John Rubel exposed Minuteman missile flaws allowing unauthorized launches, prompting a 1960 commission and costly retrofits after General LeMay dismissed civilian oversight. While SIOP-62 planned mass civilian slaughter, only General Shoup objected, yet Kennedy eventually centralized control via the nuclear football following Cuban Missile Crisis threats from LeMay. This shift contrasts with LeMay's later "Gentle Duhe Plan" in Vietnam and today's precarious "launch on warning" policy, where leaders face minutes to decide amidst unreliable defenses, risking accidental escalation despite modern triad complexities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The End Is Finally In Sight00:03:04
Cool zone media.
And we're back.
It's Behind the Bastards.
This is our special episodes on the guys who built the Nuclear Doomsday machine that could kill us all at any moment.
Episode five, the end is finally in sight.
That could be literal.
Margaret Killjoy, welcome back to the program.
How you doing?
I'm doing great.
I've gone full circle.
I've accepted that this is reality and I am just very happy to get to live in these times.
It's great that you got to that point because actually the next 10 pages are all Warhammer.
I just stopped writing about nukes at a certain point, but you can just assume that that's real.
Yeah, because that's what your brain does when presented with this much disaster is you're like, man, I really like fantasy books.
Yeah, I'm just going to relax to the comfort of a game where every single person is worse than Hitler.
Like where Hitler would be a moderate bleeding heart.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Gaps In Civilian Control00:16:07
Somebody tell me that, Georgie Hooker.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's get back to talking about this insane Minuteman system because we've talked about some of the shit that's crazy about this, but we still have not gotten to the craziest thing about this, right?
Oh, good.
So when we left off, John Rubel has been having in 1959 and started 60, he's having conversations with all these Air Force guys about the Minuteman system.
And he's come up with some serious concerns about, well, how do we decide when these things are fired?
When you choose to shoot one, how do the other nine get launched?
Is it really just four guys who have to turn their keys in order to launch 50 missiles?
Are there ways they could at 50 random cities?
Are there ways they could accidentally get launched due to an electrical error, right?
These are all concerns.
And the Air Force is like, what the fuck are you asking questions for?
You fucking nerd.
Get the hell out of here.
Let us build our devil machine.
Yeah.
You a commie?
So here's Rubel.
Because if you are, you got to tell me.
Yeah, you got to tell me if you're communist.
Here's Rubel discussing his concerns.
I was curious about the procedures for launching.
How are the decisions to be made?
And what happens when the launch commands are given?
What if you decide you really didn't want to launch the rest after you've already launched some?
Can you launch missiles one at a time, selectively?
What if some operators decide to launch without authority?
Here I cite from a transcript of my discussion of this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library.
A moment arrived in this briefing in the June of 1959, in June of 1959, when I could ask the question I wanted to ask, one I had asked Bennett in private before, but without getting a satisfactory response.
I had the feeling that if I asked the question, surrounded as I was by members of the President's Science Advisory Committee panel, that I might elicit a better answer.
So I said something like, Bob, can you describe how the missiles are launched?
Now I began to think he was made uncomfortable by the question.
He seemed reluctant to grasp its simple meaning.
And Bob gives the explanation I gave you earlier about how, well, these guys are all behind bulletproof glass and they have guns.
So they, you know, one guy can't threaten the other.
And they turn their keys at the same time or close to it.
And that'll count as a vote to launch the missile, right?
The first missile.
And so Rubel's immediate question is: when you say the missiles are launched, do you mean all 50?
And Bob said, well, that depends on whether or not the missiles are ready.
But yeah, all 50 will launch.
Now, this upsets everybody on the president's science advisory panel.
These people are not, these are like normal people, right?
These are not maniacs.
These are like science guys who are, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust, right?
And they're like, what?
Four guys launch 50 missiles with no one getting in the way?
Really?
And there's no way to stop all 50 from launching once you start the process of launching one?
Are you serious?
He was.
So everybody gets upset.
So Bob, Bob is like now in damage control mode.
And Bob Bennett goes like, now, look, you have to understand, this isn't as crazy as it sounds.
There are two modes that we can fire these in, right?
One of these modes is salvo and the other is ripple launch, right?
One of them launches all the missiles as close to simultaneously as possible and the other staggers them, right?
Does that make it better?
There's two modes, Margaret.
There's two modes.
It's fine.
The hose has shower and jet.
Yeah.
Not a hose.
You just know Bob has not sat down with anyone who is not constantly spending every second of their life like touching themselves to the thought of ending humanity, right?
And he's just like, wait, these people don't, they don't know there's two modes.
That'll fix it.
I'll tell them about the modes, right?
See, I think game theory and its consequences have been a disaster for the human.
It's a fucking catastrophe.
Yeah.
Once people start thinking about game, again, that needs to be a bricking.
If you ever encounter somebody who starts talking game theory shit, just brick them, you know?
Give them a good heart.
Game theory says you have to brick them.
That's the you have to brick them.
It's the only way to stop these people.
Yeah.
All right.
Rubel continues: quote, it turned out in pursuing the matter further that if you had preset the system for a ripple launch, there was no way to interrupt it after the launch command was transmitted to the silos.
If the first missile went, then six seconds later, let us say, the second, and after another six seconds, the third.
And if after the 20th missile you decide that was really enough missiles, you couldn't stop the system from launching the remaining 30, according to what Bennett told us at the time.
Rubel describes the committee as pretty shook by this revelation.
I don't think anybody had ever realized before that there would be four men buried in the ground somewhere in North Dakota who might someday stick their keys into four little slots, turn them, and irrevocably launch 50 Minutemen missiles.
Yeah, that's life on Earth.
Yeah, that's insane.
The next question this inspired was, under what circumstances would these men get the order to turn their keys?
Everyone outside the Air Force assumed they'd have to be a verified command from the president or a designated military authority, but that wasn't physically required.
And as Rubel notes, the whole system was designed to remove choices from civilian leadership.
Quote, by design, the president could not decide to launch one missile or two or a few against specific targets.
This was intentional.
The Air Force built it this way to remove choice from the president.
So the president, if he was asked to make that decision in 10 or 15 minutes, do we start a nuclear war?
So he would not have any option but to do it.
That's why they built it this way.
That was conscious.
That was intentional.
Fuck.
So now, I should note here, and this is something Rubell points out: 50 of these Minuteman missiles with the standard explosive loads they had would have meant more explosive power than all of the bombs used in all of the wars in human history put together up to that point.
Four guys could do that.
Yeah.
And again, the whole Minuteman system was meant to eventually have at least a thousand missiles.
General Power, in fact, advocated for 200 squadrons, a total of 10,000 missiles, all set up the same way.
Every state gets four.
Every state gets four.
Yeah.
So Rubel was so frightened by all of this that he dedicated his career to stopping the system as it existed from being implemented.
He sat down first with General Curtis LeMay, then the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Rubel expressed to LeMay that he believed the Minuteman system represented a crucial loss of civilian command and control.
Here's LeMay's response: Command and control?
Command and control.
What's that?
It's telling the fighting man what to do.
That's what it is.
And that's a job of a professional soldier.
They talk about the president exercising command and control.
What is the president?
Rubelle notes that LeMay spit out the P in president.
A politician.
What does the politician know about war?
Who needs a president if there's a war?
Nobody.
All we need him for is to tell us that there is a war.
We are professional soldiers.
We'll take care of the rest.
Just the craziest motherfucker.
Just out of his mind?
Hell yeah.
I'm impressed that you got this is like almost the worst bat.
This is Schrödinger's worst bastard in all history.
Right, right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Like this man's dedication to ending all life on Earth is really unique in history.
I mean, I assume he had a Soviet counterpart, but like, I'm not as familiar with them.
Do you think that they get like lonely, the American one and the Russian one, and they have only each other to talk to when they talk about their doomsday machine?
That they're the only people who really understand.
Yeah.
Man, they won't give me 10,000 missiles.
Bro, I know it's so hard to get enough missiles to kill the whole world a thousand times over.
Like, don't worry, we got a bunch too, though, homie.
Like, it'll be fine.
No one's going to live through this.
We'll do our part too.
All right.
As long as you do your part.
So it's here that Rubell points out every detail of the Minuteman system discussed so far was designed per the specifications of the Air Force.
This was true right down to the mechanics of how turning the keys led to firing the missiles, which is the scariest part of the whole system.
To make a complicated story kind of simpler, the keys send out these electronic pulse generators, which travel to electronic gates.
And once the signal, the pulse passes through the gate, it advances one notch for each pulse that passes through the gate, right?
And if enough pulses pass through the gates, it starts launching the missiles automatically.
Right.
Oh, my God.
So I start.
You can hack one position and get all four.
Sorry.
Yeah.
It doesn't even have to be that.
Because I explained this to a friend of mine who has never read a book about nukes, but who has done amateur unlicensed electrician work.
And she immediately asked, hey, wait, does that mean that like if the power goes out and then comes back on, it might send a pulse and advance one notch closer to firing the missiles?
Oh my god.
You wouldn't think so, right?
Clearly, anyone putting the effort of putting missiles in hardened bunkers meant to withstand an atom bomb would have made sure that something as simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in the 60s wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust.
Only now they did not.
They never considered it for a second.
Oh my God.
This thing could have started launching 50 missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages.
Because once Rubelle starts taking this to other engineers, they bring this up and they start looking into how the system design realizes that's totally possible.
Like it absolutely could have happened if they had built the system the way it was originally designed.
And no one in the Air Force even thought to look into that.
Like that's how reckless these pieces of shit are.
Now, the reason why the Air Force doesn't care about this sort of thing is that they're more concerned that just two guys can launch a whole squadron of ICBMs if everyone else in the country is killed first.
So they built an automated clock system.
The other thing they added to this is they have this automatic clock system that counts down from between six hours.
You can set it to like one hour or six hours.
You can set it to a variety of times.
But depending on how you set it, if one command center votes to launch the missiles, after a limited, after whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining 40 missiles in a piece, right?
Yeah.
Now, when this is explained, I'm impressed this is worse than I expected.
It's so bad.
That came in here with so fucked.
Yeah.
It's so bad.
Like, it's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles.
It's nuts.
Like, yeah, totally.
Not even Caltech, or it's at least interesting.
No, not even Caltech.
Yeah, they built a nuclear SIG P320 to go off in a cop's pocket.
Oh, man.
So when all this was explained to Rubell, the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that, like, well, the minimum setting is 58 minutes, right?
And we want to have at least that much time to allow the military to disable the system if two men vote to launch without warning and we decide we don't want to launch the rest of the squadron, right?
That seems like maybe it's a safety feature, right?
Now, many of these silos are hours away from anything else.
That's kind of the point.
Even to this day, you can't reach a lot of these in 58 minutes, you know?
But the other problem is that the Air Force colonel who described the way this clock system worked to Rubell lied to him.
The minimum count you could set it to wasn't 58 minutes.
It was zero minutes.
So you really genuinely could just automate all the Minuteman?
Yeah, we damn near did.
We damn near did.
Here's Rubell again.
Zero could mean that only two men, or perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing of 50 Minuteman missiles by accident or effectively by designing the system this way in the event of a series of power interruptions.
So Rubell is like, oh God, I have to do something.
This system, these missiles are not active yet.
These silos aren't active yet, and I have to stop them from being made active, at least until this is fixed, right?
So he's he sets to work trying to get someone at the Air Force to give a shit about these problems, right?
He sits down with the head of missile development, General Shriver, who he described as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject.
Eventually, in late 1960, he manages to have lunch with the deputy secretary of defense.
And while they're arguing about this system, he's like, Look, man, tell me, would you feel safe knowing the Soviets had a system that worked the way the Minuteman does?
And he thought I had a point there.
But my concerns again dropped into another organizational black hole.
Everyone's just trying to push this guy on.
I don't want to deal with it.
I don't want to think about it.
Why are you causing problems?
Just let us build this thing and forget about it, man.
No one else has a problem with this.
That's literally how he's being treated.
It's like, so it's not even the torment nexus.
It's like one guy's trying to stop the torment nexus from being built by a bunch of people who also don't think that the torment nexus needs to be.
They're just doing their part of the tormented?
Come on, man.
Don't fuck with us.
A lot of people's jobs are on the line building the torment nexus.
Yeah.
Come on.
So, as I noted, Rubel, because he's good at his job, he gets promoted regularly, right?
And in 61, I think, 60 or 61, he passes his job at the Strategic Warfare Office, I think it's 60, on to a guy named Martin Stern.
He tells Stern that his top priority is to change the Minuteman launch control system and warns him, you will not get this done unless you get a presidential directive ordering the Air Force to do something.
And Marvin has a good relationship with some of these generals, and so he starts up being like, That's not how you get things done in the Air Force, right?
You just got to let me talk to these guys.
But then he starts talking to these guys, and all of these generals lie to him.
And he realizes, like, oh, fuck, no, they really are refusing to fix these problems, these apocalyptic problems.
And they're trying to fast-track these missiles to being activated.
To make a long story short, Rubel and several of his friends spend the next two years of their lives shouting at everyone who will listen about this.
This culminates in another guy at the DOD named Jim Fletcher heading a committee that issues a report on the Minuteman system.
Their research found a very real chance that simple power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal to fire.
The ultimate bill for, and this is, it's because of this commission report that we retrofit the whole Minuteman system, right?
And the ultimate bill for retrofitting the system is hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
It's very expensive to fix these problems, which is why the Air Force hadn't wanted to fix them.
But Rubel does win.
The most dangerous features.
It's bad for the economy.
Yeah.
It's nuclear cost.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Real bad.
Fucking the stock market does not do well when everyone's dead.
Nope.
Nope.
Doesn't do much at all.
Now, Rubell does win.
The most dangerous features are removed by the time the first Minuteman silo goes active at the end of 1961.
But a big part of why I noted all of this stuff, none of this comes out until 2008, when Rubel, at the end of his life, publishes a confession talking about all this, right?
As a way to try to warn people.
Essentially, he's warning people: nothing's really all that much better today, right?
Like, that's why he writes this to try to get people to understand how much danger we're all in.
Why We Need An Air Gap00:02:42
And a big part of like the point of that confession is he's talking about all of the gaps in the system of civilian control of the military that allowed all of this to happen in the first place, because those gaps weren't entirely eradicated by fixing this one system.
He documented a conversation one of his allies had with another Air Force general around the same time.
Quote: General Cutter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS ballistic missile early warning system as soon as possible, and he urged that we expand it in order to create a highly redundant capability at each site.
We must have an absolutely reliable early warning of a missile attack.
Basically, I agreed.
All would have been well if he had stopped there, but he didn't.
In words I can't precisely recall, he went on to say that we had to have this redundancy and the resulting high level of reliability so that when we finally connected the warning system directly to the launch button of our own ICBMs, there would be no false alarms.
I was astonished.
I told him flatly we would not automate our response and we would not connect the warning system directly to the launch button.
We would not, in some, go to a launch on warning strategy.
We would especially not go to one that did not have the president in the decision-making loop.
Cutter coldly replied, In that case, we might as well surrender now.
I love it.
It's like no one who's ever done plumbing or hacking would air gap.
You need a fucking air gap for a while.
Never trust a computer.
Don't trust people and don't trust computers.
Every hacker is like, this is my computer that matters, so it doesn't have the internet.
Right.
Like, it's just, it's fucking insane.
Like, the whole, well, we might as well surrender now if we're not just going to have an automatic doomsday device that goes off if a radar has an hallucination.
Why don't we just quit?
Fuck it.
Let's be communists.
Like, it's fucking crazy.
And I should note that this happens later, but the Soviet Union does devise a similar automated system called the Dead Hand.
In some aspects, it's kind of unclear exactly how put together this is, but they do a version of the same thing, right?
This is not a cooler name.
Right.
It is a really cool name.
But it's basically a way to guarantee that if the U.S. wiped out their command and control first, that there would be an automatic launch system in order to retaliate, right?
Yep.
It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but these same conversions of all of these same conversations happen in the USSR.
Because if nothing else, they need the Americans to believe they do that.
Yeah.
Right, right, exactly.
And like, everyone is worried about what the other guy is doing, and everybody's out of their fucking minds.
Automatic Launch Systems Explained00:04:47
Yeah.
Now, the good news is, Margaret, it's time for ads.
Oh, good.
It is a nice thing.
It makes the ads seem like a nice refreshment.
Yeah, yeah.
Probably not going to get ads for nukes.
Huzzah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Warden.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
Goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So the good news is this.
Removing Operational Control00:15:32
This is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern military advisors and officers today.
But General Cutter's type of thinking is not extinct at the Pentagon, and it is still very common.
I don't know if I'd say it's completely dominant, but there are a lot of guys who think this way, who are still part of our nuclear defense architecture, right?
This, in fact, getting that job kind of requires that you're at least a little bit like these people, right?
It's fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with some of this to wind up in those positions.
Rubel points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized for examining the technical status of launch controls for any of our nuclear weapon systems, and there is none today, right?
And that's a real problem.
There's no one checking other than guys like Rubel to make sure we don't build another really flawed, suicidally flawed missile system, which the Minuteman initially was.
Now, while Rubel was fighting to reform the Minuteman system, he was part of the problem in a different way, right?
We've just talked about how maybe he saved everybody's lives.
Here's him being kind of a bastard.
In late 19, yeah, in late 1960, which is right in the middle of when he's having this fight, President Eisenhower issued an order for all three military departments to formulate a single operational plan or SIOP for nuclear war, like S-I-O-P, not like a PSY-OP, but it is pronounced the same way, right?
And this will get finalized in 62, but they start working on it and they presented initially in 1960.
So in late 1960, the DOD, the Department of Defense, shares a cohesive plan for nuclear war to a mix of military personnel and selected civilian defense officials for the first time.
The single integrated operational plan, or SIOP 62, was, in Rubel's words, deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on innocent civilians in the USSR and China.
This plan was presented at an underground meeting at the SAC headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska.
General Power stage-managed a deliberately theatrical display in which, at his command, aides would simultaneously set up easels and start flipping maps over that, like each new map would show different detonations from different waves of planned strikes, you know, five minutes in, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, right?
This is like it's an analog PowerPoint, right?
He has like guys being his PowerPoint presentation, basically.
Yeah.
And I'm going to quote from Rubel because Rubel is at this meeting, right?
I'm going to quote from his description of what he sees here.
At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying, Just a minute, just a minute.
He turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path and we take it out.
With that, to which the response was utter silence, Power turned to the speaker and with another wave of his hand told him to go ahead.
Just casually was like, by the way, we're killing everyone in Albania immediately.
Yeah, famously our enemy.
Hope you don't got family there.
Because again, we nuke them right away because of a radar station.
We're just going to kill everyone in the country because of a radar station.
Everyone in the country.
We're wiping the whole country out.
Yeah.
So Rubel, I think we've established, is a thinking man and a man who cares about ethics.
He's not a monster.
He's a part of this terrible system, but he has a soul.
And he's upset.
He's upset at this at General Casual being like, so we start by killing Albania just for shits.
Okay, right?
He's upset, but he doesn't say shit, right?
He writes about this decades later.
He writes about his discomfort in this meeting and that specifically he writes about his discomfort at the fact that SIOP 62, quote, deliberately removed effective operational control from the president or any other civilian or even military commander in the event of a nuclear conflict.
Now, none of this is public knowledge for decades, right?
It takes a long time.
We only know what we know because in 2008, Rubel published his experiences as a warning to the rest of the country.
And he noted that during this meeting, General Power and the other authors of SIOP 62 gave an anticipated death count of 500 to 600 million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR and China.
That gets into the like, that's like the combined death count of every war that's ever happened to levels probably.
Yeah, like, right, it's got to be up there, right?
Quote, no accounting was presented of reciprocal effects in the United States or collateral deaths and damage in many other parts of the globe where global clouds of radioactive dust would eventually descend.
They just don't bother with that.
We're not interested in what the fallout might do.
We're not interested in the knock-on effects.
We're just interested in killing half of all of the people or more in the USSR and China, right?
Yeah.
And the way in which Power and the other briefers talk about civilian death on an unimaginable scale struck Rubell as ghoulish.
Quote, there are about 600 million Chinese in China.
He said his chart went up to half that number, 300 million on the vertical axis.
It showed that deaths from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number, 300 million, half the population of China.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They don't care.
They don't give a shit.
Yeah.
Now, I say they don't give a shit.
Someone in this meeting does give a shit, right?
And I'm going to, I'm going to continue with Rubel's reminiscence.
A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying, may I ask a question?
General Power turned again in his front row seat, stared into the darkness and said, yeah, what is it?
In a tone not likely to encourage the timid.
What if this isn't China's war? The voice asked.
What if this is just a war with the Soviets?
Can you change the plan?
Well, yeah, General Power said resignedly.
We can, but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan.
Hey, what if we don't need to kill 300 million people in China?
Can we like nix that part?
Well, I hope not.
That really fucks up my plan.
If we're not killing 300 million people in China, that really fucks things up for me.
We already had the banner printed, you know?
Yeah, we've got the banner printed and everything.
We got a mission accomplished board here.
Come on.
Yeah.
You don't want to kill 300 million people in China?
What's wrong with you?
Yeah, but what was that?
Bonus effects?
Yeah, bonus effects.
Now, it says something about Rubel that it was not until this moment that he found himself thinking about the Von Say conference in January of 1942, in which a group of top Nazis planned the Holocaust.
For some reason, this is one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War to me.
A man who truly cared about protecting his country and stopping a dangerous system from going live finds himself stuck in a room where something many times worse than the Holocaust is being casually planned and he realizes, oh, fuck, oh shit.
I'm like some junior SS guy sitting in the back of the Vonse conference, too scared to speak up and ruin my career.
Fuck, fuck.
I'm a Nazi.
Like, that's literally how he describes his recollection.
It's like, this is the fuck.
This is so much worse than the Von.
They're talking about killing 600 million people.
And he doesn't even be in a war with it.
He doesn't say shit.
He does not speak.
He is not that kind of brave, right?
He is a work within the bureaucracy.
That's like a telling human condition thing.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Because we all imagine ourselves saying something.
Right.
You want to hope you would.
And I get the feeling from his writing that Rubel never quite forgave himself for not, right?
Good.
He shouldn't have.
Yeah.
He shouldn't have.
This should haunt you to the end of your days.
But he's still the most deeply human person in that room.
I'll say the second most because we're about to talk about someone who does speak up.
There is one guy who has, who actually has some courage here.
Okay.
So the day after this first meeting at the SAC headquarters, Rubel takes part in a smaller meeting about the meeting they just had, right?
Even the military, you can't escape meetings about meetings, you know?
Like that's just, that's just, that's just bureaucracy, baby.
So this smaller meeting includes the Secretary of Defense, all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of each major branch of the military, plus the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, speaking on the harrowing meeting they just had, quote, told everyone that they'd done a very fine job, a very difficult job, right?
So, and that sentiment is echoed by everyone.
Everyone just goes around congratulating each other at the start of this meeting, being like, it was a great meeting.
It was really tough, but you guys really pulled together and came up with a plan to kill 600 million people.
And I'm proud of you.
You know, it's not easy to figure out how to kill half a billion people or more, but you guys really have a job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment, except for one guy, General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps.
And, you know, the Marines, the Marines are an interesting branch because both the chuttiest maniacs in the military and the absolute, like, coolest, like, best soldiers in American history, like Smedley Butler, were Marines, right?
Yeah.
Like, they have a history of producing occasionally these like really weirdly like woke generals and stuff.
Like, Smedley Butler is a committed anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist who gets very angry about being used as a gangster for capitalism.
And David N. Shoup, who's the commandant of the Corps at this point, is cut from the same cloth.
He's the same kind of guy.
You probably see like more like honor, like more like, yes, whatever you believe in, you're still like, you're like, no, I'm willing to risk my life to go do this thing.
That's why I joined the Marines.
Yeah, right.
Like, my dad was a Marine and doesn't have entirely positive things to say about the people in it without like.
That's what I'm saying.
They run the gamut, you know?
Yeah.
But Shoop is a really interesting guy.
In the long history of Marine Corps commandants, he is one of the men who earned that job title the most.
He had been born in Indiana in 1904 to a poor family, and he was raised politically progressive and grew into a staunch anti-imperialist with a very strong anti-business outlook.
He is not super sold on capitalism, and he hates imperialism.
As a starving young man, he joins the military to survive.
He proves very good at the job and is deployed twice to China during their civil war.
He serves as a staff officer in the Pacific during World War II until he was given a combat command to lead the invasion of an island called Tarawa.
His forces encountered immediate and fierce resistance.
His transport was disabled before landing, and he had to wade ashore where he was struck by shrapnel and shot in the neck.
Despite this, he continued to organize and lead his men from the front with a gunshot wound to the neck.
On the afternoon of the second day of the attack, he sent a message to his divisional headquarters: combat efficiency, colon, we are winning.
Just a badass.
One of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war.
Shoop receives a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts, right?
If you want to know, like, how like what kind of a badass this dude was.
Like, he is a general leading from the front in such a way that he gets a medal of honor for his service in combat.
And he is the only man in this entire story who gives us anything we can be truly proud of as Americans.
And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War Here.
No one's, and this is after they're going over the plan again to kill 600 million people.
No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a U.S. government-led preemptive first-strike nuclear attack, Rubel wrote.
Not any of the joint chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense, not John Rubel.
Then, finally, one man did: General David M. Shoup, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, a Marine awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II.
Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural mid-American community, recalled Rubel.
He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole opposing view on the plan for nuclear war.
That Shoop said, All I can say is any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan.
That is not the American way.
The room fell silent, Rubel wrote.
Nobody moved a muscle.
Nobody seconded Shoup's dissent.
No one else said anything.
According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way.
Yeah, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At least there was one.
I know.
At least there was one guy being like, are you, do you guys realize how fucking evil this is?
Are you out of your minds?
You know what you're talking about?
Killing 300 million people who might not have fun all to us.
They don't even have nukes yet.
Yeah.
We killed Japan for trying to kill all the Chinese people.
Yeah.
Do you not see a problem here?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not the American way.
Unfortunately, it is, but I can't blame Shoup for trying to make it not be.
Yeah, exactly.
Shoup goes on to be a cool guy the rest of his life.
He spoke vocally against nuclear escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Like he was a major voice trying to be like, no, no, no, we need to take a step back.
And he was also, he advised against entering South Vietnam during the end opening stages of the Vietnam War.
He was one of the few generals who was like, this is a terrible idea and we should not get involved at all.
This is a really bad plan, right?
In general, he was the one sane man, not afraid to speak his mind in the entire defense establishment during some of the maddest years of the Cold War, right?
So, thank you, General.
I'm good.
I know what this is involved.
We shouldn't do this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he clearly, like, not afraid of confrontation, is willing to say, like, you people are fucking maniacs.
Yeah.
But unfortunately, he's the only one.
So Rubel, who is not a fighter, not great at confrontation, one gets the idea, does continue to push bureaucratically for a saner nuclear posture, but he does so from within the bureaucracy in which he was comfortable.
In his 2008 report, he accused defense planners of building both PSYOP 62 and the Minuteman system deliberately to deny, quote, any but a go-no-go option to civilian leadership.
As Henry Kissinger put it in 1961, and this is the only time I'll quote Kissinger approvingly, these plans offered the president just one choice, quote, suicide or surrender, holocaust or humiliation.
In other words, the military has set it up that the only choice the president gets to make is let the country get nuked or kill everybody.
Right.
The good news is that in the early 1960s, at the very start of the Kennedy administration, is probably the high watermark for at least the danger of an atomic holocaust during the Cold War.
Part of why we stepped at the United States.
I like to be able to point out that part because during the Cold War so far.
Yeah.
Part of what got us to step back from the brink a little bit is that after the Berlin crisis, which is, you know, the Soviet Union tries to cut off supplies into the chunk of Berlin that NATO is occupying and we have to like drop a bunch of shit in by plane, right?
After that, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy comes to realize what Rubel had known for a while, which is that the men running the Strategic Air Command in particular and the Air Force in general are out of their goddamn minds, right?
The Lock On Nuclear Weapons00:07:42
Like that, he starts to become, Kennedy starts to become very aware that like these people are crazy and they're going to get us all killed.
I have to do something about the way this system works, right?
And this is arguably the best thing he did in his presidency.
One of the first moments where this was made clear to him was on September 5th during Kennedy's first year in office, in which several Air Force men submitted a first strike study that suggested killing 54% of the USSR's population.
An alternate plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy named Kaysen, the study author, estimated would kill only around a million civilians.
However, U.S. casualties from a Soviet response ranged from basically none to 75% of the U.S. population.
Uh-huh.
Right.
Rubel includes a note about the reactions of people in the Kennedy administration to this horror show.
Ted Sorensen, the chief White House counsel and speechwriter who had been with Kennedy since his earliest Senate days, was outraged when Kaysen told him about the study, shouting, You're crazy.
We shouldn't let guys like you around here.
Even more appalled was a friend of Kaysen's on the NSC staff named Marcus Raskin.
Raskin had served as foreign policy advisor to a few liberal Democratic senators and had been hired as a token leftist.
Raskin was horrified by the very existence of such a study.
How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?
He hollered at one point.
Raskin never spoke to Kaysen again.
Good question.
Yeah, really good question.
Yeah.
Kennedy himself was briefed on the likely death toll of a nuclear war, basically on the result.
Like he's briefed on this case and study, and his response is characteristically eloquent.
He says, and we call ourselves the human race.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah.
The Cuban missile crisis unfolded across 13 days in 1962, and it seems to have inspired Kennedy to take action to reduce the ability of his insane generals to destroy the world.
When he imposed a blockade of Cuba to force the USSR to remove their nukes, General LeMay insisted on direct military intervention as the only path forward, claiming that any attempt to solve the problem without violence would lead to war.
Look, we might have a war if we don't get violent with these guys.
You don't want a war, do you?
Quote, LeMay indirectly threatened to make his dissent public.
I think that a blockade in the political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this.
And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too.
In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time.
LeMay's words angered Kennedy, who asked, what did you say?
LeMay responded, you're in a pretty bad fix.
Kenneth O'Donnell recalled in his memoirs that after the meeting, Kennedy asked him, can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?
These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor.
If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.
I better understand the second half of the 20th century was a big push for pacifism on the left.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, and it's one of those things you like look back at and you're like, oh, that seems kind of silly.
And you're like, some parts worked, some didn't.
But oh, yeah.
I get why people lean towards that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is arguably the best thing Kennedy does is it's during the Kennedy administration that we take trigger control mostly and eventually entirely away from the military, right?
The scenario now, and this is, I don't, I think it's better, but it's also differently bad.
Now, some general or some colonel or some kid in a silo couldn't launch our arsenal, right?
You can't have four kids launching 50 missiles on their own because you have to have like codes transmitted and stuff, right?
But one guy can decide to launch everything and it's the president.
Now, that does mean we have civilian control.
And I think that's a positive step away from a bunch of insane generals potentially having that command or four kids in a cornfield having that ability, right?
But, and that is a major thing that happens under Kennedy, right?
Is that command and control of our nuclear arsenal gets shifted much further to the president and that process continues over the years.
This is what leads to the nuclear football, right?
Which I think people are generally aware of, right?
Because it's under Kennedy.
I talked about how that Los Alamos scientist came up with the idea to we need a lock on these fucking things.
And they figure out how to do that during the Kennedy administration.
And Kennedy gives the order to start putting locks on our weapons, right?
Which starts moving.
This all, I'm yada yadaing.
This takes longer to get to where we are now, but this starts the process, right?
That leads to the situation we have now, where these weapons all do at least have a lock and where we have the football, right?
The nuclear football, which is ultimately a product of both that scientist, Agnew, realizing a single private with eight bullets was all that stood between a nuke and whoever, as well as Rubelle and his allies repeatedly insisting to their bosses that these Air Force fuckers are out of their goddamn minds, right?
Like that is, you know, a really good thing that happens here.
And characteristically, when the switch, the lock, is first demoed, it was presented to President Kennedy, who immediately is like, yeah, put these on everything we can.
Like immediately, right now, do it today.
You have no other priorities.
And the military loses their fucking mind.
They locked up our bombs.
They plan to lock our bombs up.
The fears of one general, Alfred Starbird, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows.
How is a pilot, U.S. or foreign, somewhere around the world going to get a code from the president of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops?
I don't know.
Okay.
Maybe it's, I'm fine with that, actually.
Yeah.
If a couple of people die instead of all of us, I don't know.
Yeah.
Look, I'm not casual about the lives of soldiers.
They're people too.
Yeah.
But it's a soldier's job to potentially die for their country.
And I prefer that to the whole world dying.
Including that soldier.
Including that soldier.
They're not living through it.
None of these bomber guys, all of these SAC bombers know that their missions are suicide missions.
If they get the order to fly to the USSR, they are not coming back.
There won't be anywhere to come back to, right?
Yeah.
Or they'll be the only people still alive.
They'll be flying for another 10 minutes before.
Yeah.
I mean, that's how it is now because we have these doomsday planes that we literally call like doomsday planes, which are these huge shielded planes that are able, the president basically can hand over control of continuing to launch our nukes to the official in the plane because the president's going to be dead pretty soon.
Everyone is.
None of these bunkers work nearly as well as people want to believe they do, especially not when you're talking about multiple thermonuclear impacts.
It doesn't matter how deep, if people are dropping multiple hydrogen bombs as they would be, or missiles as they would be in this, very few things could protect you.
All of these fancy bunker complexes are great if you don't get directly hit by multiple thermonuclear bombs, but they're not going to protect you from you're going to boil alive.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
And that's Annie Jacobson's nuclear war book, which posits a pretty chilling theory about how this could all go down.
Does have everyone dies.
Like everyone in command and control is fucking dead except for the guy in the doomsday plane who makes sure that everyone dies on the other side of the world.
That's nuclear war.
Anyway, let's have some ads and then we'll come back and finish this story.
Woo.
The Doomsday Plane Pilot00:04:25
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I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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And he's like, just give it a shot.
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A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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Morale And War Games00:14:51
So this is what gets us.
The stuff with Kennedy evolves into like, you know, the system we have today, which gives the president sole authority to end civilization.
We'll talk about that a little more in a second, but I want to finish with Curtis LeMay's story first.
In 1964, now as chief of staff of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay is still in 1945, Curtis LeMay is in charge of all of the U.S. air power in Southeast Asia, basically.
During the Korean War, same deal.
During the start of Vietnam, same deal.
So when we, when in 1964, when we really start upping our commitment in Vietnam, he is running things and he pushes a plan to bomb Northern Vietnam into submission.
The plan is described, and I believe this was his name for it, as the Gentile Du Hei Plan, right?
I mentioned that earlier, like it's the polite version of the Duhe plan, right?
Duhei being the guy who's like, you just kill all the civilians until they're not willing to fight anymore.
Now, there's a big battle between Kennedy's civilian advisors who wanted the U.S. to threaten North Vietnam's industry, but not actually blow it up immediately.
So that we blow up some of it and we make it clear we can really cripple their industry so that we have a negotiating hand to push for peace, right?
And I'm not, I don't think we should have gotten involved in fucking Vietnam whatsoever.
I'm not saying that like these guys are good and ethical, but that is a much saner response than LeMay's because LeMay just wants to send North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, right?
Right.
Like these liberals are like, well, we can bomb them, you know, kind of strategically in order to exert a cost and make them willing to come to the negotiation table.
And LeMay is like, what if we just fucking kill everybody?
I'm going to quote from the book Bombing to Win by Robert Pape.
Quote, destroying the North's industrial economy appears to have been valued more for its effect on civilian morale than for reducing the flow of military goods into the South.
For instance, the rationale for closing the port of Haiphong was not to interdict battlefield hardware, but to weaken civilian morale, right?
Which keeps not working.
As you may recall, none of this did.
This led to Operation Rolling Thunder.
And Rolling Thunder is LeMay's baby.
This is like Operation Rolling Thunder is the genteel Duhei plan put into effect.
It is a three-year bombing campaign that resulted in what, Margaret?
You want to guess?
No effective destruction of the morale of the enemy.
I mean, stuff was just, yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't work.
We don't win Vietnam in case you were unaware of that.
Oh, interesting.
This does not stop their ability to equip and support their troops.
It does not break civilian morale.
It does not, it doesn't do the trick.
This brings me one of the main things I've learned over this epic journey we've been on.
If you had asked me, I would have been like, well, it's probably immoral to bomb all these enemy cities, but it probably is effective at destroying morale.
And what I have learned is that it's not.
No.
No, you got to think.
If, like, if somebody, for example, goes and stabs the person you love most in the world in the gut, are you going to like walk away because you're demoralized?
Or are you going to fuck that person up?
Like, are you going to do everything in your power to destroy that person?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think people think similarly when their family is incinerated from the sky.
Yeah.
But this break, the fact that this fails and the fact that LeMay's plans kind of fail a lot brings me to a key point about LeMay and all the Duhe acolytes who came to run our air power during this time.
These guys.
Surrealist Man Ray is also one of these people.
Yeah.
These guys loved nukes because nukes were the weapon the only weapon system that worked the way they thought all weapons should work.
So they always insisted on using nukes at every corner.
And when they were denied, they didn't know how to fight a modern war well because they only have the one strategy and it only works if you use nukes.
So when the president says, no, you can't nuke them, then they're left like, well, I guess we try to use conventional bombs and it just doesn't do it.
But they don't, none of these people are actually capable of adapting and looking their failure in the face because they've based everything on this being how war works.
And it doesn't, unless you're killing everyone.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because they're 12-year-old boys.
Yeah.
Now, fuck.
I'm ending this story in the mid-60s, right?
Which there's a lot more to talk about in terms of nukes and shit, obviously, after this point.
But I'm ending here because kind of by the point we're at in the story, right?
Vietnam, the tale of how our nuclear arsenal functions changes, but not like in earth-shattering ways, right?
Everything gets kind of better.
Our early warning systems get better.
Our missiles get more destructive and reliable.
Nuclear submarines are, by this point, a part of the deterrent.
We're not talking about that all that much, but that's a major part of the deterrent package, right?
Because a nuclear submarine absolutely cannot be found, right?
It's basically impossible.
Like if you have nuclear submarines, you always have nukes out there that you can throw back at whoever fucks with you.
So it's a guarantee that you'll be able to get some sort of second strike.
Nuclear submarines are fucking terrifying.
They're the scariest weapons human beings have ever made and probably ever will make, right?
Like it is just death tubes.
They're fucking nightmares.
I had a friend.
I have a friend who went to Annapolis.
That's the Naval Academy and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the 80s.
There's a book called Blind Man's Bluff that's about like all the stuff that he used to do.
And all of his like stories are, because what US and Soviet subs were doing in this period of time was like basically one would try to like play chicken, trying to force the other to surface, right?
So, you know, because it was like that was kind of part of the game that we were playing in the high seas.
And so he has all these stories of just like he and a couple of his friends are standing in, I guess, the bridge or whatever, doing a bunch of complicated math in their heads.
And if they fuck up the math, everyone dies because they crash into something, right?
Like it's like those kind of stories.
Like nuclear subs are fucking terrifying.
But, you know, once we get nuclear subs, that's we have all three kind of arms of our nuclear like posture.
We have our ICBMs, we have nuclear subs, we have our bombers, right?
Obviously, we also have like field artillery and you know nukes and stuff that the army can use.
But nothing that happens after this point seriously alters the fundamental calculus up until something that's kind of more recent.
And that fundamental calculus is we and the Russians and other people, China now as well, right?
Obviously more people have nukes, but all of the nuclear powers have a bunch of nukes ready to fire at a moment's notice.
And in both the US and Russia, only the president gets to decide when we use them, right?
Right.
That's the way it is starting in the 60s.
And that's the way it is today, right?
Obviously, like, I'm not going to talk a lot about hypersonic missiles.
That's kind of the biggest recent change that might seriously alter a lot of calculus because it allows a strike that potentially might not get spotted at all.
And so maybe there's no warning, which is why I read a really fucked up War on the Rocks article that was basically arguing for like an automated AI like second strike system because of the fact that, well, maybe they are able to, if they blow up the president, no one can launch the nukes back, right?
So no one's watched the movie War Games is what I'm hearing.
No one has ever watched the movie War Games.
Actually, actually, War Games, literally one of the generals they quote references war games in order to say that we don't have a machine that does that right now.
They were arguing that we need to do it.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
And this is part one of the one of the things that I have worry about, because I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're going to give AI the ability to launch nukes or do that.
That's not my immediate worry, but they're already integrating different machine learning tools into the radar systems and our early warning systems.
That's the worry is that people are being advised by these by machines that have machines.
That like the Minuteman will have unanticipated flaws that the arrogant pieces of shit who design these weapons refuse to consider because they cannot accept the fact that maybe they didn't think of everything and they will fuck up and miss stuff and it could cause a ser it could cause the end of the world, right?
That's what scares me more than like a death computer, right?
Which any hacker or wannabe hacker would immediately be like, oh, you can't build systems that don't have flaws.
That doesn't happen.
No, no.
That's why up until very recently, this was all being done on like the big 1980s floppy disks and everything's fucking air gapped.
It's like, you want this shit simple and reliable as possible.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, now it's all about Bluetooth.
Now is, yeah, exactly.
Well, that's the most reliable thing in electronics is Bluetooth.
Everyone who has a headset knows that.
So it's important everyone know that our launch policy from 1964 to today remains launch on Warren.
Now, the USSR, to be fair to them, officially rejected a launch on Warren policy.
There are grave doubts as to whether or not that was the real policy or propaganda, right?
A lot of people say they would definitely launch on Warren 2.
I think that's probably right.
I think both the U.S. and Russia... more or less would have fired if they felt like they had a credible warning that the other was firing, right?
Well, I don't think either of us would have waited.
Russia needs us to believe their launch on warn, even if they're saying something else.
They have to say it in a way where they're like, oh, don't worry, we would totally not launch on warn, but scare people into thinking they would.
Well, and now since Putin's taken, and this is really interesting in the last few years, Putin has made it very clear that the Russian Federation is now launch on Warren as well, right?
So they are just straight up saying like, everyone is now launch on Warren, the U.S. and Russia.
And that's all that really matters.
China's got some nukes.
I don't know as much about their system, but they don't have near like both all it takes is the U.S. and Russia, right?
Yeah.
Like, you know, there's, there's, it's worth being concerned about North Korea, obviously, because one missile opens the possibility that all of the missiles start flying, right?
Because of the kind of cascading decision trees people will make.
But the U.S. and Russia are by far the most heavily armed, right?
Now, I know there's a tendency among folks on our side of the political aisle to say, oh my God, isn't it terrifying that Donald Trump has the fucking nuclear football?
Right.
And I'm going to say something controversial here, which is I don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other president.
Not because he would do a good job at that, but because no one can.
Everyone is bad at this.
Nobody is competent to make that call.
And it's a dangerous mistake to believe that, oh, well, Obama's would have been a good guy to have in the seat, or Biden would have been a good.
No, they're all bad at this.
They would all have been terrible.
No one will do a good job if they are put in that situation.
In her chilling book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson makes one very important point several times.
She quotes John Wolfstahl, the former national security advisor to President Obama, who said, no one, not even the president, has complete knowledge of what is going on in a crisis or in a conflict, let alone a nuclear war.
Former Secretary of Defense for Reagan, William Perry, added, many presidents come into the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war.
Some seem not to want to know.
This is a point made several times that presidents generally don't know much about this.
Even though this footballs with them at all times, they don't like to think about it.
They don't like to ask too many questions about it.
They don't like to dwell on it.
A bunch of people who were in a position to know have said similar things that like president's not super well informed generally on how all this works because it's scary.
They don't like to think about it.
I don't like to think about it.
Like this falls firmly into the like things that you can't control.
You don't worry about it.
If I was the president, I would think about this a lot.
Yeah.
I'd be sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes.
But that's why you're running in what, 2032?
That's right.
That's right.
On a take out Lake Superior.
Yeah, more like Reagan, you know?
That's right.
That's right.
We're going to get revenge for those brave men on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Anyway, Jacobson continues talking about how unready presidents are to make these kind of calls.
Once at a press conference in 1982, President Reagan went so far as to incorrectly tell the public that submarine ballistic missiles are recallable.
That's why that myth exists.
After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union was dissolved, William Perry found in his experience as Secretary of Defense that many people clung to the idea that nuclear war was no longer a threat, when in fact, he now says nothing could be further from the truth.
In a nuclear war, confusion over protocol and speed of action will have unintended consequences beyond anyone's grasp.
It will send the United States of America into the heart of darkness that defense official John Rubel warned about in 1960, into what he called a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one-third of the Earth's surface.
Yeah.
Yep.
The fundamental issue here, in terms of is Trump any worse than anyone else on this specific issue.
Theoretically, the president is only going to be asked to make a call on whether or not to launch our missiles if one or more are known to have been launched towards the U.S. or an ally.
Because of the way all of these weapon systems work, this means that the hypothetical president in this scenario is going about his day doing something else and is grabbed and taken bodily.
Like the Secret Service response team's job is to literally physically haul him, like carry him into the bunker and then into a chopper to get to a more secure location because the White House bunker isn't really all that safe.
But he will be grabbed in the middle of his day, taken into a situation room, and told that the entirety of Washington, D.C., is about to die in flames, including nearly every member of his administration.
In the most likely scenarios, he will then be told that he has between three and six minutes to decide to launch a world-killing salvo of, in most situations, hundreds to a thousand nuclear warheads.
The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisors whose entire job is to think about how important it is that we strike back before being decapitated, will shout for him to launch everything that we've got.
No one is qualified for that job.
Impossible Interception Missiles00:07:29
Yeah.
The only president we've ever had who could be argued to have stood up to this kind of pressure was JFK, right?
And JFK was a combat veteran, had been in some scary situations before, and thank fucking God, he was the guy on the ground at that point in time because it could have been a lot worse than it was-the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bunch of other shit.
I don't have any real faith that Obama or Biden would have performed much better than Trump in this nightmare scenario.
As John Rubel wrote in 2008, we know that this mentality, given half a chance, will surface in military and government councils.
We know from recent history that a compliant bureaucracy, military and civilian, will murder 6 million people in cold blood or plan, buy, design, build, and deploy the means to murder half of the people on Earth, probably including themselves.
How come?
Is all this built into the human genome?
A melancholy procession from stones to atoms?
A predestined progress toward the end times?
The inevitable rise of malign leaders over compliant masses?
Anyway, thanks for listening to my podcast.
Wow.
What a way to end.
Yeah, like what did you do today?
Oh, I got my job is that I have to make jokes during the, as I get described, the mechanism by which the world will end.
Yeah.
Cool stuff.
Legit.
I don't know.
Probably should be something people are like asking presidents to change.
We could change this.
It doesn't have to be this way.
It doesn't have to be this dangerous.
Like, there are other ways this could all be designed to where we're not permanently 15 minutes or less away from annihilation, you know.
And if we step back, probably the Russians do, at least a little bit.
You know, I don't have a lot of faith in Putin, but I don't think he wants to die in nuclear hellfire either.
And I think most people don't.
I think most people don't.
Fair, fair.
Anyway, maybe this should be like a voting issue that people talk about, right?
Like it's, you know, climate change is obviously very important and people, it needs to be much more of an issue, but this is up there.
This is an equivalent problem, right?
Because this is potentially a much more thorough destruction of the biosphere than climate change will bring.
Even quicker.
We should probably care about this a lot.
Yeah.
Anyway.
What a good system that we all have.
Yeah.
It's pretty nuts.
I actually recommend all the books that I read for this.
Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War, a scenario.
Again, I don't entirely agree with kind of some of her panic about North Korea, but it's a pretty good book on the whole about the way the system works today.
The book 15 Minutes is a really good look at like basically how we got to the point where we're 15 minutes away from annihilation at all times.
And then Command and Control, among other things, talks about a bunch of the different like fuck ups and errors that have happened along the way.
They're all good books.
The movie House of Dynamite that just came out recently, it's the one that the way specifically the drama is just around, it's around the nuclear football.
It's around the chain of command that relates to it and the current one.
And it's what started me like a couple of weeks before this, starting thinking about being like, oh, this isn't as like, I sort of thought I was like, oh, we probably have like decent intercept systems if it's just like one missile, right?
You know, you're like, oh.
If it's just one, maybe.
But again, we don't have decent intercept systems.
None of these work nearly as well as they're supposed to.
And there are some similar problems with at least some of the different early warning systems.
And this is really a problem for the Russians because the Russians, like one of the problems with the Russian system is that it's not smart enough to know because each of the missiles that we would be firing launches a bunch of chafe, right?
So you have the actual warheads and ICBMs now often have multiple warheads, right?
It's called an MIRV, I think.
And basically what you can do, and this is particularly a case with like a lot of the sub-mounted missiles too, is you launch one missile, but then it splits into like multiple warheads, each of which is targeted at a different area, right?
But also all of these missiles have what's called chaff, which is basically like little strips of aluminum that come out with like the warhead in order to confuse like the anti-missile system.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So that like it can protect the missile, basically.
Yeah.
But one of the main Russian systems can't tell the difference between that chaff and a shitload of additional missiles.
So like say there was a situation where North Korea launched an ICBM at somebody and we launch a decapitation strike at North Korea or a strike at their nuclear facilities.
That's a limited strike.
We're just firing a couple of missiles.
It might look because of where North Korea is, Russia and China might both think, oh shit, the Americans are launching hundreds of missiles and they could be coming for us.
We don't know where they're targeted.
And if the president hasn't gotten through to both of those leaders to inform them, or if they don't trust the president, who knows what's going to happen.
I hate to say that H.G. Wells is right because I don't actually believe in one world government kind of famously with my political position.
But this idea that like the only way out of this, besides everyone de-escalating, is better diplomacy and everyone talking to each other and like moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your borders zealously and moving.
Well, I think the solution to most problems is to get rid of national borders, but I'm, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
I'm not.
I'm so glad I'm not in charge of trying to figure out how to solve this.
That's the main takeaway that I have.
Yeah, I, there's a couple of things we could do.
Jacobson talks about this.
Like one of the things that we don't do but ought to, because it's so hard to basically impossible almost to stop an ICBM reliably once it gets above a certain level.
Like once it gets, and in terms of like, there's no real way to like protect against the massive ICBMs that Russia could launch, but North Korea doesn't have all that many, and if we were to keep like a bunch of uh predator drones in the area, we could theoretically have a quick reaction force that could intercept an ICBM before it could get to the point of no return where you have no ability to shoot it down.
But we just decided not to do that.
Like that got theorized and it was like, I think it was too expensive.
It's the same thing with like, well, we could have Thad batteries to protect certain things that might be like that nuclear plant that might be a target, but we're not, we're just going to keep them, you know, protecting Israel.
We're not going to have them, you know, in the U.S. or whatever for the most part.
I mean, obviously, we have a lot of those in Ukraine and there's good reason for that, but we don't devote.
It's both a mix of none of it really works all that well.
None of our missile interception stuff is perfect.
The Thad is about as good as it gets, but it's not good for everything.
Like it could be useful against like some of those sub-based missiles, but I don't think like it can take out ICBMs.
Certainly not, or certainly not a hypersonic.
I don't think anything can take out a hypersonic if it actually works the way they're supposed to.
There's just not really reliable ways to stop a massive nuclear attack.
If you get shot at by one missile, you might be able to do something, right?
That's kind of where we are.
That's fun.
Yeah.
No Reliable Defense Exists00:03:00
I love talking about it, though.
I love me some nukes.
The ideas of all the things that I want to write fiction about as related to it.
Yeah.
Yeah, folks, get out there.
Go to go to the Wausau Sound.
You know, look around.
Hike around.
Get your metal detectors out.
There's a couple of nukes just waiting for a new home.
Jesus Christ.
You could be the next nuclear power.
Yeah.
Take care of each other and tell your friends you love them, but not in a way where you don't get completely lost thinking about this stuff all the time.
And also podcast cool people who did cool stuff, which is the opposite of this, but you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sweet.
All right, everybody.
Go away.
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