scallorn, there on the right-hand side, says that this is a bad idea because the oxidizer tank could be at any point ready to blow since it was at 42 PSI an hour ago.

He wants them to enter the control center instead of the silo. I'd screw that up earlier. I'm sorry. And then check tank pressures before they go for it. Lloyd Levitt tells him to shut the hell up. Martin Marietta. Compelling argument. Martin Marietta speaks up and is like, do you guys want our thoughts?

And Leavitt goes, go ahead. And they go, we think you should get as far away from that silo as possible and wait to see what happens. Oh, wait and see. I like it. Martin Marietta says they would never send their people into a situation like this. Yeah, but this is the Air Force. We have an infinite number of 19-year list.

We don't care about. We basically own them. Exactly. They can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges. The Air Force decides to go for it. Shocking. Oh, my God.

I can't believe that. Fuck yeah. Send to the piss suit, boys. Two hours later. much like this podcast. Yep. Yep. So next slide.

I will never let you finish a sentence, Scooter. So mind you, Kennedy is fucking livid at this point because they haven't sent anybody in. They haven't done anything. And at this point, whatever the fuck they're going to do is a bad idea, but it's his men going in. So he's going to at least be around for it. So we are on plan whatever the fuck. But. Yes.

The plan is they're going to take five guys out to the fence and go down into the entrapment area, break in through the two doors. Audio just went crazy. Sorry. They're going to break in through the blast doors and go in to the command center and get the pressures. Kennedy goes with the PTSD guys that are going in because he wants to be there. Morris doesn't want him anywhere near it because they're still mad that he wouldn't. in the silent.

So what happens is they get two guys there volunteers, or sorry, three guys there volunteers, Greg Devlin, David Livingston, Rex Huckle, and then Kennedy, all ride the truck up to the site and then get into the PTS, into the ref co-suits. And then Morris and Hanson,

who's another sergeant, are commanding them through their radios. The plan is to send one, guy up, check the vent, see if it's 200 parts per million. If it's not, go in the entrapment area, break the door open, go into the command center, get pressures. This is the plan they decide to act on. It is 1am. This thing has been venting since six. Oh, good. It's probably, it's probably almost done by now. Living is nothing, there's nothing like a bad, there's nothing like a bad decision made slowly. Yep. Livingston goes up to the vent and gets an off, off meter high rating on the vapor detector.

Oh, okay. Levitt says to, not great, not terrible. Yeah, Levitt says to go continue on and go in. So they have Devin and Huckle go first, and they take a pump and a crowbar. Oh, cool. I like Half-Life. Yeah. The first two doors are just like steel doors. so they just pry them open.

The first one takes 15 minutes. They have 30 minutes of air on their airpack. The first one takes 15 minutes. The second door takes 15 seconds. Devlin was a boxer. Feeling great about you play a weapon security. Yeah, right? So they get to the blast door.

They hook the pump up to the blast door, but neither of them know how the pump works, so they can't get to force the pins open on the blast door. I feel like that's something. someone should have gone over and whatever. Correct. They run out of time. They only had seven hours. They run out of time

and come back topside because their air packs are about to run out. Run out. They had an hour worth of air, but none of these things actually worked for an hour, so they gave them 30 minutes. So they come top side. How are we a

superpower? They come the stuff didn't break. Except when it did. This much. Jesus Christ, it's like the Keystone cops had a nuclear deterrent. So they come topside.

Scalorin's pissed because they've waited seven hours to do this and they're not recalling these guys in. But they come topside and Hansen and Morris are like read the instructions for the pump, switch out your air pack and go back in. Oh, I didn't think about that.

Exactly. Well, Kennedy. Doing the IKEA, like, question mark, phone call illustration, but then he's wearing a spacesuit. It's just covered in piss. Kennedy actually knows how the pump works. So he goes up and goes, I'll go in with Livingston. And Livingston volunteers to go with.

with him. So Kenny and him get suited up. They go back into the entrapment area. Next slide, please. I love to walk into something called the entrapment area. Exactly. That's where the FBI lives for leftist protesters. They go in and they get told to go towards the missile this time and read the vapor detector in the cableway to the missile. They go into the cableway, operate the pump, open the door, you know, because Kennedy actually can figure it out. And it's off meter high at 25 hundred parts for a million. Have it sort of white noise, airborne toxic event thing about this, where it's like, well,

at least now they've got a handle on it, you know? They understand it about it. Yes. Well, they find out it's off-scale high and they decide to leave. They're told to leave by Morrison Hansen. They go up topside. And as soon as they get topside, Hansen tells them to go and throw the purge fan switch for the cableway.

Later on, this is said that they are told to go stand by the switch, not to flip it. This is a point of contention later on. But Livingston goes down. into the hole. Kennedy stays topside right by the entrapment area. He flips the switch,

30 seconds go by, and he gets topside again about two feet away from the door. What were you going to say, Victoria? Oh, I was just going to say not to be like, you know, too much of a systems head about this, but I feel like if the seven hours into your nuclear missile recovery,

your entire, like, fault rests on whether or not somebody misheard and flipped the switch, I think you may have systemic issues further upstream. Just a little bit. If your nuclear missile recovery lasts longer than seven hours, consult a physician. Consults of physicists, really. I dropped the socket. Yeah, at the end of the day, like, if dropping a socket causes a nuclear disaster, you fucked something up along the way.

Real bad. Yeah, I mean, you put that whole disclaimer in at the beginning about like, don't blame these individual guys. And no, I think that my blame here does not rest with the 19 year old who accidentally dropped a tool while he was balancing on a ladder 80 feet up in a missile silo. I think it might be with the system that, you know. Allowed it to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of allowing it to happen, 30 seconds go by. 9-11, yes. God damn it I'm sorry I shot

I shot down flight 93 I'm sorry so so Kennedy and Kennedy and Livingstner standing topside they just got out of the entrapment area everybody's looking at the silo because they were told to evacuate after the fans turned on

they're all going to regroup and next slide please December 19th, 18, 1983, 3 a.m. The damn thing finally detonates. Boom. The black dots or tires. This is actually not a picture of the explosion.

The only photos is like a really shitty, grainy video that's a guy running the fuck away from it trying to get 10 seconds of footage and it's really bad. So I didn't include that. Yeah, because the press, the press had become aware and were like congregating outside the, uh, at the end of the road. Yeah.

And they all went fucking running all of a sudden, uh, for reasons. This picture is actually- If you see a guy in an astronaut suit running, try to keep up. Follow him. So it blows. The missile goes off. This picture's from when they were destroying the silos at the end of the program, but the missile blows up and everybody fucking evacuates all of the PTSD teams, all the news, everybody just starts running in whatever direction was gone. They all decide to regroup at the local grocery store in Damascus, because that's a good place, I guess.

Who else is there to go? Sizzling fajitas. Good news. You're the protein. I can go for Bahezas right now. Can you go for Vitas right now, Piscay? And Piscay is just like,

I dropped the socket. I'm the reason that happened pointing at the mushroom cloud down the road. I'm sorry. I dropped the socket. Can I have a can I have a

medillo with the lime? Please. The poor 19-year-old. who was with him is like, I guess I'll have a lemonade. Immediately drops the medella. Oh, shit. This is why everyone hates me. I can't do anything right.

So, next slide, please. There's three theories to what happened here. Oh, that's one of the diagrams of all time. I love this. Yeah, this is bananas. The first theory, this is straight from the book on Titan too, by the way. I love this diagram. The first theory is the one that Kennedy prescribes to, and is probably the most accurate, is that the fans started it. The electrical spark lit the

fumes in the cableway. They got down into the silo, you know, problem song. Big 1970s DC Motor probably, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. The other is just a general rogue equipment spark because they had left everything everything on in the silo that wasn't like able to be turned off at the command center. So like why again 70s electrical engineering. Exactly. Yeah. The third is probably the the third is probably the most like plausible in my opinion is because we knew that the missile like four hours beforehand was in the negative pressures in the tank is that the stage one just collapsed. and when it collapsed, it obviously created sparks,

the oxidizer tank ripped open and detonated. And then the first explosion blows the silo door off and launches the second stage up into the air with the motor from the second stage jammed into the fuel tank. That causes the fuel tank to rupture and explode because the oxidizer also ruptured and exploded just at a ground level. So there's two explosions,

and the first launches everything out of the silo, the second launches it all up into the air, including the W53 Warhead, which is expected in the report to have gone a thousand feet up into the air. God damn. Big boom. W53 being like, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it. Oh, it's finally happening.

It's finally happening. Moscow. Moscow. You finally get to lace them up, and it's nothing. I was hoping for, if not Moscow, at least Nizhny Novgorod, but no. Can't have shit this house. You think that Warhead ever talks about how it could have gone through, but then it, like, blew its knee out. So that's what happened when it comes to the explosion.

Again, everybody's running for their lives. By the way, this fucking tilt-shifted, isometric disco-aliseum command and Conquer-looking ass thing. Incredible. I want to right click on this right now. So everybody goes running. All the guys that were like right there, the four. of them, Morris in the truck was sitting in the truck waiting for them to come back.

He says that he laid down on the seat when the windshield blew out and just sat there and laughed as the like mushroom cloud went through the windshield. The old Justin Rossiak, yeah. I found that story the funniest of all of them, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. Devlin starts running and gets his ankle broken by a piece of rebar launched out of the silo. Ow. Yeah, no thanks.

Yeah, Huckle was saying on the back of the truck. Guy who becomes negatively polarized against nuclear weapons by this. By a nuclear weapon. Just to like, you know, kind of like, put this all into focus. exactly would have been the difference if they had been like, oh shit, we fucked up, we listened to the experts in Denver and we all just run away as far as possible versus what actually happened. Less guys would have been injured. Cool. Okay. So like maybe they should have, sorry, I just, that was all I wanted to check here because it seems like for the last eight hours,

they've just been throwing 19 year olds. Yes. Uh, into a hole to see how many they can know. I said it sounded like he was just feeding 19 year olds to the missile silo and then his lieutenant general started yelling. I really, I realize now how badly I need. I realize now how badly I need a kind of strategic air command jarhead or generation kill. Listen, that would be great. Listen, if it sucks, hit the bricks. Yeah, you could just leave. You can leave. You will, you will be court-martialed, but you could just leave. Just fucking leave. So if you're in the military right now and you don't like it, just change genders. If you drop the socket,

join the French Foreign Legion, I guess. There you go. Anyway, I just want to verify that like. You get into the French Foreign Legion and they ask you about your past to see whether they like, whether or not you're an ex-Nazi or something and they're interrogating. and they're interrogating you and you just say, like, I dropped the sarah. I dropped the song.

But they're in a sad voice. So. Just before you got into the death toll, I just wanted to make sure that, like, you know, we didn't need to let anybody die. No. We've been the exact same end result. Okay, cool.

This is Levitt's fault. Like, yeah, just checking. Like, this is 100% because even the guy's on directly under him, like Scallorn and Mozier are all like, no, this is, no. And he's like, no, they need to go in and stop this because, you know, nuclear warhead. But we'll get to that. I want to just say content warning for the next two because it's ugly. I mean, you've heard worse on this podcast, but still bothers some people.

Next slide, please. It's a bad sunbone. So on the left-hand side's Devlin, who I just said has ankle. shattered and was burned to shit because he was coming out of his refco suit at the time. Stay in the piss suit. We're making you get on this big-ass phone to Ronald Reagan, and we're making you hold that phone in your burned hand. Yeah.

What a dick move. So Devlin gets like, Devlin's the only person I could find pictures of injuries for this, so that's why I included it. has a gets thrown as he says in the documentary in his very thick main accent he gets thrown ass over tea kettle from the silo and then he tries he tries to run but his leg was broken so he's like in the thick of it all inhaling oxidizer because his face shield got shattered um and as he's trying to run away, he can hear Livingston, who was pretty much right next to him, screaming for help. Why is Livingston in such bad shape? Well, a hole, the size of your fist, was blown through his

abdomen. And he was also burned to... Don't like that. That. Yeah, not very good. So, uh, everybody hauls ass away, including Morris Devlin, them, you know, get a, you know, get as far away as they can. And then two guys hear Kennedy on the radio of Morris's truck saying come help us, come help us. So they come in and throw

Livingston Kennedy in the back of their truck and they take them out to the main road. Because they all thought this was a totally unsurvivable incident. Correct. Everybody thought everybody on the site was dead. Yeah. Now, at the same time, at the command post,

Colonel Mosier's on the phone with the missile potential hazard team and all the radios go silent including the phone line at the site and he thinks that the warhead detonated for about 10 minutes they had no contact with the site so they just assumed that they had just blown it to hell,

blown Little Rock to hell and they were waiting for a blast wave. That's got to be fucking nerve-wracking. Don't love that. Yeah. I wanted to include that because that's like, you know, just like, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, you thought dropping the socket was bad? How about the 10 minutes where you thought you just blew up Little Rock?

Yeah. As you're sitting in Little Rock waiting for it to hit. Waiting for this to be the end, right. I mean, at that point, at this point, I think that you're kind of happy. Just be like, all right, fine, fucking. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with the consequences of this tomorrow. Get my retribution for dropping the socket.

I can't believe I'd drop the socket. I can't do anything right. This is not what Little Rock deserves, though, buck up, soldier. I really wish I could spend more time on this. You get pretty into the weeds with it. But, yeah, at the end of the day, the guy, all the people that were on site end up at the local hospital in Little Rock and not the base hospital. This becomes a problem because the Air Force wants them back so they can't talk to the press.

Livingston dies in the hospital. He goes into surgery and they can't fix his abdomen. He's burned to shit. Apparently on his way back to the hospital in the back of that truck, he's like begging for people not to tell his mom. even though he didn't do anything. He flipped a switch. He didn't drop the socket. It's not his fucking fault.

That was the real crime was dropping the sock. Kennedy goes into the ICU because he inhaled a bunch of oxidizers so he couldn't breathe on top of his leg being shattered and ripped open. He ends up getting out, but him and Devlin are two people that have talked about this,

what happens afterwards is they get out finally and they want to discharge from the Air Force for their injuries because Kennedy can barely breathe because of the oxidizer. Devlin had been burned and can't walk. And they get put in a psych ward at Lackland Air Force base.

Oh, that's the Air Force we know and love. Yeah. They actually got Catch 22. Yes. Yeah. They get put in a psych ward for a while. And then they get, they don't get their discharge. They get sent back to their base.

Suck my fucking dick. I, I hope, I hope Iran wins. We deserve it as it just as a society. To quote Colonel Mosier is a well-known phrase that I was going to say at the beginning of this, is to error is human. To forgive is not sack policy. And they sure approve it during this. Yeah.

So... Low me. Bad news. You're going to have to fly more emissions. In 1981, in 1981, the report comes out. All the blame is put on Livingston for turning the fan on without permission. Oh my God.

Yep. Yeah, listen, we might have built the nuclear in this on a silo unfairly, but this guy flipped a switch. Kennedy, they blame the explosion on him. but not the fault for the explosion. Kennedy gets reprimanded for violating the two-man rule, and then Powell gets a... Powell, who dropped the socket, gets a official...

Ah, crap, I didn't put in the notes. He gets an actual charge. He gets charged for not using the torque wrench instead of the ratchet. You've been indicted on one... count of dropping the socket. Actually. Actually. Doing the whole length of a few good men, but to be like, did you drop the socket?

You're, God damn right, I did. You want me on that gantry. You need me on that gantry. And I'll drop it again. I'll throw it this time, actually. Slosh around. Covering a court in my piss boots

Eventually because of public outcry because they had spoken to the press Kennedy, Deblen and three others get an Air Force medal and then get their discharge. Kennedy and Devlin

sue Martin Marietta because you're not allowed to sue the Air Force if you're in it for millions and they only only get about $6,000 each. Which, okay, to be fair, not to be like, oh, I'm going to defend the corporation here. But Martin Marietta, to their credit, was like,

hey, you should get the fuck out of there. Yeah. So really, you should blame the Air Force. Yeah, we wouldn't put out guys in this shit. Probably, probably, probably walk away from this one, guys. In every incident that we've had loss of life with this

missile, somebody sued Martin Marietta and settled out of court for it. Which is, again, it's like they built it. I would like a small compensation payment, yeah. I would very much like to, imagine, imagine if one of the missiles actually, you know, went to his destination, that'd be a hell of a loss. Oh, boy. So Kennedy passes away at 56 in 2011, right before the book on this was released.

he had severe oxidizer like burns on his lungs so that's likely how he didn't make it Devlin becomes a space shuttle propellance technician he actually lives down

in Titusville, Florida and when he retired he started writing children's books now he does interviews about this all the time and I wish I could have gotten him on this but he's very

candid about how shittily he was treated after the fact, him and all the guys. And then like I said, Powell losing his own- guy who got like horribly treated in a space suit to be on a three-hour, 17-minute podcast with us assholes. It feels like elder-dreve. That might be worse, yeah. I did reach out to talk to him. He just never got back to me.

So, um, next slide. Justified. Maybe he listened to some other episodes. Yeah. Just given the number of bets that I am friends with, the U.S. military just kind of seems like a machine that turns 19-year-olds into radicalized 30-year-old communists. Awesome, go. Yeah, or goo. Yeah.

Yeah, go, that's true. All right. So you're ready to get really mad? I am. Oh, great. Sure. So the Air Force refuses to talk about the incident immediately after, including with state and environmental groups. they can neither confirm nor deny that there was an incident

and whether or not there was a nuclear warhead attached to the missile. They can neither confirm nor deny there's any contamination or anything. There was, as far as you know, nothing happened other than an explosion. That was contained. Immediately after reporters sat at the end of the driveway for the site and harassed every vehicle and every person entering the site for any kind of comment. The Air Force gave none, including to the local sheriff from before that had his shit blown in from the oxidizer. Never talked to him, refused to.

It's a heinous incident and unthinkable. The guy dropped a socket. I forgot to mention that if you remember the disaster response team, when the missile blew they were the first to leave the site. Oh, I bet they were. Naturally, yeah. No, there's a few. There's a couple stories in command and control of like, okay, there's just this insane convoy of military vehicles booked it off the site.

You know, people saw them go by. And it was like, is something up? Is something happening? They didn't stop to give instructions. They didn't stop to warn people. They just booked it. They were out of there. Yep.

Yeah. I've just seen 20 of the coolest Suburans I've ever seen in my life going 70 down a dirt road. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like maybe that's the signal that you should also go that way. I don't know. So Vice President Mondale is briefed by the Air Force before he goes on to talk about it. But the Air Force local management decides that they can neither conform nor deny that there's a warhead, even though he demands to know.

This is the vice fucking president. Would you tell Jady Vance if there was a warhead? No, no. But. Yeah, Mondale had even less respect than that. So, well, Mondale calls Harold Brown, who's the secretary of defense. Cool. I, you know, I don't really know on that one. But he asked.

The sec deaf? Yeah, sec deaf. Probably not a cool guy. I'm just going to throw it out there. I don't think he would get along with us. Not with this podcast, but when it comes to all of this military history,

he's not the worst. But anyway, that's not the point of why I'm getting to. We do not have to hand it to the secretary of defense. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just, yeah, anyway.

So Mondale calls Harold Brown, and Harold Brown is like, Well, yeah, it's fine. There's no radiation spreading. It's, you know, we've got everything contained. We're going to work on getting everything cleaned up. And he goes, yeah, but was there a warhead? And he goes, I can neither confirm nor deny that president,

Vice President Mondale. And Mondale cusses him the fuck out on the fuck. And then he goes, well, actually, yes, there was a warhead. It's contained. So similarly, Lloyd Levitt has to go on a press conference and all they want to ask about is the warhead right after Mondale lets it out that there was and he threatens to end the conference

if somebody asks one more time if there was a warhead and the press laughs at all. Help me, I am turning this car around. I'll tell your dad. You're going back to the side of the explosion. Yeah, everybody had come on like at gunpoint. making them all. I'll make you get in the suit, God damn it.

You've got your piss hole. The command, after everything's done, everything's, like, the site's cleared, but they haven't started, like, doing remediation work. The command crew is sent back in because they're still technically in charge of that missile site, and they have to go in to get the documents out of the command center that they couldn't get into the safe to make sure they were secure because there were too many documents. They go back down in and they could have wrote it out. The glass of Coke that the commander had poured right before everything started was still

sitting on his desk. So had they have voted out, I wouldn't finish that though. I wouldn't finish that. Oh, the Nukakola. Totally unsurvivable because that Coke went flat. Erzine cola. The point of this is though Had they have wrote it out

They could have checked the pressures They could have turned the vent fan on from inside They could have opened the silo door and vented it They could have done a lot from there And they didn't because they were told to evacuate But also they could have just Not thrown guys in the hole True

Yes Or they could have gone in through the emergency escape hatch they could have gone in through escape hatch because you can fit a refco down there. I like the not throwing the guys in the whole thing, but if you had started this with these guys staying in the hole, you could have like vented it and then sent a PTSD team in. I just love that this is obviously a process that needed to happen a bunch,

and they just didn't have a protocol for like what happens in fuel spills. Correct. Like nobody even ever thought, huh, what happens if we spill some of this? we could never spill fuel? What are you talking about? Well, what happens if the missile gets damaged, is the real question. The answer is it won't get damaged. Yeah, that's it.

There's no way. No. Someone could drop the socket. They all save them for pussies. So the warhead that we saw talked about that got flung, got flung into the air and then landed in a ditch on the access road. They find it and everybody's shitting their pants because, like, is it armed?

Is it ready to go? They fly out somebody from Sandia, which is the weapons laboratory that builds nuclear weapons for the United States. And their specialist looks at it and goes, oh, it's fine, because the electronics package had been ripped off of it. So. Yeah, it's good. It's good. It's good. It's going to a whole bit.

So they passed. Slaping it like a Midwestern dad with a boat trailer. Like, that shit ain't going anywhere. Don't worry about it. Hold on. I know how to do this. Now, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to kick it. And it should be good. And if it isn't, it's not our problem anymore.

Exactly. So they pack it into a jet fuel container, apparently, that's filled with sand, loaded on a flatbed truck. And then they had, like, a multi-convoy of flatbed trucks leave the site to hide that it was in one of those trucks. Doing the fucking Las Vegas, like, uh, Shell game scam. They just didn't want the press to know. So they were just trying to play games with it.

I do like in the videos of it that the guys running the trucks are giving thumbs up as they go by the press. Like, hey. It's like fucking smoking the bandits camp convoy. Just like, what's up? Oh, damn, I'd watch that movie. You seen that shit in the back? You see what I'm hauling today? Hey, I got a

And then And you stop at the choking They're saying milk we're hauling There's the sheriff So I talked to a guy That was one of the security forces After the explosion And I asked him

I asked him like What was it like being there And his answer was They told us to go out there Because we had to keep our military safe from all those damn Arkansas looky-lose. And I was like, did you have many? And he went so damn many.

The worst were the news. The damn Air Force didn't exactly make it easy with all, make them easy to deal with all that can neither confirm nor deny bullshit. That was the dumbest thing I've ever done. I loved that guy. That was such a fun conversation. Yeah. So that is the end of our disaster,

but you might be asking what happened with the Titan 2. And simply, it got pulled out of service. It was decided that it was too old, two accident prone, and they didn't want to do the upgrades to it to make it safer. Remember the accident happened in 1980? They didn't pull out of service. until 1987.

Well, good. I mean, seven years is pretty quick by Air Force standards. As we see, given that it takes them seven hours to flip a switch that explodes the missile. They did a lot of not dropping the socket training. Well, so the reasons that they kept it was because earlier before, when it was an outdated missile system, but Damascus hadn't happened. It was as a negotiating tool is half the reason. Henry Kissinger wanted to keep it around to trade off for the SS7, I believe.

Could be wrong. And the real reason it was kept around, though, is because the Air Force needed their big stick. It was a third of the megatonage of the whole force, and they needed their big stick until they got a replacement. Next slide. The country is so stupid. Here's the big stick. Ooh. This is the LGM 118 peacemaker.

Look how many presents you can deliver. Wow. Peacemakers and blamers. The present deliverer. America is one of the ugliest nations on the face of the earth. Yeah, we're the great Satan for a reason. It really, really. It really, every time I do one of these, I'm just like, oh, I didn't think I could hate this

place anymore. so that this began Wait a second, wait a second Scooter is that the fucking train they have at the goddamn Dayton Air Force Museum? Yes. God damn it! I've seen that train.

I think I took a picture with it. Nuclear weapons will pervert everything you love most in the world, including trains. Yes. Well, at least it was like a carbon-efficient method of delivering presents. Yes. It's a good way to decarbonize the delivery

method of carbonizing a lot of people. So they started development in 1971, but it took so long to get this thing out, like, they kept changing what it was. This is the one that they were going to put in the trucks and run everywhere through the desert. It took so long to actually get

out, it didn't get deployed until 1986. And it was just deployed in a bunch of used Minuteman silos. So it was like fairly cheap for being 10, 10 warheads of 300 kilotons on top of this thing plus decoys. They did want to put it on a train. It would have been cool as shit.

But they cold war ended because George H.W. Bush came to save us. And that was that. We won. Yay. Wow. Now, I've maintained that the main reason the Soviet Union collapsed because they were too busy working on the Buron and they forgot to do their budget. It was like the drill candles tweet, but it was all just energy of Iran.

I mean, it was revisionism, but we're saying the same thing, I think. Yeah, basically. No, it was revisionism, yeah. I'll agree with that one, yeah. So after the Titans are pulled, they need to do something with them. So next slide, please. they turned them into space launch vehicles. They used them to launch satellites.

Once again, proving my theory that a missile is just a rocket with worst PR or vice versa. But actually. They launched 13 of them as the as the 23, the Titan 23G launch vehicle from Vandenberg. They scrapped 42 of them. And then there are seven left in museums, including the Titan Missile Museum. we've seen multiple times, Dayton. There's one out in Washington at the, I think,

Evergreen Museum. Oh, I've seen that one. Yeah. That's the one that was owned by the ex-CIA Front Company that is now a vineyard and they have a 747 rotting in a field of grapes.

Isn't America so cool? God, I love the Northwest. It's insane. I will admit, it is a great kind of like, like, cascadia aesthetic to just like in a big vineyard on a rainy day with a green painted

ex firefighting CIA shell company Jembo jet next to you? That's cool as hell. Oh God. The missiles got real excited. Let me through your border, America. Let me in. This was real happy. Like, we're finally

going to Moscow, boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to orbit. Go all the way, boys. Yeah, there's one at the Stafford Air Museum, which I was half tempted to drive out to just get the damn size of that dust cap for the socket. Tight missile museum.

Yeah, there's there's there's a bunch to look at. It's worth going to see how crazy this thing was. Yeah, I will say like having been to the missile room at the Dayton Air Force Museum where they kind of grew both together. And they actually have like a replica like sort of silo area at the Evergreen Museum. It's one thing to talk about all this stuff. It really is actually like hit, hidden your stomach sickening to see these things.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's great. Next slide, please. So the family lived on after the Titan 2. There was the Titan 3 and the Titan 4. And it was solely used for orbital vehicle launch or sending stuff out of orbit out into deep space.

On the left is the manned orbiting laboratory launch. That was a test to make sure you could send a capsule up with a hatch in the bottom of it. I think it's cool because it was tall and pointing and neat. And then on the right is pointing. The Titan launch system being hauled. This was hauled by trains by two SWs. I love this locomotive very much. It's a beautiful paint scheme.

That would be an absolutely kick-ass model railroad. One got sold, and then the other is still at Cape Canaveral at the Space Museum. Like you can go see that they were stored at- I've been back on my train sim bullshit lately, and that's, I mean, it's good. It's a good way of boring yourself on purpose so the rest of your mind can wander, but like, I feel like maybe they could introduce just a thought the idea of maybe some trains that are like interesting. Yeah.

I know a guy who works for train simulator who has explained to me exactly why they cannot do that, which is... No, I know, right? They've tried to sneak stuff out, right? They've brought out like the military cargo thing where they tried maybe what if the thing that the train was hauling was interesting. And I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll buy that. But like, then if you do that, like, the, like, you know, 2% most autistic.

population of Germany get very mad at you for being like, actually, you should be modeling exactly the timetable of the Schnello-unka-den. I mean, you can't . . . . . . . No, no, it's worse. It's worse than that. It's worse than that. You can't even, like, simulate a bad day on the railroad if you're licensing actual railroad, you know, stuff because they get mad at you for showing that sometimes the railroad

doesn't work. Yeah. Which I don't know if you've worked on the railroad. Why can't you use assets that you would have to develop for free? Because the intellectual property is there of like, I don't know, X like fucking communist countries. Then you could show shit being as bad as you want. Yes.

It's the same thing. Why am I doing Newtruck simulator driving from Frankfurt to Stuttgart all the time when I could be blasting through Libya at 70 miles an hour? Yeah, we can do the DACR. I want to do a bonus episode about the train simulator and how it's declined. Yes. You know. Because I would be thrilled.

I can contribute to that. Sure. Yeah. No, we should we should figure that one out. Yeah. Can I finish? No. Yes.

Listen, you're making me work until 2 a.m. on my birthday. So I will interrupt you just. as much as I feel like. I drop the socket. Delirium of a sudden. So they still use that launcher for ULA launches, but they don't use the cool locomozo anymore. They use

stupid ashtrak mobiles. So if you want to see it. I don't think it was the Toyota Tacoma. The what? Just a high rail pulling this thing out. No, there was a pickup truck commercial. It was a Toyota Tundra, actually. where it pulled the space shuttle.

It was just a big one. Gotcha. American car company commercial 15 years ago that I have memorized some fucking reason. What are what that is? Probably nothing. Who would have a commercial from 15 years ago memorized? I'll call now. I hope.

I hope RFK isn't listening to this or I'm going to get put on yet another list. The Fulger's one where the like brother comes home from Africa and he's excited to get good coffee in America. Yeah. So I just wanted to finish out with, there is so much more to this story that you can't fit in. Read the book, Command and Control. It's really fucking good. The audio book's just as good. The movie is short, but very good. And yeah, it's wild. It's very bad story, but it's a very wild, well-reported story. It's a pretty wild story. Yeah. And yeah, this is just one incident with nuclear missiles. There, I came across so many fucking more and looks like we've got one more to talk about. Uh-oh. Roz, it's all you. Well.

Well, first, what did we learn? Ah, right. Don't drop the socket. Don't piss in the suit. Happy birthday, Nova. Yeah, on a statistical average, most of being 35 is spent talking about ICBMs. Yes. There are worse things.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Don't drop the socket. I drop the socket. Don't drop the socket. I want to make that a shot. Don't drop the socket.

Don't drop the socket. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Don't know, no, no, no, shake hands with danger. Hello. Hello. Well, there's your problem. I was told I had a topical story and that I must write in. Well, here you go.

I was a missile maintainer at the F.E. Warren Missile Fields in the 1980s. Oh, boy. All missile all the time all day. Let's go. Yes. This is a topical safety third. Across my time in the Air Force, we had. many exciting times, like driving three hours to then have to drive three more because we brought the wrong wrench, flying in a helicopter to a site in a hurry, just to realize the problem was usually trivial, like a light bulb being out, or getting stuck in our beat-up vehicles in the

snow because none of these silos could be conveniently put on a major highway. but nothing will be as exciting as the first time we had the call. Oh, dear. It was the 1980s in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Oh, boy. That's another, that's another homeland of Union Pacific. We were at the base when suddenly everyone was told to drop everything

and start running for a silo miles away. apparently a launch control center had the missile away light come on and the associated missile stopped responding to input from the silo or for the layman it was trying to launch lace them up lace them up lice them up moscow Moscow Moscow So as the two guys in the hole Start shitting their pants Ripping the wiring out of the walls

Trying to get the system to shut down We start driving out with the closest available vehicle Which was a peacemaker More professionally known as the Cadillac Gage Ranger Scene on the right The most like hastily hastily armored truck in the world. I love this thing. It looks so fucking doofy. Yeah. Five tons of Dodge pickup,

killdozer, especially for the Air Force security forces. Shit, that actually goes. That's awesome. I'd hate handing it to them, but they did it. It looks so happy to be there. Yeah. I'm part of the team. Once at the site, the instructions, were simple. Pull up on top of the silo, park the front wheels on the door, put it in park, get out and run like hell. If the damn thing did start the sequence to launch. So they're

parking like over here. Like on the edge. If the damn thing did start the sequence to launch, the 110 tonne door would blow off at about 45 miles. hour, and the peacekeeper would flip into the hole, solving the unofficial launch problem. Also, I just note here, the turret gunner here is wearing an MSA millennium, which also makes this transgender. I mean, it's an MCU, too, the like, you know, military version, but still. Now, of course, this latter situation. did not happen, otherwise this would be a bigger story.

The texts were able to get in and reset everything. But after I did my time and left the Air Force, I saw articles on this incident on the internet. And it turns out through reading about it on Facebook, this was a regular occurrence. Yes. The parking the truck on the door, that was and maybe still is, standard operating procedure. Of course, strategic. Call of Duty type shit. Hell yeah.

Of course, Strategic Air Command and Strategic Command have sanitized all of this since, but no one can ever keep their mouth shut. Hope this doesn't keep you up tonight. Keep up the fun show from Florida Minuteman. Thanks, Florida Minute Man. Thank you. I forget where I heard this, but apparently these big silo doors

when they go off, they slide across the desert like a hockey puck. Yep. That's horrific. I made the slide and I included the big gas generator. It's just this big pneumatic cylinder that just literally just counterweights and just flings that thing off. I really want to drive that truck. Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner getting a bliss raced by the Bison Tense

flower on the side of a 110 ton blast door. I do also love the idea of weaponizing a dodge hitting something to save the world. Like we've taken the natural inclination of a dodged truck. It's a funny thing. You can still drive it afterwards. That's if it was a Toyota. Or Dakota diesel, sir. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. That's a great way to solve a problem. Drop a truck on the missile. This is why ride heights have to be so high. Otherwise. I got your physics package right here. I didn't see them do this on top gear. Well, there's your problem, North Dakota special.

Well, that was safety third. Brab-d-d-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha- your birthday present to me is to listen to all of my podcasts and subscribe to the Patrions. They are this, trash future, be gay, solve crimes, kill James Bond. No gods, no mares. Check out Nate from Trash Futures banned second homes just put out their album.

It's really good. It's called Find a Way to Hate it. It rocks. Yeah, that's been, what else? There's some bangers on there. Subscribe to Tran Galismo. Just maybe break into rail yards and start stealing rail cars. I don't know.

Everything. Yes. Gareth Dennis and I will have a new project shortly, which is just on the Railnatter Patreon, where we're just going to chat for 30 minutes about trains every week. Oh, hell, yeah. I love this for you. This is awesome.

I'm supposed to say it out. Somehow you didn't die on your way to work podcast, which I was on actually a month ago. I'm talking about time. is the tank engine. So I'll put a link to that in the description. Oh, can I just throw in one thing really quick? What's the 10,000 losses?

Huh? I am trying to finish my next photo book fairly soon, and I am looking for events and people to shoot focused on queer life in Seattle. And since I keep getting recognized in the city of Seattle from being on this podcast, I figure there might be some people listening who that would be cool for.

So if that sounds like modeling for pictures sounds like something you would enjoy, maybe let me know. It needs to be relevant. Yeah, do that. Do that. I'm going to be in Dublin from the 12th to the 19th of May. I'm not doing anything. I'm just hanging out.

If you see me on the street, just say hi, I guess. Fiddly D. Potatoes. Fiddly D. Potatoes. I don't associate myself with these people. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. I have those founding documents, buddy.

All right. End this. All right. Happy birthday Nova. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye.