Chapter 1: What is the harrowing story behind the men who decided to unleash nuclear weapons?
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the special episodes on how we're all possibly going to die in nuclear hellfire. I'm Robert Evans. This is a series we'll be doing over the course of two weeks, five episodes.
We're in our second week, so you'll be getting a bonus episode this week about the sons of bitches who created the doomsday device that, again, could kill every single person you've ever known and loved and every animal on Earth except for, you know, Cockroaches and the like.
15 minutes from now or right now, you know, we'd have no way of knowing unless you're, I don't know, in the White House at this exact moment. Margaret Kiljoy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? You thinking about nukes? Well, I got promised this was about Warhammer 40K, but I suppose we're learning about the nuclear apocalypse. I'll bring you on when we do our Warhammer show. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of genocide in that, too. I could be the podcast editor for that, because I actually don't know anything about Warhammer. It does involve a lot of nukes and radiation poisoning, which is what we ended our last episode talking about. Our friend Louis Slotin, who was the partial father of the first atomic bomb, had his innards dissolved due to a horrible nuclear error.
Oh, yeah, and he got to, like, kind of, like... leave a record for science because he was a pretty cool guy like that that's badass like when you know that like okay well i have just taken an immediately fatal dose of radiation i'm going to die the most nightmarish death imaginable time to take notes like fucking that's cool that's cool like
Also, acting with agency is a really good way to not stress. Right, yes. I have a job. I'm just doing my job. I'd say it takes him off the perpetrator. He did help build that first nuke, but as we've discussed, there's some mitigating factors. I think dying to it afterwards, you know. Yeah, his comeuppance happened.
I'm taking him off the list of guys I'm pissed at.
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Chapter 2: How did the use of atomic weapons impact Japan's surrender during WWII?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, shit. So it was a way to stay capitalist was to be like, oh, it was the nukes. The nukes did us in. More than that, it was a way to avoid what happened to Germany, right? They're watching Germany get split up, right? That's obvious at this point, and they don't want that, you know?
And surrendering now before the Soviets are in the mix, so to speak, means that the country doesn't get split up, right? You're not going to 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 out 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? Yeah. 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 ā how many people would die in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, American casualties alone would have been in the neighborhood of 500,000 to a million.
And if you're talking about the kind of casualty ratios that we saw on these other island hopping campaigns, 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 500 to a million American casualties estimate, have any basis in reality. How many did we lose in Europe? We lost ā the whole war, the United States lost about half a million people. OK. So this would be basically doing World War II all over again for us more or less, right?
Yeah.
It's not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And I want to quote from an article by Alfie Kohn 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 20,000 and 46,000.
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Chapter 3: What arguments exist regarding the necessity of dropping atomic bombs?
Right. But nuke. Yeah, if anyone gets into the military whose name rhymes with either of these guys' names, we need to redact it immediately. So as Richard ā I'm going to quote now from a piece in The New Yorker by Richard Rhodes in which he lays out LeMay's thinking in the rest of this speech. And it all kind of follows from the basic idea that you can't stop an aerial nuclear attack. Quote ā
This meant to LeMay that the United States would have to have an air force in being that could move immediately to retaliate if the country was attacked. The preparation for retaliation, the threat 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 1945, LeMay 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, right? You're like, oh, my wife left me. Yeah, exactly. Like it's fucking remarkable. We lived through the Cold War.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah. What we see in this period as early as 1945 is men in the military establishment expressing a sense of interest in minimizing the harms of and knowledge about nuclear war to civilians. People were tired after World War Two. Soldiers long deployed wanted to return to civilian life. I'm going to quote from Rhodes again.
In the four years that the United States held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, it reduced its military forces to bare bones, shrank the defense budget from its wartime high of nearly $90 billion to less than $15 billion, and counted on a small but growing nuclear arsenal to deter a 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.
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Chapter 4: How did military leaders justify the use of nuclear weapons post-WWII?
It is not a fun job. It is boring ā 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 are tasked with a singular purpose, right? 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 1948. He's not the first guy in charge of it, but he takes command and he really forms it in a meaningful way. The next year, 1949, the USSR detonates its first nuclear warhead. Terrifying members of the U.S. defense establishment. There had been a lot of guys. Anyone who was smart knew, well, of course, the Soviet Union's got a good science program.
They have resources. They've got spies. They're going to get a bomb, right? Right. They have the ability to get uranium or plutonium, all this, whatever shit they need. It's there's like a fifth of the world's landmass. They have the ability to do this. Yeah. Like we invented the wheel. No one else has the wheel. No one's going to figure out the wheel. They figured out machine guns, too.
God damn it. No, of course they were going to do this. But there were ā and it's a mix. There were plenty of people obviously. There were a number of people in our military who knew that this was going to happen at some point. But there are a lot of people who are shocked, right, and are terrified and like, oh my god, I can't believe the communists figured out this bomb, right?
Now, is this because of that like spy couple or is that ā There are several spies who play a role. And honestly, I think that that probably did more to stop nuclear weapons from being used again in war than anything else. I think once the U.S. has them, if the Soviets didn't ever acquire them, we probably would have wound up nuking the USSR at some point. Right.
Yeah, that seems very like that's unprovable. But that that's kind of where I come in. Right. Like, yeah, well, it's kind of a gun war. 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 going to have one when the crazy ass motherfuckers I know have them like now? Yeah.
The people who want to kill me have it. I've read enough history to know what happens after you disarm. And here's the problem. There's a logic to that, and also that leads us both to having 400 million guns and having tens of thousands of nukes, right? So it's like I understand the thought process, but it might fundamentally be what will doom us, right? Uh-huh.
So there's a degree to which, like, I have to put myself in where these guys are. And keep in mind, this is not a period of time in which all of our generals or most or many of them are dudes who just came up and have done this as like a desk job, right? All of these, Curtis LeMay saw heavy aerial combat. All of these guys did, right? So these dudes are fucked up and crazy.
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Chapter 5: What role did Curtis LeMay play in shaping nuclear strategy?
Right, but accurate, yes, accurate. Like you really can be pretty far off with a nuke and still hit your target. But these guys do so badly that even with nukes, they would not have destroyed most of their intended targets. This is not an effective raid.
And LeMay calls this fake attempt to destroy Dayton, quote, the darkest night in American military aviation history because not one airplane finished that mission is briefed. And like, man, you were part of raids where guys died. I think that's darker, right? 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. Y'all incinerated babies. Like, yeah, that might be darker. Hiroshima all might be darker, arguably. Yeah. Now, this means that when the Korean War kind of starts up, it's going to be not quite the last point.
Some people will argue that, like, you know, there's some shit in JFK's early administration, like Berlin. There's some shit 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? Yeah. But the Korean War is the last major armed conflict where the U.S.
could have used nuclear weapons on a tactical level and known the risks were minimal, that things would have like spiraled into global annihilation, at least at that point. Right. And given that fact, given that we could have nuked North Korea and even China and the 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. Yeah.
That it didn't happen. Right. Yeah. 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 gotta use them or lose them, right? If we don't use them now, we'll never be able to use them, right?
Right, and if you're playing the world like a video game, this is true, right? If I'm a video game general, I would nuke. I would start nuking immediately, which I do in any video game that gives me a nuke, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, which is why gamers should not be allowed in the Department of Defense. No. Oops, all gamers, it turns out. Under strict control by non-gamers. Right.
So at the start of hostilities in Korea, strategic bombing advocates encouraged a campaign against a handful of significant strategic targets in North Korea. And they succeeded in these bombing raids on paper, right? The SAC destroys the targets assigned to them. But North Korea, if you know much about North Korea then and now...
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Chapter 6: How did the Korean War escalate the nuclear arms race?
Yep. Did we move away from skeet shooting? We definitely have moved away from nuclear anti-aircraft artillery. We have the ability to use that, but also we've gotten a lot better. And so have our quote unquote adversaries at making planes that are hardened, you know, from EMP and the like. I don't think it's as much. There's just not. much point in defenses.
The other reason is that like, sure, you could stop some bombers, but it's the ICBMs that are going to kill everybody and the sub-launched nukes. And you can kind of, again, we have these things called like THAAD batteries that could be, if we actually had any placed 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 Israel and the like, right? We don't have any, one of the scenarios Jacobson talks about is a North Korean sub nuking this huge nuclear power plant on the coast of California, which would cause this titanic environmental catastrophe.
And she points out, there are plans for having THAAD batteries that could protect this thing, but we're using them all overseas, so we don't have any set up. And that's one of those things where I'm like, well, I guess if we're going to be spending money on something, I would like to spend money on more of those and not the bullet that shoots another bullet in the air or more nukes. I don't know.
Yeah, totally. But none of this really is going to be enough if there's a full scale nuclear engagement. You know, your best hope is that maybe it's just one or two nukes that get fires and maybe we're able to stop them, you know? Yeah. Anyway, that's part three, Margaret. Yay. Got any pluggables to plug? Well, if you like history, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is the opposite of the show.
Although I still have to end up talking about terrible things all the time.
And you can go listen to that at Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
And you can also listen to Robert and I playing Pathfinder. That's right. On the It Could Happen Here feed or the Cool Zone Media Book Club feed. That's right. You can check all that out. And you can check... Me out. And I could day when we do the next episode because you're getting a bonus one this week. You lucky ducks.
Anyway, assuming that, you know, we don't all die in nuclear fire, which is entirely possible. It could happen right now. Oh, no, we're good. All right. Oh, OK.
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