Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

doesn't look that hard. The doctor wasn't down there very long. You could figure it out, you know. Pruners sure, you know whatever, it takes a rubber band. That's how we do it on the sheep anyway, Margaret, Okay, how are you doing.

built that. Because we don't have quite as much granular detail on their counterparts in the Soviet Union, you can generally assume a version of everything we're talking about. This we happened over there too, right, Like, they didn't not

create a planetary killing doomstate device. We both just kind of built one that was heavily based on our game theory understanding of how the other side would respond in like an escalating nuclear scenario, And the end result of that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still today ready at all times to wipe out more or less all of human civilization. But in roughly fifteen to thirty minutes, that's about how long it would take.

if the world had been destroyed. So even if nine times out of ten we destroyed the world, we're stuck being alive.

built could kill us all at any moment. Accidentally, that

happened so many times. We'll be talking about the fucking minute Men missiles and how they were initially set up But what's interesting about this week is that our subjects are kind of like Schrodinger's bastards, where some of these guys do have big body counts, especially the folks who were, you know, responsible for getting the new like Leslie Groves right, who was the general whoever saw Manhattan Project right, You can put a lot of deaths under his his name,

But most of the people who built this system never killed anybody, even indirectly, really, but they could at any moment. Guys, in fact, guys whose last bit of work was in the sixties, could fifteen minutes from now, if the right things had started happening fifteen minutes ago, or a couple of seconds ago, fifteen minutes from now, all of these guys could become the biggest murderers in world history right collectively.

the machine that could at any moment end at all. Right, because it's and I need to correct this from the start, all of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has been done to make the system safer since the end of the Cold War, and in fact, it's significantly more dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War, in part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be in a launch on warn situation, which is where both both Russia and the United States are today is launch

on warn, which means that the policy of both governments is to start shooting everything they have when they have a credible warning that they're being nuked. Right, and our best case scenario would be like one crazy country like North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the United States, but that would still trigger a massive nuclear response.

And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch with the Russian government, And as a heads up, there have been times where we've been out of touch with them for as much as forty eight hours when there's been like critical things to like like that happens, the gaps and comms like that, especially since Ukraine happened. And if we started launching missiles the way that most of our missiles would work, a lot of them would go through or at least appear to be going towards Russi

aspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of these radar systems are perfect, So there's a very good chance even if we weren't didn't have it set up to Crossrustner Chinese airspace, they would think that for a period of time that is longer than the amount of time they know they have to choose to launch their arsenals in response. As per the way to Terrence theory works, this could happen at any moment. This could have started

happening seconds ago. Right. So that's what we're talking about this week, is how we got to this point that we have not ever stepped back from. We are just as close as we were during the Cold War. That's very important for people to understand. So these next couple of weeks we're going to talk about how this all came to be. Right, because all of the men were talking about this week most of whom again have no

body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives. All of these guys put the work in to make this machine knowing that they were building a system that, if used, would lead to planetary genocide, and they built it anyway.

They built it because they knew it would work that way. Right, So we're gonna talk about why we're gonna talk about because they thought they were doing the morally right thing, and up until now you could make a case, up until the missiles fly, you could continue making a case that it was the right thing to do, which is part of one of the fucked up things about it, right, Right, So this is this is a complicated topic, but I do think these people are worth discussing in part because

these are all people who sat down and had conversations about like, Okay, we do this and that'll kill about six hundred million people. Yeah, build it, you know, like the these are the talks that they were having. There's a joke that gets made online today a lot, a meme about a tech company building the Torment Nexus, an imitation of classic sci fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus. It's kind of a joke about the way a lot

of tech broke, a lot of tech projects. Feel now where it's like, this is exactly what the sci fi that inspired you was warning against, right, But that really is the reality of the atom bomb. And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schlasser, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used to sources for these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlosser points out that the first person to conceive directly of

an atomic bomb was HG. Wells, who wrote a nineteen fourteen novel titled The World Set Free. I was not aware, and now there's some other candidates, but this is like the first. I'll tell you why this is I think the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine an accurate, semi accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it, Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the

backstory of the Federation. In Star Trek, scientists create the ultimate explosive, a radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry in a purse or suitcase quote an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. As Schlosser writes, these atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind as every nation seeks to obtain them and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world's great capitals are destroyed, and civilization

nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government. And this is Wells. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs, which shook men out of cities, shook them also out of their old established habits of thought. Wells wrote full of hope, and yeah, I think that's fascinating. I didn't know any of that.

over years of time. But Wells came pretty close to foreseeing that the real thing, close enough to foreseeing the real thing that in nineteen twenty nine, a Hungarian physicist named Leo Sillard sz I l r d. Met with Wells to try and purchase the literary rights to publish his novel in Central Europe. This is relevant ter of like who was the closest to a nuke? Because Leo Zillard is one of the fathers of the Adam Baum.

A decade or so after trying to buy the rights to this this is true, he comes to the US and he's he becomes one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, and he's a guy. You can't really blame Sillard, right again, if we're talking about where does the moral blame lay. He has the most understandable reason for wanting

to help the US build a nuke of anybody. And it's kind of good to talk about him because it does make the point that it's a little unfair to judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the world that formed them. Sillard was a Jewish refugee. He fled Nazi Germany, and he wound up in the United States. Because he was a physicist, and because he was a refugee of the Holocaust, he knew not only the threat that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a

bomb program going. In nineteen thirty nine, he sends a letter to Albert Einstein laying out his fears, and Einstein is the guy who've sent the letter to Einstein. And then yeah, Einstein helps him write a letter to FDR. Yeah please, Yeah, like the Einstein helps him craft this letter and he sends it to FDR. And this letter warns about bombs of a new type, and FDR takes the warning seriously that he keeps exploring the idea, which helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in

nineteen forty two. Like, that's Leo Zillard and he ties directly back to the Wells idea.

rights to this. And we'll talk a little bit more about him later, but is it is so tragic because you can't blame him, like he's like his attitude is like, we need, we need to have this because Hitler might have it, right, yeah, which like, yeah, maybe I don't know, but that's the same logic that like, and you know, the USSR is not Nazi Germany, obviously we can the proof of that is as simple as what happened in the Cold War. Right, And to be fair, neither is

the United States. Neither country use the damn things on the scale that would have ended civilization.

we do, right, And those stories are like half the reason this happened, because a lot of people of goodwill got involved with the Manhattan Project because they were like, well, this is probably the lesser It's probably better that the US has this than that a fascist country is the only one with a nuke, right, right, Like that's their

logic here, and they they had to operate on. We know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke, right, just based on the choice because they didn't, right, they went in different directions. They did not make the choices ultimately that would have given you have.

kill everyone in the Soviet Union, right? Oh?

you guys talked about it. We had a plan to do it, you know, so you're not and maybe by by the way, it's if it's arguable that building this doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do, and a lot of people argue that to this day, then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the US would have killed six hundred or so million people, right, right,

We know that because we talked about doing it a lot.

the least painful option available. The road is optimistic in terms of like the aftermath of thermonuclear war and a planetary scale anyway, So those guy, but guys with that logic basically that like, well, this is a messy thing. I don't really want to be building a giant bomb, but it might save a lot of lives in the long run. That's like a sizeable chunk of the Manhattan Project. Right. That's like a big amount of the logic behind the

reason individual people got involved. Right. The other half, though, is and this is largely on the military side of things. It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is how the military thinks of these weapons, both when we're starting to plan one and then immediately after we start using them. Right.

And the military logic for why this is, why building this system, why getting as many of these things as possible is a good idea is based on a military theory that starts to take hold after the end of the First World War, and this is ultimately the theory that leads us to the system of internet national usually

assured destruction that we live in today. Right, And there's an element of historical rhyming here that we build this global real literal global doomsdaate device as a result of a theory that takes off in the end of World War One, based on what happened in World War One, because World War One is itself the result of a doomsday device going off, a device that was never supposed to go off, and a device that a lot of people a lot if you right up until the start

of World War One, if you talked about this, this system of alliances and military build up, right and like an arms build up that like you've got all these munitions, refit schedules and whatnot and interlocking alliances was meant to ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war, Right That was the people who would defend it would say that, like, well, if everyone's really well armed, and if everybody's always and if we have all these alliances

between different powers that make it an unwinnable situation, we won't have this war. Right, people would make that argument. You know now obviously the technology at the time, they didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines, so they had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf. And these do work like a machine, right, and that's that is what happens. You know, you have Austria declares war

on Serbia that brings France and Germany into it. The German plan that they had built meant that like, well, the only way we can possibly win this war is we have to do this specific kind of invasion that takes us through Belgium that brings Great Britain into the you know, and so on and so forth, right, and

a maxim gun and they've got that. Everyone's got a version of the maxim gun, and everyone's got your Everyone's also thinking, well, I just re like we just refurbished and upgraded our artillery, and France is France has just

upgraded this thing, but they haven't upgraded this thing. And if we go now, they won't have the new version of this thing, and ours will still be Like that's a big part of the thinking too, right, And this is like always the case and it had been for decades prior to World War and prior to World War One, the fact that it would be so costly and it was so like everyone's plan for victory rested on so many like assumptions and was sketchy enough, no one really

wanted to do this, right. I mean, with the exception of the military thinkers who had spent their entire lives building and planning out the system of like, this is how we're going to activate our troops, this is the order at which we'll get the marching, and this is where they'll move in. They really So you have this mix of nobody on the civilian side of governance wants to think about this seriously because it would be a calamity and they know it, and everyone in the military

is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start having leaders need to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to go to war, the loudest voice in the ear is this general who's thought of nothing else's entire professional life. And by the way, in the six minutes a US president would have to decide whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice in his ear is going to be a guy who thinks about using the nukes NonStop.

sides were similar. For all of the flaws of all of the men running both countries the duration of the Cold War, all of them had one thing in common, which is they were guys who were like, no, that would be fucked up. Yeah, that that'd be fucked up. We're just not gonna do that. Yeah.

you mechanically have to have the president looped in. Right, although there will talk about that it's not a perfect system either, but that that became the way we do it during JFK's administration. And when he when all of this got explained to him how this works, I think his exact quote was like, can we call ourselves the human race?

calculus to a startling degree. Right, This is why a lot of people there's a good book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in a pretty unsparing term, and she provides like a theoretical and her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles for unclear reasons, right. And what I don't like about it is I don't really agree with the whole the Kim family are like crazy thing. I think they're pretty rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the

same things that other countries aren't. Entirely.

It like, basically the premise was North Korea does something that kills some South Korean civilians, right. I think that's they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits, which has happened before. Right, North Korea has in fact killed South Korean civilians, not all that long ago. Right. And as a result, the North Korean present, without seeking US approval, fires missiles at military targets non nuclear missiles

at military targets in North Korea. But the leader of North Korea doesn't know that the US didn't approve of the firing of missiles, and their system can't entirely tell what's incoming and what's not, and they see one. Once North or South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the US starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes aware and anyway, it's this whole it's this whole cycle

of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just requires And by the way, one of the things we found at very recently is that the currently imprisoned former president of South Korea, who is being charged with I believe insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into North Korea illegally without getting US approval or anything while he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically get to declare martial law. Right, So, like this stuff,

like shit like that happens all the time. It just hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple stages of a few different apocalypses occur. This is not a crazy This is not crazy, and it doesn't require any power Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes to be like mustache twirling mad man. It just requires them to all be have incomplete, imperfect information and focused on their own survival. Right, Yeah, it's it's good.

Like the mutually assured destruction is a product of a military theory that gets born at the This this theory of strategic bombing that gets born at the end of World War One, Right, And that theory only exists because World War One happens, and World War One is the result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go

off going off. Right, You have all these treaties and stuff that basically guarantee that if one of a couple of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them, it will start a chain reaction that leads to a general European war, right, and because of the way that armies work in this period, right and all basically all military wisdom at this point is based on the last war, as it always is, and the last war for Europe is the Franco Prussian War of eighteen seventy to eighteen

seventy one. That's not literally the last conflict in Europe during this period, but it's the last big one that people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions, like.

so we should be fine. Anyway. The great land powers of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Austro Hungary knew that the instant war was declared. There was this clock ticking, right, because most of your army is reserves, right, The largest amount of manpower you have isn't your active duty. It's this this mass of like reserve troops, these guys who when they're eighteen or whatever,

they're basically drafted. They sometimes serve like a year and then for a period of time they have to do. It's basically they're all in the national guard, right, that's the norm. In most of these states. You have some version of that, and so it takes a period of time to call these guys up from civilian life, to issue them their gear, to get them moved into their units,

and then to get them moved to the front. So everyone is working not just not only do have this interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side knows I have to be able to get my reserves ready for active duty before the enemy can. Otherwise they're going to invade before I have my army, which means I have a ticket like I. Once the Archdeoke of Austria Hungary is assassinated, and then people start to realize

that generally European war is in play. It's not just a matter of diplomatically, can we smooth this, It's that all of my generals are shouting that, like, if we don't mobilize now, we don't know that France isn't mobilizing, right, we can't tell they might be mobilizing, and if they're mobilizing, we only have this period of time to start mobilizing in turn. Right, that's a big part of everybody's thinking here. And that's the same with nuclear war, right, where you

don't know entirely what the other side is doing. We the US have pretty good data on when people are because we have this nuts insane like level of life spice, satellites and shit like that, although all of it has errors, all of it has things that can go wrong. Right, none of it's perfect Today, I will run it.

at least for everyone. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide and basically all of the one of the things that's fascinated to me, and this is the case in a lot of wars. Everyone's planning at the start of World War One is based on how the last war had gone, and everyone's planning is wrong. Germany. Germany's plan to knock France out of the war in the first couple of

months doesn't work. France and Russia have this plan where we'll both hit Germany on either side, right, if Germany starts some shit, we'll come in on both flanks and we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute

the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, well, we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up, and it'll probably be fine, right, And they realize, oh no, actually we're kind of you have to have actually millions of guys with guns, you know, how fast can we draft all the coal miners, all of these and Germany or Great Britain's plans are based in part on like, well,

we've got this great navy, that's probably all we'll need, right, And they have a Tolkien and they got Jero Tolkien somewhere in there. You know, surely will be okay. Anyway, everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war, and it leads to disaster. And so after the carnage a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying what had happened to try to make predictions about what would happen in the next war, which is the same

thing that did happened after eighteen seventy one. And they'd made the wrong predictions. But they're sure this time we'll get it. Wal we're smarter than that. Last generation of military thinkers will make conclusions from the last war that are right, you know. And one of these guys, among the most influential of these fuckers, is an Italian general

named Guilio Duhey. Now. He had been born in Caserta, Italy in eighteen sixty nine, but his family were refugees from Savoy, which was a former Italian possession that had been ceded to the perfidious French. As a young man, he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer in the Italian Army. He continued his formal education by

studying engineering at a university in Turin. Du Haey rose steadily through the ranks, and by the early nineteen hundreds he was a member of the Italian General Staff, basically their joint chiefs. Right, that's kind of the idea. He had been an early advocate for dirigibles, initially used as spots for artillery and the like, and once the first aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for

aircraft as a weapons system. Right now, this on its own is a noteworthy He was right, obviously aircraft are pretty important in modern war. Yeah, but very a lot of people, I'm not. It wasn't universal. There were certainly some guys being like, no, the infantryman with a rifless will be the always be the core of any war

fighting effort. We don't need planes. There were some nuts, but most intelligent people were like, obviously planes are going to be useful, you know, being able to have the sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict and do Hay. But one thing that did make him noteworthy where he was kind of seeing far ahead, was that he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of ground commanders, right, it would effectively need to be its own kind of service, you know. And this is something

even during World War Two. There's not an air force in the US. We have the Army Air Corps, right, it's a part of the Army, do Hay ahead of times it's like, no, the air power should be its own independent branch. It's different enough, right, it's like the navy. In nineteen eleven, he got a chance to act on some of his theories when Italy went to war again in Libya against the Ottomans, because an awful lot of Italians had never really gotten over Roman Empire. That's the

gist of why we keep fucking with Ethiopia. Du Hay's conclusion from this was and this was like the first real world use of air combat power for Italy. And his conclusion is that in the future planes will get better and high altitude bombing will become the number one battlefield role of planes. Right, this is not true for

World War Two entirely. I mean it's debatable, right, but there's a lot of argument that that that that's not entirely that high altitude bombing was not the number one battlefield use of air power.

shoot from higher up. But he's wrong in spirit, right, which is that like this is not the way most effective combat use of airpower in World War two is not high altitude bombing, right, And even if you look in the Pacific theater, right, like, it's a lot of naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but it's not really high altitude bombing. You know, Pearl Harbor isn't high altitude bombing, right, Like it's a different kind

of use of aircraft. But dou Haey is certain that high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the not just like critical, but basically the only thing that airpower will be used for. Right, And he's he's so certain of this that he becomes kind of an asshole about it, right, Like he illegally orders the construction of bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money, and it burns out his career. He gets forced into the infantry, and he spends the early stages of World

War One basically screaming that Italy can win. We can break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make the enemy harmless if we could just gain command of the air. And he calls for the construction of five hundred bombers to drop one hundred and twenty five tons of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the

stalemate of trench warfare. Now, yeah, so this is the kind of thing It seems ahead of its time, right, because this is sort of where military thinking went, right, Like, it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking World War two because of dou Hay. But it's not correct ahead of its time in part like Italy simply couldn't have built five hundred high altitude bombers to drop that

kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have the capacity, like the Italian industry, the Italian military in the middle of World War One was not going to be able to do that. Right, It's just not a realistic ask of the country.

this is what I mean. He will eventually say this is how the future should work, But he is also arguing we should be trying to do this right now, and Italy just doesn't have the resources or technical know how to create the bomber fleet he wants in nineteen fifteen, when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen, and he is such an asshole about this that he is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about how because he's calling his superiors incompetent for not following

through with this impossible plan.

One of the things he's saying is that, like, look at what happened in this fucking First World War. It was a shit show. Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right, You can get right over them. You can hit targets behind the trenches like their artillery, right, and you could maybe knock infantry out of trenches. Now, this is actually something One of the things will be proved wrong on that is that infantry and trenches are a lot less

vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be. Right. Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people, especially with the kind of technology they're going to have by World War two, it's better than just shelling them endlessly. But it is not the get out of trench free card. Do Hey pretends it is right now? Du Hay is also he's one of a number of growing military theorists who had learned from the last war that these huge

conscript armies that everybody has moved towards. Like, if that's how war works, if the whole male civilian population is potentially part of the military, and the whole country is being mobilized to support the military, then you can't limit yourself to just striking troops in the field. In future wars civilian populations. Do hey attitude is, civilian populations make continued resistance possible, and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure

of war must be attacked, right yeap. Oops.

It would be very inaccurate to pretend Duhey is the first guy who is like civilians are on the table, right.

US combat aviation history, is an interesting guy. He was a key member of what became known as the Fighter Mafia, which is a group of guys in the Air Force who argue and this is in like the latter half of the twentieth century, they argue that like the branch's bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about the This is like right before the birth of I think the F sixteen. They're they're they're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt and it's lying about how well certain weapons systems work

for corrupt reasons. And as a result, they have all these complaints about like hybrid role fighters as opposed to dedicated anti aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debatus to whether or not the fighter mafia was right bringing this up, because this is a guy who has a history of being on controversial sides of arguments right, and he wrote an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for the Air Force right where he is kind of laying out his thinking as to why do Hay was wrong,

and he summarizes do Hay's arguments this way. He also believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land and at sea, and that an enemy's ability to sustain a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of enemy airpower in the air and on the ground. The need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but also to destroy their eggs and their nests. Hay wrote enemy aircraft production plants were defined as prime strategic targets.

He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses against them were useless. He believed that attacking populations with relatively small amounts of explosives, incendiary and gas weapons would make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the way very influential people in military plannings still think to

this day. Do Hayes thinking is incredibly common, or at least a descendants of do Hayes thinking is incredibly common within military planners to this day. And this is the root of mutually assured destruction. It starts with these ideas, right, particularly the idea, yeah.

going to go. So if you have a powerful enough bombing fleet, like no one will attack you because they know they're doomed in that instance, right, And this is basically how we think about near peer nuclear warfare to this day, right, and that knowledge deters those soda of wars. So this is part of why people will argue to Hey round up being right even though he did not. We're seeing nuclear weapons right in any way, shape or form. And to be clear, he's not right right.

Nor is he theorizing about twenty first century nuclear warfare or even late twentieth century warfare. He is discussing the war he expected to break out in the next twenty years or so, and on basically every technical point, du

Haey was desperately wrong. Again. He argues, the sky is so big that airpower should only be offensive because airpower cannot defend territory, and the only way to protect the homeland is to build an air force that can bomb the enemy into the ground before you're opponent can do the same. He makes really specific predictions, arguing in nineteen twenty eight that dropping a payload of just three hundred tons of bombs over a capital city and under a

month would be enough to end a war. This would all be proven catastrophically wrong, but for the later period of his life do Hay as effectively the first air power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but it becomes the bible of how to make an air force for basically all of the men who were in charge of the air forces in World War Two. Like on every side, he's super influential, and that's not entirely accurate.

He has his detractors, obviously, but he's massively influential, and I'm sure to Hay would have been thrilled to have had such an influence because everyone in World War Two tries out his ideas, but he never gets a chance to see that. Shortly after Benito Mussolini makes him the Italian chief of Aviation, he dies of a heart attack in nineteen thirty. So, by the way, ends's life is a fascist two.

so it's kind of an adaptation, right. England also dou Hayes attitudes have a lot of influence on how the Royal Air Force is constructed in the inter war period, and England spins a lot of resources creating a bomber command that was meant to deter German action on the continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids. You know, that does not exactly work out. Here's how

Colonel Risioni describes what happened next. Germany then turned to the invasion of England and its first test of dou Hayes's theories. The Battle of Britain was engaged to gain air superiority for operations Sea Lion. Britain's bomber command had failed to deter the war and the attacks on England, but Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to its knees. The Luftwaffa tried to gain superiority over England.

The initially frail fighter force of the Royal Air Force, under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Doubting and using the nascent technology of radar, was able to inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts. After the Battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population to its knees. Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to

a higher pitch. So from the start do hay has proven wrong, just immediately on boccounts about yes, yeah, the having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also, you can defend from a bombing attack, and aircraft are great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works really fucking well.

the same. It takes place over a shorter period of time with airpower because shit moves faster now, right, But it is the I mean this it's the it's the the red Queen hypothesis, right, like everyone is constantly moving as fast as they can just to stay in place, you know, like you were you you build up this great bomber fleet just in time to get attacked by a bomber fleet of your own and realize, actually, we probably should have had more fighters that might have been handier.

It's to jump right, yeah, But also the Germans are learning all you need is a bunch of bombers. We've got a bunch of bombers. Oh shit, fighter aircraft really fuck up bombers. Oh no, all our pilots are gone.

That doesn't happen, which for nuclear planning. This again, one of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes do Hey correct on is that like, well, once you've got nukes, if you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs, then yeah, fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers and do enough damage that it renders like, you know, the Germans will drop some bombs in response, but you can make it be more costly for the Germans than

it is for Great Britain. Right, if a thousand bombers each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from hitting and all they need is one, right, Right, That is an important point about this is another lesson that's being learned right at the same time as we're learning how wrong dou Hay is. Once nukes come into the picture, people are going to be looking at this data and seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a nuclear attack of sufficient size even before ICBMs.

bombing precision bombing, which is another thing people are. The strategic bombing side also breaks down to a couple of broad schools, and as is always the case, most people are you know, have are a little take some from column as from Colum b. But there's you've got area bombing and precision bombing, right, And the idea behind precision bombing is that you can hit just the target you want.

That is, like the factory making bombs or the factory making planes, right, or a barracks, and not hit the high rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is a lie, right, it's especially it's it's not all that true today, but it's especially a lie in World War Two. Right, it's a lot. Now you can kind of do it, although it never works as well as planners like to

claim it does. But in World War Two it's just a fantasy, right, And so there's a lot of that that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris, who are like, well, fuck precision bombing, just bomb desaturate an area with bombing, right, you accept greater civilian casualties so that you can cripple their industrial capabilities. Right, that's the public argument. In private, they're saying something different, But the public argument is that this is just the way

it has to work. The first area bombings by the RAF on German cities was in nineteen forty one, in nineteen forty two, and they did not work very well. Right. They's spun as wins, but on an actual strategic level, they're not huge hits. They caused some shock to the German citizenry, but they don't accomplish the stated goal, which is to damage war production. Right, and the RAF suffers

high casualties because German air defenses are excellent. You know, do Hay continues to be very wrong about air defense. It is popular possible. I mean in Vietnam, North Vietnam. Part of why the war goes the way it does is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air defenses. Right, something gets lost in the whole. It was just some farmers in the jungle that beat the US. No, they had an army, they had radar guided missiles and everything.

You know. When Arthur Harris took over bomber command for Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign, Operation Millennium. On May thirtieth of nineteen forty two, nearly eleven hundred Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some six hundred acres of the city and rendering one hundred thousand people homeless.

Harris declared the raid a success. The British press did too, but they focused on the destruction of war industry, not the civilian cost, and this frustrated Harris, in part because it was inaccurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent of a month's war production. The real cost to Germany, as bomber Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later described

the purpose of bomber Command. In his eyes, the aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers,

and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee prob an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by products of attempts to hit factories.

it does to morale doesn't in the war. You know, So Bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude right as to like what would work to actually in the war, and he doesn't. He never gets called on that because we win the war anyway, and everyone kind of thinks, fuck those guys, low key a high key but and you know, fuck them, but it doesn't work. That is important. Now. There's not agreement and in fact a huge a lot

of conflict between the US and Great Britain over the strategy. Initially, the guys in the US Army Air Command do not all agree with Harris, and in fact we keep conducting the Brits are doing night time raids, which allows you to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for a long time, which are way more dangerous because the idea is it gives these civilians more of a chance to get away, right, that's part of why you're doing it.

It's more honorable basically, right, which it is, but it also means you lose a lot more guys right, like, it's way more dangerous. Yeah, it's very dnerable thing I think that we're doing for a while. We're not always going to be that way. So yeah, this debate really starts to erupt after this point. And on one end you've got these area bombing strategic bombing advocates saying like, you know, I know it hasn't quite worked yet, right, Like,

we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not giving up yet, but if we just get more bombers, bro, it'll work.

a future invasion of France. An early test for the strategic bombing advocates, on the other hand, came prior to the invasion of Sicily. There's this island called Antillaria, which is garrisoned with about eleven thousand Italian troops that we need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy. And I'm going to quote for an article in National

Interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pantelleria became an experiment when anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that bombing would ratify what up to then had been a matter of faith, but would soon offer proof through bombing alone, surrender was a certainty. All these forces were assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing more in, then in due course of time it becomes

impossible for him to defend himself. Major General Jimmy Doolittle said, if bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies planned to invade the island by June eleventh. In an attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, the Allies generated five two hundred and eighty four sorties, dropping a total of twelve point four million pounds of bombs on Pantelleria. Jesus did it work kay After a month of unopposed round the clock bombing. The Italians surrendered after Allied ground

troops had approached the island. Right, They did surrender on their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops came in. Now you can still say, but that still worked. Right. However, there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses were remarkably intact still given the force deployed against them, because nearly every bomb missed. The B seventeens were most accurate,

with a twenty two percent hit rate. That's defined as landing a bomb within one hundred yards of its target. So the B seventeens hit twenty two percent of the time, and that's our best bomber.

which was like, this is the shit. This makes precision bombing possible. It's like almost it's like a little computerized bombing system that like, we can do things with bombs we never could do before. You can drop a bomb for twenty five thousand feet and hit a target the size of a pickle barrel. Right, that's the promise Iri Echer makes Winston Churchill when he's like they're sitting there, He's like, we can hit a pickle barrel at twenty

five thousand feet. Now in combat. A few months later, these things would hit within a football field only twenty two percent of the time. Yeah, so you're getting this. This is going to be also a theme with all of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They will make all these claims about yes, you know, it'll it's it's this accurate, and it's this safe, and it can only be activated if this and this and this happens,

so it like could never be accidentally fired. And they're like, oh wait, but what if this thing happens that happens every day, Oh yeah, that could accidentally launch all of our missiles. Yeah, are you guys gonna fix it? We actually don't wanna. That's the story of the minute Man in a nutshell, but we'll talk more about that later. Anyway, with a fleet of these eager price we can disembowel the German Reich and destroy its industrial capacity with no

need for ground forces. Right, we can just get the Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct experience with aerial warfare, and he does not believe Eger, right, he doesn't believe about the accuracy. And the other thing that iri Eker is saying is we don't need fighter escorts for our B seventeens because they have all these guns on them that will that'll be enough to deter attack. We can send the fortress. Yeah, that's basically the idea

behind that title. But like, yeah, because these B seventeens are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to if they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate. And that that's necessary because the bombers can fly a lot further than the fighters. So what Eker is saying is we can send these bombers into the heart of enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range of the fighters, and they'll be fine. And he's going

to be wrong about that too. So one result of this the Casablanca Conference, is that the Allies put together a list of military assets they want prioritize destroying or disabling a task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power. These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities, and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first of these targets was a ball bearing production facility in Regensburg.

Ball bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and number of other important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by Major General Ekers eighth Army Air Force on August seventeenth, nineteen forty three. Three hundred and seventy six bombers plowed deep into German territory, beyond the range of any fighters

to escort them. Per the website code names operations of World War II, The mission inflicted heavy damage on the Regensburg target, but only at catastrophic loss to the force inasmuch as sixty bombers were lost and many more damaged

beyond economical repair. As a result, the Eighth Air force was incapable of immediately following double strike with a second attack that might have seriously crippled German industry when Schweinfert, that's the industrial facility was attacked again two months later. The lack of long range fighter escorts still had not been addressed, and losses were even higher. As a consequence, the US deep penetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for five months.

Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a defending military for women inflicting severe casualties on a farmer fleet, and that despite the damaged under the Regensburg Plant. German industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. As Reich Minister of Supply Albert Spear stated at after the war, no plane or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings. Colonel Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Rassioni noted in his article the Allies failed in their choice of a

target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad. Germany was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point, and it also stop. They had foreseen this and stockpiled pre war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft and shit to not see as many ball bearings.

disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable in intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts if attempts to hit factories. Yeah, Bobara Harris,

one thing you have to give him. He's very clear. No, no, no, this is about killing women and children and riten'ing them homeless. That's what we're doing. That's the business the RAF is in. You guys need to stop pretending that you're fucking with ball bearings.

put into practice. But there had been this theory that by dropping incendiaries in the right place, in a certain parts of a city, you can create these firestorms that massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign. Right, And this is like when it when it really works for the first time. This is going to be a massive part of our strategy. And when we're bombing the Japanese

home islands, right, is creating these these hideous firestorms. And this also this becomes I think the term is literally like bonus damage. Basically, this is like a concept of nuclear war too. Is a big part of the appeal of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them is that you create these firestorms the size of states, and like, that's really handy It really amplifies the amount of a country you can destroy when you create firestorms that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain.

and Conquer. Yeah. In November of nineteen forty three. In March of nineteen forty four, there were vast raids on Berlin which left much of the capital in ruins, and yet German morale continued to hold this is the thing, Bomber Harris, He's more honest, But what he's saying will happen still doesn't happen. Yeah, he's No amount of bombing

causes Germany to give up. By the time the war in Europe enters its endgame, there were very mixed conclusions to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and precision bombing. Both ideologies had suffered failures, and both had claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success.

Months earlier, bomber Harris had considered strategic bombing the same as opening a new front, summarizing a write up for the Juno Beach Center quote until D Day, he was convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force Germany into submission without the Allied casualties that were bound to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe. In Part two, we're going to talk about what happens next. We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll start talking about

the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device that we all live under right now. Like this second, an incident could have started, maybe just because a radar station was wrong, that will in fifteen to thirty minutes result in the annihilation of all organized life human life on the planet. That could have happened, as I say this sentence, and we mostly won't know until the bombs fall,

and there's really nothing. Like One thing that maybe will comfort you is that that like, none of the facilities we have to protect our government will work, like none of them are sufficient for the amount, the tonnage, the mega tonnage of explosives coming at them. That little like this is a good This is a good thing about Jacobson's book Nuclear War. One thing she points out is like, yeah,

there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone will bake to death slowly as if they're in an oven. Like we know what kind of forces will be deployed against DC. There's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a much worse death than the people top side will have. Well that's good, that's good anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up. We roll out of part one.

people were conscious of, people talked about. That's a reason why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances and like military armament schedules and like the different like arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device, right, because it worked that way, and it is really relevant to discuss that in the context of the doom state device that we all live under, right now, Yeah, yep, cool, cool? All right, all right, everybody.