Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All
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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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Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? Who catfishes a city? Is it even safe to snort human remains? Is that the plot of Footloose? I'm comedian Rory Scovel, and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
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Who would you call if the unthinkable happened? My sister was shot 22 times. A police officer, right? But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue? This dude is the devil. He'll hurt you. This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down. I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
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Let's get back to talking about this insane Minuteman system. Because we've talked about some of the shit that's crazy about this, but we still have not gotten to the craziest thing about this, right? Oh, good. So when we left off, John Rubel has been having, in 1959 and start of 60s, having conversations with all these Air Force guys about the Minuteman system. And he's come up with some serious concerns about, well... How do we decide when these things are fired? When you choose to shoot one, how do the other nine get launched? Is it really just four guys who have to turn their keys in order to launch 50 missiles? At 50 random cities? At 50 random cities. Are there ways they could accidentally get launched due to, you know, an electrical error, right?
These are all concerns. And the Air Force is like, what the fuck are you asking questions for? You fucking nerd. Get the hell out of here.
Let us build our death machine.
Yeah. You a commie? So here's Rubell. Because if you are, you got to tell me. Yeah, you got to tell me if you're a communist. Here's Rubell discussing his concerns. I was curious about the procedures for launching.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–12:01
2
How did the Minuteman missile system raise concerns about launch authority?
12:01–31:17
3
What ethical dilemmas arise from the potential use of nuclear weapons?
31:17–1:00:09
4
How does the military's approach to nuclear war planning affect civilian control?
1:00:09–1:18:30