Part Three: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, Welcome to the show. How are you doing. You're thinking about nukes?

a hideously bloody ground invasion. Right, this is a question people still argue about. There's not an objective answer here. I think you'll it'll be pretty clear where I tend to land once we get through this. Right, But this isn't something that like, this is something that's debated, right. I'm not going to come in and just give one side of this. Again, I have my my take on

the matter. I think it's worth emphasizing even if you argue that the sheer horror of atomic warfare forced Japan to surrender, that the military Japan never independently agreed to call it quits, and if the Emperor of Japan had not broken the Supreme Council's deadlock and started peace negotiations, we can't say that the civilian population wouldn't have continued supporting the war effort, no matter how many fire bombs or even additional nukes fell. Right, We actually don't know

that there's a that's a valid point. There's also an argument that the view pushed after the war, which is that the horror of nuclear warfare was justified by avoiding a greater slaughter in Japan. That like, if we had invaded the main islands, so many more people would have died. That that gives too much credit to atomic weapons as

a single weapons system. In an article for outrider dot org Jasmine Power Rights, there is general agreement that the bombing of Nagasaki did little in the way of changing the hearts and minds of the Japanese military. By blaming their surrender on the atomic bombs, Japan avoided the Soviet Union having a hand in the post war reconstruction process. Japan was afraid that the Soviet Union might try to

push a communist regime onto the country. It was also very convenient for the US that the attributed their surrender to the atomic bombings, and.

have Tokyo divided or whatever. Right, that's one argument people will make, you know, And in this view, pretty simply, Japan was defeated not because of the nukes, although that's not a non factor, but they were defeated because they were defeated viciously and comprehensively in every field of military endeavor.

It's not just the nukes. It's the fact that we beat the shit of them all across the Pacific, right, yeah, like, which is probably, i mean, certainly a more accurate view than just saying it was the nukes, right Like, there

was a whole war. A lot of guys had to die to finish that thing, right And Yeah, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombs dropped, went on record basically saying that military planners had told him that when they were looking into like what how many people would die in an invasion of the Japanese Home islands, American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of five hundred thousand to a million, and if you're talking about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on

these other island hopping campaigns, and that would have meant both the military and civilian cost for Japan would have been higher than that. Right Now, that said, this is not a real estimate, as best as I can tell, you will encounter it often. It comes up constantly, but it's heavily debatable whether or not those numbers that five hundred to a million American casualties estimate have any basis

in reality. Lose in Europe we lost in the whole war, the United States lost about half a million people, Okay, Like so this this would be basically doing World War Two all over again for US more or less. Right, It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfi Khne on

kind of the veracity of these numbers. Historian Barton Bernstein writes that military planners at the time put the number of American casualties between twenty thousand and forty six thousand. But far more disturbing than this discrepancy is the strong possibility that neither an invasion nor in nuclear attack was

actually necessary to get Japan to surrender. And this is an interesting point because if you're saying, oh, five hundred thousand to do a million Americans killed and injured, millions of Japanese people dead, you know, maybe the nukes save lives. But if you're looking at well twenty to forty six, forty or fifty thousand American casualties, probably twice that many Japanese casualties, well, maybe that's better than nuke the islands. Right, Yeah, you know.

He notes that the US fire bombs had already incinerated Japan's six largest cities and are basically the siege that we put on the Home Islands had blocked all oil

from entering the country. What held up Japanese surrender was in part a desire for the Emperor to retain his title, con sites in nineteen forty six report from the War Department Strategic Bombing Surveys Study Group, which concluded the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war,

did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May of nineteen forty five that the war should be ended, even if it meant acceptance of defeat on Allied terms.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, is the survey's opinion that, certainly prior to his thirty first of December nineteen forty five, and in all probability prior to first November nineteen forty five, pan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, Even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or completed. This is the US War Department.

and several prominent US officers agreed. Admiral William Lahey, the president's chief of staff during the war, called Truman's decision to deploy an atomic bomb for the first time adopting quote an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark Ages, which is a nuts thing for the president's chief of staff to say about. Like Dwight Eisenhower reached a similar conclusion early on, arguing it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. So I guess I

go with Ike on this. One. Not a perfect man, but he pretty much he knew World War two pretty well.

their decision to surrender, and the nukes were part of that. Right, But what isn't arguable is this President Truman and men in high positions within the US Army like Curtis LeMay never considered anything but a nuclear option once they knew they had a bomb. Right, there was never any possibility in their minds but that they would use it. Percne's article, the fearsome new weapon was not treated as an option

of last resort. It would be easier to accept the argument that he Truman had no choice but to drop the bomb if other possibilities, such as demonstrating its power to Japan the leaders on an unpopulated island and demanding surrender, had been carefully considered. They were not there was never a serious attempt at to find a strategy short of

obliterating the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Yale sociologist Kai Eriksson put it, using nuclear weapons was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a product of mature consideration. We have it on the authority of virtually all the principal players that no one in a position to do anything about it ever really considered alternatives to dropping the bombs on Japan.

huge number of these people died. Like the rivers were just flooded with corpses, charred bodies of people who had tossed themselves, burnt and singing and like melting basically into the water. It was horrible, And in the days and weeks after the bombing, survivors started to sicken, vomiting up blood,

pulling their hair out, and clumps from radiation poisoning. Right, Like, this is something that we were pretty immediately aware that not only does the bomb kill a shitload of people when it goes off, but there are knock on effects that continue killing people. Right even though we didn't have a full understanding of this, we had a pretty good understanding pretty early of what we were doing to people with these things. The Air Corps generals did their best

to minimize the horror of atomic weapons. In November of nineteen forty five, General Leslie Groves, who again the military head of the Manhattan Project, that before the US Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, and I want to read you a selected Q and A from that meeting, Senator Milligan. General, is there any medical antidote to excessive radiation? General Groves. I'm not a doctor, but I will answer it anyway. I always love it when people say that the radio

act of casualty can be of several classes. He can have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He can have a smaller amount which will cause him to die rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die. Oh yeah, that's what people say about people say about radiation, about having your insides liquefied, pleasant, chill.

evidence that radiation poisoning was not pleasant. Precisely what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not yet fully understood by most Americans, but early reports of horrific burns and lingering sickness far from the blast sight were available. More to the point, you've heard about the radium girls in the like. People had been exposing themselves to different kinds of radiation for decades and they died horribly. We knew radiation poisoning was not pleasant before we ever

dropped an atomic bomb. Right now. Again, the point here is that Groves was he was not just lying, He was engaged in a cover up. This is a conspiracy, and it's a conspiracy that ran parallel to one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time, the campaign to get Americans on the bomb. Step one of that campaign was to keep people from thinking of the horrors of atomic weapons for a little while, longer we knew

eventually it would get out. Right. These generals all knew you can't lie about this forever, right, But the longer we lie about it, the more money we get into these programs, the more momentum they get behind them, the more we can centralize the US military and defense apparatus around nukes, which was their goal right Their goal was replaced as many humans as possible with atomic weapons, and

they start on it almost immediately. For these generals, as for Curtis LeMay, the existence of the atom bomb seems to have given some sort of purpose and provided a dark, animating force to the remainder of their lives. Immediately after the war's end, they set to work launching a new kind of campaign, a media blitz targeted at convincing decision makers in the US that nukes were the only future

for the military that was worth caring. About three months after the bombing of Hiroshima, LeMay visited the Ohio Society in New York City to give a speech. He warned slash promise the men a symbol that the next war, understood to be the next World War, would be fought with rockets, radar, jet propulsion, television guided missiles, and that all of these weapons would be launched at speeds faster than sound and involve atomic power. So he's he's got

a pretty clear vision of the future. Our friend Curtis Lamay, and he is now trying to sell.

our air power development. That doesn't sound at all like a crazy man, No, and it's you know, this is a pretty bleak series of episodes. I will say. One thing that has me optimistic is that Curtis Lemy tried harder than any single human ever has to end the human race and he didn't do it. And I don't

quite know why. Like, it's shocking that we survived. Curtis Lamay, he would do shit like fly bombers into Russian airspace just to like tweak them, Like he was such a piece of shit, And they always had.

allowed to develop, unhindered and unschained. I cannot emphasize enough how much of LeMay's speech to the Ohio Society was just warmed up do Hay. He insisted no air attack, once it is launched, can be completely stopped. This was an echo of du Hay's argument that the sky was too vast for bombers to be perfectly intercepted, right, And this hadn't proved true in World War Two, But when

you got nukes, it kind of is true. Right. If you send five hundred bombers and they each have a nuke, one of them is going to drop that fucker, you know.

an aerial nuclear attack. Quote. This meant to le May that the United States would have to have an air force in being that could immediately move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the thread of it might be sufficient to prevent attack in the first place. If we are prepared, it may never come. It is not immediately conceivable that any nation will dare

to attack us if we are prepared. So in November of nineteen forty five, l May was already thinking in terms of what came to be called deterrence. But therein lay the contradiction. If no air attack could be completely stopped, then retaliation would not protect the country, It would only destroy the enemy's country in turn. Right, And what he means by an air force in being is you always have planes loaded with active nuclear bombs ready to fly

minutes away from flight. And it's eventually going to mean you always have planes in the air with nukes. And that's going to mean for a period of like a couple decades, there are never not nukes flying around in the air always. And this is before there's no governor on these. This is not a thing today. Every nuke that we have you have to get like codes and shit from the nuclear football. This is some guys in a plane have the ability to activate these things.

Yet now that the Cold War was kicking up, the US found itself simultaneously pressed with all kinds of new commitments. Nuclear weapons offered a solution to what seemed like an

impossible problem. I'm gonna quote from Rhodes again. In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its mild terry forces to bare bones, shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly ninety billion dollars to less than fifteen billion dollars, and counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter as Soviet march to the Atlantic across a war ravaged

Western Europe right. And this is kind of the first use that we have for nukes after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is, we can't keep all these soldiers in the field, but we're now responsible for guarding Western Europe from the scary communists. So let's just keep a bunch of nukes all over the place. That way, we don't need as many guys. We can just set off a shitload of nukes and we can slow these these Russians down while

we get our shit in gear, you know. And this works as a deterrent strategy when the Soviets don't have a bomb, right, because they don't have anything to counter this with. Hap Arnold sent a letter in nineteen forty five laying out he's an air force general laying out some of the first principles. While the air force doesn't exist yet, he's an army air thing general laying out some of the first principles for what would become the

theory of deterrence. Quote. We must thereforece it cure our nation by developing and maintaining those weapons, forces, and techniques required to pose a warning to aggressors in order to deter them from launching. A modern devastating war. In order to ensure this happened, Arnold ordered studies into the scientific projects the Air Force should support over the next twenty to thirty years. This resulted in nineteen forty six and

the Air Force setting up the RAND Corporation. You've heard of the RAND Corporation.

death ray feels like a good idea. Let's get one of those fuckers. I watched War of the World's to hell with it now, And to be honest, if we've made a death ray. That would be pretty cool.

back having a good time. So right around the time the Rand Corporation gets formed, you know, because the war is over, because the normal normal life is starting to reassert itself, for at least the new normal, some people have begun to question the logic with which men like bomber Harris Curtis LeMay in General Power. I still can't believe his literal name was General fucking Power approached a real warfare. Was it really possible to break in? Yeah? Right?

How did one measure a broken will? Far more effective were strikes against petroleum refineries, airport factories, and power plants, the loss of which ravaged the Germans war, making capabilities and destroyed their economy. This led to post war air atomic planning that emphasized Soviet industry as targets for nuclear strike, key targets that, if destroyed, would have a large and

effect far larger than the facility's mere destruction. These plants were often located in major urban areas, said one Air Force general of this conundrum. I think it was sort of a shock to people when a few began to talk about the bonus effects and industrial capital, and particularly when they began to ask, what was a city but a collection of industry and that's an important Yeah, it's hideous.

in the world. In a memo to the House of Representatives, he argued the existence of this ready force would act as a deterrent to any countries looking to acquire nuclear weapons. So first, we need a ready force so that no one else will get nukes. If we always have planes ready to nuke people, no one else will even try to get them, right, this is this is their first argument, you know.

they come to control our long range missile assets. I say control. Technically all of our nuclear weapons at this point are in the custody of the Atomic Energy Commission, right, and they maintain direct control over the nuclear weapons that we're starting to build in the post war period.

people cheat on tests constantly. There's stories about guys in nuclear silos doing fucking ecstasy, you know, because it's a shit job. In this period of time, it is not seen as a shit job. These are seen as this is the best part of the military to be in. This is the most elite force in the military. It's certainly the best thing to be if you're any kind of pilot, right, and these are the best pilots and engineers that our entire military can put together, right, and

they're tasked with a singular purpose, so it's different. At this point, that is probably what you want. Now, that's the idea. It's debatable are they ever really that good? We'll talk about that. Curtis LeMay takes command of the SAC in nineteen forty eight. He's not the first guy in charge of it, but he takes command and he really he forms it in a meaningful way. The next year, nineteen forty nine, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead,

terrifying members of the US defense establishment. There had been a lot of guys, anyone who was smart and well, of course, like Soviet Union's got a good science program. They have resources, They've got spies, are gonna get a bomb, right, they have the ability to get uranium or platonia, all this whatever shit they need. It's it's there's like a fifth of the world's land masks. They have the ability to do this.

It's the gun thing. Do I wish like there were no semi automatic and automatic assault rifles at all in the country? That would probably be more pleasant? Am I not gonna have one? When the crazy ass motherfuckers I know have them?

the sky. They're not thinking the way normal people think anymore. Yeah, and the same is true of the Soviets. By the way,

they lost twenty million people in this war. The Soviets were not getting into it because I have less detail on it, but they are making mirror decisions generally to the US, right, sometimes a little less crazy, sometimes a little crazier, but they're also have all been completely deranged by this hideous war, Right, so I do have a little bit of like, well, fuck, how could this not have gone bad? Right?

like fifty two to fifty three. Is this insanely dangerous, dangerous period really up until like the early sixties, where the Soviets have some nukes but not all that many, and the US has a lot, and we could have started and won a nuclear war. It would have been really pretty easy for US. Right. There would have been casualties and tens of millions of deaths, but they would have mostly been over in Europe, right, because the Soviet

Union just didn't have a lot of bombs. And they didn't have the ability to get a lot of bombs over here. There's no ycbms. You're flying fucking bombers, right, so we would have lost Alaska maybe, right, Like their long range bombing capacity, especially in like nineteen forty nine to fifty is it probably could have accomplished that, but it wasn't great. Right. In nineteen fifty, a year after the first Russian nuclear test, the United States had nearly

three hundred nuclear weapons, The USSR had five. The newly founded Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Department of Defense, which that'll get started in this post war period, right, we don't have the Joint Chiefs or like you know in World War two. Right, this is a post war innovation,

you know, if you want to call it that. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DoD had concluded, after a study that some two hundred nuclear bombs would be sufficient to depopulate most of the Earth, quote, leaving only the stigial remnants of man's material works, that is, the Joint Chiefs. They say two hundred nukes will do that, and so we build three hundred. Yeah, cool, Well we'll get a lot more. By nineteen fifty one will have more than four hundred such weapons.

They're not dropping real bombs obviously, but all of the fake bombs are horribly off target. Like every they fuck up really badly. The supposedly elite force cannot drop bombs to save their goddamn lives. Right, This is probably less on training. I mean there's some degree of training. It's more than just like, bombers aren't great at hitting things precisely at this point. Yeah, yeah, And nukes.

airplane finished. That mission is briefed and like, man, you were part of raids where guys die, I think that's darker, like where guides died and the mission wasn't really that successful. I think that's worse than a raid where fake bombs just don't hit very well. I don't know, babies, like, yeah, that might be darker, horotia monig oh, it might be darker. Arguably. Yeah, Now this means that when the Korean War kind of starts up, it's gonna be not quite the last point.

Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's this some shit in the JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's some shit in during the Eisenhower administration in Taiwan where we probably could have used nuclear weapons without total planetary

annihilation or getting nuked into the Stone Age ourselves. Right, But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict where the US could have used nuclear weapons on a tactical level and known the risks were minimal that things would have like spiraled into globally annihilation at least at that point. Right, And given that fact, given that we could have nuked North Korea and even China and guys wanted to, it's kind of a miracle that we didn't.

It's like shocking to me when I get into the history that like we that it didn't happen, right, Yeah, And going into the war, some powerful men in the Defense Department argued for just that action. Curtis LeMay was the most prominent of a cadre of officers who considered our nuclear arsenal, the term they used for it, was a wasting asset in other words, because we know the Soviets are starting to build up a nuclear arsenal and starting to get long range bombers and the other things

they need to be able to strike us. Every day we don't use our nukes, they become less effective. Basically, he's saying, we got to use him or lose him. Right. If we don't use them now, we'll never be able to use them, right, right.

of exposure. There wasn't a lot that we could really do to fuck them up that bad by bombing them, right, like we do some damage, but that's just kind of not how their military is wired at this point in time. And to make matters worse for the United States, we start this war using very new high tech guided bombs like the Asma one Tarzan, but those run out immediately,

which is a thing in modern warfare too. If you look at what's happened in Ukraine, right, like, you have these incredible munitions that are capable of really impressive things, but also it's really hard to make them, and you instead of them all and it turns out you go through that shit real fast in a war. So, as I said, Curtis LeMay had taken over control of the SAC in nineteen forty eight and he was the architect

of the bombing campaign against North Korea. He interpreted the fact that we had run through all of our most advanced munitions without ending the war as another l for team precision bombing. Basically, LeMay is like, well, look, clearly, just striking strategic targets doesn't work, so he orders US bombers to start playing the classics. Colonel Rossioni, in that article that he wrote, describes SAC's plan as to quote increase the level of pain in North Korea by bombing

civilian targets. LeMay and the sac used US air power to kill around two million North Korean citizens over the next two years. In change.

and who wasn't, Like, I don't one who wasn't. Yeah, And even if they were, you know how many you know, how many children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere near the evil of what Rome did in terms of killing them.

once again, though this is really important. Actual war disproves all of the foundational assumptions of our military leadership. First off, North Korea invades despite the fact that the US has troops in South Korea and we have an overwhelming edge and strategic bombing per the theories that LeMay and do Hey both espoused, if you have a good enough strategic bombing force, you won't get attacked. Right, that's the point.

It just doesn't work. It's never true. That Also are the fact we have air superiority, but it doesn't stop North Korea from fighting effectively, and none of the bombing we do it doesn't shatter civilian morale. In fact, a strong argument could be made that the Korean War goes as badly as it does because guys like LeMay had

gotten their way in the interwar period. As I noted earlier, we really cut back on the military after World War Two, and in fact, all military development outside of making the SAC stronger took a back seat. And as a result, when North Korea invades, the US troops stationed in South Korea are not well prepared. Their weapons are barely maintained.

I've talked to my grandpa about because he was there the whole war, and he was like, yeah, we were in shit shape when the war started, and it was because they had let like we had, like fucking our bazukas wouldn't fire and shit like we had, Like there were serious issues with like the maintenance of basic equipment because guys like the LeMay were like, all we need are bombers, bro, trust ye, all we need o bombers, you know.

Then China enters the war with a shitload of dudes, and suddenly the un forced are in full retreat and they get pushed backs. It's really it's a it doesn't not enough study of not enough people. Americans know anything about the Korean War, but it's a fucking wild ass time.

have the option to use them if in an emergency situation. Right, Uh huh. Truman says yes to this. MacArthur also wants these planes in their nukes placed under his direct control. And this is a weird moment where Curtis LeMay may have saved a lot of people's lives, and I don't think it's for a good reason. But he steps in and he sent begs Truman to say no and keep the bomb under SAC. He wants the bombs to stay with the SAC right, he wants to have control over them.

But I do think he is less I don't think he would have I don't think he certainly was not unwilling to nuke North Korea, but he was less interested in doing it than MacArthur. Right, he was not convinced it was the only path forward, and MacArthur was really convinced it was the only way to win right now for decades because the fact that we sent nukes to

Guam during the Korean War has been well known. But if you look up any histories that are like older prior to the twenty first century, it will say the SAC sent nine planes and nine atomic bombs to Guam. We now know that this was inaccurate, and I'm going to quote from the book fifteen Minutes here. The first nine departures for Guam were uneventful, but as the last

B twenty nine accelerated down the runway. Two propellers ran away as the bomber lifted off, forcing the pilot to shut down two engines, and what would later be described as heroic flying, the pilot somehow pulled the fuel laden bomb ladd bomber into the air and managed to turn back towards the runway, but as he did, he lost

altitude and the bombers simply went into the ground. The crash was not hard, reported an aid to General le May, but twelve men were dead and eight were trapped in the burning wreckage, which came to rest at the edge of a trailer park that housed military families. That's a nuke. We blow up a nuke next to base housing. And that's why everyone just knew that we sent nine planes, because they just pretend this doesn't happen. They lie about they cover this the fuck up, right, So this is

like this is drop safe. Nukes are drop safe. Kind of The good news is that because of how nukes work, they don't detonate on accident. They have to be set up for. In order to get the big, the explosion that we all recognize as a nuclear blast, you have to set off a nuke in a specific way. The bad news is that even if it's not set off in the way that causes a traditional atomic blast, you're still talking about five thousand pounds of conventional explosives in

the bomb and a bunch of radioactive material. So it can still make from what I've seen, because this happens a few times. It doesn't always make a dirty bomb, but it can. You can get radiation contamination when one of these things explodes in a plane crash, right. That does happen sometimes. I don't actually know if it does in this case because of how much was covered up. I can't tell you if any of these fucking civilians

and the base house got radsick. But the blast of this nuke not going off as a nuke is felt thirty miles away. It kills seven rescue personnel, and it injures one hundred and eighty one civilians. The Air Force immediately lies and says, oh, that was just loaded with normal bombs. It was a training mission, sorry, guys, not a nuke though. Don't worry.

miles outside of Quebec. And here's the wild part. That was the fifth nuclear bomb lost by the SAC from the end of World War two to November of nineteen fifty five lost nukes in five years.

situation in Korea grows more dire. He develops a plan that would have involved dropping between thirty and fifty tactical atom bombs on enemy air bases and depots, and then he would have followed up by a massive invasion of Taiwanese troops backed by two marine divisions. Enemy reinforcements from China were to be blocked. This army that he's going

to have basically cut Korea off from China. They're going to lay a belt of radioactive cobalt behind them in order to make it impossible for Chinese forces to cross into Korea for generations. That was the plan, is to radiate the entire border alongside nuking a bunch of people.

It could have been worse, I guess, is what I'm saying.

is not as much of a factor. Right, We don't have to have these things ready to detonate at five minutes notice, right, And so for safety's sake, again, this is one of these the Atomic Energy Commission kind of comes in and is, like Wilson, the bombs over, but not the nuclear material. We will keep the nuclear cores in the US so that we can airlift them over to Europe on a moment's notice.

have direct control over our nuclear arsenal. Eventually, Truman agreed to give Strategic Air Command custody of these weapons in Gwam. Right, this is kind of the first time that the military gets direct custody for a long period of time. Is in Guam. During the Korean War in nineteen fifty one, the US had increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons from two hundred ninety nine to four hundred and thirty eight, twice the number of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had

been told in an internal report, could destroy civilization. As I noted, the USSR has around fifty bombs. Their stockpile will go rapidly after this point. But to deal with the fact that the gap is starting to close, we start working on a bigger bomb.

the blast dies immediately. Everyone within two or three miles of the blast is incinerated over the course of a few seconds. Right, You're talking millions of deaths in the space of a minute or two. Like, yeah, these these are not survivable. Everything is there's no buildings left, everything is combusted. You'ar like, like the power of these bombs cannot be exaggerated. These are not survivable. There is not an after thermonuclear war.

as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb, if detonated in a city like New York or Soul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash. These are so I think.

to be. Enrico Fermi, Garwin's mentor and a Manhattan Project scientist, actually sent a letter to President Truman begging him not to go through with testing the first hydrogen bomb. Quote. The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. Don't build the torment nexus.

island called Illuge Lab. And you see the before there's a Luge Lab, it's an island, and then in the after there's just no island.

the Marshall Islands. We are not doing this onquote unquote, I mean they're to this extent that they're uninhabitants because we forced people off, right Like, this is a crime against humanity. Our testing of thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands is a crime against humanity. You can check out James Stout's reporting on it if you want more on that. After this series right, I'm not going to be getting into it because he did that series. But no, I

can see that. Yeah, yeah, you can see just in the picture how catastrophic these weapons are.

one of the irrational men who made this possible. Like you're wearing the banana suit here, Truman, Like, come on, man, you gave the call to use the first of these fucking things. Yeah. Jacobsen goes into more detail about how military planners respond despite what Truman says to the existence now of thermonuclear weapons. Quote, what happened after US war planners saw what ten point four megatons could instantly destroy

simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. In nineteen fifty two, the United States had eight hundred and forty one nuclear weapons. A year before Truman left office. In nineteen fifty one, a group of scientists and researchers that included doctor Robert Oppenheimer launched Project Vista. This was a study to analyze if there was any room for improvement in NATO's strategy

for responding to a Soviet invasion. They concluded that having the SAC be in charge of basically everything through their one strategy of nuking everybody was a bad idea. Instead, who yeah, here's the problem. They conclude that instead NATO should replace manpower with low yield, tactical nuclear weapons that would evaporated vance Soviet forces and that could be deployed by battlefield commanders on the ground. Now, there's a degree to which they're trying to do a kind of noble

thing here, Right. The stated goal here is bring the battle back to the battlefield. If we're using nukes on soldiers but not nuking cities, maybe we don't consume every city in Europe with atomic hell fire. Right, That's what Project Vista's kind of trying to argue for, and their conclusions are supported by the US Army, not because the Army is a particularly benevolent force, but because it reduces the influence of the SAC. Right, the SAC has the nukes.

Now the army wants some nukes of its own. Right, right, A. Schlosser writes in the book Command and Control, as would be expected, Curtis LeMay hated the idea of low yield tactical weapons. In his view, they were a waste of physile material, unlikely to prove decisive in battle, and difficult to keep under centralized control. The only way to win a nuclear war, according to SAC, was to strike first and strike hard. Successful offense brings victory. Successful defense can

now no only lesson defeat, LeMay told his commanders. Moreover, an atomic blitz aimed at Soviet cities was no longer the SAC's top priority. La May now thought it would be far more important to destroy the Soviet Union's capability to use its nuclear weapons. Soviet airfields, bombers, command centers, and nuclear facilities became SAC's primary targets. Lamay did not make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's not completely off base here.

LeMay did not advocate preventative war. An American surprise attack on the Soviet Union out of a blue, but the counter force strategy he endorsed was a form of preemptive war, sac planned to attack the moment the Soviets seemed to be readying their own nuclear forces. Civilian casualties, though unavoidable, were no longer the goal. Offensive airpower must now be aimed at preventing the launching of weapons of mass destruction

against the United States or its allies. LeMay argued. This transcends all other considerations because the price of failure might be paid with national survival.

US defense policies, Iike decided both sides were right. The US needed tactical nuclear weapons on the ground in Europe, but we also needed an arsenal of thermonuclear weapons that could bomb the Soviets at a moment's notice. After all, in late nineteen fifty three, the USSR detonated its first thermo nuclear device. By nineteen fifty four, the United States had more than seventeen hundred nuclear weapons. By nineteen fifty five, that number had climbed to nearly twenty five hundred. We

were building roughly two bombs a day. By nineteen fifty nine, the United States had an arsenal of more than twelve thousand nuclear weapons, and we were manufacturing more than five per day, including three different families of thermonuclear warheads. You see just how quickly like there's not any conceivable use

for twelve thousand nuclear warheads. Everyone's dead after the first thousand, at least, you know, maybe less right Like surprisingly, it was under Eisenhower that the army suffered its most significant budget cutbacks, losing a fourth of its manpower. This has kind of been forgotten, but Ike does you know, people are generally aware of like the military industrial complex speech.

But at the start of his presidency, Ike really prunes the military budget and actually causes like kind of an eruption of anger within the military at him, at General Eisenhower, because he's cutting back so much. The Army, in order to deal with this loss of ban power, starts lobbying for more nukes of its own, because that's the only thing you can get funded for now, right, that's all

they're giving out. You know. General James R. Gavin, during secret testimony before Congress laid out the number of atomic shells, anti aircraft missiles, and land mines the Army needed. These are all nuclear artillery, nuclear anti aircraft missiles, and nuclear land mines.

up planes really bad. And that's actually kind of reasonable if there's this many of these things like he's shooting also is only going to kill soldiers, right, I mean the fallout and write there will be consequences to that too, But it's a defensible position as compared to everything else that they're doing, right, Like, I can see how you might want to be able to just like try to blow up five hundred planes in the air with a

big nuke, right, that kind of makes sense. Like this is all crazy, but I get it.

the sub launched nukes. And you can kind of again, we have these things called like fad batteries that could be if we actually had any place in the US, could be useful against like a sub attack. Right. You could actually stop a good number of sub based nuclear weapons, right with these batteries, but they're all deployed overseas, protecting

like Israel and the like. Right, we don't have any One of the scenarios Jacobsen talks about is like a North Korean sub nuking this huge like nuclear power plant on the coast of California, which would cause this app titanic environmental catastrophe. And she points out, like there are plans for having fad batteries that could protect this thing, but we just we're using them all overseas, so we don't have any set.