Part Two: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Trek's and Next Generation, terrorism can be a very effective strategy. Look, that's not my conclusion, that's data from star Trek's conclusions. Is Android take it up with him, you know. Yeah, so talking of of terrorists and look, there's I don't want this to come out as and this is sometimes the way it sounds saying that like strategic bombing did nothing in World War Two and that it was no

part of the German defeat. Right, that's not accurate. But as we'll discuss what du Hay is claiming, what a lot of the people believe is that strategic bombers and

a powerful enough air force render everything else unnecessary. And that's only true in the context of nuclear war, and even then it's not really true because subs are pretty important and ground based missile launches, so it's not really true with that right anyway, There's this group called the bomber Mafia that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on that had some terrible takes. But these are the guys who are like advocating for the massive and expanded use of

like saturation bombing on civilian targets, you know. And Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay on the American side, are two very prominent members of this group. Like many American officers, Curtis LeMay came from humble origins. He is not a sir, very different from his counterpart in the RAF. He was born in nineteen oh six in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a handyman who I'm going to guess had some sort of maybe he was drinking. He's not stablely employed.

He is not able to keep the family fed. Right. It's one of those kind of situations, and as a result, LeMay grows up poor. His first job was, in Eric Schlosser's words, shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed a neighbor's cat. So much backstory in that sentences the.

He works constantly when he's not at school, and this leads him to feel quote cut off from normal life because he never has time for a childhood. He's just kind of like working constantly and very concerned from an early period with serious things. Right, he does not get to be a kid. Too many kids have experience during the fucking Great Depression, and today it's a bummer and it's not gonna make him a better person. He does save enough money to pay his way through Ohio State,

where he studies civil engineering. He goes to school every day and works at a steel mill at night, usually until two or three in the morning, at which point he will sleep for a couple of hours and then go back to school. That's his college experience.

cool job in the Air Force. But by this point planes are really new, you know, it's really cool, and most young officers want to be fighter pilots because that's the sexiest job than and now there's not really any sexier job than fighter pilot. I'm sorry, you.

cultural osmosis. Everyone is talking about do hay and strategic bombing, you know, when you're in like the Air Force cadet school, right, and so he just encounters a lot of that way yeah.

to the start of Vietnam. He will name his strategy for bombing North Vietnam the genteel dou Hay Plan. That's like the nickname. Everyone refers to it as like, so this is like the polite version of dou Hay's plan. We're not going to kill quite as many civilians as do Hay.

He earned the nickname old iron Pants as a result. Yeah, that's that's what is. That's what is, like the kind of lovingly his crews call him when.

really off target because she's zigzagging. May and the attitude was that like, well, if you're just flying straight, there's only a limited period of time in which you really low that you're super vulnerable to anti aircraft fire. And if you're just going straight, it's a death sentence. You're just marching directly into the enemy guns. And LeMay argued, no, no, no, flying straight is way safer because it's faster. You're out

in half the time. Zigzagging doesn't do all that much to protect you, but getting out of there faster does. So just going straight and then getting out of the fucking death zone as quickly as you can is the best way for us to do this. And he created a new type of formation for bomber aircraft based on this that was optim that was supposed to like basically keep them with the optimal distance to offend each other

with their guns. Now, everything about this new tactic was controversial among his pilots, and the way that LeMay stifled any disagreement was promising to fly in the lead plane, which was the one that would be in the most danger if his theory was wrong. Right, So he'd be like.

is doing it. Right, you know, another guy who's doing basically the same thing as LeMay. Around this period of time, actor James Stewart, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jimmy Stewart actually becomes a general and is like deeply involved in our air strategy and Korea too. He's he's arguably one of the highest body count like actors that has ever existed, like like a list actors. He's not the only one in contention, by the way.

Robert McNamara, future Secretary of Defense for the most of the Vietnam War, came to believe that this abort rate was caused by cowardice, which he defined as pilots not wanting to die because their CEO had fucked up. McNamara credits LeMay with ending the abort problem. Quote, he was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal.

He got the report, he issued an order, he said, I will be in the lead plan on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target, or the crew will be court martialed. The abort rate dropped overnight. Now that's the kind of commander he was so seeing like the upsides and the downsides of this man. He's like, not a lot of sympathy for Creus, not wanting to die because somebody decided they don't need fighter escorts.

the military at some level. Yeah, but he's maybe better at it than you want someone to be maybe, right.

skill here. You know, of all the officers in these episodes, had you been in the military at the time, LeMay is probably the guy you would have wanted to serve under, not for logical reasons, but because that seems to have been how his men felt about him. Right. Yeah. Now, At the same time, his instincts made him perhaps the worst possible guy to wind up with the job that he gets, because he is the dude who directs the formation of our grand nuclear strategy. He winds up in

charge of the Strategic Air Command. Correct fifty to fifty, so that's good.

to fifty percent of us are gonna die. Maybe you know, like he's done that so much that he has during like as a result of what happens to him in Europe, his face gets paralyzed. It's Bell's palsy. He gets an attack of Bell's palsy, and his face is completely paralyzed after this point, so he like can't smile or show emotion.

this as well as we could have. This was a guy who was going to go to his grave believing that area bombing not only worked, but it was the only way to win a war. Right. He is basically always convinced that do Hay was mostly right. And the problem with this is that he hadn't been, as we have discussed. And this is not just Robert, you know, old left wing radical Robert saying that the strategic bombing

guy was that Reagansburg was a failure. Bernard Brodie of the Rand Corporation would later conclude in a study of dou Hay's theories in World War Two. If one disregards for a moment the overall visions and considers only specific assertions and theses, one has to conclude in World War Two that do Hay proved wrong and almost every salient point he made to assert the reverse, as is often done, is to engage in propaganda, not analysis, and that's just

impossible to argue against. Bombing alone did not destroy the third right. Its capacity to wage war was degraded, not just through bombing, but through a mix of air, ground,

and naval warfare. Like there's a lot of well, after nineteen forty four, while we were strategically bombing German cities, their war production finally collapsed, and it's like we were also taking a lot of territory from them, like they were losing ground to other things were happening, and the air power played a role in us being able to take ground. But it's a much more complicated picture than

do Hay and his advocates are making. It was not just strategic long range bombing, and that's what do Haye was saying, right, You can't just say, well, bombing was a useful part of the overall no, no, no, that's not what do Hay was claiming. And all of these air Force guys are going to be arguing for the rest of their careers. All we need is an air force, right, that's a big part of this.

with our plans for nuclear war. They're always built assuming an enemy who doesn't adapt or change as we do things to them, because like Germans, yeah, we knock out some factories, so they decentralize their factories and they make them less vulnerable to bombing, so that they're assembling things in pieces and each individual's target is less important to

the whole. Right, there's a bunch of the that with like manufacture of a bunch of different material, and German air defenses remained pretty good until late in the war. Like dou Hay is just really wrong on all of this stuff. Now, by nineteen forty five, over in the Pacific theater, similar lessons had been learned visa VI the wisdom of dou Hay's theories. Japan's bold air attack at Pearl Harbor had been a tactical success, but number one

was not long range strategic bombing. These were planes that got there on aircraft carriers as part of a naval attack. It was pretty important to the overall thing, and it didn't knock the US out famously as a combatant. It really really just kind of pissed us off.

this is the way Harbor figure out. Yeah, we Japan didn't need to do a Pearl Harbor and it didn't help them right now, they did a Pearl Harbor. This is again to get back to how the same logic that could really fuck us in terms of a global nuclear war that kills everybody is part of why I think it's reasonable to fear that is the same logic has repeatedly gotten humans in trouble in the past. The logic behind the attack at Pearl Harbor is the US

is already fucking with us. Right by by throttling our access to stuff like fuel, They're going We're going to wind up fighting them anyway. It's inevitable, and so we need to launch a first strike to stop their capacity to hurt us, you know, Like it's the it's the same logic, right that, well, we have fight, some sort of conflict is inevitable, so we might as well hit them first. It's our only chance to survive.

to like strike first is entirely incorrect. That is like absolutely how everyone would like instead, Like I think about this time, you know, like because like you know, sometimes when you're outside, people like randomly, drunkenly try to fight you or something, right, and it's like literally learning I'm not advocating passivism here, but literally learning. If someone just is looking for a fight and they punch you and you ignore them, that ends it, at least in my experience. Right,

But as soon as actually trying to destroy you. You have to do something. So that's just like the whole concept. Sorry, I'm just like thinking a lot about this. Is it scales up next into guns and then into nukes or yeah, you know, wars or whatever.

fits every scenario. And the problem is with nukes you don't really have you don't have room to do the less fucked up apocalyptic scenario that's not really an option.

stop the doom luke that kills everybody. Yeah, and that also that also predisposes you're just having one nuke at you, right, which is the most like and I think one of the things that does scary most is not and this is something that could easily turn into the apocalyptic scenario, but something that starts as like and this is kind of what the book Nuclear War Jacobson thea Like talks about.

But like, essentially you get like a nuclear January sixth, right, one nuke goes up, gets launched at or goes off in one country because of some sort of like weird stupid fuck up that isn't going to be repeatable necessarily, Like it's easy to learn from. You could stop subsequent ones, but in the immediate wake of the fuck up, this precedent is set that number one, there's a really high chance that it just immediately leads to everyone shooting everything

because like nobody has perfect data on what's happening. They just know that like a nuke has gone off, and everyone gets so like, if the country that gets nuked is becomes convinced any point they're under attack, they have about six minutes to choose to launch all of the missiles or not right. Right, That's how it works for a US president. It's no different as far as we

know really for Russia's president. Right, if that nuke goes off anywhere, you're going to have like six minutes to figure out do I end the world over this or not?

we can't just bomb our way out of this. Naval power is important, and in fact, the aviation that's most influential in the early stage of the Pacific campaign or not long range bombers, it's navy tactical aircraft, right, because that's a lot of these naval engagements come down to our carrier group finds their carrier group, and we fucking killed the shit out of them with planes. But they're

not doing like long range strategic bombing. You know, this is like really close combat in aeronautical terms, and it's pretty fucked up, and there's still a lot of work for infantry, right, No, matter how much, because we are bombing these islands like Okinawa, and we're shelling them before we send in ground troops. But no amount of bombing and shelling is sufficient to clear all of the infantry out. Soldiers are able to you know, they've got these bunker

networks that the Japanese Army has built. These are sufficient enough that like we're not able to bomb them out right the future and past of war, right, tunnels always work really well. And this is again it's more refutation of this. All we need are bombers, Like, no, you keep needing to send an infantry with fucking knives to clear guys out right, we haven't made the fucking knife obsolete by nineteen forty five, like we're not doing everything

with bombers. Duhey and his advocates had been irrationally optimistic. So that said, by like early nineteen forty five, we've isolated the Japanese home islands. And Colonel Rassioni and his piece summarizes the success of strategic bombing prior to nineteen forty five of Japan's heartland. Quote General Hansel commanding and directing bombing attacks on Japan and still unaware despite his extensive European experience that precision bombing was a myth, attempted

to use it to destroy Japan's military industrial capacity. After three months of intensive precision operations, his B twenty nine bomber force had destroyed none of the designated high priority targets, a failure that brought about his dismissal. Right, three months of precision bombing, the Air Force is not able to destroy any of their high value industrial targets. Right, it just doesn't work. So they bring in Curtis LeMay. And again, LeMay is neither of these guys. Both these guys are.

Both Hansel and LeMay are advocates of strategic bombing. Hansel is just saying it has to be tactical, it has to be like, you know, precision bombing. Sorry, and LeMay is saying, nah, you just got to fuck up everything, right, And his job is basically esque direct this air war to break the back of the Japanese without US needing to actually send in ground troops to invade the Home Islands, and he embarks on the most terrible bombing campaign of

World War Two. As Rassioni describes, it was General Curtis LeMay who put duhayes theories to the ultimate test, all of Japan's major cities except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki were burned out with conventional weapons. LeMay starts his job commanding the air war against Japan. He is the youngest general in US history. He gets the rank at age thirty

six after his work in Europe. The fire bombing of Tokyo is his idea, like that is his plan entirely, and when he takes the job he tells his deputies Japan will burn if I can get fire on it. And the book Commander Control Schlosser writes LeMay was involved in almost every aspect of the plan, from selecting the mix of bombs magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter, to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm. He is very nuts and bolts as a commander, he

is the personal architect. This is his great work is the fire bombing of Tokyo, and he plans it to like the most intimate degree. Perission's article, LeMay studied the mission reports and reconnaissance photographs, realized that the Japanese had almost no air defense left, and sent three hundred and twenty five pilots loaded with jellied gasoline fire bomb clusters over Tokyo in the early hours of March tenth, nineteen forty five. You're going to deliver the biggest firecracker the

Japanese have ever seen, he told his crews. As he waited impatiently for the bombers to return, he confided to McElway, who's like his adjutant, Basically, in a war, you've got to keep at least one punch ahead of the other guy all the time. A war is a tough kind of proposition. If you don't get the enemy, he gets you. I think we've figured out a punch he's not expecting

this time, and the mission was a success. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that quote probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour period than at any time in the history of man. More than ninety thousand civilians are killed and roughly a million are made homeless in a one night of bombing.

their entire capital from the sky. We killed more human beings in an hour than have ever been killed in history in a similar period of time, probably, and they're they're still swinging. Uh. Maybe maybe we've got some assumptions here that aren't entirely correct. Now, that is not how anyone thinks. One of the men planning these raids with LeMay was a close subordinate of his General Thomas Sarsfield.

Power is literally general power. Yes, he has a g I Joe name, and General power is going to help to build the nuclear doomsday machine we all sleep alongside today, right like he is one of the architects of this, alongside Lea May. And the fact that he has a name the name of a G I jo character belies

the fact that his backstory is pretty tame. His parents are Irish immigrants from branches of wealthier families started by second or third sons who left the home country to find their fortune because how inheritance worked at the time. Thomas Power grew up working class in New York City. As a young adult, he entered the US Army Air Corps in nineteen twenty eight when it was still a baby. Since this was a comparatively dull time for the US military,

his career was pretty dull until World War Two. Power was a gifted officer and hard working, and so once the military starts expanding massively to meet the demands of the war, officers like him are promoted rapidly. Power sees combat for the first time, flying B twenty four missions over Italy. He starts the war a major, and he ends it a brigadier general and Deputy Chief of Operations for all US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific. Now.

Power is not briefed immediately about the existence of nuclear weapons. LeMay is one of the first generals who learns about the Manhattan Project who learns that we have a nuke. Now he's not allowed to command the raid in person. He wants to. He tries to, but he's at this point too high ranking to be given that job, so

the nuke one. Yeah, I mean he's not allowed to command raids in person in general, right, Power, I think is his guy doing a lot of that, And Power is the guy, Yeah, Power is the guy who is commanding the raid on Tokyo in person. Yeah. So I do think it's kind of worth noting in terms of how these guys are both thinking. They're still patterning their options.

They've moved away from like the shit Eker was doing, but they're patterning their operations largely off of how bomber Harris had planned operations right in Tokyo as in Cologne. The military insisted its primary objective was the destruction of industrial buildings, but the Air Force planners working for LeMay in Power picked targets based not on industrial density, but

how well they thought given neighborhoods would burn. The B twenty nine crews were informed that the purpose of the attack was to destroy small factories, but LeMay in Power both knew that was not the real target. And these guys have their way with the Army Air Corps in

Japan for months, but final victory still proves elusive. We dropped more than sixteen hundred tons of explosives, on Tokyo on March tenth, and again, remember duhe had theorized three hundred was enough to wipe out any city on the earth, but the Empire refused to surrender. LeMay's entire philosophy of war was that victory could be achieved through the application of long range bombing, and the application of long range bombing alone. His only response when confronted with inconvenient facts

like this isn't working was to escalate. In the book Fifteen Minutes, L. Douglas Keeney describes the generals escalating Mania, LeMay bombed with an increasing sense of urgency. He bombed Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. He attacked when and where he was ordered to, but when he was finished, he pulled names out of almanacs or off maps and bombed some more. In his view, the only reason runways had been built on Tinian and the only reason that B twenty nine were fueled up

and loaded with bombs. The only reason he was in the Marianas was to bomb Japan. Five hundred bombers against one city, eight hundred against another nine hundred bombers. Today one thousand bombers tomorrow. The only point was to end the war, one factory, one city at a time. So intense were his operations that by the end of May, LeMay eventually exceeded the supply of bombs the United States Navy could deliver to him and was forced to take

a break. I feel that the destruction of Japan's ability to wage war lies within the capacity of this command, LeMay road of the bomber forces he commanded, I.

into Japan. Now, this is where you get a lot of debate, right, And his book, Keeney describes the plans for an invasion of Japan by the Allies as unnecessary, and I think he expresses what I'd call significant faith that Japan was on the brink of collapse. This is not a conclusion shared by everyone, but I think there's

a strong argument here. One of the issues that's already developing, as you can see though, is that a lot of guys, even at this point, had already forgotten what had made bombing Japan possible, Right that, Like, we're kind of narrowing it down to, like, okay, and we bombed, Like both sides of the nuke issue. One side is like, we didn't need de nuke Japan because we had already destroyed so much of them through bombing the island that they

were going to surrender anyway. And the other side is Japan never would have surrendered unless nuked, and so we had to nuke them to avoid an even costlier invasion. Right, That's the basic argument. And both of these, if you're thinking in the grand strategic sense, ignore the fact that we only got to the point where we could bomb the Home Islands the way we were after defeating Japan

in a series of more conventional engagements. Right, just in terms of the whole strategic bombing is all we need thing was never correct, right.

and so bombs save lives. Part of why that gets started is it's really convenient for guys like Curtis Leamy, Right, It really helps a lot with the bets that they've been making in their careers. If this is the only way to end the war. You know, that's not the only thing going on here, But they find it it's very helpful. It's not a non factor here. How helpful this is to a lot of people's beliefs about how war already works that have kind of been proven wrong.

Is that nukes kind of retroactively make them right.

is bombers. Now, Now, I don't really think it's productive to like try to make an argument about whose view of the use of nuclear weapons was correct, you know, because there's no there's not a perfect answer to that, and a lot of it comes down to what you believe about ethics. And like I would argue, even if it would cost the lives of a million soldiers, that's better than mass killing civilians for the human race, Like,

it's just bad. It opens us out, Like right now, we're all fifteen minutes away from the end of humanity, in part because decisions like this kept being made, and each one leads to a bigger decision that kills more people, and we probably shouldn't have started going down that road, right, That would be like my answer, But LeMay felt very differently. He himself laid out his theory of warfare pretty succinctly. And this is a direct quote from the man. I'll

tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough, they stop fighting. And this is like how the animating theory that the US brings into basically every war. You know, we dress it up differently. Very few of our general staff will say straight up, that's what I believe. But this is what we thought in Afghanistan and didn't work. This is what we thought in Vietnam. This is what like, well, you just got to kill enough of the bad guys. Eventually they run

out of bad guys. And that's just not how things work. Really.

how it works in the long run. Yeah, Or this insurgency that is being supported by the local populace, if we make life miserable enough for the populace, they'll stop supporting the insurgents. Gotta be a no dog. Unfortunately, history is repeatedly shown it doesn't work as the way you think it does, right, those.

ought to work. As soon as we use a nuke for the first time, there's this immediate, loud and growing chorus of voices within the Army Air Corps that like, maybe this is the only weapon we ever need in the future. And I want to read another quote from the book fifteen minutes. The fact that Japan, while still in possession of a formidable and intact land army, surrendered without having her homeland invaded by enemy landforces represents a

unique and significant event in military history. LeMay would later say. General James H. Jimmy Doolittle agreed the Navy had the transport to make the invasion of Japan possible, the ground forces had the power to make it successful. The B twenty nine made it unnecessary, said General hap Arnold. The influence of atomic energy on airpower can be stated very simply.

It has made airpower all important. Right, So this is immediately a lot of the most influential guys in the Air Corps are saying, this is kind of all it matters in war going forward right, Like, yeah, we finally figured it out. We were wrong last time, but like we weren't ready yet, but now we're ready to make bombers be the only thing that you need. Yeah, if you're wrong long enough, here become right right. Yes, that

is how things work sometimes. And it may seem that I am not going into detail about the Manhattan Project and the guys who like developed and built the first nuclear bomb, because you'd think, if we're talking about the global nuclear doomsday device, the guys who made the first nuke are somewhat culpable for that, right, and they are. I don't think their role is worth me covering here

for a couple of reasons. For one, there's been a pretty big budget movie recently about those guys, so I think there's a pretty high background level of understanding about like the Manhattan Project right now. And more to the point, I don't place most of the moral blame on a

potential global nuclear war on the Manhattan Project guys. I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of guys like Sillard, who we started the series talking about, right, these people who are watching the worst war ever happen, and all of tens of millions die and they're being told, Hey, if we build a bomb big enough, maybe we can

stop this war. Right, Given the knowledge a lot of these guys would have had at the time, and these guys are not all high level state actors with access to complete information about the strategic scenario, right, given the level of knowledge they would have had to understand, I think participation in the Manhattan Project is understandable, right, Yeah, yeah, at that stage. And to make that point, let's talk about a guy called named Lewis Slotkin. I'm gonna have

to go back and get his name right. I corrected myself. I spelled it wrong at the start. I had a K in there. I fucked up. I'm sorry, I'll correct it later. Lewis was Canadian by birth, but his parents were Yiddish speaking Jewish refugees from Russia's Mini Pagrams. So he grows up in Canada and he does well enough as an undergrad that he's accepted to a PhD program at King's College in London. He excels there as well. The nature of his work is beyond me, but he

won prizes for his continuous contributions to physics. Right, I don't understand what he was smart about, but it was physics, and he was good at it. Here In's a reputation, a rare one for an engineering nerd, as being an adrenaline junkie. In the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Robert Yunk says that Slotkin's colleagues at the time described in regularly going off quote in search of fighting, excitement,

and adventure. He had volunteered for service in the Spanish Civil War more for the sake of the thrill of it than on political grounds. Jeez, he's that kind of dude, right, He's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. He gets hired by the University of Chicago in nineteen forty two. He is invited to the Manhattan Project and he works directly with uranium and plutonium. Slotkin's particular expertise is in

assembling the cores of atomic devices. This is very dangerous, high stakes work, and he seems to thrive on the thrill of it. I found one account of him by Martin Zelig, quoting a colleague who worked closely with Slotkin. It was Friday afternoon and Lewis wanted to shut down the reactor to make adjustments to an experiment at the bottom of the tank of water, which was used to absorb radiation. We said that was impossible, and we planned

to shut down the reactor that weekend. When we came back on Monday morning, I found that Lewis had stripped down to his shorts, dived into the tank and made the adjustments underwater. I was appalled that anyone would take such risks. It shows what kind of a person he was. He was like a cowboy, but a good experimental scientist. So you've got like your cowboy nuclear engineer here, right.

like that's his job title. But the honors failed to make up for the downsides of his job, like the fact that in August of nineteen forty five, he watched his good friend Harry Dalling Daglin dagh La I n die horrific death. After there's this there's this thing you have to do sometimes where you're like switching out the

core of a bomb. And I think this is basically at the time, how you have it like armed or disarmed pretty much, but you've got this this thing known as the demon core, which is this like plutonium gallium alloy bomb core. And these are insanely dangerous. The process of like moving them is called tickling the dragon's tail for a reason because it's it's this insanely like if this thing falls or breaks in any way, you're dying

a horrific death. Like this is one of those rare things about nukes that's as dangerous as like the movie version would be. Like if anyone drops this thing, it's a fucking like hell is unleashed in the room and his so Slotkin's friend Harry dies this way, this nightmarish death from radiation exposure, just a few weeks after Hiroshima, and at this point in time, we don't know much about radiation sickness as it involves nuclear weapons, right, We've

had very little experience medically with this. Dalaane's agonizing death provides Los Alamos researchers with some of their first hard data on acute radiation poisoning. Slotkin was shaken by the incident, and as the months after the bombing flew by, he grew disillusioned with the US military as an institution. You know, the sheer carnage of the first atom bombs may have influenced this. He helps build these with his bear he's

not bear, but with his hands. And the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand people as a general estimate, right.

But after victory in Japan. It becomes harder and harder for slot Can to justify what he's doing because the US is now a nation at peace and they're continuing to build nuclear weapons, and he is forced to grapple with a new reality, which is that the US does not have an enemy, and we are building a massive nuclear stockpile, right, and military leaders, it's generals who have

direct troll over those weapons. You know, they theoretically have to follow the president's orders, but there's nothing stopping them physically from utilizing those nukes, right, yeah, Yeah, And he also is aware, being reasonably well read, because these guys are just talking about this, that a lot of these military leaders believe overwhelmingly that the use of nukes is to break the will of an enemy population through mass

destruction of the civilian populace. Right like that, we're using them. Yes, it's not hard to imagine why he may have felt compelled to change his career. He committed to that course of action in nineteen forty six, and we'll discuss what happened to him in a little bit.

He is their producer, for lack of a better word, Sophie, you know, one of the great producers in all of history, Leslie Groves.

build a nuke. And part of the lectures he has to convince these scientists, why if we get a nuke, other countries won't immediately start trying to develop nukes, leading to like a nuclear arms race. And he says, no, no, no, once we've got a nuke, everyone will be too scared to try to get a nuke. And he described his reasoning as fear of counter employment. Right, this is why. And this will evolve into they won't use a nuke if we've got enough nukes because they know that we'll

use them in return. Right, But it starts with no one will even try to get one, you know, because they'll be so scared of our nuke. You just move the logic when it proves ineffective. That's how logic works. So yeah, yeah, Promises like this have been key to weapons development since the creation of the machine gun and dynamite.

And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the logic shifted. We now had to assume our adversaries would develop a nuclear arsenal, so we'd have to expand ours until it was sufficient to destroy the enemy. Right before we have a nuke, We're like, no one will even try to get these after we have them, and then as soon as we set one off, So obviously everyone's gonna have one of these. You gotta get enough of them to stop them. General Omar Bradley summed up the general thinking among the brass

after World War Two. And this is Bradley talking in nineteen forty five. Our greatest strength lies in the threat of quick retaliation the event we are attacked, and the only retaliation Bradley believed would be atomic quote. The a

bomb is the most powerfully destructive device known today. As a believer in humanity, I deplore its use, and as a soldier I respect it, and as an American citizen, I believe we should be prepared to use its full psychological and military effect towards preventing war, and if we are attacked, towards winning it right and a pillar of Bradley's and this is how all these guys talk to this day in a lot of ways, which is like, look, the only job of a you know, a president should

not have any any actual role in how we operate as a military. His job is to decide when we're at war. The civilians decide when we go to war, and then we should be the ones who decide how to win it, right, Like, that's a very common school of thought among military people, especially in this period of time.

And you get part of the danger is that, like, well, then when war is on the table, the guy whose job is to advise the president on war has only been thinking of nuki everybody, right, like, and maybe that's bad.

will be nuked first. Right, He's only everything in terms of defense, and this is not where the logic is now, So this is important. Initially, the argument by guys like Bradley is that if we are nuked, hundreds of thousands of Americans or millions will be dead. Right, we might nearly all be dead, and so the only response we can prepare for is an overwhelming nuclear one that will wipe out the enemy in a similar level. Right, That's not where things are today. No one waits. No one's

policy among the two primary nuclear powers. Neither policy is wait until we have a bloody nose to calculate our strike back. Right. That is important, you understand, But it's important to understand. That's where a guy like Bradley is starting from, and what became our current nuclear strategy diverged from Bradley's purely defensive strategy when guys like General Leslie

Groves started pondering what the future had to bring. Groves described a theoretical nuclear war as unendurable and believe that the existence of nuclear weapons made that such a war unthinkable. But that wasn't just a statement of recognition, it was a strategic plan in order to protect itself. Groves thought the US had to make the concept of nuclear war unthinkable to its enemies. And this is going to end. This is going to start with, well, we need to

have some nukes of our own. Well, we need to have bombers that are spread out and always ready to take off, and those planes need to always have bombs in them so that it could cut down the amount of time it would take them to get into the air, so that we can guarantee we'll have a response. And if we can guarantee that we'll have response no matter how quickly the enemy bombs us first, then they'll never bomb us because they know that they're going to get

nuked back into the Stone Age in return. Right, But then where we go from here is well, actually, with ICBMs and shit, it's not enough to just have planes on the runway. You need to always have some planes in the air and some subs at sea that are nuclear armed and ready to strike, which means you always have planes with live nuclear bombs. Flanger right. You see how the logic starts in this with Bradley. There's a reason, there's some rationality, and if an enemy kills millions of us,

we need to be ready to strike back. And the only possible strike back is going to be cataclysmic because we've been nuked, right, And it goes to we always have to have planes in the air and submarines in the ground with live nuclear missiles one hundred percent of the time. That esk and you get there very quickly. That escalation chain hits that point as soon as the technology becomes available, right an extent, it drives the technology.

In nineteen forty five, military leaders in the US started putting forward variations of a battle plan that called for simultaneous nuclear attacks on multiple cities. Dale Osmith, and Air Force colonel, wrote an article for Air Force Quarterly Review where he described this sort of strike simultaneously hitting a bunch of enemy cities as a bullet of the heart. Smith wrote, the most effective air siege will result by concurrently attacking every critical element of an enemy's economy at

the same time. If all critical systems could be destroyed at one blow, so that recuperation were impossible with any foreseeable time, there seems to be little question that a nation would die, just as surely as a man will die if a bullet pierces his heart and his circulating

system has stopped. Another military planner wrote that his primary concern was quote the bomb's potential to break the will of nations and peoples by the stimulation of man's primordial fears, those of the unknown, the invisible, the mysterious.

highly debatable, but it hasn't really turned out. So No, we just have to kill all of their civilians, right, and we have to be always ready to kill all of their civilians, otherwise someone might kill all of our civilians. We get there very quickly, and in terms of how quickly we get there after the bombing of Hiroshima, but before Nagasaki, world War II is not over yet. General Groves receives a list from US Army Air Forces of

potential targets for subsequent nuclear strikes. In the book fifteen minutes, Kini writes, quote highlighted were forty key or leading cities, each assigned a priority for destruction. A map accompanied the chart, and on it were drawn lines that showed the likely penetration routes for the A bomb carriers. The forty cities were in the Soviet Union. We're still allied with them, and we're putting forward plans for the strategic annihilation of

Soviet cities in nineteen forty five before we bombed Nagasaki. Oh, they're talking about the possibility, right. If you want to wonder how much of this was to scare the Soviets. Also, oh, that's on the table in nineteen forty five, we're still fighting with them, like ally.

is just a situation. He saw what a bombing on that scale would do, right, And he decides he had been wrong really like maybe not wrong about trying to get a nuke before the Nazis got it, but that it shouldn't be used under any circumstances. And he starts protesting the slaughter of Japanese civilians by US air power. In June of nineteen forty five, Leo leads a group of scientists from the University of Chicago to send a

report to the Manhattan Project leadership. In it, he requests that they demonstrate their nuclear de weapon for the first time in an uninhabited area, right so, before we bomb Heroshima. He has a letter of reports sent to the Manhattan Project being like, please don't set this off for the first time in a city full of people, Like set it off in the middle of nowhere, to scare Japan

at a surrendering right now, we don't do this. There's a few reasons for We're not sure the bomb's gonna work, and it would be really bad if we promised Japan the biggest bomb ever and then nothing happens, Right, So there's a worry of that now. Sillard his justification for why we need to not murder a city with a nuke is that it'll harm the US's reputation going forward, and it'll set off a deadly chain reaction. Right if the first use of a nuclear weapon is in war,

destroying a civilian city. Sillard believes quote. This new means of indiscriminate destruction will spark an arms race, and soon every powerful country will want a nuclear arsenal of their own, and the entire survival of humanity will be imperiled. Like if we start by nuking a city, we have no we have no sort of moral standing to be like, don't none of.

So Lewis sluttin finds himself increasingly horrified. In March of nineteen forty six, he writes to a friend, I have become involved in the Navy tests, much to my disgust. The reason for this is that I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb put her togetherers. He's already disgusted it being with the Navy.

He doesn't like what he's doing. In an article for The Beaver, a Canadian publication of record, Zelig writes, despite his seeming zeal, there are hints that Slutin might not have been enamored with Adam Baum's per se. And in nineteen eighty two, Winnipeg Free Press story journalist Val Wearer writes that Slotin's father was astonished to hear after Hiroshima that his son had been working on the atomic bomb. The response was, we had to get it before the Germans.

Winnipeg lawyer Israel Ludwig Slowden's nephew recalls his mother saying that Uncle Lou was troubled by what he was doing

in Los Alamos. In November of nineteen eighty nine, Philip Morrison, in a terse note to me scribbled at the bottom of my letter of inquiry to him, wrote that he and Slowtin talked a good deal about war in peace, so he is starting to He's become pretty quickly after the war decided that like this is not a good path to be going down, and he puts his notice in at Los Alamos in nineteen forty six, upset at

the future that he sees looming for his troubled part child. Tragically, just days before he would have quit, Slotin performs a demonstration of the same basic tickling the dragon's tail technique that had so recently killed his friend. He's teaching a new guy how to do it. History repeated itself. Slowdin drops the core and he throws himself in front of the new guy to take the brunt of the radiation, and he like, within hours he's vomiting and like his

body is starting to turn into soup. They keep him alive for nine days in the hospital, but there's never any hope. They would it would have been kinder to shoot him in the head.

kills people. That's his like immediate action is to like sketch out where everyone was when the device went off.

once separated one of Slowtin's organs from the next. Without this lining, his organs had merged into one.

people you know are excited about. Yeah, Like it's like, if you take any lethal weapons self defense class They're like, the best way to win a gunfight is don't get into a gunfight.

a lot of it is from the anti nuke movement. Yeah, and it's confusing to look at from the modern perspective, but if you put yourselves in the shoes of like the kids who grew up in this m you're like, yeah, no, that actually just makes a lot of sense.

not fully rational. There are some rational fears regarding nuclear power, but a lot of it is just people that are scared of nukes for other reasons. Right, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, Margaret, like the we probably shouldn't always have a doomsday device. I will say where I differ from a lot of people right now, and this has become increasingly the case the more I've studied it. I'm not really more worried about Trump being the president than

anybody else in regards to that. Okay, I think maybe, I guess maybe there's an argument maybe he'd be dumb enough to try and use make a limited nuclear strike, right or maybe his policies in terms of like the military or degrading readiness to a degree that might make it likelier for one of these missiles to wind up in the wind or something. Certainly, the fact that we are now like both the US and Russia are talking

about resuming nuclear tests is bad. But in terms of how how would Trump behave if he was put in that you got six minutes to destroy whether or not to kill everyone on Earth scenario. I'm not sure anyone's

more competent than anyone else in that scenario. Yeah, fair right, Like it's fundamentally and this is something Jacobsen points out in her book is that when you talk to because a lot of guys whose job was in the nuclear weapons thing for the Department of Defense or for the like the Strategic Air Command, like a lot of those guys have versions of the same thing, which is that like the president, didn't the president at my time, They've

said this about multiple presidents. The presidents that I dealt with never seemed very interested in it. They didn't ask questions, they didn't want to know much. They didn't like thinking about it.

I don't believe in skynet. I think it's silly to believe that, like, oh, this AI will automatically seek to destroy humanity. I think it's very reasonable to be like, well, if we connect AI to any of this at all, it's just going to amplify the chances that somebody fucks up in a way that ends with the nukes aal going off. Right, Yeah, you've just you're making you're making it more complicated, and that increases the odds that we kill everybody every time.

a couple of stories like that. One of the things Jacobson talks about is that like once North Korea started using ICBMs and it became clear that because you can't really stop an ICBM, we have these we have like forty something of these intercept missiles that are supposed to be able to shoot down an ICBM, but they don't. They have like a fifty percent success rate in like tests. But that's even overstating it because the way they work.

They're not even a bombs, they're dumb. They're bullets. They have to hit the missile directly while it's in flight. And if they don't, you missed by an inch, You missed by a mile, right, like, Yeah, and we have very few of them, so the odds of us and we would have very little time to actually deploy any or have them ready.

here on our book club weekend show. That's fun. That'll distract you briefly at the looming apocalypse that awaits us. All yea, and for other distractions from the apocalypse, keep listening to podcasts. Don't think about how bad things are. Don't think about the fact that literally nothing can save you if the nukes all fall. There's no defense, there's no prepping for it. There's just death on a scale almost uncomprehensible. Don't think about that, think about podcasts.