Bonnie Ramthun, a former DoD war gamer with a computer science background from the University of Wyoming, reveals Trevor Air Force Base’s classified simulations—retinal scanners, EMP-vulnerable satellites, and "Brilliant Pebbles" missile defense—while questioning government secrecy over non-human threats. She links thermobaric bomb tests in Afghanistan to her book Earthquake Games, speculating seismic weaponization, and warns of biological warfare risks like Ebola or a "white plague" scenario. A 1955–1963 polio vaccine controversy (San Francisco Chronicle, March 9th) surfaces, with 30M recipients facing potential lymphoma ties. Ramthun dismisses conspiracy claims but confirms U.S. infrastructure—dams, tunnels—was hardened post-9/11, framing the attacks as a military provocation rather than terrorism. The episode underscores how war gaming’s unintended consequences and hidden agendas blur the line between defense and global destabilization. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest evidence: Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you may be in all three four time zones covered by this program called Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It's great to be here.
It is still the first of April here, and.
Oh my god, did you get me?
You got me too, folks.
Listen, first I'd like to welcome a brand new affiliate, KKXL, in Branfort, North Dakota.
Welcome to this strange program 1440 on the island.
Branforts, North Dakota.
I'd like to say hello to the GM Jim Holberg and PD Brian Rivers.
Great to have KKXL on board.
There's a very long, distinguished, rotten tradition we have of doing these April 1st things.
And this year I had no idea what Keith was going to do.
And it was sort of an array of things, but the one that got me, of course, was the blue screen of death.
When you bring up my website, I was at an XP computer that I had recently put XP in earlier in the day, and I went to the website, the blue screen of death came off, and I was like, damn.
You know, I thought I was away from this.
I mean, I'll be anyway.
And there it was.
And like everybody else, you know, I didn't read.
I didn't even, like a dummy, notice, gee, new font.
You know, I just noticed blue screen of death, and I rebooted my computer.
Well, Keith did that.
Along with several.
Then there was another one that actually got me too.
Because somehow he managed to make the web page jiggle every now and then.
But it only does it after you've been on it for a while.
He had an array of guests in there and guest hosts.
And then he had black mold in my house and had me living, gone for the week and living out in my motorhome.
And, oh, man.
But the one that got me, the blue screen of death.
And listen to this.
Here's a letter.
Dear Miss Bell and Miss Roland, I realize now, prior to reformatting my hard drive and back in the comfort of my home, and I've been truly had.
Mr. Bell, I work in a high school with roughly 200 computers in it.
Guess how many I went through before I gave up trying to figure out the blue screen fatal exception error?
Take another guess to where I have my internet homepage set.
In each case, of course, I was brashly greeted by what I had begun to believe was the product of a disgruntled Microsoft programmer.
And the problem lay much deeper.
I am indeed grateful that my school is not in session, Mr. Bell.
All are still away for the Easter holiday.
I would have raised the proverbial red flag to full mast, and it would have been laughing stock of nearly 1,000 students and faculty.
In conclusion, thank you for giving me something to do today.
This will look exemplary on my April Fool's Day work journal, Dave in Erie, Pennsylvania.
I had no idea it was coming.
It got me too, folks.
It shows how we read, doesn't it?
Coming up in a moment, Linda Moulton-Howe, author, investigator of all things Abinormal, a winner of many documentaries on the environment, reporter, science reporter for this show now for years, with a report coming up.
In the next hour, we're going to play real war games.
Here from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is Linda Moulton-Howe.
Fishermen who have spent their lives catching marine life in the waters between Naples and the Florida Keys began noticing massive areas of water in January so dark and dense that it was eerie to them.
And many fishermen said that they had never seen anything like it before.
By the middle of March, NASA satellite images clearly showed dark waters that at one point spanned an estimated 100 miles.
You can see one of the NASA satellite images of this dark water taken March 21st at my website, www.earthfiles.com, along with images that have now been taken of some of the dead and dying coral and sponges in the area that this dark water passed through.
Fishermen also noted that dead plants from the ocean floor seemed to rise up and follow the movement of the dark water through Florida Bay and the Keys.
Fish seemed to turn away from the dark currents, and eventually scientists discovered that coral and sponges had died in certain channels where the dark waters had been.
This past week, on March 28th, members of the scientific community met at the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg to review data from some water samples that they had collected up to that point, and many more had been collected.
And later on in the next half hour, I will be bringing a report hot off the presses that I got just about an hour ago.
But on Thursday, their consensus was this, quote, discolored water is most likely due to a non-red tide algal bloom of coastal marine origin.
The presence of a large amount of algae in the water can potentially cause problems for bottom organisms as the bloom decays, unquote.
The discolored area is now still observable in a region about 30 by 10 miles, and divers will be going down over the next couple of weeks into the dark waters to take more water samples.
After this meeting, I interviewed Dr. Brian Keller, science coordinator for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in Marathon, Florida.
The sanctuary is funded by NOAA.
Even though no single organism has been identified as the cause of the massive dark waters, Dr. Keller has a theory that the organism responsible is a species of diatom, which is a microscopic type of algae that gives off a kind of gold-brown color.
First, I asked Dr. Keller about the fisherman's first report.
unidentified
The observations that were coming in from commercial fishermen were water conditions unlike anything that they had ever seen in their time on the water.
Dark appearing water, no sheen characteristic of an oil spill, no strong aroma that would be characteristic of red tide.
At night, boat propellers caused phosphorescence.
There were sightings of large numbers of comb jellies in the water.
This can cause phosphorescence, as well as some of the types of phytoplankton can cause phosphorescence at night.
They said they were seeing something like they had never seen before, a dark mass of water that fishes appeared to be avoiding and that the fishes in the water appeared to be behaving unusually.
They talked about stringy masses in the water column.
That could have been a type of cyanobacteria that can form stringy-looking growth forms in the water column.
They collected water samples that have been sent to the Florida Marine Research Institute for analysis.
Some of those samples have fairly large numbers of diatoms in them.
More recent samples collected by the Moat Marine Laboratory just north of an area called Sugarloaf, many of those samples had medium to high concentrations of a particular type of diatom.
And so our thinking is that this may be a particularly massive and persistent bloom of algae.
And why blackness and why such an unprecedented appearance to the fishermen?
unidentified
Well, the blackness is apparent only in satellite imagery.
And people on the water in what appears to be black in the satellite imagery appears a brownish, greenish-brown there at the water surface.
So we have some kind of a disconnect between the satellite imagery and the actual appearance of the water, which is more of a dark color.
It's not black to the eye up close.
And what's unusual is the size and persistence, and we can only speculate that there was more than the usual influx of nutrients that fed this bloom and enabled it to grow to such a massive size and to last as long as it has.
And those nutrients would fall into the category largely of fertilizers and pesticides?
unidentified
Well, these actually come out of the system naturally.
Part of the geology in that part of Florida, we have a shift from sediments, the normal types of sands that are silica sands, into Florida Bay, which is all carbonate sands.
And so the Shark River outfall can bring with it naturally occurring silicate.
The agricultural areas are a long distance away from that part of Florida and pass through a lot of wetlands vegetation.
And the studies in the Everglades indicate that the agricultural nutrients pretty rapidly get taken up by the wetlands vegetation in what are called water conservation areas.
And so it's unlikely that agricultural nutrients are going all the way across to the southwest coast of Florida.
And so you would say right now as an educated guess that whatever fed this diatom bloom was some natural relationship between the silica and the other kind of sandy floor in those two waters?
unidentified
That's correct.
And we've had a very wet, what normally would be our dry season from November until about April.
We've had a very wet dry season that may be linked with what we think is a forthcoming El Niño event.
And that could explain why more than the usual outflow came from Shark River bringing these nutrients to feed this diatom bloom.
Is it definite that it is the diatons that are causing the blackness from the satellite, or could there be something else there mixed with the diatoms?
unidentified
Again, looking at the water up close, it does not appear black.
But what can happen in these blooms is that there can be shifts in the types of algae that dominate the blooms, so that one type of algae will bloom and then die off and provide nutrients that feed yet another bloom.
And that may have been the sequence in this case.
In early January, Florida International University conducted one of its four-time a year surveys out through the sanctuary waters out onto the southwest Florida shelf.
And they saw a low salinity between the 10th and 13th of January Right in the area of the mouth of the Shark River that supports the notion of an outflow at that time.
They saw an area of concentration of chlorophyll A, which is a photosynthetic pigment utilized by these algae.
And they saw the highest concentrations of chlorophyll A that they've ever measured in these waters since 1995.
They also saw a very high concentration of oxygen, which also supports the idea that this was a dense bloom of algae that generate large amounts of oxygen when they're photosynthesizing during the daytime.
This was definitely not a dead zone.
This was a very full-of-life zone at that time.
And now, two months later in March, we're seeing signs down here in the sanctuary that we still have large numbers of diatoms, but we're seeing dead diatoms, the skeletal material they leave behind.
So it appears that the bloom is starting to age and dissipate.
Now, there were reports that sponges and corals in a channel off of Key West were found dead at the height of the fishermen reporting the dark water?
unidentified
That's correct.
Those observations were made about a week ago by a very experienced diver who's an excellent natural history observer.
And we have scientists from Moat Marine Lab are going to that same site today to collect tissue samples for analysis, get some photographs and some video of what the community looks like, and possibly get some more quantitative data on what's happening there.
If the answer to all of this dark water is a diatom, why would a diatom, which is a plant, have the ability to kill sponges and corals?
unidentified
Well, we're not sure that there is that linkage.
We're not sure whether it's something associated with the bloom other than the diatom that is causing this effect.
We had a massive sponge die-off in Florida Bay in the early 1990s that was associated with a different kind of algal bloom, with a cyanobacterial bloom.
And there can be a combination of toxic effects.
A lot of these microscopic plants carry nasty chemicals to try to prevent animals from eating them.
There can also be physical clogging of filter feeders by huge quantities of these microscopic particles that can clog up the filtering apparatus of things like sponges.
So we're not sure what's causing the die-offs that we've seen near Key West associated with this bloom.
And we're hoping that the tissue samples that are being collected today and probably more in the future will give us some insight into what caused those die-offs.
Now, what is the current data from pilots or fishermen as we begin April in terms of how much of this discoloration is still being seen in the waters?
unidentified
Well, we had another vessel from NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in the vicinity of the Bloom on Friday, and it did a cruise track along what's called the backcountry, which would be the northern edge of the Keys that are characterized by a lot of shallow water areas.
And they saw these bloom conditions from an island known as Big Pine west to Key West, and that would cover a distance of approximately 30 miles.
And they estimated that it extended to approximately 10 miles to the north, this very brownish-green water.
The underwater visibility is typically less than two feet in this kind of pea soupy appearing water.
The divers that I've spoken to have experienced no adverse effects other than the limited visibility in the water.
Again, there are areas where the bottom community appeared healthy and okay despite being immersed in this what appears to be very concentrated plankton bloom.
What is it about a bloom of something like a plant that naturally exists in the ocean that can become so dense that it can cause destruction of coral and destruction of sponges?
And what makes that become a potential threat in the future?
unidentified
A general issue in that regard for any such phenomenon is how much is due to human-related causes and how much is truly natural.
And in this particular bloom, I'm not sure that we're going to be able to develop a good answer for that.
And this complete inability to fully understand what has happened, point a finger is that one thing you will hear in the next half hour from a woman who has spent hours and was up tonight up till 10 o'clock when I last talked to her.
She had been looking under a microscope and examining some of the water from this area.
And you will find it very interesting to hear from a woman who for 30 years has been analyzing and examining flasks of water from Florida and how this one is so hard to finger any particular culprit.
But she will also, I think, that all of this is perhaps leading to something that all the scientists say that they need to understand more art, and that is, is it possible that in this time of increasingly warm temperatures and the warmest winter on record in North America,
combined with what Dr. Heller pointed out, was water in Florida with warmer temperatures, could we be moving into a new era in which these kinds of explosive growths might happen on a more frequent basis?
And I would like to share with Coast listeners a historic reference from Dr. Keller that is worth noting.
Coast listeners can see this report in photographs and its historic reference at my website, www.earthfiles.com.
Go to headlines and scroll down to the top story about scientists investigating dark Florida waters.
And there is an excerpt from my conversation with Dr. Keller in which he said that in the mid-1950s, a crew of a boat that went on a regular basis out by the Tortugas National Park,
which is out further west from the Naples and Sable Bay Area, they wrote in their logbook that, and I'm quoting, they saw a very unusual mass of dark water between Key West and the Dry Tortugas.
Then, back in 1898, scientists there on a marine lab that then existed in the Dry Tortugas, which is an island, at that time they reported a dark water event.
Dr. Keller raises these historic questions, saying nobody knows from that time period what these massive dark areas were, but could it be related to whatever happened in terms of the conditions this time around in 2002?
Now to show you how strange and totally right now this is just not nailed down, tonight, while she was in the lab, what you're going to hear from is Beverly Roberts.
She's research administrator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in the Florida Marine Research Institute.
For 30 years, she has analyzed flasks of water, and she had before her tonight, she had the whole gamut of what had been turned into the Florida Marine Research Institute.
Flasks have also gone to the moat laboratory and some other places.
And of those, what seemed to be the most dominant organism, plant or otherwise, that you found?
unidentified
There isn't one.
There isn't a single dominant one.
Not really.
That's what I'm saying about our samples are giving us quite varied results in terms of phytoplankton.
Samples collected from March 28th through the 30th in areas just north of the Keys indicate that a Florida red tide organism, Coronia brevis, is still present and apparently a very patchy distribution throughout that area.
We have observations that the discoloration and actual textural variations along the surface are quite different within just a few nautical miles of one position and another recorded position.
And we may not have good resolution of what's causing this discoloration at this time, certainly, and possibly for some time to come.
Well, the divers have been going down and getting right in the middle of it in what they call the pea soup and have been reporting that they are not finding anything deleterious in themselves.
But another part of the findings so far by Beverly Roberts was what's called brevatoxin.
And this is produced from red tides, which are very common to the Florida area.
And in almost all of the samples, she has found the presence of some brevatoxin.
She cannot prove absolutely conclusively that there is enough red tide algae to be producing the brevatoxin.
And it gets even more complicated because some other plants can produce this toxin.
Yeah, in terms of the algae, but she has been finding the brevatoxin, which is this chemical that the red tide produces.
And in her own mind, she wonders if that could be responsible for what might have happened to some of the coral and the sponges.
It is truly a, if it's pea soup water, right now, clarity about exactly what has happened since January is not very clear either.
And right over the next two weeks, they're going to send down more teams of divers.
There will be what's called cruises, more scientific cruises.
They're going to do some more sampling.
They think, right now, that they can say this much with some certainty, that the amount of the diatom skeletons that are building up means that whatever this bloom was, or series of blooms, which is more likely, a whole series of different kinds of algae growing and getting more expansive on each other until it covered this 100 miles,
that because they are building up, they think this is the decline of it and that it should be over.
But both Dr. Keller and Beverly Roberts raised a similar question.
With warming temperatures, with this having been the warmest winter in North American history, with a general trend for the last 13 to 15 years of increasingly warmer temperatures,
that we are possibly moving into a new era in which these kinds of explosive blooms without anybody knowing exactly what sets them off and how big they can become could become more common than they've been in the past.
She says, Australia has had its coldest summer ever, and this devastated the grape production.
Also, hundreds of thousands of baby penguins were killed during the Antarctic summer because it was so much sea ice that they had to travel 30 miles to get food.
So what kind of sense does that make on a global scale?
In the computer projections over the last 15 years in which they've put in the data of CO2 buildup and global warming patterns, you find the oddest, cold, and warm areas.
The poles get warmest fastest, and we've certainly been seeing That in terms of the melt of the North Pole Ice now down to 43% of what it was only a couple of decades ago.
The scientific world was expecting that there would be disintegration of that big Larsen B ice shelf, but they never expected that it would be nearly gone in 2002.
And now we're looking out at a projection that maybe in only three years, maybe at the utmost five, it will all be gone there.
And then that means these questions about increasing Antarctic other melt is still there.
And this is all part of what appears to be a pattern that is affecting the world.
And right now, drought is worsening in the United States on a national basis.
Yeah, and I have just done a big report at EarthFiles.com in the environment section.
And it is so bad now on the East Coast that up in the Cannonsville Reservoir, the Delaware River watershed, that feeds, it's one of three reservoirs that feeds Manhattan, for example, that the watershed was exposed to mud for the first time since it was built.
And that reservoir, which helps get water to Manhattan, had only 3% of its water capacity in December.
Yeah, nobody had expected that anything like that would happen.
And in fact, half of the drinking water for New York City comes from these three reservoirs in the Delaware River watershed.
And all three right now, on April 1, have less than half their normal water levels.
Now, this means that we're just starting into what's going to be five months of increasing temperatures.
What is going to happen in Manhattan?
Well, the mayor last week declared a drought emergency.
That is the most severe that the mayor or a governor can declare.
The governor of Pennsylvania in February declared 17 counties here in drought emergencies.
From Maine and New Hampshire, people have been spending huge amounts of money trying to drill new wells to find water because the ground table water has lowered so much that wells have been drying up.
They're estimating that over 1,000 wells in Maine alone are now dry.
We've got all the specific data that is coming in that apparently an El Niño is brewing.
And when an El Niño kicks in, which would be over the next six to 12 months if it really takes hold, one of the things that almost always happens is that the East Coast gets drier and warmer while the Southeast and Texas get wetter.
And already that pattern seems to have been developing.
And I talked, if you want to hear, it's very brief, but I talked with Bill Douglas.
He's an executive director in the Upper Delaware Council up in New York about what is happening with the reservoirs and how serious this could get.
And if you take that against all three reservoirs being less than half of what they should be.
Right.
And this is March 29th.
How serious is it if we do not get rain this spring and given the fact that there's no snow pass?
unidentified
The word I'm getting from the experts in the field are that this coming summer, if we haven't made significant impacts on bringing that deficit up, we are going to be in very serious trouble meeting all the water demands that we have here.
Well, it is a very it's it really is a concern in the future if these temperatures continue to keep increasing incrementally each year.
And I also talked with Don Wilhyt.
He is the climatology man and director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
And he pointed out that he, this week, he read a report from Colorado.
And the state of Colorado is so concerned about the fire hazards there.
And he was pointing out to me that in West Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona, in Colorado right now, that one of the greatest worries is dryness to the point that it's tender.
So as we start going into the hot temperatures, they could be trying to cope with huge fire threats there.
Well, as I said, I just have this feeling that if I had to hope the elders about, they'd have a lot to say on this subject.
Coming up in a moment, War Games.
unidentified
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
To Coast AM from April
1st, 2002.
To Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
Destination unknown, double-cross messenger, oh Lord Can't get no connection, can't get through, where are you?
Well, the nightly's heavy on his guilty mind It's far from the borderline When the hitman comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated And he's a
idiot, son And I'm stepping into the twilight zone The heads in the house, it feels like he's gone Like he's looking blue at the moon and star But everyone's low, now that I've lost the past You've got to
go, when a bullet hits the bone So do what I want to go, when a bullet hits the bone When a bullet hits the bone Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired April 1st, 2002.
Tonight should certainly be a different kind of experience.
Bonnie Rantham is here.
Bonnie Rantham is the author of Ground Zero and Earthquake Games.
No kidding.
She's a former war gamer for the Department of Defense.
With a computer science degree from the University of Wyoming and an itch to see the wild side of the defense world.
Oh, that'd be the wild side, all right.
She's worked in helicopter crash investigations, robotic automobile assembly, missile defense, war gaming.
She now lives in Erie, Colorado with her husband Bill and their four children.
She's skilled, very skilled at military maneuvers, savvy about international defense, at ease profiling a terrorist, been known to save the world from nuclear annihilation often before lunchtime.
As a war gamer for the Defense Department, it was all in a day's work.
That's who's coming up next.
Well, I've always wanted to talk to somebody like you, Bonnie.
In fact, when they did the redo of NORAD, now I'm sure almost everyone knows, but for those who might have been off the planet for the last few years, NORAD is the giant underground facility in Colorado Springs.
It's built inside a mountain, Cheyenne Mountain.
Well, they did a redo of Cheyenne Mountain after the movie War Games came out, not because of the movie, it was just that time.
And the actual facility in Cheyenne Mountain was just this little room.
And they thought that the movie was so much better than what they had in reality.
In fact, the facility where I worked, Trevor Air Force Base, was built, I swear, was built by people who had seen every James Bond movie and had a lot of money to spend.
I went through a retina scanner every day that was a clear glass booth.
I would step in and it would lock me in, click, and I would be locked in there until I passed all the tests.
And the other thing, which I was curious, and the whole reason I became a war gamer is because I always wanted to get into the most interesting places I could find.
That was my entire goal of becoming a computer programmer.
I always wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to write about really interesting things.
And then when I got the clearance, I figured out one of the reasons people come back in pale and shaky is because they keep the room at like 50 degrees.
Ground Zero is a thriller, murder mystery that takes place in a war gaming center, the war gaming center.
And I take you, the reader, into my world because there's a murder that occurs.
And it's a locked room murder mystery.
You have to figure out who done it as well as how done it.
And the murder itself causes a cascade of events which leads to a terrorist group getting hold of information which they use to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States.
Yes, because when you look at, we would have missile trail markers.
So as the nuclear weapons came up out of China or the Soviet Union and would curve over the poles and head down towards the United States, you would see all these tendrils and it would look like this big hand coming over.
When you saw that, oh, you know, send the vice president to South America because there's not going to be anything living here bigger than a cockroach.
There we probably get into some national security issues because what we have in space right now, I think probably we don't know everything we have in space right now.
And do we have weapons there?
Do we have what we're going to call defensive weapons in space right now?
And the whole idea of a brilliant pebble in space is that you want to shoot down the missile coming out in its country of origin.
For example, if you shoot down a nuclear missile heading towards the United States and you hit it off the coast of the United States or you hit it over the United States, it won't go off.
You're not going to have a nuclear bomb because a nuclear device does not go off unless everything works perfectly.
So you hit with a big rock, no more nuclear weapon.
But what you do have is plutonium, which will rain down upon the country where you hit it.
Or if that missile has something else on it, like why don't you just stop right there?
And again, the whole hand of God scenario, end of the world scenario, really went away when the superpowers decided this was, you know, they had had enough.
What we really saw after the Soviet Union fell was the concept of a limited strike.
And something else about space, too, is that think of what's up there floating around.
You know, your doctor who's on his pager or her pager, who gets called in in case you get into a traffic accident, that pager is based on a satellite system.
In our present technological society, if there was a war that let's say it didn't get to the ground, implausible as that is, but we just destroyed all these satellites and they destroyed ours, what would that do to our economy?
You know, we never played a scenario where it didn't get into a shooting war.
You mean they almost all go eventually to Well, if let's say if the bad guys put up what we call an EMP weapon, electromagnetic pulse weapon, and take out all the non-hardened satellites, of course you can harden a satellite against electromagnetic pulse.
That's one of the reasons the Army and the Air Force always seem to cost so much more when they put their birds up in the air, as well as the fact that they don't tell anybody that it's going up.
That's a whole other can of worms.
When they put those birds up in the air, you say, hey, what's that sound on the horizon?
The End I don't know if you all know this or not, but Whitley Streeber, a very good friend of mine, co-author of the book War Day, one of the best written on the topic.
There have been many, many good ones.
I think I've seen every movie and read every book on nuclear war that's been out, including On the Beach, with both the original and the HBO remake, which was awesome.
Now, I've always wondered, Bonnie, in a full nuclear exchange, would the rather immediate aftermath of that perhaps unfold as On the Beach suggested it would with the Northern Hemisphere and,
of course, the Northern Hemispheres, I guess I ought to say, all going into virtual dead zones and then, of course, with the winds the way they are bringing the whole thing down eventually to Australia and ending all life.
Not something I really, it's so depressing to even think about that.
But yes, that's what would happen.
One of the things that we fought desperately to do during a hand of God war game was to prevent that from happening if we could.
For example, we knew that there was no way we could prevent enough nuclear weapons getting to our country to save our country.
But we could shoot down enough of them so that the radioactivity would fade out before it took all life on Earth.
So it was a matter of preserving, if we could, the chance for life.
And boy, those were depressing.
Depressing war games to play.
Because while you're fighting the battle, fight, fight, ground interceptors, ground interceptors, put some more sensors up in the air so we can determine.
And then somebody would tap you on the shoulder and you'd look at the map and you'd say, oh, I'm dead.
It would be very similar to what happened with the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.
You would create a blocking effect of the sun's rays.
Everything would cool down.
Once you started the cooling down, it would cause an ice age.
and you end up with the few people who had survived if they survived would not then be able to plant or grow anything because the world would be glaciated just as it was back in the ice age and stuff i just don't know how you could have You said you began to have nightmares about it.
I was, but not the massive scenarios, because very shortly after we started doing war gaming, we began to realize that that sort of conflict was becoming less and less of a potential because not only were we bringing our nuclear weapons, our nuclear bombs down in levels, but also the Soviet Union was.
Also, it was so interesting.
One of the first war games we played was Blue, which is R-Forces.
We played several missile defense war games where we did not have any blue assets in the field.
Essentially, we would play as though we had no nuclear weapons.
Well, the first time we played Blue, we had been playing for a year, basically, shooting down incoming weapons but not doing anything in return.
So we play this war game, and I don't know who it was, China or the Soviet Union, sent over a very small-scale attack.
And we're all getting ready to do the usual.
You know, we shoot down the small-scale attack, we call them up on the phone and say, let's talk.
You know, we don't need to end the world here.
And all of a sudden, all these lights started going over the United States, and we looked at all the missiles are coming out of all the silos all across the United States.
Suppose, for example, Over an issue like, oh, God, who knows, Taiwan, maybe.
Yeah.
Let's say the Chinese have, you know, they've blustered that they could fire a nuclear device, say, at Los Angeles and do that from a submarine, and they probably could.
If Los Angeles went up in a white flash, what do you think the U.S. response would be?
You know, it's interesting, Bonnie, and this will, of course, been way since you're out of the war games business, but gee whiz, Bonnie, the other day, the President of the United States made a statement about sort of a rethinking of the use of nuclear weapons.
And I said to myself, oh, the important story is really, if you look very carefully, this is a major change, probably in response to 9-11 and what they might see coming after 9-11.
But it sounds like they're getting ready to justify the use of nuclear weapons.
Well, more than that, we have always had the option to use a weapon of mass destruction against a weapon of mass destruction.
And I say those words very carefully.
A weapon of mass destruction includes smallpox.
It includes sarin gas.
What they were saying to Saddam Hussein, who is frantically attempting to develop a hardened Ebola and a smallpox that's resistant, is that if he uses those against the United States, that's a weapon of mass destruction and we'll nuke him.
Yeah, and let's hope and pray that that doesn't happen because obviously there are many people in Baghdad who hate Saddam Hussein a whole lot more than I do.
They have been under his jack boot for a generation.
And I believe that the saber-rattling, that's a really good way to put it, the saber-rattling was done as an attempt to prevent such a thing from occurring.
But, you know, that's a warning to people that you would think are thinking rationally in some sense.
People who take over airliners and crash them into buildings and the Pentagon and stuff like that, from our point of view, are not thinking rationally.
I'm not saying from their point of view, it's not rational, but from our point of view, it's completely irrational.
So threatening them with utter annihilation might not register the way we would imagine it would register on us.
One of the problems, though, I think, with the world opinion thingy, which I'm not an expert on, is that a weapon of mass destruction has been understood to be nuclear.
I think that the United States is making it very clear to our allies as well as our enemies that a weapon of mass destruction includes biological and chemical weapons.
Yes.
And we don't have, we don't develop smallpox that kills people.
We don't develop Ebola that's hardened so that it's resistant to antibiotics.
Could in fact Ebola be weaponized to the degree that it would live long enough to propagate itself in the horrible manner that we could imagine it might propagate if it didn't.
It's like Ebola seems like a brush fire.
It's so horrible that it burns itself out very quickly.
Well, you know, obviously we want to kill al-Qaeda, and that's a good way to kill al-Qaeda.
However, if you attack a biological facility, you don't want to throw a big, dusty bomb on top of it that throws essentially pieces and parts of that facility into the air.
What you want to do is you want to incinerate that facility and not disturb it.
So you basically burn it out without potentially, let's say for example, throwing particles into the air which might infect someone several miles away.
Oh, I think that the thermobaric bomb's idea, the reason we tested it in Afghanistan is so that we can use it against a biological facility of Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, thermobaric.
unidentified
Oh, all of a sudden it doesn't seem so happy after all.
Listen, I even get jittery when we start getting reports all across the nation of these strange rashes.
These kind of stories, now it's probably nothing, but from coast to coast in Nova Scotia, everywhere, I've got stories of these strange rashes suddenly developing.
Well, people don't say it, and I'm not certainly saying it now, but I mean, who's to say that something like that is not, they have no idea what it is.
It doesn't mean that somebody caught something and is a precursor to something else.
And we just live in very, very strange times.
After 9-11, everybody, of course, is on edge and almost expecting something biological.
In fact, our government was saying, you know, they were talking about smallpox so much.
I was like waiting for the other shoe to fall.
They were talking so much about smallpox that I thought it's coming.
They know it's coming, and that's why they're talking about it.
Well, I mean, they have to be actively coming up with defenses if they know Russia or whoever is working on these things.
And in that effort to get a defensive against it, you have to be able to create it, which means you have to have it.
Hold on, Bonnie, we're already at the top of the hour.
My guest is Bonnie Ramthen.
She was a war gamer for the Department of Defense.
We will be right back, I think.
unidentified
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
I, I, I, I, I, I, all those tears I cry.
I, I, I, I, I, I, I...
Velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she made it
in Some velvet morning when I'm straight Flowers growing on a hill Driving flies and duffel deals Learn from us very much Look at
us but do not touch Phaedra is my name Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate And maybe
tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life And how she gave me life You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time On Premier Radio Networks Tonight an encore presentation on of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
My guest is a very serious person, Bonnie Ramthan, who was a war gamer for the Department of Defense.
It's a pretty interesting conversation if you have the stomach for it.
Back now to my guest, Bonnie Ramthan, who was a war gamer for the Department of Defense.
So anyway, wrapping up with what we were talking about with regard to Germs.
You know, Bonnie, even though you can't answer directly because you didn't get in, it wouldn't seem to me that we could afford to have a germ gap, as it were.
The whole idea of launching a nuclear assault, shall we say, is to remove the possibility of them hurting us again.
So you don't nuke to kill people.
You nuke their facilities.
Our nuclear response against, let's say, Russia, even during the big bad days, was not to target their cities, their population centers, but to target their missile fields, to target their missiles.
And that was their whole mutual assured destruction stance.
Lots of people think that we had a mutual assured destruction pact with Russia.
It was like, nobody's going to nuke, you're not going to nuke us because we've got our nukes aimed at your women and children, so don't fire at our women and children.
That's mutual assured destruction, and that's just so morally bankrupt I can't even imagine anybody subscribing to that theory.
Where, by the way, I must say, a lot of Russian I've been there.
there's a great deal of russian treasure there as well as uh...
of course uh...
uh...
inside uh...
of the kremlin i was inside the kremlin god that's and have you been there now uh...
the jewels to go there okay that's not a very very very much for me at the kremlin it was great And they've got a lot of jewels and a lot of treasure both in Moscow and what it used to be Stelingrad.
So we wouldn't hit secondary targets of that sort then.
And I watched it happen in a military wargaming sense as opposed to reality.
I watched where Blue launched and where they landed.
The concept is very precise, limited strikes that would remove their capability of launching more nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, what you really want to do is prevent them from getting their nukes into this country and then send in the Marines.
Let's send conventional forces over.
We don't need to nuke Baghdad.
We can take Baghdad with conventional forces.
What we do need to prevent, if they release smallpox on the world, let's say, is we need to prevent them releasing a secondary, let's say, Ebola or, you know, a flu like in the Stephen King book.
Yes, we played several games where we had a cascade, where India and Pakistan are busy throwing nukes at each other, and China gets into it, and then China decides to launch towards us because they think we're coming in on one of those horrible situations where everyone's trying to settle things down, and it's a mob situation.
Once the Soviet Union went down, now China does not have the same capabilities that the old Russia did.
Russia bankrupted itself building nuclear bombs.
They do not have the capability to destroy the whole earth.
But we're looking at a pre-depression situation in this country where we possibly could have two or three different people declaring themselves presidents just because you would lose Washington, D.C. You would lose New York.
The major city centers would be uninhabitable.
And people would basically be alive.
There would be no nuclear winter.
It would not be a situation where you couldn't grow crops.
But it would be a situation where you wouldn't have a big federal government.
Well, looking back at what just occurred on 9-11 and what that did to the probably already, to some degree, in trouble economy, and the scale you're talking about, would be.
You'd still have to pay your mortgage, but your 401k would be gone.
I mean, what worse situation?
You still have all your debts to pay, but the stock market's been nuked.
It's not a good situation.
On the other hand, I remember playing a practice war game, and there was an attack, what we call a decapitation attack, where they're trying to take out Washington, D.C., New York.
And all the bombs going towards Washington, D.C., this was a practice, all the bombs going towards Washington, D.C. were not getting shot at.
They were all friendly.
They were blue colored.
And I'm just going around trying to figure out what's going on.
Finally, I get on the intercom and I said, I think we've got a bug in the system.
Everything going towards Washington is blue.
And somebody gets on this guy down the, you know, three or four doors down, gets on the intercom and says, oh, that's just me.
I kind of figured if we took out Washington, things might be better.
Back to my second book, Earthquake Games, is kind of the opposite take on Ground Zero.
In Ground Zero, my character has worked on a government project that does great good, which is missile defense wargaming.
It's this incredibly good thing to shoot down nuclear missiles.
But I could also see how a government project could do evil because I knew that my project was in this area that nobody could get in except those of us with this particular sort of clearance.
There were buildings on the base in which I worked that I couldn't get into.
Well, yeah, but the fact that it was at a level beyond your own, and you're at nuclear war level, a level beyond, boy, what that suggests, Bonnie, gosh.
I don't have no, you know, I didn't get told by any of the engineer guys that's what they were doing.
But I looked as it was being built.
I was in there, you know, with my lunch bag, poking around, and they had electronic wiring throughout the girders around the area where the War Game Center was being built.
And, of course, there was the submarine-style doors.
Now, these, I mean, what in the heck was the point of submarine-style doors?
And of course, you know, then I read a little bit about remote viewing because I thought, now this is more than trying to intercept electronic surveillance.
Obviously, a satellite's not going to be able to see into this building.
There's no windows.
And there was no way you could park a truck and aim a dish anywhere nearer than half a mile away.
Of all the people that I've interviewed that are On the edge.
The remote viewers have long since convinced me.
I've interviewed every one of the ones, the major ones in the project, every single one of them.
And I've long since been a believer in that.
Bonnie, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Bonnie Ranthan is my guest.
Her books, Earthquake Games and Ground Zero, I've got to read both.
I'm going to get both.
I'm guarantee you.
She booked at the last minute.
Didn't get a chance to get them first.
But I'm going to get hold of them.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
In the heat of a summer night, in the land of the Dalabill, when the town of Chicago died, and they talked about it still.
When a man named out the phone, tried to make that town his own, and he called his gang to war with the forces of the law.
I heard my mama cry.
I heard her pray the night Chicago die.
Brother, what a night it really was.
Brother, what I thought it really was.
No.
Go round by the wind.
Throw time in a spin.
Bye.
I did love about the week.
I did to the top.
I did not feel.
I did have to stop You blow it all sky high I tell you I'm your enemy alive Without a reason why You've blown it all sky high You Oh, oh, oh, oh You go down.
Everything.
You're good to come.
You've blown it all, Sean.
Oh, my.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired April 1st, 2002.
Because, of course, if Israel became involved to the nuclear level, not out of the question, that would no doubt involve us in some way rather quickly.
And then you don't know about the Russians anymore, depending on what begins to happen to some of their friends.
They've got a big puff of cotton over there, and everybody's striking matches.
When is it going to go up?
I'm not sure what would happen.
I think that the entire intent is to keep things from going nuclear.
It would be so easy to put a couple of nukes on Saddam Hussein's biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons facilities over there, or just get a good-sized nuke in the general area.
And if they say, oh, we didn't have anything there, say, well, look at that big crater.
Who knows?
I mean, that's an easy solution, isn't it?
We're not doing that.
What we're trying to do is come up with bombs like the ThermoBarrick.
ThermoBarrick, my new favorite bomb, that does not require nuclear weapons to destroy these facilities.
So we're really putting forth a great effort here to keep the nukes away, and for good reason.
By the way, they're using these daisy cutters and thermobaric bombs in Afghanistan, and it may be completely unrelated, but there sure have been a lot of earthquakes over there lately.
The premise of my book, Earthquake Games, is that the United States government has a Tesla machine, originally designed by Nikola Tesla, which generates a magnetic Earth resonance pulse, which causes a fault line then to vibrate harmonically and sets off an earthquake.
Now, I originally got this idea because in 1994...
Not so wild.
In 1994, there was an earthquake in Northridge in California.
I thought, oh, my goodness, what if they didn't predict it?
They caused it.
And then I read about, you know, then it all falls into place from there, that in order to prevent major earthquakes like what happens in places like South America or Turkey or now Afghanistan, you create a smaller earthquake that bleeds that pressure off that fault so you don't get the killer earthquake.
But of course, that kind of power in the hands of a secret government organization is very tempting to turn towards your own purposes.
I have this great scene in my book where they go into, and my CIA analyst, of course, who has the requisite clearances, goes into this labyrinth world to find the Tesla files.
It was so fun to write as fiction because it's so close to reality.
They have all the Tesla files.
So my book came out, Earthquake Games, and while I was doing the first series of publicity on the hardback, there was another earthquake.
And it was January 13th, 2001, over Martin Luther King Day weekend.
The January 17th, 1994 earthquake was on Martin Luther King Day weekend.
And I was thinking, wow, you know, either nature has an affinity for Martin Luther King Day or there's something to this.
It was a lot of fun to write the book, but the more I delved into it, the more I realized that it parallels reality almost too much.
And behind this, it is said, in quotes, is Osama bin Laden.
What do you think you know about Osama bin Laden?
And what should we, if you were war gaming the scenario, knowing what you know now about Osama's willingness and capability, what kind of gaming would you be doing about this?
And believe me, while I was weeping with the rest of the world over what happened, I mean, I couldn't believe that we never thought of that and that we never gamed aircraft.
Of course, I also know that in 1985, was it during the Reagan administration, an airliner was shot down in the Persian Gulf.
It was an Iranian airliner that had some problem with their communication systems, and our aircraft carrier shot it out of the sky.
And what you do, and they used airliners, which is Quite unconventional of them, but brilliant.
They use airliners to essentially do what we've gamed in a nuclear sense.
You take out Washington, D.C., the capital, the White House, the Pentagon.
You take out the financial district of New York.
Then you take out several city centers, such as Atlanta, and what's the other one we always gamed, of course, Colorado Springs, because that's got the NORAD and Wargaming Missile Defense and Peterson Air Force Base and the Air Force Academy.
So that's definitely ground zero.
And several other city centers, and then that's it.
I believe the reasoning behind that was basically in Nevada you had all of the pawns, not the major chess pieces.
You have to have the king and the queen on your chessboard in order to direct those pawns.
So why take out Nevada when they are pawns?
Now, this is a philosophy, the decapitation attempt is a philosophy that comes from people who believe that you have the ruling elite and then a bunch of peasants.
So once you knock off the ruler, like what happened in Afghanistan, then everybody descends into tribes and they fight each other, which is not really what America is all about.
But that's the concept.
So what they did on 9-11 was they failed in a decapitation attempt.
They hit the World Trade Center first, which allowed the alert to go out.
They grounded the plane so the other terrorists on the planes were not able to complete their missions.
And then, of course, the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon may have been aimed at the White House, may have been aimed at the Capitol.
And if the president had been in the White House, they didn't know he wasn't.
But if he'd been at the White House and they had taken out, basically, the first three or four in the command structure, you know, you might have two or three different people, like a hi in a bunker in Omaha saying, I'm the president now.
And there was no, there was reason to believe, certainly I would have believed, that if they were doing an attack like that, that the secondary wave might have been a suitcase nuclear bomb.
So, you know, don't go back to Washington, D.C., Mr. President, because there may not be one if we go back there.
So he forced them to go back to Washington, D.C. in the evening, basically to say, you know, to show that he was not a coward, you know, that he wasn't being hidden in some bunker.
Right, and I've played war games where I've seen, it's so interesting to watch what happens when you apply pressure in unexpected ways to people who are used to dealing with A, B, C, and D, and you throw them W. Right.
Then sometimes they don't really panic in a sense that you or I would panic because these are trained military men and women who've been to the war college and everything.
But what they'll do is they'll start throwing, you know, into the mix, they'll start throwing different things trying to find a solution.
You know, they'll start fitting those puzzle pieces in.
Okay, what about this?
Okay, what about this?
What about this?
And it's pretty frantic.
You know, I remember seeing a very, he was a Marine.
I love the Marines.
And he was just in a purple-faced rage because he was trying to save the Earth and everything was going wrong.
And he couldn't get the proper commands out.
And I think something like that must have happened.
It was so unexpected that what they were trying to do was say, okay, what about this scenario?
What about that scenario?
We've got to go here.
Okay, vote about there.
And then things started to settle down a little bit.
Bonnie Ramthan, who was a war gamer for the Department of Defense, is my guest.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
You know, you know, don't come beaver.
I'm just waiting for you if you wanna sing the words.
And you know, don't come easy.
You don't have to shout things about easy.
When all of the colors are black, it's not that the colors are there.
It's just imagination.
Everything's the same back in my little town.
I know there's a little bit back in my little town.
Nothing but the day and night back in my little town In my little town I never meant
nothing, I was just my father's son Saving my money, dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight an oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
But I'm not, again, I'm not aware of all the different reasons that they chose not to do so.
And I don't know if we are going to go in again and take care of the job this time.
I have hopes.
I have suppositions based on playing enough games to know that when you get a bad guy of this magnitude, you don't wait for him to knock more pieces off your side of the board.
You have to strike at him.
But that doesn't mean that we're going to do so.
I hope we do.
I think that there's a lot of people who have fears of what will happen if we do.
And places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are essentially representative of the goodness of our country and the tolerance and what these Islamo-fascists consider to be the decadence of our country.
And so, really, the hope of decapitation is that, again, that so much confusion reigns that, as you pointed out, you get people in bunkers, in mountains, declaring themselves president, that sort of thing.
it's not unreasonable that it could be that bad here i don't believe no they could be that that here but i'm an optimist i can hear that and more than a You wouldn't think that kind of work would turn you into an optimist.
If you think of it as a bell curve or a curve, like a stock market curve, you start out losing most of your games, and then you start winning, and then you plateau out.
So only the most serious situations descend into really nuclear strikes succeeding in landing and killing people.
Most of the scenarios that we played, once we got our, I'm trying to think of a phrase that is not scatological in reference, once we got our manure in a group, we started winning these battles without a nuclear weapon hitting the ground.
And that includes our own.
So yeah, it was pretty optimistic after a while.
And, you know, the occasional scenario would be run where that wouldn't happen.
In the scenarios that you run in those cases, when you gain that, how many times or what percentage of the time or on your bell curve does it get out of control or what percentage do we win?
Yeah, but in other words, I would like to know if we're attacked biologically and we do first strike with nuclear weapons, say at Iraq, what kind of result there would be or might be.
Even though Russia is now what it is, and that's something different than when it was the Soviet Union, they are now watching us build a generation of space-based defense weapons.
And there's certainly a line of thinking that your weapons are about to be made, your situation is going to be made academic and moot because you can't hit this other country with these weapons.
So there comes a sort of a strange point where you have to make a decision to either use them or lose them.
Yeah, and that's the point where, you know, do you trust your government or not?
Do you trust your government to have the ultimate weapon and a missile defense system and therefore to be able to say, you know, I don't know, all the beautiful Russian women come over here or we're going to nuke you.
You would hope that our government wouldn't do that.
And so far in our history, we haven't.
We had our time of empire where we went out and conquered territory.
But still, if we build this, there is going to come that interesting moment where the Russians, which still, after all, do pay attention to things, are going to say, look, if this goes any further at all, our weapons are useless.
We either use them now or who's to say it isn't already built, sorry?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Bonnie Ramthan.
I have a brief comment, then a question, and then a comment if I don't run too long.
I have been basically pointed at the future my entire lifetime in my late 40s now.
Ever since I was the Geiger counter monitor in the sixth grade in Southern California when we were doing these pathetic duck and cover exercises under our desks.
He didn't get to the comment, but it was an interesting question.
All human women sterile?
That would do it in a generation or so, eh?
unidentified
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
Close my eyes But I couldn't find a way So I said I'd hope one day to leave you Tell
me, tell me Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies Tell me lies Oh no, no, you can't discuss You can't discuss
All the times have come
Here, but now they're gone Seasons don't feel the reefers Nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain We could meet our day out Come on, baby Don't feel the reefers Baby, take my hand Don't feel the reefers You're missing one bell somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from April 1st, 2002.
Although, you know, they weren't saying, oh, you know, we must save the children.
They were quite willing to fight the battle.
But women have different ways of looking at things, and that's why it's good to have both women and men fighting a battle.
Because they have, although I'm not a big believer of having them on the battlefield carrying guns, for example, because it's sort of physical strength requirement out there in the field.
But as far as the mental capabilities go, you need that dichotomy.
You need both men and women looking at the same problem together.
I understand they do understand to know where the territories are, but the potential, if you look at the article and give it any veracity, and they're pretty good, you know, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and University of Texas said that 42 to 43 percent of up to 30 million people vaccinated in that time period would potentially have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Now, that's about 12.9 million people potentially, if that doesn't play into the same scenario from just possibly our own blender.
Yes, actually one of the most interesting war games we played was one where some eco-terrorists took over a missile silo and launched, hoping to launch at Washington, D.C. But the twist, which I thought was really amusing, was that the missile was misfired and headed towards Seattle.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Bonnie Ramfin.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, I was listening to a senior fellow from the War College, John Pellich here, and he said we have to be very on guard against a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign building up for a pretext to attack Iraq.
And I'd like to mention a couple standards here where the United States government is hoarding more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined.
It's used them and others to kill millions of people around the world from Hiroshima to Vietnam to Iraq.
It's making now terrorist nuclear threats against seven countries.
It supports and has installed death squad regimes around the world.
And it refuses to allow weapons inspectors into the United States ever.
Yeah, but sir, aside from all that, we're pretty nice guys.
unidentified
Well, yeah, if you consider killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq that hasn't done absolutely nothing to us, and yet we turn around and hypocritically say that.
I'm an independent citizen, and in fact, I worked as a war gamer with the idea in mind that I would face whatever I had to face if there was something evil going on.
I got those clearances, and if they were going to show me something that was harmful to America, I was going to expose it.
Obviously, Bonnie is very articulate, probably with a genius level IQ.
But I can't help but wonder, Bonnie, I wonder if you took it into consideration.
I mean, you had people like, of course, recently Robert Hanson, DNC Counterintelligence FBI.
You had CIA Mould.
You had John Walker, naval code clerk who was actually in the chain of communications command for the National Command Authority between them and the Ohio-class boats.
I mean, as you look at all these things, you talk about we'd shoot their missiles down if they went for Los Angeles.
Man, we don't have any capacities.
We'd shoot many incoming missiles down, and you should well know it.
Now, we did another test the other day with a launch from Vandenberg in which we did, in fact, successfully shoot down a missile that we fired, so we knew where it was coming from and all the rest of it.
But we did.
Now, the statement he made or the challenge he gave you was that we have no defense whatsoever to stop a missile aimed, say, at Los Angeles.
And if it was a submarine launching against Los Angeles, which the Chinese have threatened, there's not going to be much of a way to stop that in time, is there?
I hope they'll be still in the beans, but as far as protecting ourselves, did they consider our bodies of water upstream from dams as a potential critical site to protect?
Well, there's foreign troop training going on here.
I'm not aware of any invasion force, although the other thing that might be argued is that there are cells here that wish us ill will and may still be here.
And I think if you listen to the government and what they're saying, Bonnie, you may agree or disagree, but there are clearly indications they are still here waiting to do something.
My question, I've sometimes read in the past the safest places to live per se.
Short of global destruction, would you, Bonnie, have any clue through all the war games that you've played, where could possibly be one of the safest places to live?
In fact, the safest place in this country is pretty much anywhere, even in the area of a nuclear detonation, we're still looking at a situation where the people in the blast zone would die, but we have enough infrastructure to save people out of the blast zone.
So even if you were living in the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and they got off a nuke in the center Washington, D.C. area, many, many people would survive and would, in fact, you know, they may be at higher risk for the money.
But that kind of situation is something that people are afraid of because they were raised with this 70s diet of a nuclear destruction, nuclear winter, nothing left on Earth, but cockroaches.
And that's why I don't want to say exactly where, in case one of my supervisors is listening.
But Bonnie, if there is some sort of attack from Iraq and we attack back, and you brought up the cascading effect, what possibility do you see that cascading out of control if we do use these new thermo-type bombs?
I don't think that we would see a cascade effect in those situations.
You really see a cascading effect where you're going into countries, not our country, but some other countries like India and Pakistan or China and Russia attacking each other.
now or again in the middle east now you've got to consider the possibility money that And if we were to move heavily against Iraq, there's no guarantee that Israel would not be attacked by any number of countries.
And then the cascading effect, I suppose, all goes right back into place.
Your two books, Earthquake Games and Ground Zero, I assume in bookstores generally across America, certainly on Amazon.com, where they almost, well, they give real good deals.
So, listen, what can I say?
Thank you so very much for being here tonight.
You've lived up to everything that I hoped that you would be.