Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And we're back. It's Behind the Bastards. This is our special episodes on the guys who built the nuclear doomsday machine that could kill us all at any moment. Episode five. The end is finally in sight. That could be literal. Margaret Kiljoy, welcome back to the program. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I've gone full circle.
I've accepted that this is reality and I am just very happy to get to live in these times. It's great that you got to that point because actually the next 10 pages are all Warhammer. I just stopped writing about nukes at a certain point, but you can just assume that that's real.
Yeah, because that's what your brain does when presented with this much disaster is you're like, man, I really like fantasy books.
Yeah, I'm just going to relax to the comfort of a game where every single person is worse than Hitler. Like where Hitler would be a moderate bleeding heart.
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Chapter 2: How did the Minuteman missile system raise concerns about launch authority?
Oh, my God. So I start. You can hack one position and get all four. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't even have to be that because I explain this to a friend of mine who has never read a book about nukes, but who has done amateur unlicensed electrician work.
And she immediately asked, hey, wait, does that mean that like if the power goes out and then comes back on, it might send a pulse and advance one notch closer to firing the missiles?
Yeah.
You wouldn't think so, right? Clearly, anyone putting the effort of putting missiles in hardened bunkers meant to withstand an atom bomb would have made sure that something as simple as a power outage in rural North Dakota in the 60s wouldn't trigger an atomic holocaust. Only no, they did not. They never considered it for a second.
This thing could have started launching 50 missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages. Yeah. Because once Rubell starts saying this to other engineers, they bring this up and they start looking into how the system's designed and realize that's totally possible.
Like, it absolutely could have happened if they had built the system the way it was originally designed and no one in the Air Force even thought to look into that. Like, that's how reckless these pieces of shit are. Now...
The reason why the Air Force doesn't care about this sort of thing is that they are more concerned that just two guys can launch a whole squadron of ICBMs if everyone else in the country is killed first. So they built an automated clock system.
The other thing they added to this is they have this automatic clock system that counts down from between six hours ā you can set it to like one hour or six hours. You can set it to a variety of times. But depending on how you set it, if one command center votes to launch the missiles ā
After whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining 40 missiles in a squadron. Right? Yeah. Now, when this is explained to Rubellā I'm impressed this is worse than I expected.
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Chapter 3: What ethical dilemmas arise from the potential use of nuclear weapons?
And I'm going to continue with Rubell's reminiscence. A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying, may I ask a question? General Power turned again in his front row seat, stared into the darkness and said, yeah, what is it? In a tone not likely to encourage the timid. What if this isn't China's war? The voice asked. What if this is just a war with the Soviets?
Can you change the plan? Well, yeah, General Power said resignedly. We can, but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan. Hey, what if we don't need to kill 300 million people in China? Can we like nix that part? Well, I hope not. That really fucks up my plan. If we're not killing 300 million people in China, that really fucks things up for me.
We already had the banner printed, you know? Yeah. We've got the banner printed and everything. We got a mission accomplished board here. Come on. Yeah. You don't want to kill 300 million people in China? What's wrong with you? Yeah. What was that? Bonus effects? Yeah. Yeah. Bonus effects.
Now, it says something about Rubell that it was not until this moment that he found himself thinking about the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, in which a group of top Nazis planned the Holocaust. For some reason, this is one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War to me.
A man who truly cared about protecting his country and stopping a dangerous system from going live finds himself stuck in a room where something many times worse than the Holocaust is being casually planned. And he realizes, oh, fuck. Oh, shit. I'm like some junior SS guy sitting in the back of the Vance conference too scared to speak up and ruin my career. Fuck. Fuck. I'm a not fuck.
Like, that's literally how he describes his recollection. It's like, this is the fuck. This is so much worse than the fuck. They're talking about killing 600 million people. Like, who we might not even be at a war with. He doesn't say shit. He does not. He is not that kind of brave, right? He is a work within the bureaucracy. That's like a telling human condition thing. Oh, yeah.
Right?
Because we all imagine ourselves saying something. Right. You want to hope you would. And I get the feeling from his writing that Rubell never quite forgave himself for not, right? Good. He shouldn't have. Yeah, he shouldn't have. This should haunt you to the end of your days. But he's still the most deeply human person in that room.
I'll say the second most, because we're about to talk about someone who does speak up. There is one guy who actually has some courage here. So the day after this first meeting at the SAC headquarters, Rubell takes part in a smaller meeting about the meeting they just had, right? Even the military, you can't escape meetings about meetings, you know? That's just bureaucracy, baby.
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Chapter 4: How does the military's approach to nuclear war planning affect civilian control?
like second strike system because of the fact that, well, maybe they are able to, if they blow up the president, no one can launch the nukes back. Right. So no one's watched the movie war games is what I'm hearing. No one, no one has ever watched the movie war.
Actually, actually war games, literally one of the generals, they quote references war games in order to say that we don't have a machine that does that right now. Like this is, they were arguing that we need to do it. Yeah. Oh my God.
And this is one of the things that I have worried about, because I don't really think it's an immediate worry that they're going to give AI the ability to launch nukes or do that. That's not my immediate worry, but they're already integrating different machine learning tools into the radar systems and our early warning systems. That's what I was worried about.
That's the worry is that people are being advised by machines that will have ā By lying machines. That like the Minuteman will have unanticipated flaws that the arrogant pieces of shit who designed these weapons refuse to consider because they cannot accept the fact that maybe they didn't think of everything and they will fuck up and miss stuff and it could cause the end of the world, right?
That's what scares me more than like a death computer, right? Yeah. Which any hacker or wannabe hacker would immediately be like, oh, you can't build systems that don't have flaws. That doesn't happen. No, no. That's why up until very recently, this was all being done on like the big 1980s floppy disks and everything's fucking air gapped.
It's like you want this shit simple and reliable as possible. Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, well, now it's all Bluetooth. So now, yeah, exactly. Well, that's the most reliable thing in electronics is Bluetooth. Everyone who has a headset knows that. So it's important everyone know that our launch policy from 1964 to today remains launch on warn. Now, the USSR, to be fair to them, officially rejected a launch on Warren policy.
There are grave doubts as to whether or not that was the real policy or propaganda, right? A lot of people say they were definitely launch on Warren too. I think that's probably right. I think both the US and Russia more or less would have fired if they felt like they had a credible warning that the other was firing, right? I don't think either of us would have waited.
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