Also 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 Kiljoy, 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 ten pages are all Warhammer.

Oh 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, yeah, man, I really like fantasy books.

Yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna relax to the comfort of a game where every single person is worse than Hitler, Like we're Hitler would be a moderate bleeding hearts.

Well, let's get back to talking about this insane minute man 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, Good, So we left off.

John Ruble has been having in nineteen fifty nine and start at sixty.

He's having conversations with all these Air Force guys about the minute Man 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 fifty missiles?

Are there ways they could at fifty random cities?

Are there ways they could accidentally get launched due to, you know, an electrical error?

Right?

These are all concerns, and the Air Force is like, with the fuck are you asking questions for?

You fucking nerd?

Get the hell out of here.

Let us killed.

Yeah you a commie?

So here's Rubelt are tell me?

Yeah, you got to tell me if you're a communists.

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 nineteen fifteen.

In June of nineteen fifty nine, when I could ask the question I wanted to ask, when 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 it 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 miss and so Rebel's immediate question is when you say the missiles are launched, do you mean all fifty?

And Bob said, well, that depends on whether or not the missiles are ready, but yeah, all fifty 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 were, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust?

Right, And they're like, what or guys live launch fifty missiles with no one getting in the way.

Really, and there's no way to stop all fifty 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 as 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, 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 they and its consequences have been a disaster for the years.

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.

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 twentieth missile you decide that was really enough missiles, you couldn't stop the system from launching the remaining thirty.

According to what Bennett told us at the time, Rubelle 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 fifty 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 ten or fifteen 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 Rebel points out, fifty 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 this, and again, the whole minute Man system was meant to eventually have at least a thousand missiles general power.

In fact, advocated for two hundred squadrons a total of ten thousand 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, than the Air Force Chief of Staff.

Rubelle expressed to LeMay that he believed the minute Man 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 with a professional soldier.

They talk about the president, exercise and command and control?

What is the president?

Rebel notes that le may spit out the p and 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, will take care of the rest.

Just out of his mind.

Hell yeah, I'm impressed that you got This is like almost the worst bat.

This is Schrodinger's worst bastard in all 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 ten thousand 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.

The no one's gonna live through this.

We'll do our part too, all right, as long as you do your part.

Mm hmm.

So it's here that Rubell points out every detail of the minute Man 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 get the signal pat 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.

Yeah, 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.

Wow, God, you wouldn't think so, right.

Clearly, anyone putting the effort of putting missiles and hardened bunkers meant to a stand an atom bomb would have made sure that something as simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in the sixties wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust.

Only they did not.

They never considered it for a second.

My god, this.

Thing could have started launching fifty missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages.

Because once Rubel starts taking this to other engineers, they bring this up and they start looking into how the system design realized 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 fought 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 are 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 limit, after whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining forty missiles, and Jesus right, yeah, Now, when this is.

Explained, this is worse than I expected.

It's so bad, so fucked.

Yeah, it's so bad, like it's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles.

It's nuts, like to not.

Even no, not even Celtech.

Yeah, they built a nuclear cig P three twenty to go off in a cops box.

Oh man.

So when all this was explained to Rubel, the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that, like, well, the minimum setting is fifty eight 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 fifty eight minutes, you know.

But the other problem is that the Air Force colonel who described the way this clock system worked to Rubel lied to him.

The minimum count you could set it to wasn't fifty eight minutes.

It was zero minutes.

So you really genuinely could just automate all the minute men.

Yeah we damn near?

Did we damn near?

Did?

Here's rebel again.

Zero could mean that only two men or perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing of fifty minute man missiles by accident or effectively by designing the system this way in the event of a series of power interruptions.

So Rubel 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 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 Shreiverer, who he described as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject.

Eventually, in late nineteen sixty 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 minute man does?

And yeah, 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 trying?

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.

Torment said, 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 sixty one I think sixty sixty one, he passes his job at the Strategic Warfare Office I think it's sixty onto 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 at being like, that's not how you get things done in the Air Force, right, you just gotta 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 and another guy at the DoD named Jim Fletcher heading a committee that issues a report on the minute Man system.

Their research found that a very real chance that simple power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal to fire.

The ultimate bill and this is it's because of this commission report that we retrofit the whole minute Man 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 for the economy, Yeah 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 Rubel does win.

The most dangerous features are removed by the time the first minute Man silo goes active at the end of nineteen sixty one.

But a big part of why I noted all of this stuff.

None of this comes out until two thousand and eight, 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.

And a big part of 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 expanded 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 in the resulting high level of right 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 at 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.

No, yeah, air gap, you need a fucking air gap, needs for so many gaps.

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.

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?

What's the 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, and some aspect it's kind of unclear exactly how put together this is, but they do a version of the same thing, right this right it is a really cool name, but it's basically a way to guarantee that if the US wiped out out their command and control first, that there would be an automatic launch system in order to retaliate.

Right, It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but they this is these same conversions of all of these same conversations happened in the USSR.

Right two, because they, if nothing else, they need the Americans to believe they do that right right exactly, and like everyone is worried about what the other guy is doing and everybody's out.

Of their fucking minds.

Yeah.

Now the good news is, Margaret, it's time for ads.

Oh good, it is a nice thing that makes the ads seem like a nice refreshment.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably not going to get ads for nukes.

Huzzah.

And we're back.

So the good news is this, This is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern military advisors and officers today.

But general Cutters 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 fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with some of this to wind up in those positions.

Rubell points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized for examining the technical status of launch controls for any of our nuclear weapons 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 minute Man system, he was part of the problem in a different way.

Right.

We've just talked about him.

Maybe he saved everybody's lives.

Here's him being kind of a bastard and late night.

Yeah, in late nineteen sixty, 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 PSYOP for nuclear war like SIOP, not like a psyop, but it is pronounced the same way, right, and this will this will get finalized in sixty two.

But they start working on it, and they presented initially in nineteen sixty.

So in late nineteen sixty 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 PSYOP sixty two was, in Rubel's words, deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on in innocent civilians in the USSR in 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, AIDS 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 ten minutes, twenty 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 Reubella 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 Cashry was like, by the way, we're killing everyone in Albania immediately.

Yeah, famously our enemy Uh huh.

Hope you don't got family there, because again we knew pok 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 general casual being, like, so we start by killing albaniact just for shit, 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 SIAP sixty two 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 two thousand and eight, Rubell 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 si UP sixty two gave an anticipated death count of five hundred to six hundred million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR in China.

That gets into that, like, that's like a combined death count of every war that's ever happened.

Levels ye problem, yeah.

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 in China, right yeah.

And the way in which Power and the other briefers talk about civilian death on an unimaginable scale struck Rubel as ghoulish.

Quote.

There are about six hundred million Chinese in China.

He said, his chart went up to half that number, three hundred million.

On the vertical axis.

It showed that debts from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number three hundred 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 gonna 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 three hundred million people in China?

Can we like nix that part?

Well?

I hope not.

That fucks up my plan.

We're not killing three hundred 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 in everything.

We had a mission accomplished board here.

Come on, Yeah, you don't want to kill three hundred million people in China.

What's wrong with you?

Yeah?

But what was that?

Bonus effects?

Yeah, yeah, bonus effects.

Now it says something about Rubel that it was not until this moment that he found himself thinking about the Vonse Conference in January of nineteen forty two, 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 guys sitting in the back of the Vonse conference too scared to speak up and ruin micro fuck fuck, I'm a not fuck like.

That's literally how he describes his recollection is like, this is the fuck.

This is so much worse than the they're talking about skilling six hundred million people.

He doesn't say shit, he does not.

He is not that kind of brave, right, He is a work within them that's.

Like a telling human conditioned thing right, because we all imagine ourselves saying something right now.

You want to hope you would.

And I get the feeling from his writing that Rubelle 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 that's 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 it was a great meeting.

It was really tough, but you guys really pulled together and came up with a plant two six hundred 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 got a job.

Yeah.

Yeah, So everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment except for one guy, General David M.

Shoop, commandant of the Marine Corps.

And you know, the Marines.

The Marines are an interesting branch because both the chuttiest maniacs and the military and the absolute like coolest, like best soldiers in American history, like Smedley Butler were Marines, right, Yeah, 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 and Shupe, who's the commandant of the Core at this point, is cut from the same cloth.

He's the same kind of guy, and.

He probably seem 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.

It doesn't have entirely positive things to say about the people in it with that, Like.

That's what I'm saying is there's they run the gamut, you know.

Yeah, but Shop 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'd been born in Indiana in nineteen oh four 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 just a badass, Like, what are these?

What of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war.

Shep receives a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts, right if you want to know, like, how 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, and this is after they're going over the plan again to kill six hundred million people.

No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of six hundred million people in a US government led preemptive first strike nuclear attack.

Rubel wrote, not any of the joint chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense, not John Ruble.

Then finally, one man did, General David M.

Shupe, the commandant of the US Marine Corps, a marine awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War Two.

Shupe was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a school teacher from a rural Mid American community.

Recalled Rubel, he remembered how Shop spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole a poising view on the plan for nuclear war.

That Shop said, all I can say is any plan that murders three hundred 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 Shoop's descent.

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?

Ht you out of your minds.

You know what you're talking about killing three million people who might not have fun, fuck all to us.

They don't even have nukes yet.

Yeah, we we killed Japan for trying to kill all the Chanese people.

Yeah, did you not see a problem here?

Yeah?

Yeah, that's not the American way.

Unfortunately it is.

But I can't blame for trying to make it not be Yeah, exactly.

Shoop 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 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 Yeah.

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 yeah, thank you, general, i'd 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 uh, he's the only one.

So Ruebel, 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 two thousand and eight report, he accused defense planners of building both Syops sixty two and the minute Man system deliberately to deny quote any but a go no go option to civilian leadership.

As Henry Kissinger put it in nineteen sixty one.

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 nineteen sixties, at the very start of the Kennedy administration, is probably the high water mark for at least the danger of an atomic Holocaust during the Cold War.

Part of why we stepped to tell you, yeah, during the 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 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 like that, he starts to become Kennedy starts 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 fifth, during Kennedy's first year in office, in which several Air forcemen submitted a first strike study that suggested killing fifty four percent of the USSR's population.

An alternate plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy named Casin, the study author, estimated would kill only around a million civilians.

However, US casual he's from a Soviet response ranged from basically none to seventy five percent of the US population.

Uh huh right.

Rubell 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 Cayson told him about the study, shouting, you're crazy.

We shouldn't let guys like you around here.

Even Moripauld was a friend of Caseon'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 Cason 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 thirteen days in nineteen sixty two, 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 and 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 like second half of the twentieth century is 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 kins 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 fifty 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 scientists 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 this all, I'm YadA yading.

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 Agnu realizing a single private with eight bullets was all that stood between a nuke and whoever, as well as Rubel 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 right immediately, right now, do it today.

You have no other priorities, and the military loses their fucking mind.

The faust are bombs.

They put a lock, our bombs up.

The fears of one General Alfred Starbird, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows.

How is a pilot us are four and somewhere around the world going to get a code from the president of the United States to ourma nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops.

Okay, maybe it's this.

I'm fine with that.

Actually, yeah, a couple instead of all of us.

I don't know.

Yeah, Look, I'm not casual about the lives of soldiers.

They're people too, 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 all.

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, although the.

Only people still alive, they'll flying from other ten minutes before.

Yeah, yeah, I.

Mean that would 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 to 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 working 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 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 it, which is you're going to boil alive, right, yeah, yeah, no, And that's anti 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 make sure that everyone dies on the other side of the world.

That's nuclear war.

Anyway.

Let's have some ads and we'll come back and finish this story.

Whew, all right, we're back.

So this is what gets us.

The stuff with Kennedy evolves into like, you know, the system we have today which gives the president's 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 nineteen sixty four, now is Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

Curtis Lamay is still in nineteen forty five, Curtis LeMay is in charge of all of the US air power in Southeast Asia.

Basically during the Korean War, same deal.

During the start of Vietnam, same deal.

So when in nineteen sixty four, 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 genteel du Pey Plan.

Right.

I mentioned that like the polite version of the dou Hay plan, Right, do Hay 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 US 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 don't think we should have gotten involved in fucking Vietnam whatsoever.

I'm not saying that, like these guys were good and ethical, but that is a much saner response than Leamy's, because Limay 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 the May 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 it.

Yes, 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 dou Hay 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.

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 and thiss 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 a moral 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, Well, you gotta think if like, if somebody, for example, goes and stabs the person you love most in the world in the gut, are you gonna like walk away because you're demoralized, or are you gonna fuck that person up?

Like?

Are you gonna 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 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 dou Hay acolytes who came to run our air power during this time.

These guys.

Surrealist Manray is also one of these people.

Yeah, these guys loved nukes because nukes were 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 leg 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 because unless you're killing everyone, right, yes, yeah, because they're twelve year old boys.

Yeah, now, fuck, I'm ending this story in the mid sixties, 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, are missile get more destructive and reliable.

Nuclear submarines are by this point a part of the determent.

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, Yeah, I have a friend who went to Annapolis that's the Naval Academy, and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the eighties.

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 d basically one would try to like plain 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 and 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 sub nuclear subs are fucking taro.

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 sixties, and that's the way it is today, right Obviously, Like I'm not gonna 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.

There's 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, That's what I'm meaning.

No one has ever watched the movie war Actually, the actually wargames.

Literally one of the generals they quote references Wargames in order to say that we don't have a machine that does that right now, like this is so they were arguing that we need to do it.

Yeah, oh my god.

And this is part of one of the one of the things that that that I have worry about, because I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're going to like 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 like the radar systems in our early warning systems.

That's the worry is that people are being advised by these by machines that like them, that like the minute Man, will have unanticipated flaws that the arrogant pieces of shit who designed 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 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 wanna be hackers you 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 onlike the big nineteen eighties floppy discs and everything's fucking air gapped.

Is like, you want this shit simple and reliable as possible.

Yeah.

Anyway, well now it's all bluetooth.

So now's 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 nineteen sixty four to today remains launch on warn.

Now, the USSR, to be fair to them, officially rejected a launch on warn policy.

There are grave doubts as to whether or not that was the real policy or propaganda.

Right, A lot of people say they were definitely launch on warn too.

I think that's probably right.

I think both the US 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.

Russia needs us to believe they're 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 to thinking they would.

Well, and now since Putin's taken and this is really interest.

In the last few years, Putin has made it very clear that the Russian Federation is now launch on warn as well, right, So they are just straight up saying like everyone is now launch on warn, the US 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.

The all it takes is the US and Russia, right, Yeah, Like, you know, 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 US 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 gonna say something controversial here, which is, I don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other present, 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, well, well, Obama's would have been a good guy to have in the seat or Biden wou 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 Wolfstal, 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 football is 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 knells firmly into the lake.

Dude, things that you can't control, you don't worry.

Absolutely.

If I was the president, I would.

Think about this a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd be sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's why we're that's why you're running in what twenty thirty two?

That's right, that's right on a takeout Lake Superior.

Yeah, more like inferior.

That's right, that's right.

We're going to get revenge for those brave men on the Edmund Fitzgerald know.

Anyway, Jacobson continues talking about how unready presidents are to make these kind of calls.

Once, at a press conference in nineteen eighty two, President Reagan went so far as to incorrectly tell the public that submarine ballistic missiles are recalling.

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 nineteen sixty, into what he called a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless group think 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 his 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 US or an ally.

Because of the way all of these weapons 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.

Like response teams job is to literally physically haul him like carry him into the bunker and then into like a chopper to get to a more secure locations.

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, DC 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 one thousand nuclear warheads.

The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisors, who his 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.

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 of a bunch of others.

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 Ruble wrote in two thousand and eight, 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 six million people in cold blood, or plan by 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 maligned leaders over compliant masses.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my podcasts.

Yeah, wow what a wait end?

Yeah?

Like, what did you do today?

Oh?

I get 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 fifteen 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 Buden, but I don't think he wants to die in nuclear.

Hell fire either, and most people don't.

I think most people don't.

Uh.

Anyway, maybe this should be like a voting issue that people talk about, right, Like it's you know, climate change 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 that climate.

Change will bring even quicker.

We should probably care about this a lot.

Yeah, anyway, what a good system 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 Fifteen Minutes is a really good look at like basically how we got to the point where we're fifteen 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.

I h the movie house a 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.

This relates to it and the current one.

And it's what started me, like a couple weeks before this started 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, uh.

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.

It's been 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 that 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 like little strips of aluminum that come out with like the warhead in order to confuse like its system right right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly, so that like it can protect the missile basically, 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, and if or if they don't trust the president, right, who knows what's going to happen.

I hate to say that HG.

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, yeah, I'm moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your borders zealously, and moving well, I think the solution of most problems is to get rid of national borders.

But I'm you know whatever, Yeah, I'm 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, there's a couple of things we could do.

Jacobsen 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 mass of ICBMs that Russia could launch, but North Korea doesn't have all that many.

And if we were to keep like a bunch of predator drones in the area, we could theoretically have a quick reaction for US 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 fad 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 US or whatever.

For the most part, I mean obvious 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 fad is about as good as it gets, but it 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.

Well away.

Yeah, I love talking about it though I love me some nukes.

The ideas of all the things that I want to write fiction about is related to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Folks, get out there to go to the Wassaw Sound, you know, look around, hike around, get your metal detectors out.

There's a couple of nukes just waiting for a new home.

Out you know.

Nuclear power.

Uh 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 podcasts 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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