Part Five: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Summary

Behind the Bastards: "The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All" (Part Five) – Episode Summary
Podcast by Cool Zone Media/iHeartPodcasts | Host: Bobby Finger | Guest: Margaret Killjoy | December 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the terrifying, often absurd history of the U.S. nuclear command-and-control system during the Cold War—especially the creation and near-miss disasters of the Minuteman missile system and Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Host Bobby Finger and guest Margaret Killjoy unpack how technical failures, bureaucratic inertia, and deeply flawed military thinking put civilization at risk, highlighting the ordinary, disturbingly fallible people behind doomsday machines that could have annihilated humanity.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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The Minuteman Missile Launch System: Built for Apocalypse

• John Rubel’s Warnings (03:27–08:12)
  Bobby recounts John Rubel, a defense official in 1959-60, whose questions about how the Minuteman ICBMs might be (accidentally) launched went largely ignored by gung-ho Air Force brass.

  • The system enabled four men in a bunker to launch 50 nuclear missiles—no way to interrupt after launch.
  • Launch modes: "salvo" (all at once) vs. "ripple" (one after another)—neither provided meaningful human oversight.
  • Notable Quote:
    "These are like science guys who are, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust... and they're like, what, four guys launch 50 missiles with no one getting in the way, really?" (Bobby, 05:20)

• Unintended Consequences and Design Flaws (12:07–14:02)

  • The pulse-based trigger design meant a simple power outage could potentially launch all 50 missiles by accident.
  • Retrofits cost hundreds of millions, only undertaken after intense bureaucratic knocking from Rubel and his allies.

• Air Force Attitude Toward Civilian Control

  • High-ranking generals (e.g., Curtis LeMay) openly believed only military "professionals" should control nuclear arms, marginalizing the President’s authority:
    • Notable Quote:
      "All we need [the President] for is to tell us that there is a war. We are professional soldiers. We'll take care of the rest." (LeMay, as recalled by Rubel, 10:00)

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Automated Apocalypse: Near-Misses and Systemic Recklessness

• Failures in Redundancy/Automation Logic (19:22–21:23)
  • Proposed tying early warning radars directly to the nuclear launch button—later mirrored by similar Soviet "Dead Hand" system.
  • Rubel’s fight prevents the U.S. from fully automating doomsday, but only by the narrowest margin.
  • Memorable Moment:
    Cutter, an Air Force general, insists:
    "If we don't have an automatic doomsday device, we might as well surrender now." (20:17)

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The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP): Planning Global Genocide

• SIOP: One Switch, Half a Billion Dead (25:31–32:00)
  • SIOP 62—crafted deliberately to deny civilian leaders the option for anything but "all or nothing" nuclear war.
  • PowerPoint-style presentations showed deaths of 500–600 million, with nonchalance toward collateral casualties.
    • Memorable Quote:
      "Hope you don't got family [in Albania], ‘cause again, we nuke them right away because of a radar station." (Bobby, 28:41)
  • Hostility to limiting civilian deaths; planning for casualties in China regardless of their war involvement.
    • Margaret:
      "Hope none of you have any relatives in Albania..." (paraphrasing Power)

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A Glimpse of Conscience: General David M. Shoup

• The Lone Dissent (38:08–38:44)
  • Only General Shoup, Medal of Honor recipient and USMC Commandant, voices moral opposition:
    • Notable Quote:
      "Any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way." (Shoup, 38:06)

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Modern Civilian Command and the Limits of Safety

• Shifting Control Toward Presidents—A Mixed Blessing (43:28–47:15)

  • Kennedy, appalled by "brass hats" itching for apocalypse, brings nukes under tighter presidential control—resulting in the "nuclear football" system.
  • But the system still leaves catastrophic power in the hands of a lone, possibly uninformed individual.

• Presidential Burden & the `Suicide or Surrender’ Dilemma (40:21–42:38)

  • Quoting Henry Kissinger:
    "These plans offered the President just one choice, suicide or surrender, holocaust or humiliation." (Bobby, 40:20)
  • Even today, no robust technical auditing of launch systems exists.

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Cultural & Systemic Critique

• Bureaucratic Madness and Cold War Groupthink (53:57–56:02)
  • The SIOP’s authors, fixated on theoretical "winning," equate effectiveness with body counts, routinely mistaking horror for strategy.
  • Nukes become the only weapon that matches their worldview—when denied, they're lost.
    • Margaret:
      "They only have the one strategy and it only works if you use nukes." (paraphrased, 56:02)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (by Timestamp)

• On Casual Morality:
  “They talk about the President exercising command and control. What is the president? ... A politician. What does the politician know about war? Who needs a president if there’s a war? Nobody.”
  — Curtis LeMay, recounted by Rubel (10:00)

• On Flawed Design:
  "This thing could have started launching 50 missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages."
  — Bobby Finger (12:54)

• On Automated Madness:
  "If we're not just going to have an automatic doomsday device that goes off if a radar has an hallucination... let’s just surrender now."
  — Gen. Cutter (20:17)

• On Ethical Paralysis:
  "For some reason, this is one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War to me... [he realizes] 'I'm like some junior SS guy sitting in the back of the Wannsee Conference, too scared to speak up and ruin my career. Fuck. I'm a Nazi fuck.'"
  — Bobby paraphrasing Rubel (32:04)

• On the One True Hero:
  "Any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That’s not the American way."
  — Gen. David M. Shoup (38:08)

• On the Nuclear Football's False Comfort:
  “I don’t think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other president… no one will do a good job if they are put in that situation.”
  — Bobby (63:34)

• On Presidential Burden:
  "He will then be told that he has between three and six minutes to decide to launch a world killing salvo..."
  — Bobby (65:53)

• On the Human Condition:
  “A melancholy procession from stones to atoms, a predestined progress toward the end times, the inevitable rise of malign leaders over compliant masses.”
  — Rubel (quoted by Bobby, 68:13)

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Reflections on Solutions, Futility & the Human Factor

• Current System
  Still based on "launch on warning" with only minutes for the President to decide, no real fail-safes, and new AI/automation risks emerging.

  • "That's what scares me more than like a death computer... they're already integrating different machine learning tools into the radar systems..." (Bobby, 60:08)

• On Making Nukes a Voting Issue
  The hosts urge listeners to see nuclear command and control reform as urgent as climate change:
  "Maybe this should be like a voting issue that people talk about... this is potentially a much more thorough destruction of the biosphere than climate change will bring, even quicker." (Bobby, 69:31)

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Notable Moments of Dark Humor

• "It's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles. It's nuts.” (14:08)
• “Hope you don't got family in Albania, ‘cause again, we nuke them right away..." (28:41)
• “You're like, tormented, come on man, don't fuck with us. A lot of people's jobs are on the line building the Torment Nexus.” (referring to bureaucratic madness, 16:48)

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Conclusion

The episode closes with a sobering reminder: The nuclear command system remains deeply flawed, and ordinary, stubborn, sometimes reckless men have shaped it. The world is still closer than anyone would wish to nuclear annihilation—and the only thing that has changed is who holds the key, not the nature of risk. Activism, transparency, and system redesign are urgently needed. As Bobby says, “We could change this. It doesn't have to be this way.” (68:28)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Minuteman Doomsday Design & Rubel’s Fight: 03:27–16:38
• Launch Automation & Redundant Systems: 19:22–21:32
• SIOP and Casualty Planning: 25:31–32:00
• General Shoup's Dissent: 38:08–39:19
• Transition to Presidential Command: 43:28–47:15
• Failures of Strategic Bombing (Vietnam): 54:17–56:45
• Modern Risks & Call for Awareness: 60:08–69:40

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Recommended Reading (from Bobby Finger)

• Annie Jacobson’s "Nuclear War: A Scenario"
• "15 Minutes"
• "Command and Control"

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Tone

Both hosts employ dark humor, sarcasm, and deep skepticism, contextualized with sympathy for the moral complexity and terror faced by the few genuine dissenters amid widespread institutional madness.

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This summary is intended to provide the key information, memorable moments, and urgent ethical issues discussed in the episode, serving as a detailed guide for anyone wishing to understand the profound human and technical failures that nearly—and still might—destroy us all.

Transcript

[Bobby Finger]

Coal Zone Media.

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 Killjoy, welcome back to the program. How you doing?

[Margaret Killjoy]

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.

[Bobby Finger]

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.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Because that's what your brain does when presented with this much disaster is you're like, man, I really like fantasy books.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. I'm just gonna 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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[Bobby Finger]

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[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

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[Bobby Finger]

I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me. In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why they were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

[Margaret Killjoy]

She received death threats before the bombing.

[Bobby Finger]

She received more stress after the bombing. I think that this is a deliberate.

[iHeartRadio Announcer]

Attempt to sabotage our movement.

[Bobby Finger]

Episodes of rip current season two are available now listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's get back to talking about this insane Minuteman system. Cause 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 Ruble has been having in 1959 and start of 60, he's having conversations with all these Air Force gu 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? Are there ways they could accidentally randomly 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 for questions for, you fucking nerd? Get the hell out of here.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Let us build our devil machine.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, you a commie.

So here's Rubel, because if you are, you got to tell me, yeah, you got to tell me if you're communist. Here's Rubel discussing his concerns. I was curious about the procedures for launching. How are the decisions to be made and what happens when the launch commands are given? What if you decide you really didn't want to launch the rest after you've already launched some? Can you launch missiles one at a time, selectively? What if some operators decide to launch without authority? Here I cite from a transcript of my discussion of the this matter for the John F. Kennedy Library. A moment arrived in this briefing in the June of 1959. In June of 1959, when I could ask the question, I wanted to ask one. I had asked Bennett in private before, but without getting a satisfactory response, I had the feeling that if I asked the question, surrounded as I was by members of the President's Science Advisory Committee panel, that I might elicit a better answer. So I said something like, bob, can you describe how the missiles are launched. Now, I began to think he was made uncomfortable by the question. He seemed reluctant to grasp its simple meaning. And Bob gives the explanation I gave you earlier about how, well, these guys are all behind bulletproof glass and they have guns, so they, you know, one guy can't threaten the other, and they turn their keys at the same time or close to it. And that'll count as a vote to launch the missile. Right? The first missile. And so Rubell's immediate question is, when you say the missiles are launched, do you mean all 50? And Bob said, well, that depends on whether or not the missiles are ready. But, yeah, all 50 will launch. Now, this upsets everybody on the President's science advisory panel. These people are not. These are like, normal people, right? These are not maniacs. These are like science guys who are, you know, scared of nuclear holocaust, right? And they're like, what, four guys launch 50 missiles with no one getting in the way, really? And there's no way to stop all 50 from launching once you start the process of launching one. Are you serious? He was. So everybody gets upset. So Bob is, like, now in damage control mode. And Bob Bennett goes like, now, look, you have to understand, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. There are two modes that we can fire these in, right?

One of these modes is salvo and the other is ripple launch. Right? One of them launches all the missiles as close to simultaneously as possible, and the other staggers them. Right. Does that make it better? There's two modes, Margaret. There's two modes. It's fine.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The hose has shower and jet. Yeah.

Make it not a hose.

[Bobby Finger]

You just know Bob has not sat down with anyone who is not constantly spending every second of their life, like, touching themselves to the thought of ending humanity. Right? And he's just like, wait, these people don't. They don't know there's two modes that'll fix it. I'll tell them about the modes. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

See, I think game theory and its consequences have been a disaster for the human.

[Bobby Finger]

It's a fucking catastrophe. Yeah. Once people start thinking about game again, that needs to be a bricking. If you ever encounter somebody who starts talking game theory shit, just brick them, you know, give them a good hard.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Game theory says you have to brick them. That's the.

[Bobby Finger]

You have to brick them. It's the only way to stop these people.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

All right. Rubell continues, quote, it turned out in pursuing the matter further, that if you had preset the system for a ripple launch, there was no way to Interrupt it after the. The launch command was transmitted to the silos. If the first missile went, then six seconds later, let us say the second, and after another six seconds, the third. And if after the 20th missile, you decide that was really enough missiles, you couldn't stop the system from launching the remaining 30, according to what Bennett told us at the time. Rubell describes the committee as pretty shook by this revelation. I don't think anybody had ever realized before that there would be four men buried in the ground somewhere in North Dakota who might someday stick their keys into four little slots in turn them and irrevocably launch 50 Minuteman missiles. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And life on Earth.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. That's insane. The next question this inspired was, under what circumstances would these men get the order to turn their keys? Everyone outside the Air Force assumed they'd have to be a verified command from the President or a designated military authority. But that wasn't physically required. And as Rubell notes, the whole system was designed to remove choices from civilian leadership. Quote, by design. The President could not decide to launch one missile or two or a few against specific targets. This was intentional. The Air Force built it this way to remove choice from the President. So the President, if he was asked to make that decision in 10 or 15 minutes, do we start a nuclear war? So he would not have any option but to do it. That's why they built it this way. That was conscious. That was intentional. Fuck. So.

Now, I should note here, and this is something Rubel points out. 50 of these Minuteman missiles with the standard explosive loads they had would have meant more explosive power than all of the bombs used in all of the wars in human history put together up to that point. Four guys could do this. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

And again, the whole Minuteman system was meant to eventually have at least 1,000 missiles. General Power, in fact, advocated for 200 squadrons, a total of 10,000 missiles, all set up the same way.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Every state gets four.

[Bobby Finger]

Every state gets four. Yeah. So Rubell was so frightened by all of this that he dedicated his career to stopping the system as it existed from being implemented. He sat down first with General Curtis LeMay, then the Air Force Chief of Staff. Rubell expressed to lemay that he believed the Minuteman system represented a crucial loss of civilian command and control. Here's LeMay's response. Command and control. Command and control. What's that? It's telling the fighting man what to do. That's what it is. And that's a job for the professional soldier. They talk about the President exercising command and control. What is the president? Rebel notes that lame spit out the p in President. A politician. What does the politician know about war? Who needs a president if there's a war? Nobody. All we need him for is to tell us that there is a war. We are professional soldiers. We'll take care of the rest.

Just out of his mind.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hell, yeah. I'm impressed that you got. This is, like, almost the worst bat. This is Schrodinger's worst bastard in all history, right?

[Bobby Finger]

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Like, this man's dedication to ending all life on Earth is really unique in history. I mean, I assume he had a Soviet counterpart, but, like, I'm not as familiar with them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Do you think that they get, like, lonely, the American one and the Russian one, and they have only each other to talk to when they talk about their doomsday machine, that they're the only people who really understand.

[Bobby Finger]

Man, they won't give me 10,000 missiles, bro. I know. It's so hard to get enough missiles to kill the whole world a thousand times over. Like, don't worry. We got a bunch, too, though, homie. Like, it'll be fine. No one's gonna live through this.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We'll do our part, too, all right. As long as you do your part.

[Bobby Finger]

Mm. So it's here that Rubell points out. Every detail of the Minuteman system discussed so far was designed per the specifications of the Air Force. This was true, right down to the mechanics of how turning the keys led to firing the missiles, which is the scariest part of the whole system. To make a complicated story kind of simpler, the keys send out these electronic pulse generators, which travel to electronic gates. And once the gate, the signal pat. The pulse, passes through the gate. It advances one notch for each pulse that passes through the gate, right? And if enough pulses pass through the gates, it starts launching the missiles automatically, right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, my God.

[Bobby Finger]

So I start.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You can hack one position and get all four. Sorry.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't even have to be that, because I explained 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? Now, 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 now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, my God.

[Bobby Finger]

They did not. They never considered it for a second.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, my God.

[Bobby Finger]

This thing could have started launching 50 missiles if there was a power outage or a couple of power outages.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Cause once. Once Rubell starts saying this to other engineers, they bring this up and they start looking into how the system design 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 fought 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. That counts down from between six hour. 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 after a limit, after whatever time you set it to, this automated system will act as the second vote to fire the remaining 40 missiles in a. Jesus. Right? Yeah. Now when this is explained, this is.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Worse than I expected.

[Bobby Finger]

It's so bad. I came in here with. So fucked up.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

It'S so bad. Like, it's the Taurus firearms of nuclear missiles. It's nuts.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Like, yeah, totally. When not even Kel Tech, where it's at least interesting.

[Bobby Finger]

No, not even Kel Tech. Yeah, they built a nuclear SIG P320 that could go off in a cop's pocket. Oh, man. So when all this was explained to Rubell, the Air Force guy who's telling him this says that like, well, the minimum setting is 58 minutes. Right. And we want to have at least that much time to allow the military to disable the system. If two men vote to launch without warning and we decide we don't want to launch the rest of the squadron. Right. That seems like maybe it's a safety feature, right? Now many of these silos are hours away from anything else. That's kind of the point. Even to this day, you can't reach a lot of these in 58 minutes, you know. But the other problem is that the Air Force colonel who described the way this clock system worked to Rubella lied to him. The minimum count you could set it to wasn't 58 minutes. It was zero minutes.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So you really, genuinely could just automate all the Minutemen?

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, we damn near did. We damn near did. Here's Rubell again. Zero could mean that only two men, or perhaps none at all, could set off the unstoppable firing of 50 Minute man missiles by accident or effectively by designing the system this way in the event of a series of power interruptions.

So Rubell is like, oh, God, I have to do something. This system, these missiles are not active yet. These silos aren't active yet. And I have to stop them from being made active at least until this is fixed, right? So he's. He sets to work trying to get someone at the Air Force to give a shit about these problems, right? He sits down with the head of missile development, General Shriver, who he described as conspicuously disinterested in discussing the subject. Eventually, in late 1960, he manages to have lunch with the Deputy Secretary of Defense. And while they're arguing about this system, he's like, look, man, tell me, would you feel safe knowing the Soviets had a system that worked the way the Minuteman does? And, yeah, he thought I had a point there. But my concerns again dropped into another organizational black hole. Everyone's just trying to push this guy on. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to think about it. Why are you try. Why are you causing problems? Just let us build this thing and forget about it, man. No one else has a problem with this. That's literally how he's being treated.

[Margaret Killjoy]

It's like, so it's not even the Torment Nexus. It's like one guy's trying to stop the Torment Nexus from being built by a bunch of people who also don't think that the Torment Nexus needs to be. They're just doing their part.

[Bobby Finger]

You're like, Tormented. Come on, man, don't fuck with us. A lot of people's jobs are on the line building the Torment Nexus.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Come on. So, as I noted, Rubell, because he's good at his job, he gets promoted regularly, right? And in 61, I think 60 or 61, he passes his job at the Strategic Warfare Office. I think it's 60 onto a guy named Martin Stern. He tells Stern that his top priority is to change the Minuteman launch control system and warns him, you will not get this done unless you get a presidential directive ordering the Air Force to do something. And Marvin has a good relationship with some of these generals. And so he starts up being like, that's not how you get Things done in the Air Force, right? You just gotta let me talk to these guys. But then he starts talking to these guys, and all of these generals lie to him, and he realizes, like, oh, fuck, no. They really are refusing to fix these problems, these apocalyptic problems, and they're trying to fast track these missiles to being activated. To make a long story short, Rubell and several of his friends spend the next two years of their lives shouting at everyone who will listen about this. This culminates in another guy at the DOD named Jim Fletcher, heading a committee that issues a report on the Minuteman system. Their research found a very real chance that simple power outages could cause large portions of our nuclear arsenal to fire. The ultimate bill for. And this is. It's because of this commission report that we retrofit the whole Minuteman system. Right? And the ultimate bill for retrofitting the system is hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. It's very expensive to fix these problems, which is why the Air Force hadn't wanted to fix them. But Rubell does win the Most Dangerous Features.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Bad for the economy.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Nuclear cost.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, yeah, real bad. Fucking the stock market does not do well when everyone's dead. Nope, nope. Doesn't do much at all. Now, Rubell does win the Most Dangerous features are removed by the time the first Minuteman silo goes active at the end of 1961. But a big part of why I noted all of this stuff, none of this comes out until 2008, when Rubell, at the end of his life, publishes a confession talking about all this, right? As a way to try to warn people. Essentially. He's warning people. Nothing's really all that much better today, right? Like, that's why he writes this fuck. To try to try to get people to understand how much danger we're all in. And a big part of, like, the point of that confession is he's talking about all of the gaps in the system of civilian control of the military that allowed all of this to happen in the first place, because those gaps weren't entirely eradicated by fixing this one state system. He documented a conversation one of his allies had with another Air Force general around the same time.

General Cutter told me that we had to complete the BMEWS ballistic Missile Early Warning System as soon as possible. And he urged that we expand it in order to create a highly redundant capability at each site. We must have an absolutely reliable early warning of a missile attack. Basically, I agreed all would have been well if he had stopped there, but he didn't. In words, I Can't precisely recall. He went on to say that we had to have this redundancy and the resulting high level of reliability so that when we finally connected the warning system directly to the launch button of our own ICBMs, there would be no false alarms. I was astonished. I told him flatly we would not automate our response. We would not connect the warning system directly to the launch button. We would not, in sum, go to a launch on warning strategy. We would especially not go to one that did not have the President in the decision making loop. Cutter coldly replied, in that case, we might as well surrender now.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I love it. It's like no one who's ever done plumbing or hacking.

[Bobby Finger]

No, yeah, air gap.

[Margaret Killjoy]

You need a fucking air gap for a.

[Bobby Finger]

So many gaps. Never trust a computer. Don't trust people and don't trust computers.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, every hacker is like, this is my computer that matters. So it doesn't have the Internet.

[Bobby Finger]

Right. Like it's just. It's fucking insane. Like the whole, well, we might as well surrender now if we're not just going to have an automatic doomsday device that goes off if a radar has an hallucination. Why don't we just quit? Fuck it, let's be communists. Like it's fucking crazy. And I should note that this happens later, but the Soviet Union does devise a similar automated system called the Dead Hand. And some aspect, it's kind of unclear exactly how put together this is, but they do a version of the same thing, right? Yeah. And it's a cooler name, right? It is a really cool name, but it's basically a way to guarantee that if the US wiped out their command and control first, that there would be an automatic launch system in order to retaliate. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yep.

[Bobby Finger]

It's kind of unclear exactly what got actually built, but these same conversions of all of these same conversations happen in the USSR too.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because if nothing else, they need the Americans to believe they do that.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, right, right, exactly. And like everyone is worried about what the other guy is doing and everybody's out of their fucking minds. Yeah. Now the good news is, Margaret, it's time for ads.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, good. It is a nice thing that makes the ads seem like a nice refreshment.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Yeah. Probably not gonna get ads for nukes. Huzzah.

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[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

In 1997 in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road and Fear cr.

[Bobby Finger]

Discoveries of Saturday. Investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman. Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

[Bobby Finger]

We felt like we were in the presence of some someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets from.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

Tenderfoot TV and iHeart podcasts. This is Le Monstre, season two, the Butcher of Moss. Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bobby Finger]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[iHeartRadio Announcer]

What?

[Bobby Finger]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am sorry. So psyched you're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

So let's, let's.

[Bobby Finger]

Let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. So the good news is this. This is not the only kind of thinking exhibited by modern military advisors and officers today. But General Cutter's type of thinking is not extinct at the Pentagon, and it is still very common. I don't know if I'd say it's completely dominant, but there are a lot of guys who think this way who are still part of our nuclear defense architecture. Right. This, in fact, getting that job kind of requires that you're at least a little bit like these people. Right. It fairly uncommon for people who don't somewhat agree with some of this to wind up in those positions. Rubell points out that there was no technical auditing practice standardized for examining the technical status of launch controls for any of our nuclear weapons systems, and there is none today. Right. And that's a real problem. There's no one checking, other than guys like Rubell to make sure we don't build another really flawed, suicidally flawed missile system, which the Minuteman initially was. Now, while Rubel was fighting to reform the Minuteman system, he was part of the problem in a different way. Right. We've just talked about how maybe he saved everybody's lives. Here's him being kind of a bastard in late 19. Yeah, in late 1960, which is right in the middle of when he's having this fight. President Eisenhower issued an order for all three military departments to formulate a single operational plan, or siop, for nuclear war. Like S I O, P. Not like a psyop, but it is pronounced the same way. Right. And this will. This will get finalized in 62, but they start working on it and they presented initially in 1960. So in late 1960, the DOD, the Department of Defense, shares a cohesive plan for nuclear war to a mix of military personnel and selected civilian defense officials. For the first time, the Single Integrated operational plan, or PSYOP 62, was, in Rubell's words, deliberately designed to inflict hundreds of millions of deaths and uncounted casualties, mostly on innocent civilians in the USSR and China. This plan was presented at an underground meeting at the SAC headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. General Power Stage managed a deliberately theatrical display in which, at his command, aides would simultaneously set up easels and start flipping maps over that, like, each new map would show different detonations from different waves of planned strikes. You know, five minutes in, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Right. This is like a. It's an analog PowerPoint, right? He has like, guys being his PowerPoint presentation, basically.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

And I'm gonna quote from Rubell because Rubell is at this meeting, right? I'm gonna quote from his description of what he sees here. At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying, just a minute, just a minute. He turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path and we take it out with that. To which the response was utter silence. Power turned to the speaker and with another wave of his hand, told him to go ahead. Just casually was like, by the way, we're killing everyone in Albania immediately. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Famously our enemy. Uh huh.

[Bobby Finger]

Hope. Hope you don't got family there because again, we nuke them right away because of a radar station. We're just gonna kill everyone in the country because of a radar station. Everyone in the country. We're wiping the whole country out. Yeah. So Rubel, I think we've established, is a thinking man and a man who cares about ethics. He's not a monster. He's a part of this terrible system. But he has a soul. And he's upset. He's upset at this, at General Casual being like, so we start by killing Albania just for shits. Okay? Right? He's upset, but he doesn't say shit. Right. He writes about this decades later. He writes about his discomfort in this meeting and that specifically, he writes about his discomfort at the fact that PSYOP 62, quote, deliberately removed effective operational control from the president or any other civilian or even military commander in the event of a nuclear conflict. Now, none of this is public knowledge for decades, right? It takes a long time. We only know what we know because in 2008, Rubel published his experiences as a warning to the rest of the country. And he noticed that during this meeting, General Power and the other authors of PSYOP62 gave an anticipated death count of 500 to 600 million deaths from fallout alone in the USSR, in China.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That gets into that, like, that's like the combined death count of every war that's Ever happened? Levels probably.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Like, right, it's got to be up there, right? Yeah. Quote, no accounting was presented of reciprocal effects in the United States or collateral deaths and damage in many other parts of the globe where global clouds of radioactive dust would eventually descend. They just don't bother with that. We're not interested in what the fallout might do. We're not interested in the knock on effects. We're just interested in killing half of all of the people or more in the USSR and China. Right? Yeah. And the way in which Power and the other briefers talk about civilian death on an unimaginable scale struck Rubell as ghoulish. There are about 600 million Chinese in China, he said. His chart went up to half that number, 300 million on the vertical axis. It showed that deaths from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number. 300 million. Half the population of China.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. They don't care. They.

[Bobby Finger]

They don't give a shit.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Now I say they don't give a shit. So someone in this meeting does give a shit. Right. And I'm gonna 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.

[Margaret Killjoy]

We already had the banner printed, you know.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, we've got the banner printed and everything. We got a mission accomplished board here. Come on.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

You don't want to kill 300 million people in China. What's wrong with you?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, what was that bonus? The effects.

[Bobby Finger]

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 a. Oh, fuck. Oh, shit. I'm like some junior SS guy sitting in the back of the Von say conference, too scared to speak up and ruin my career. Fuck. Fuck. I'm a Nazi fuck. Like, that's literally how he describes. His recollection is like, this is the fuck. This is so much worse than the V. They're talking about killing 600 million people. Like.

[Margaret Killjoy]

And he doesn't.

[Bobby Finger]

We might not even be in a war with it. He doesn't say shit. He does not speak. He is not that kind of brave, Right. He is a work within your office.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That's like a telling human condition thing.

[Bobby Finger]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Because we all imagine ourselves saying something, right?

[Bobby Finger]

You want to hope you would. And I get the feeling from his writing that Rubell never quite forgave himself for not Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Good. He shouldn't have.

[Bobby Finger]

But, yeah, he shouldn't have. This should haunt you to the end of your days.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But he's still the most deeply human person in that room.

[Bobby Finger]

I'll say the second most, because we're about to talk about someone who does speak up. There is one guy who has. Who actually has some courage here. Okay, 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 in the military, you can't escape meetings about meetings, you know, like, that's just. That's just. That's just bureaucracy, baby. So this smaller meeting includes the Secretary of Defense, all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of each major branch of the military, plus the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, speaking on the harrowing meeting they just had, quote, told everyone that they'd done a very fine job, a very difficult job. Right? So. And that sentiment is echoed by everyone. Everyone just goes around congratulating each other at the start of this meeting, being like, it was a great meeting, it was really tough, but you guys really pulled together and came up with a plan to kill 600 million people. And I'm proud of you. You know, it's not easy to figure out how to kill half a billion people or more, but you guys really would have been able to come with it. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone in the room echoes this congratulatory sentiment, except for one guy, General David M. Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps. And, you know, the Marines. The Marines are an interesting branch because both the the chuddiest maniacs in the military and the absolute like coolest, like best soldiers in American history. Like Smedley Butler were Marines, right? Yeah. They have a history of producing occasionally these like really weirdly like woke generals and stuff. Like Smedley Butler is a committed anti capitalist and anti imperialist who gets very angry about being used as a gangster for capitalism. And David M. Shoup, who's the commandant of the Corps at this point, is cut from the same cloth. He's the same kind of guy.

[Margaret Killjoy]

He probably seemed like more like honor, like more like whatever you believe in. You're still like, you're like, no, I'm willing to risk my life to go do this thing.

[Bobby Finger]

Why I joined the Marines.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, right. Like my dad was a Marine. It doesn't have entirely positive things to say about the people and in it with it.

[Bobby Finger]

That's what I'm saying is there's they run the gamut, you know. Yeah.

But Shoop is a really interesting guy. In the long history of Marine Corps commandants, he is one of the men who earned that job title the most. He had been born in Indiana in 1904 to a poor family and he was raised politically progressive and grew into a staunch anti imperialist with a very strong anti business outlook. He is not super sold on capitalism and he hates imperialism. As a starving young man, he joins the military to survive. He proves very good at the job and is deployed twice to China during their civil war. He serves as a staff officer in the Pacific during World War II until he was given a combat command to lead the invasion of an island called Tarawa. His forces encountered immediate and fierce resistance. His transport was disabled before landing and he had to wade ashore where he was struck by shrapnel and shot in the neck. Despite this, he continued to organize and lead his men from the front with a gunshot wound to the neck. On the afternoon of the second day of the attack, he sent a message to his divisional headquarters. Combat efficiency colon. We are winning. Just, just a badass. Like.

One of our absolute coolest battlefield commanders in the war. Shupe receives a Congressional Medal of Honor for his efforts. Right. If you want to know like how, like what kind of a badass this dude was, like, he is a general leading from the front in such a way that he gets a medal of Honor for his service in combat. And he is the only man in this entire story who gives us anything we can be truly proud of as Americans. And I'm going to quote from Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War here, no one's. And this is after they're going over the plan again to kill 600 million people. No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a US government led preemptive first strike nuclear attack, Rubell wrote, Not any of the Joint Chiefs, not the Secretary of Defense, not John Rubel. Then finally, one man did. General David M. Shoup, the Commandant of the U.S. marine Corps, a Marine awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II. Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural mid American community, recalled Rubella. He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the Soul a poising view on the plan for nuclear war. That Shoup said, all I can say is any plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way. The room fell silent. Rubell wrote, nobody moved a muscle. Nobody seconded Shoup's dissent. No one else said anything. According to Rubell, everyone just looked the other way.

Yeah. Fuck, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

At least there was one.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I know.

[Bobby Finger]

At least there was one guy being like, are you. Do you guys realize how fucking evil this is? Are you out of your minds? You know what you're talking about? Killing 300 million people who might not have fun. Fuck all to us. They don't even have nukes yet.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, we. We killed Japan for trying to kill all the Chinese people.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Do you not see a problem here? Yeah.

Yeah. That's not the American way. Unfortunately, it is. But I can't blame Shoup for trying to make it not be.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, exactly.

[Bobby Finger]

Shoup goes on to be a cool guy the rest of his life. He spoke vocally against nuclear escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like, he was a major voice trying to be like, no, no, no, we need to take a step back. And he was also. He advised against entering South Vietnam during the opening stages of the Vietnam War. He was one of the few generals who was like, this is a terrible idea and we should not get involved at all. This is a really bad plan. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

In general, he was the one sane man not afraid to speak his mind in the entire defense establishment during some of the maddest years of the Cold War. Right. So, yeah. Thank you, General.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Shot in the neck. I'm good.

[Bobby Finger]

I know what this is involved. We shouldn't do this. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

And he clearly, like, not afraid of confrontation, is willing to say, like, you people are fucking maniacs.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

But unfortunately he's the only one. So Rubell, who is not a fighter, not great at confrontation, one gets the idea, does continue to push bureaucratically for a saner nuclear posture. But he does so from within the bureaucracy in which he was comfortable. In his 2008 report, he accused defense planners of building both PSYOP 62 and the Minuteman system deliberately to deny any but a go, no go option to civilian leadership. As Henry Kissinger put it in 1961, and this is the only time I'll quote Kissinger approvingly, these plans offered the President just one choice, suicide or surrender, Holocaust or humiliation. In other words, the military has set it up that the only choice the President gets to make is let the country get nuked or kill everybody.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Bobby Finger]

The good news is that in the early 1960s, at the very start of the Kennedy administration, is probably the high watermark for at least the danger of an atomic holocaust during the Cold War. Part of why we stepped a tiny.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think you have to point out that part because during the war so far.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Part of what got us to step back from the brink a little bit is that after the Berlin crisis, which is, you know, the Soviet Union tries to cut off supplies into the chunk of Berlin that NATO is occupying and we have to like, drop. Drop a bunch of shit in by plane right after that. And then the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy comes to realize what Rubell had known for a while, which is that the men running the Strategic Air Command in particular and the Air Force in general are out of their goddamn minds. Right? Like that. He starts to become. Kennedy starts to become very aware that, like, these people are crazy and they're going to get us all killed. I have to do something about the way this system works, right? And this is arguably the best thing he did in his presidency. One of the first moments where this was made clear to him was on September 5, during Kennedy's first year in office, in which several Air Forcemen submitted a first strike study that suggested killing 54% of the USSR's population. An alternate plan suggested just attacking Soviet military targets, which a guy named Kaysen, the study author estimated would kill only around a million civilians. However, US casualties from a Soviet response ranged from basically none to. To 75% of the US population. Uh huh, Right. Rubell includes a note about the reactions of people in the Kennedy administration to this horror show. Ted Sorensen, the chief White House counsel and speechwriter who had been with Kennedy since his earliest Senate Days was outraged when Kaysen told him about the study, shouting, you're crazy. We shouldn't let guys like you around here. Even more appalled was a friend of Kaysen's on the NSC staff named Marcus Raskin. Raskin had served as foreign policy advisor to a few liberal Democratic senators and had been hired as a token leftist. Raskin was horrified by the very existence of such a study. How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany? He hollered at one point. Raskin never spoke to Kaysen again.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Good question.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Really good question.

Yeah. Kennedy himself was briefed on the likely death toll of a nuclear war, basically on the result. Like, he's briefed on this case and study, and his response is characteristically eloquent. He says, and we call ourselves the human race.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Oh, fuck, yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded across 13 days in 1962, and it seems to have inspired Kennedy to take action to reduce the ability of his insane generals to destroy the world. When he imposed a blockade of Cuba to force the USSR to remove their nukes, General LeMay insisted on direct military intervention as the only path forward, claiming that any attempt to solve the problem without violence would lead to war. Look, we might have a war if we don't get violent with these guys. You don't want a war, do you?

Quote, LeMay indirectly threatened to make his dissent public. I think that a blockade and the political talk would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. In other words, you're in a pretty bad fix at the present time. Lame's words angered Kennedy, who asked, what did you say? Lame responded, you're in a pretty bad fix. Kenneth o' Donnell recalled in his memoirs that after the meeting, Kennedy asked him, can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I. I better understand. The second half of the 20th century was a big push for pacifism on the left.

And it's one of those things you look back at and you're like, oh, that seems kind of silly.

[Bobby Finger]

And you're like, some parts worked, some didn't.

[Margaret Killjoy]

But oh, yeah, I get why people lean towards that.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, yeah. And this is Arguably the best thing Kennedy does is it's during the Kennedy administration that we take trigger control mostly and eventually entirely away from the military. Right. The scenario now, and this is. I don't. I think it's better, but it's also differently bad. Now, some general or some colonel or some kid in a silo couldn't launch our arsenal, right? You can't have four kids launching 50 missiles on their own because you have to have, like, codes transmitted and stuff, right? But one guy can decide to launch everything, and it's the President. Now, that does mean we have civilian control. And I think that's a positive step away from a bunch of insane generals potentially having that command or four kids in a cornfield having that ability. Right? But. And that. This is. That is a major thing that happens under Kennedy, right, is that command and control of our nuclear arsenal gets shifted much further to the President and that that process continues over the years. This is what leads to the nuclear football, right, Which I think people are generally aware of, right. Because it's under Kennedy. I talked about how that Los Alamos scientist came up with the idea to we need a lock on these fucking things. And they figure out how to do that during the Kennedy administration. And Kennedy gives the order to start putting locks on our weapons, right? Yeah. Which starts moving at this. This all. I'm yada yada. This takes longer to get to where we are now, but this starts the process, right, that leads to the situation we are. We have now, where these weapons all do at least have a lock. And where we have the football, right, the nuclear football, which is ultimately a product of both that scientist Agnew realizing a single private with eight bullets was all that stood between a nuke and whoever, as well as Rubell and his allies repeatedly insisting to their bosses that these Air Force fuckers are out of their goddamn minds. Right? Like that is, you know, a really good thing that happens here. And characteristically, when the switch, the lock is first demoed, it was presented to President Kennedy, who immediately is, yeah, put these on, everything we can. Like, immediately. Right now. Do it today. You have no other priorities. And the military loses their fucking mind. The fears of them.

[Margaret Killjoy]

They locked up our bombs.

[Bobby Finger]

They better lock our bombs up. The fears of one General Alfred Starboard, which is a wild name, were summarized as follows. How is a pilot, US or foreign, somewhere around the world going to get a code from the President of the United States to arm a nuclear weapon before being overrun by a massively superior number of Soviet troops? I don't know. Man, maybe it's. I'm fine with that, actually.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. If a couple people die instead of all of us, I don't know.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. Look, I'm not casual about the lives of soldiers. They're people too. But it's a soldier's job to potentially die for their country. And I prefer that to the whole world dying.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Including that soldier.

[Bobby Finger]

Including that soldier. They're not living through it. None of these bomber guys, all of these SAC bombers know that their missions are suicide missions. If they get the order to fly to the ussr, they are not coming back. There won't be anywhere to come back to. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Or they'll be the only people still alive. They'll be flying for another 10 minutes before.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, I mean, that's how it is now. Cause we have these doomsday planes that we literally call like doomsday planes, which are these huge shielded planes that are able. The President basically can hand over control of continuing to launch our nukes to the official in the plane. Because the President's going to be dead pretty soon. Everyone is. None of these bunkers work nearly as well as people want to believe they do. Especially not when you're talking about multiple thermonuclear impacts. It doesn't matter how deep. If people are dropping multiple hydrogen bombs as they would be, or missiles as they would be in this, very few things could potato. Could protect you. All of these fancy bunker complexes are great if you don't get directly hit by multiple thermonuclear bombs, but they're not going to protect you from which you're going to boil alive. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah. No. And that's Annie Jacobson's nuclear war book, which posits a pretty chilling theory about how this could all go down. Does have everyone dies. Like everyone in command and control is fucking dead. Except for the guy in the doomsday plane who makes sure that everyone dies on the other side of the world. That's nuclear war. Anyway, let's have some ads and we'll come back and finish this story. Woo.

[Apollo Advertiser]

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[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

In 1997 in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road and Fear Creek.

[Bobby Finger]

Discoveries of Saturday Investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman. Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

[Bobby Finger]

We felt like we were in the presence of someone, was going to the grave.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

With nightmarish secrets from Tenderfoot TV and iHeart podcasts. This is Le Mans season two, the Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bobby Finger]

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets.

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We were in the car like a.

[Bobby Finger]

Rolling Stone came on and he said.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

There'S a line in there about your mother.

[Bobby Finger]

And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me.

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In the middle of the night, but.

[Bobby Finger]

I couldn't hold on to what had happened. These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, we're back. So this is what gets us. The stuff with Kennedy evolves into, like, you know, the system we have today which gives the President sole authority to end civilization. We'll talk about that a little more in a second, but I want to finish with Curtis LeMay's story first in 1964. Now, as Chief of Staff of the air force, Curtis LeMay is still. In 1945, Curtis LeMay is in charge of all of the. The US air power in Southeast Asia, basically during the Korean War, same deal. During the start of Vietnam, same deal. So when we. When in 1964, when we really start upping our commitment in Vietnam, he is running things, and he pushes a plan to bomb Northern Vietnam into submission. The plan is described, and I believe this was his name for it, as the Gentile duhei Plan. Right. I mentioned that earlier. Like, it's the polite version of the duhei plan. Right? Duhei being the guy who's like, you just kill all the civilians until they're not willing to fight anymore. Now there's a big battle between Kennedy's civilian advisors who wanted the US to threaten North Vietnam's industry, but not actually blow it up immediately so that we blow up some of it and we make it clear we can really cripple their industry so that we have a negotiating hand to push for peace. Right. And I'm not. I don't think we should have gotten involved in fucking Vietnam whatsoever. I'm not saying that, like, these guys are good and ethical, but that is a much saner response than La Maze, because LeMay just wants to send North Vietnam back to the Stone Age. Right? Right. Like, these liberals are like, well, we can bomb them, you know, kind of strategically in order to exert a cost and make them willing to come to the negotiation table. And LeMay is like, what if we just fucking kill everybody? I'm going to quote from the book Bombing to Win by Robert Pape, quote. Destroying the North's industrial economy appears to have been valued more for its effect on civilian morale than for reducing the flow of military goods into the South. For instance, the rationale for closing the port of Haiphong was not to interdict battlefield hardware, but to weaken civilian morale. Right.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Which keeps not working.

[Bobby Finger]

It does. As you may recall, none of this did. This led to Operation Rolling Thunder. And rolling thunder is LeMay's baby. This is like Operation Rolling Thunder is the genteel duhei plan put into effect. It is a three Year bombing campaign that resulted in what, Margaret? You want to guess?

[Margaret Killjoy]

No. Effective destruction of the morale of the enemy.

[Bobby Finger]

I mean, stuff was just. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't work. We don't win Vietnam, in case you were unaware of that.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh, oh, interesting.

[Bobby Finger]

This does not stop their ability to equip and support their troops. It does not break civilian morale. It does not, but it doesn't do the trick.

[Margaret Killjoy]

This is actually one of the main things I've learned over this epic journey we've been on. If you had asked me, I would have been like, well, it's probably immoral to bomb all these enemy cities, but it probably is effective at destroying morale. And what I have learned is that it's not.

[Bobby Finger]

No, no, you gotta think. If somebody, for example, goes and stabs the person you love most in the world in the gut, are you gonna like walk away because you're demoralized or are you gonna fuck that person up? Like, are you gonna do everything in your power to destroy that person? Right, yeah, yeah. I think people think similarly when their family is incinerated from the sky.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

But this, the fact that this fails and the fact that Lame's plans kind of fail a lot brings me to a key point about lemay and all the duhei acolytes who came to run our air power during this time.

[Margaret Killjoy]

These guys, Surrealist, man Ray is also one of these people.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, these guys loved nukes because nukes were the wep, the only weapon system that worked the way they thought all weapons should work. So they always insisted on using nukes at every corner. And when they were denied, they didn't know how to fight a modern war. Well, because they only have the one strategy and it only works if you use nukes. So when the President says, no, you can't nuke them, then they're left like, well, I guess we try to use conventional bombs and it just doesn't do it, but they don't. None of these people are actually capable of adapting and looking their failure in the face because they've based everything on this being how war works. And it does. Unless you're killing everyone. Right, yeah, yeah. Because they're 12 year old boys.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Now I'm ending this story in the mid-60s, right. Which there's a lot more to talk about in terms of nukes and shit, obviously after this point. But I'm ending here because kind of by the point we're at in the story, right, Vietnam, the tale of how our nuclear arsenal functions changes, but not like in Earth Shattering ways. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Right.

[Bobby Finger]

Everything gets kind of better. Our early warning systems get better, our missiles get more destructive. And relia. Nuclear submarines are by this point, a part of the deterrent. We're not talking about that all that much, but that's a major part of the deterrent package, Right. Because a nuclear submarine absolutely cannot be found. Right. It's basically impossible. Like, if you have nuclear submarines, you always have nukes out there that you can throw back at whoever fucks with you. So it's a guarantee that you'll be able to get some sort of second strike. Nuclear. Nuclear submarines are fucking terrifying. They're the scariest weapons human beings have ever made and probably ever will make. Right. Like, it is just death tubes. They're fucking nightmares. I had a friend, I have a friend who went to Annapolis, that's the Naval Academy, and was a nuclear submarine pilot during the 80s. Yeah. There's a book called Blind Man's Bluff that's about the stuff that he used to do. And all of his stories are. Because what US and Soviet subs were doing in this period of time was like, basically one would try to, like playing chicken, trying to force the other to surface. Right. So, you know, because it was like that was kind of part of the game that we were playing in the high seas. And so he has all these stories of just like he and a couple of his friends are standing in, I guess, the bridge or whatever, doing a bunch of complicated math in their heads. And if they fuck up the math, everyone dies because they crash into something. Right. Like, it's like, it's those kind of stories. Like.

Nuclear subs are fucking terrible, but. But once we get nuclear subs, we have all three kind of arms of our nuclear posture. We have our ICBMs, we have nuclear subs, we have our bombers. Right. Obviously we also have field artillery and nukes and stuff that the army can use. But nothing that happens after this point seriously alters the fundamental calculus up until something that's kind of more recent. And that fundamental calculus is we and the Russians and other people, China now as well. Right. Obviously, more people have nukes, but. But all of the nuclear powers have a bunch of nukes ready to fire at a moment's notice. And in both the US And Russia, only the president gets to decide when we use them. Right? Right. That's the way it is starting in the 60s, and that's the way it is today. Right. Obviously. Like, I'm not gonna talk a lot about hypersonic missiles. That's kind of the Biggest recent change that might seriously alter a lot of calculus because it allows a strike that potentially might not get spotted at all. And so maybe there's no warning, which is why I read a really fucked up War on the Rocks article that was basically arguing for like an automated AI 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.

[Margaret Killjoy]

So no one's watched the movie War Games is what I'm hearing.

[Bobby Finger]

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 a machine. They were arguing that we need to do it. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Oh my God.

[Bobby Finger]

And this is one of the things that I have worry 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 in our early warnings. That's what I was worry about. That's the worry is that people are being advised by these, by machines that.

Like the Minuteman will have unanticipated flaws that the arrogant pieces of shit who design 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.

[Margaret Killjoy]

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.

[Bobby Finger]

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. Is like, you want this shit simple and reliable as possible. Yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Anyway, well, now it's all Bluetooth.

[Bobby Finger]

So now it's. 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 Warn 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 Warn 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. Well, I don't think either of us would have waited.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Russia needs us to believe they're launch on war. And even if they're saying something else, they have to say it in a way where they're like, oh, don't worry, we would totally not launch on war, but scare people into thinking they would.

[Bobby Finger]

Well, and now since Putin's taken, and this is really interesting, the last few years, Putin has made it very clear that the Russian Federation is now launch on war as well. Right. So they are just straight up saying, like, everyone is now launch on one, the US And Russia, and that's all that really matters. China's got some nukes. I don't know as much about their system, but they don't have near like both the. All it takes is the US And Russia. Right?

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Like, you know, there's, there's, it's worth being concerned about North Korea, obviously, because one missile opens the possibility that all of the missiles start flying. Right. Because of the kind of cascading decision trees people will make. Right. But the US and Russia are by far the most heavily armed right now. I know there's a tendency among folks on our side of the political aisle to say, oh my God, isn't it terrifying that Donald Trump has the fucking nuclear football? Right. And I'm gonna say something controversial here, which is, I don't think Donald Trump is less suited to make that call than any other president. Not because he would do a good job at that, but because no one can. Everyone is bad at this. Nobody is competent to make that call. And it's a dangerous mistake to believe that, oh well, Obama's would have been a good guy to have in the seat, or Biden would have been a good. No, they're all bad at this. They would all have been terrible. No one will do a good job if they are put in that situation. And her chilling book, Nuclear War, Annie Jacobson makes one very important point several times. She quotes John Wolf's thoughts, the former national security adviser to President Obama, who said, no one, not even the president, has complete knowledge of what is going on in a crisis or in a conflict, let alone a nuclear war. Former Secretary of Defense for Reagan William Perry added, many presidents come into the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not to want to know. This is a point made several times that presidents generally don't know much about this, even though this football's with them at all times. They don't like to think about it. They don't like to ask too many questions about it. They don't like to dwell on it. A bunch of people who were in a position to know have said similar things that like, President's not super well informed generally on how all this works because it's scary. They don't like to think about it.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I don't like to think about it. Like this goes firmly into the, like things that you can't control. You don't worry about. If I was the President, I would.

[Bobby Finger]

Think about this a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd be sending those missiles straight to the Great Lakes. But no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

That's why we're, that's why you're running in what, 20, 32?

[Bobby Finger]

That's right, that's right. On a take out. Lake Superior.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, more like Lake Superior.

[Bobby Finger]

That's right. That's right. We're gonna get revenge for those brave men on the Edmund Fitzgerald, you know. Anyway, Jacobson continues talking about how unready presidents are to make these kind of calls. Once at a press conference in 1982, President Reagan went so far as to incorrectly tell the public that submarine ballistic missiles are recallable. That's why that myth exists. After the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union was dissolved, William Perry found in his experience as Secretary of Defense that many people clung to the idea that nuclear war was no longer a threat, when in fact he now says nothing could be further from the truth. In a nuclear war, confusion over protocol and speed of action will have unintended consequences beyond anyone's grasp. It will send the United States of America into heart of darkness that defense official John Rubel warned about in 1960, into what he called a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the Earth's surface.

Yeah, Yep. The fundamental issue here in terms of. Is Trump any worse than anyone else on this specific issue? Theoretically, the President is only going to be asked to make a call on whether or not to launch our missiles if one or more are known to have been launched towards the US or an ally. Because of the way all of these weapons systems work. This means that the hypothetical President in this scenario is going about his day doing something else and is grabbed and taken bodily. Like the Secret Service like response team's job is to literally physically haul him, like carry him into the bunker and then into like a chopper to get to a More secure location as the White House bunker isn't really all that safe life. But he will be grabbed in the middle of his day, taken into a situation room and told that the entirety of Washington D.C. is about to die in flames, including nearly every member of his administration. In the most likely scenarios, he will then be told that he has between three and six minutes to decide to launch a world killing salvo of, in most situations, hundreds to a thousand nuclear warheads. The entire time that he struggles with this decision, military advisors, whose entire job is to think about how important it is that we strike back before being decapitated, will shout for him to launch everything that we've got. No one is qualified for that job. Yeah, the only president we've ever had who could be argued to have stood up to this kind of pressure was jfk. Right? And JFK was a combat veteran, had been in some scary situations before, and thank fucking God he was the guy on the ground at that point in time, because it could have been a lot worse than it was the Cuban Missile crisis, a bunch of other shit. I don't have any real faith that Obama or Biden would have performed much better than Trump in this nightmare scenario. As John Ruble wrote in 2008, we know that this mentality, given half a chance, will surface in military and government councils. We know from recent history that a compliant bureaucracy, military and civilian, will murder 6 million people in cold blood or plan, buy, design, build and deploy the means to murder half of the people on earth, probably including themselves. How come is all this built into the human genome? A melancholy procession from stones to atoms, a predestined progress toward the end times, the inevitable rise of maligned leaders over compliant masses.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my podcast. Wow, what a way to end.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah, like, what did you do today? Oh, I got my job is that I have to make jokes during the. As I get described, the mechanism by which the world will end.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, cool stuff. Legit. I don't know, probably should be something people are like asking presidents to change. We could change this. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this dangerous. Like, there are other ways. This could all be designed to where we're not permanently 15 minutes or less away from annihilation, you know, and if we step back, probably the Russians do at least a little bit. You know, I don't have a lot of faith in Putin, but I don't think he wants to die in nuclear hellfire either. I think most people don't I think most people don't. Fair, fair. Anyway, maybe this should be like a voting issue that people talk about. Right. Like it's, you know, climate change is obviously very important and people, it needs to be much more of an issue. But this is up there. This is an equivalent problem. Right. Because this is potentially a much more thorough destruction of the biosphere than climate change will bring even quicker. We should probably care about this a lot.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah.

[Bobby Finger]

Anyway.

[Margaret Killjoy]

What a good system we all have.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, it's pretty nuts. I actually recommend all the books that I read for this. Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War A Scenario. Again, I don't entirely agree with kind of some of her panic about North Korea, but it's a pretty good book on the whole about the way the system works today. The book 15 Minutes is a really good look at basically how we got to the point where we're 15 minutes away from annihilation at all times. And then command and control, among other things, talks about a bunch of the different fuck ups and errors that have happened along the way. They're all good books.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The movie House of Dynamite that just came out recently, it's the one that the way specifically the drama is just around. It's around the nuclear football, it's around the chain of command as relates to it and the current one. And it's what started me like a couple weeks before this started thinking about being like, oh, this isn't as.

Like I sort of thought, I was like, oh, we probably have like decent intercept systems if it's just like one missile. Right.

[Bobby Finger]

You know, like if it's just one maybe. But again we don't have decent intercept systems. None of these work nearly as well as they're supposed to. And there are some similar problems with at least some of the different early warning systems. And this is really a problem for the Russians because the Russians, like one of the problems with the Russian system is that it's not smart enough to know because each of the missiles that we would be firing launches a bunch of chafe. Right. So you have the actual warheads and ICBMs now often have multiple warheads, right. It's called an MIRV, I think. And basically what you can do, and this is particularly the case with like a lot of the sub mounted missiles too, is you launch one missile but then it splits into like multiple warheads, each of which is targeted at a different area. Right. But also all of these missiles have what's called chaff, which is basically like, like little strips of aluminum that come out with like the, the warhead in order to confuse, like, missile system. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So that, like, it can protect the missile. Basically, yeah. But one of the main Russian systems can't tell the difference between that chaff and a shitload of additional missiles. So, like, say there was a situation where North Korea launched an ICBM at somebody and we launch a decapitation strike at North Korea or a strike at their nuclear facilities. That's a limited strike. We're just firing a couple of missiles. Missiles. It might look, because of where North Korea is, Russia and China might both think, oh, shit, the Americans are launching hundreds of missiles and they could be coming for us. We don't know where they're targeted. And if the President hasn't gotten through to both of those leaders to inform them, or if they don't trust the President, who knows what's going to happen?

[Margaret Killjoy]

I hate to say that H.G. wells is right because I don't actually believe in one world government kind of famously with my political position. But. But this idea that the only way out of this, besides everyone deescalating is better diplomacy and everyone talking to each other and moving away from nationalism, moving away from guarding your borders zealously and moving. Well, I think the solution to most problems is to get rid of national borders. But whatever.

[Bobby Finger]

I'm not.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I'm so glad I'm not in charge of trying to figure out how to solve this. That's the main takeaway that I have.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah.

There'S a couple of things we could do. Jacobson talks about this, like, one of the things that we don't do but ought to, because it's so hard to basically impossible almost to stop an ICBM reliably once it gets above a certain level. Like, once it gets. And in terms of, like, there's no real way to, like, protect against the massive ICBMs that Russia could launch, but North Korea doesn't have all that many. And if we were to keep like a bunch of Predator drones in the area, we could theoretically have a quick reaction force that could intercept an ICBM before it could get to the point of no return, where you have no ability to shoot it down. But we just decided not to do that. Like, that got theorized and I think it was too expensive. It's the same thing with like, well, we could have thaad batteries to protect certain things that might be, like that nuclear plant that might be a target, but we're not. We're just going to keep them, you know, protecting Israel. We're not going to have them, you know, in the US or whatever for the most part. I mean, obviously we have a lot of those in Ukraine and there's good reason for that, but we don't devote. It's both a mix of. None of it really works all that well. None of our missile interception stuff is perfect. The THAAD is about as good as it gets, but it's not good for everything. Like it could be useful against some of those sub based missiles, but I don't think it can take out ICBMs. Certainly not. Or certainly not a hypersonic. I don't think anything can take out a hypersonic if it actually works the way they're supposed to. There's just not really reliable ways to stop a massive nuclear attack. If you get shot at by one missile, you might be able to do something. Right. That's kind of where we are.

Yeah. I love talking about it though. I love me some dukes.

[Margaret Killjoy]

The ideas of all the things that I want to write fiction about as related to it.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, yeah, folks, get out there, go to the Wausau Sound, look around, hike around, get your metal detectors out. There's a couple of nukes just waiting for a new home out there. Jesus Christ, you could be the next nuclear power.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Yeah. Take care of each other and tell your friends you love them, but not in a way where you don't get completely lost thinking about this stuff all the time. And also podcast cool people who did cool stuff, which is the opposite of this, but, you know.

[Bobby Finger]

Yeah, yeah, sweet. All right, everybody, go away.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

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[Bobby Finger]

This is Jim. Hello.

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[Bobby Finger]

In April and now I have customers out the door. And this is Sarah.

[Margaret Killjoy]

Hi.

[Bobby Finger]

She started putting a portion of her.

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[Bobby Finger]

Business is booming. That's why I'm working on a Saturday.

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[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Malls in Belgium, women began to go missing. It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre Season 2 is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bobby Finger]

I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me. In season two of Rip Current, we asked who tried to kill Judy Berry and why. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

[Margaret Killjoy]

She received death threats before the bombing.

[Bobby Finger]

She received more threats after the bombing.

[Margaret Killjoy]

I think that this is a deliberate.

[iHeartRadio Announcer]

Attempt to sabotage our movement.

[Bobby Finger]

Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.