Brian Klaas
speaker
544 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Feb
Brian Klaas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It involved twice meeting with President Truman, the American president at the time overseeing this choice, and convincing him to take Kyoto off the bombing list. So it's an extraordinary intervention by a government official who is basically going out on a limb to overrule the decision of the committee that has deeply thought about the strategic value of various bombing targets.
Yeah, so the first target is taken off the list, Kyoto. So they go to the secondary target on August 6th, 1945, the other one that was very highly rated, and that was Hiroshima, which as we all know, was destroyed by the first atomic bomb. The second target that was of significance that was deemed to be one of the top value targets was a place called Kokura.
And that was where the second atomic bomb on August 9th, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima bombing, was supposed to go. So the second B-29 boxcar is approaching Kokura, ready to drop its payload. And the city is obscured by unforecasted fog and clouds and haze. So basically, they can't see the bomb site.
And as a result of this, they think to themselves, well, we can't risk dropping an atomic bomb and missing. Right. So they circle a few times and eventually they decide to divert to the secondary target as they're running low on fuel. And that is Nagasaki. And so around 1045 in the morning, they dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. And of course, nobody in Kokura was aware of this.
And so there's a term in modern Japanese culture called Kokura's luck, which is basically when you unknowingly escape disaster. Because for potentially 100,000, maybe even more people living in that city, they were spared by a passing cloud. And for the people of Kyoto, they were spared by a 19-year-old vacation of one pivotal government official who was at the right place at the right time.
This is the nature of luck is that it's in the eye of the beholder because one person's luck is somebody else's misfortune. Certainly it's the case that with Nagasaki, you know, if there had been a decision to drop the bomb on Kyoto, then the secondary target probably would have been Hiroshima. And so there's this sort of cascade of effects, this vacation, which is intersecting with this cloud.
All these things had to come together, not to mention the timing of when they discovered the atomic bomb, the discovery of uranium, all of them connected to create that moment of intense misfortune for the people who were unfortunately killed in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yeah, and this is something that, you know, when you get to these highly consequential events of warfare, of mass destruction, weapons being used and so on, there is obviously a moral component. And yet I think there's also an aspect of this that shows the amoral components of some of these interconnecting factors.
And that's because there's nothing immoral about going on vacation, but it produces this outcome that leads to an immoral action. The way I sometimes think about this is you could go outside tomorrow and plant a tree and 100 years from now, a kid could fall out of it and die. It doesn't make your action immoral, right?
It just underlines the fact that the interconnectivity of the world means that unexpected and sometimes deeply problematic things arise from the smallest of human choices.
Yeah, so it's the summer of 1905 in a little place in Wisconsin, a little farmhouse. And there's a woman named Clara Modlin Jansen who lives on the farm with her four young children and her husband. And the oldest child at this point is four years old. And if you do the math with four young children and a four-year-old, I mean, she's been having kids basically nonstop.
And at some point, the stress, perhaps the burden of being a mother for these four young children overwhelms her and she snaps. And she has a mental health breakdown and takes this horrible decision to take the lives of her four young children before taking her own life. And so the husband comes home, Clara's husband comes home and discovers that most horrific thing that any human can experience.
The single moment where his entire family has been wiped out in this intense act of murderous tragedy. And all of them are dead. And so, you know, we can only imagine what that was like. The reason I tell that story is because the man who came home to that farmhouse was my great-grandfather.
And what is really striking about it from my perspective is that because my great-grandfather remarried about a decade later to the woman that became my great-grandmother, I literally would not exist if those kids did not die. It's my sort of version of Kokura's luck in a bizarre way that every joy of my life, every moment of my life indeed, is predicated on this horrible event.
It gives you a lesson, I think, that the worst moments of your life are inextricably linked to the best moments of your life, and that the good and bads of our life end up creating future joy and future pain, and we can't do anything about that.
Yeah, I was studying the origin stories of a coup d'etat, a military takeover of the government. And the official version of events was that basically a drunken idiot had tried to take power from the Zambian military in 1997. So I went to figure out what had really happened. And what turned out to be the case was that the plot was a lot more sophisticated than I originally had realized.
So what they were planning to do was to kidnap the army commander, the top military general in Zambia. and force him at gunpoint to announce the coup on the radio.
That's exactly right. So that was the plan. And so I talked to some of the soldiers involved in the coup and I asked them what they did and they went out to the army commander's house in the middle of the night, something like three in the morning. And he sort of hears these noises and runs out, presumably in his pajamas, out the back of the compound and starts climbing up the wall.
And one of the soldiers I interviewed describes how he grabs the sort of pant leg or trouser leg of the army commander and the commander is pulling up on the wall trying to climb over and he's pulling down. And in this instant, the sort of fabric slips through his fingers.
And as a result, the commander clambers over the wall, rushes to the government house where the sort of government headquarters are and alerts them to this coup plot underway. So he slipped through their fingers by chance and the coup plot fails catastrophically. They find the ringleader hiding in a trash can three hours later. I mean, it's just like clownishly disastrous ending to the story.
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