Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Summary

Behind the Bastards — Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Host: Robert Evans (A), with guest Margaret Killjoy (B)
Date: December 2, 2025
Duration covered: Approx. 00:04:00–01:24:35 (excluding ads, intros, outros)

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Episode Overview

This episode kicks off a multi-part exploration into the often-overlooked architects of the nuclear doomsday machine—a system that perpetually hovers over humanity with the threat of annihilation. Rather than focusing on notorious war criminals or infamous leaders, host Robert Evans and guest Margaret Killjoy examine the scientists, generals, and theorists on the U.S. side who built the nuclear arsenal and the war doctrines underpinning Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Through dark humor, historical deep-dives, and reflections on the moral ambiguity of these men’s choices, the episode lays out the complex, sometimes sympathetic, but deeply troubling legacy of those who “might have killed us all.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Is this Topic Important? (04:06–07:40)

• At any given moment, the world is only “30 minutes away from the entire planet being wiped out” by nuclear weapons.
• The Cold War doctrine and hardware remain, and the nuclear threat has not lessened since the Cold War; if anything, it’s become more precarious.
  • “Absolutely nothing has been done to make this system safer since the end of the Cold War. In fact, it’s significantly more dangerous.” — Robert (08:37)
• Many who built these systems were not villains by traditional standards—their personal body counts are minimal, but collectively they engineered a system that could functionally end humanity if triggered.

2. The Paradox of ‘Schrödinger’s Bastards’ (07:40–10:15; 18:42–18:52)

• Unlike “typical” bastards, many nuclear architects may actually have saved lives (by deterrence) or doomed us all (by proximity to apocalypse)—and we won’t know which until/unless the worst happens.
  • “These people are heroes or bastards, and we will never know. And in half the timelines, they’re one and then the other.” — Margaret (18:46)

3. The Real World Inspiration for the Atomic Bomb (10:16–14:39)

• H.G. Wells was among the first to fictionalize an atomic bomb with devastating precision in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, which later influenced key figures like physicist Leo Szilard.
• Szilard, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, becomes a principal architect of the Manhattan Project after real-world fears of a Nazi atomic bomb race.
  • “You can’t blame Szilard, right? ...His attitude is: ‘We need to have this, because Hitler might have it.’” — Robert (13:01)
• The Manhattan Project drew many people who saw the bomb as the ‘lesser evil’ compared to fascism.

4. The Messiness of Motives and Espionage (16:30–18:03, 18:47–18:52)

• Discussions include stories (some apocryphal) of physicist slowdowns in Nazi Germany—possibly intentional sabotage by scientists to delay the bomb.
• Soviet spies within the Manhattan Project justified their actions similarly: giving the USSR bomb secrets would prevent the U.S. from gaining overwhelming destructive power.

5. From Armies to Doomsday: How ‘Safety’ Systems Backfire (20:11–25:25; 33:39–44:12)

• The arms race is likened to the “doomsday device” that triggered World War I, where military buildup and interlocking alliances, meant to prevent war, instead mechanized its outbreak.
  • “World War I is itself the result of a doomsday device going off..." — Robert (22:32)
• In moments of crisis, decision time is short, and the loudest advocates for ‘use’ are typically military men obsessed with preparation for worst-case scenarios.

6. The Deep Roots of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ — Strategic Bombing Theory (38:22–52:40)

• Giulio Douhet, Italian general, essentially ‘invents’ strategic bombing theory: the belief that air power alone can destroy civilian morale and win wars.
  • Douhet’s thesis: “If you destroy what a man has ...it becomes impossible for him to defend himself.” (70:52)
• Douhet advocated mass bombing of civilian populations as a war-winning tactic—a theory embraced by interwar and WWII planners on all sides despite being technically wrong and morally horrifying.
  • “He is the guy writing in a book: ‘The systematic destruction of civilian populations through strategic bombing.’ ...That’s upon his soul.” — Robert (47:26)

7. Strategic Bombing in World War II: Ideal vs. Reality (52:43–77:48)

• WWII military leaders, particularly “Bomber Harris” of the UK’s RAF, attempt to enact theories of mass city destruction.
  • However, over and over, results don’t match predictions: bombed cities (e.g., London, Hamburg) don’t capitulate, civilian morale hardens, and industrial capacity persists.
  • “No plane or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings.” — (Quoted from Albert Speer, 75:01)
• U.S. “precision bombing” was a fantasy: at best, a 22% hit rate for B-17 bombers within 100 yards of target.
  • “You can drop a bomb from 25,000 feet and hit a target the size of a pickle barrel, [they claimed]...In combat...within a football field only 22% of the time.” — Robert (71:24)

8. The Air War’s Lessons for Nuclear Doctrine (59:45–66:50, 78:51–81:46)

• The technical failure of bomber-centric war plans is masked by eventual Allied victory, but the assumed lesson—bombing (and especially now nuclear bombing) can force surrender—is carried forward.
• Firestorms (unleashed at Hamburg and later on Japan) and nuclear chain reactions are theorized as “bonus damage,” amplifying the devastation and making the “doomsday machine” concept even more catastrophic.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On quantum immortality and historical luck:
  • “It might just be pure raw luck that we didn’t annihilate ourselves.” — Margaret (05:36)
• On the unstable nature of peace:
  • “If this happens, like, 15 minutes after you finish listening to this podcast, you’ll know who to be angry at in your last couple seconds of consciousness.” — Robert (18:52)
• On the fundamental flaw in deterrence thinking:
  • “History is written by the victors. And there’s no victors [in nuclear war].” — Margaret (07:46)
  • “There’s gonna be no victors of a nuclear war. Simply no history written.” — Robert (07:48)
• On the ‘armed society’ analogy:
  • “An armed society is not a polite society …it’s just not.” — Margaret (23:30)
• On strategic bombing’s cruel calculus:
  • “The aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers …and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany.” — Bomber Harris (quoted, 66:50)
  • “No, no, no—this is about killing women and children and rendering them homeless. That’s what we’re doing.” — Robert (77:31)
• On post-apocalypse government bunkers:
  • “None of the facilities we have to protect our government will work. …It’s a much worse death than the people topside will have.” — Robert (81:28)

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Noteworthy Timestamps

• 00:04:06 — The ticking clock: how close we always are to nuclear annihilation.
• 00:10:16 — H.G. Wells’s atomic bomb and his influence on Szilard and the Manhattan Project.
• 00:13:01 — Szilard’s sympathetic case for building the bomb to counter Hitler.
• 00:22:32 — The WWI “doomsday device” as a parallel to nuclear standoff.
• 00:34:46 — Lessons unlearned: the Franco-Prussian War and the ticking clock of mobilization.
• 00:38:22 — Strategic bombing theory explained: Douhet’s influence and errors.
• 00:52:43 — How WWII military planners put Douhet’s theories into practice—and failed.
• 01:03:00–01:14:00 — Precision bombing myths and the reality of inaccuracy and horrific civilian tolls.
• 01:21:28 — Nothing, not even government bunkers, can meaningfully survive “doomsday.”
• 01:23:10 — The system of alliances and military escalation as history's original “doomsday device.”

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Tone & Style

• The hosts blend dark, often gallows humor (“Maybe do it yourself, you know, pruners, sure… Rubber band. That’s how we do it on the sheep.” — Robert, 00:01:06) with rigorous history and pointed political and ethical analysis.
• Dialogue is informal, conversational, and regularly digresses into personal anecdotes and hypothetical scenarios, but always returns to the central theme.
• Honesty about moral gray areas is foregrounded; neither host lets listeners forget the horror and absurdity at the heart of nuclear planning.

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Summary — For New Listeners

This episode traces the intellectual and institutional roots of the doomsday device, showing how well-meaning (and in some cases outright villainous) individuals created a system that threatens all life on Earth. From the first imaginings of the atomic bomb in pulp fiction, through WWII’s disastrous faith in bombing as a war-winning tool, to the continuing, precarious standoff of the nuclear age, the hosts lay out the technical miscalculations, hubris, and ethical traps that define ‘the men who might have killed us all.’ This context is vital in understanding how close humanity remains to self-destruction, not because of singular villains, but due to systems built by people convinced they were preventing catastrophe—right up until they might someday cause it.

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For Next Episode

Part Two will explore the application of these foundational doctrines to the Pacific theater, the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, and the post-war evolution of the U.S. and global doomsday mechanisms.

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If you want to feel more informed—and more existentially anxious—about how close we always are to nuclear apocalypse, this is a must-listen.

Transcript

[A]

Coal Zone media. Ah. I was just doing the atonal screaming for you, Robert. What'd you think? Well, now you fucked up the introduction, Sophie. It doesn't feel good now, does it? Feels bad. Well done, Magpie. It's harder than it sounds, you know. You know what? Honestly, kind of fun. I'm just hoping that the listeners here will appreciate how much work goes into my atonal screeches. Because to be polite, they sound a lot better than your atonal screeches. That's all I'm saying. I absolutely agree. So give the listeners one. No, no, no. I think they've gotten enough atonal screeches. Okay. Instead, let's talk about. I don't know. I'm not. We're not on video this week, folks. I'm not feeling well. I just had a vasectomy, which brag I debated on. Cause I don't like talking about my private life on the show too much. But I also think it's a good thing to encourage, so. So guys out there, if you're thinking about getting the vasectomy, if you're like, should I get a vasectomy? Go do it or do it yourself. You know, it doesn't look that hard. I can't do that. The doctor wasn't down there very long. You could figure it out. You know, pruners, pruners, sure. You know, whatever it takes. Rubber band. That's how we do it on the sheep. Anyway, Margaret Killjoy. How are you doing?

[B]

I'm good. I didn't have surgery this week.

[A]

That's also good. That's better than having surgery. As a general, I love that for you, Magpie. I certainly prefer the weeks when I don't have surgery. Even if it's minor surgery, it's never very fun. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Season three of Sniffy's Cruisin Confessions is here. Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are going deeper than ever with bold new conversations, fresh guests, and and unfiltered takes on queer sex and cruising. This season, they're also looking out for the community covering smart cruising in a chaotic world, including information on prep. And yes, their call in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air. No pressure. Tune in to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, with new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[C]

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[B]

Well, I've been thinking about war recently.

[A]

Yeah. Cause I was depressing. God damn it. Yeah, yeah, it's a. I watched a.

[B]

Movie about this recently and it's A.

[A]

Lot of people have a lot, which is kind of why I haven't actually seen that movie yet. But this is always on my mind. It's a special the whole nuclear doomsday, planetary nuclear doomsday device that we largely co created with Russia is on my mind a lot. I'm just interested in the facts of how it came together and who made it. And I'm interested in because our subjects this week are, broadly speaking, all of the people in the US at least, who built that. Because we don't have quite as much granular detail on their counterparts in the Soviet Union, you can generally assume a version of everything we're talking about this week happened over there too, right? Like, they didn't not create a planetary killing doomsday device. Yeah, we both just kind of built one that was heavily based on our game theory understanding of how the other side would respond in like an escalating nuclear scenario. And the end result of that was both countries were ready perpetually and are still today ready at all times to wipe out more or less all of human civilization in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. That's. That's about how long it would take.

[B]

Do you ever think about quantum immortality? Sorry, I'm just going to go straight into Wignet shit.

[A]

That's a nice thing to think about. It's comforting at least, the idea that, like, we'll never experience the worst case scenario because our consciousness doesn't persist in those moments.

[B]

Except that, okay, that is, that is. And I think about that specifically around nuclear destruction because I think about how often the people of the generation, you know, ahead of mine are like, they almost seem silly how worried they were about nuclear apocalypse because it didn't happen during the Cold War. So we're like, oh, obviously humanity would never do that, but it would be impossible for me to be alive now if the world had been destroyed. So even if nine times out of ten we destroyed the world, we're stuck being alive in the 1 out of 10. So it actually makes me more fearful because I'm like, well, it might just be pure raw luck that we didn't annihilate ourselves.

[A]

Yes. And unfortunately, I think that is if you're trying to look at this from an educated and accurate perspective, that is the only reason we're all alive, because we nearly wiped out. The number of times that the whole world nearly got wiped out in atomic hellfire is like, you have too many to count on. All of our fingers and toes in this podcast combined. Right? Oh, God, it happened so many times. And the amount of resistance whenever someone pointed out, oh, hey, the way this was built could kill us all at any moment, accidentally. That happens so many times. We'll be talking about the fucking Minutemen missiles and how they were initially set up. But what's interesting about this week is that our subjects are kind of like Schrodinger's bastards, where some of these guys do have big body counts. Especially the folks who were, you know, responsible for getting the new. Like Leslie Groves, right. Who was the general who oversaw the Manhattan Project. Right. You can put a lot of deaths under his name, but most of the people who built this system never killed anybody, even Indirectly, really. But they could at any moment, guys, in fact guys whose last bit of work was in the 60s, could, 15 minutes from now, if the right things had started happening 15 minutes ago or a couple of seconds ago, 15 minutes from now, all of these guys could become the biggest murderers in world history, right? Collectively.

[B]

But they won't be remembered.

[A]

But they won't. No one will be. Nothing will be right. That's the beauty of atomic Hellfire.

[B]

History is written by the victors. And there's no victors.

[A]

There's gonna be no victors of a nuclear war. Simply no history written. But they are interesting in that. Cause a lot of them are not, like, bad. And some of them are even deeply sympathetic. There's a guy we're gonna talk about who may have saved all of human life, but also helped, still did help build the machine that could at any moment, end it. All right? Because it's. And I need to correct this from the start, all of this is still relevant because absolutely nothing has been done to make this system safer since the end of the Cold War. And in fact, it's significantly more dangerous than it was at the end of the Cold War. In part because Russia's no longer pretending to not be in a launch on Warren situation, which is where both, both Russia and the United States is launch on warn. Which means that the policy of both governments is to start shooting everything they have when they have a credible warning that they're being nuked. Right? And our best case scenario would be like one crazy country like North Korea decides to fire a single ICBM at the United States. But that would still trigger a massive nuclear response. And if for some reason we couldn't get in touch with the Russian government. And as a heads up, there have been times where we've been out of touch with them for as much as 48 hours when there's been like, critical things to like the. That happens, the gaps and comms like that, especially since Ukraine happen. And if we started launching missiles the way that most of our missiles would work, a lot of them would go through or at least appear to be going towards Russian airspace or Chinese airspace for a while. And none of these radar systems are perfect. So there's a very good chance, even if we didn't have it set up to cross Russian or Chinese airspace, they would think that for a period of time that is longer than the amount of time they know they have to choose to launch their arsenals in response. As per the way deterrence theory works, this could happen at any moment. This could have started happening seconds ago. Right. So that's what we're talking about this week is how we got to this point that we have not ever stepped back from. We are just as close as we were during the Cold War. That's very important for people to understand. So these next couple of weeks we're going to talk about how this all came to be. Right. Because all of the men we're talking about this week, most of whom again, have no body count and probably lived otherwise decent lives, all of these guys put the work in to make this machine, knowing that they were building a system that if used, would lead to planetary genocide. And they built it anyway. They built it because they knew it would work that way. Right?

[B]

Uh huh.

[A]

So we're gonna talk about why, we're gonna talk about. Cause they thought they were doing the morally right thing. And up until now you could make a case, up until the missiles fly, you could continue making a case that it was the right thing to do, which is part of one of the fucked up things about it. Right, right. So this is a complicated topic, but I do think these people are worth discussing in part because these are all people who sat down and had conversations about like, okay, we do this and that'll kill about 600 million people. Yeah, build it. You know, like these are the talks that they were having. There's a joke that gets made online today a lot a meme about a tech company building the Torment Nexus in imitation of classic sci fi novel. Don't create the Torment Nexus. It's kind of a joke about the way a lot of tech projects feel now, where it's like, this is exactly what the sci fi that inspired you was warning against. Right. But that really is the reality of the atom bomb. And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used as sources for these episodes. And at the start of his book, Schlosser points out that the first person to conceive directly of an atomic bomb was H.G. wells, who wrote a 1914 novel titled the World Set Free. I was not aware of. Now there's some other candidates, but this is like the first. I'll tell you why this is, I think, the best candidate for like the first guy to imagine an accurate, a semi accurate conception of an atomic bomb. In it, Wells puts together a story that is weirdly like the backstory of the Federation in Star Trek. Scientists create the ultimate explosive, a Radioactive bomb that allowed someone to carry in a purse or suitcase an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. As Schlosser writes, these atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind as every nation seeks to obtain them and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world's great capitals are destroyed and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government. And this is Wells. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities, shook them also out of their old established habits of thought. Wells wrote, full of hope and. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. I didn't know any of that.

[B]

Yeah, well, he also. He was really into war gaming.

[A]

He also. He would have been. Oh, he would have been so into Warhammer if he was. So.

[B]

He genuinely was into war gaming.

[A]

Yes, I know.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Him as Warhammer man. I like that idea.

[A]

He would have been also another big wargaming nerd who would have been into Warhammer was the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin, early Napoleonic wargamer. Anyway.

[B]

Hell yeah.

[A]

Wells nukes didn't work quite like the real things. They went off slowly and they let off huge amounts of radiation over years of time. But Welles came pretty close to foreseeing that the real thing. Enough to foreseeing the real thing. That in 1929, a Hungarian physicist named Leo Silard S Z I L A R D met with Welles to try and purchase the literary rights to publish his novel in Central Europe. This is relevant in terms of, like, who was the closest to Anouk? Because Leo Szilard is one of the fathers of the atom bomb. A decade or so after trying to buy the rights to this, he comes to the US and he becomes one of the architects of the Manhattan Project. And he's a guy you can't really blame Szilard, right? Again, if we're talking about where does the moral blame lay? He has the most understandable reason for wanting to help the US Build a nuke of anybody. And it's kind of good to talk about him because it does make the point that it's a little unfair to judge these men without talking about the circumstances in the world that formed them. Szilard was a Jewish refugee. He fled Nazi Germany and he wound up in the United States. Because he was a physicist, and because he was a refugee of the Holocaust, he knew not only the threat that fascism represented, but he knew that Hitler had a bomb program going. In 1939, he sends a Letter to Albert Einstein, laying out his fears. And Einstein, this is the guy who sent the letter to Einstein. And then Einstein helps him write a letter to fdr.

[B]

Yeah, please.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, but. And then they send, like. Einstein helps him craft this letter, and he sends it to fdr. And this letter warns about bombs of a new type of. And FDR takes the warning seriously, that he keeps exploring the idea, which helps lead to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Like, that's Leo Szilard. And he ties directly back to the Wells idea.

[B]

That's awful. That's. So the fact that we can, like, literally say, not only don't build the torment nexus, but maybe don't write the torment nexus.

[A]

Maybe don't write about the torment nexus. I mean, it's. I think Szilard probably was. I think he probably was into Welles because he, like, people had theorized before Welles that something like an atom bomb might be feasible on physicists. Had. And I think Szilard was impressed that Welles had gotten something so close. And also he clearly wanted to warn the world about this thing, which I think is why he was interested in purchasing the rights to this. And we'll talk a little bit more about him later. But it is so tragic. Cause you can't blame him. His attitude is like, we need to have this. Cause Hitler might have it. Right. Which, like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. But that's the same logic that, like. And you know, the USSR is not Nazi Germany. Obviously, we can. The proof of that is as simple as what happened in the Cold War. Right. And to be fair, neither is the United States. Neither country used the damn things on the scale that would have ended civilization. Right. You know, we'll talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki too. But it's. You understand, like, Szilard's motivations are deeply sympathetic. Right. And a number of scientists behind the Manhattan Project, some of them are refugees. Right. But the ones that aren't still get into it because they're reading the news, they're aware of how dangerous the US's enemies are during World War II. And it's legitimate threat that Germany in particular might get the bomb before we do. Right. And those stories are like, half the reason this happened. Because a lot of people of goodwill got involved with the Manhattan Project because they were like, well, this is probably the lesser. It's probably better that the US has this than that a fascist country is the only one with a nuke. Right, Right. Like, that's their logic here. And they had to operate on we know that the Nazis were never going to get a nuke. Right. Just based on the choice. Because they didn't. Right. They went in different directions. They did not make the choices, ultimately, that would have given.

[B]

Have you heard this thing? Maybe it's in the script or maybe I'm, like, wrong about this. That there was a work slowdown of the Nazi. The Nazi bomb program where they were like. And they went. And they tried to tell their US counterparts, like, hey, we're slowing down this bomb. You all need to slow it down too. But the person that they told didn't believe them and was like, oh, shit, they're trying to lie to us. They must be, like, right about to build this bomb. Have you heard this story?

[A]

No, I haven't, actually. No, no, no, it's not.

[B]

Okay. I can never remember the name of the book because I found it in a trash can 20 years ago. It was about the social history of building of the bomb. And I read this, and it, like, changed the way that I was perceiving this stuff. But I've since read more about this and researched more about this, and I think it's, like, messier than that. But I think, again, just from memory, that there was, like, a work slowdown in the Nazi program because it was all of these physicists who used to work with Jews because before all the Jews got kicked out of the physicist programs. I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not.

[A]

Neither do I. So check on that.

[B]

I wanna believe.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple. There's some stories. And espionage is heavily baked into the whole story of how this all happened. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's the spies in the US who bring bomb information to the ussr. Are people working on a similar logic to Zillard where they're like, well, the US is obviously not a good actor. And if they're the only ones with the nuke, they're gonna kill everyone in the Soviet Union. Right?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Like. And maybe, you know, we talked about it. Plenty of guys talked about it. We had a plan to do it. You know, so you're not. And maybe by. By the way, if it's arguable that building this doomsday device stopped a war that would have killed hundreds of millions and was ultimately the right thing to do. And a lot of people argue that to this day, then it was certainly morally right for scientists to leak information to the Soviet Union because otherwise the US would have killed 600 or so million people. Right, Right. We Know that because we talked about doing it a lot.

[B]

You were really right with the. Like, Schrodinger's bastards.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

These people are heroes or bastards, and we will never know. And in half the timelines, they're one and then half or the other.

[A]

I guess part of why I'm doing this is that if this happens, like, 15 minutes after you finish listening to this podcast, you'll know who to be angry at in your last couple seconds of consciousness. Assuming you're not near ground zero for one of these things. Yeah. You know, and you probably want to be at ground zero. It's the least painful option available. The road is optimistic in terms of, like, the aftermath of thermonuclear war on a planetary scale anyway. So those guys. But guys with that logic, basically, that, like, well, this is a messy thing. I don't really want to be building a giant bomb, but it might save a lot of lives in the long run. That's like a sizable chunk of the Manhattan Project. Right. That's like a big amount of the logic behind the reason individual people got involved. Right. The other half, though, is a military. And this is largely on the military side of things. It's not exclusively military thinkers, but this is how the military thinks of these weapons, both when we're starting to plan one and then immediately after we start using them. Right. And the military logic for why this is why building this system, why getting as many of these things as possible is a good idea, is based on a military theory that starts to take hold after the end of the First World War. And this is ultimately the theory that leads us to the system of international mutually assured destruction that we live in today. Right. And there's an element of historical rhyming here that we. We build this global, real, literal, global doomsday device as a result of a theory that takes off in the end of World War I, based on what happened in World War I. Because World War I is itself the result of a doomsday device going off, a device that was never supposed to go off, and a device that a lot of people, right up until the start of World War I, if you talked about this system of alliances and military buildup, right. And arms buildup, you've got all these munitions, refit schedules and whatnot. Interlocking alliances, was meant to ensure that there wasn't going to be a colossal European war. Right. That was. The people who would defend it would say that, like, well, if everyone's really well armed and if everybody's always. And if we have all these alliances between different powers that make it an unwinnable situation. We won't have this war. Right. People would make that argument. You know, now, obviously, the technology at the time, they didn't have access to ICBMs and nuclear submarines. So they had to make do with defensive alliances that promised one country would enter a theoretical war on another's behalf. And these do work like a machine, right? And that is what happens. You know, you have Austria declares war on Serbia. That brings France and Germany into it. The German plan that they had built meant that, like, well, the only way we can possibly win this war is we have to do this specific kind of invasion that takes us through Belgium, that brings Great Britain into the. You know, and so on and so forth, right? And they have the Maxim gun, and they've got the. Everyone's got a version of the Maxim gun. And everyone's also thinking, well, we just refurbished and upgraded our artillery, and France has just upgraded this thing, but they haven't upgraded this thing. And if we go now, they won't have the new version of this thing, and ours will still be like. That's a big part of the thinking, too, Right? And this is, like, always the case, and it had been for decades prior to World War I and prior to World War I, the fact that it would be so costly and it was like, everyone's plan for victory rested on so many, like, assumptions and was sketchy enough. No one really wanted to do this, right? I mean, with the exception of the military thinkers who had spent their entire lives building and planning out this system of, like, this is how we're going to activate our troops. This is the order at which we'll get them marching, and this is where they'll move in. So you have this mix of. Nobody on the civilian side of governance wants to think about this seriously, because it would be a calamity, and they know it. And everyone in the military is thinking about it constantly. So the instant you start having leaders need to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to go to war, the loudest voice in the ear is this general who's thought of nothing else his entire professional life. And by the way, in the six minutes a US President would have to decide whether or not to launch the nukes, the loudest voice in his ear is going to be a guy who thinks about using the nukes nonstop.

[B]

Yeah, it's like his job.

[A]

It's his job.

[B]

This is like the, you know, the whole, like, an armed society is a Polite society. Logical fallacy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, like, it's. It's just so interesting that it's this writ large where we have.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We have data that shows that an armed society is not a polite society.

[A]

It sure isn't.

[B]

Not. I pro second amendment for complicated reasons, but very complicated. But, like, it's just not. It's like you could watch all the videos of people being like, you parked in my space, and now they're shooting at each other.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they would have been punching each other in a different world.

[A]

Yes. And it's one of those things I have had. I've literally had the exact situation of, like, I had a situation that would have been violent, but we all had guns and knew it, and so nobody started shit.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I'm also more than aware of the fact that, like, the United States States is more violent than a lot of unarmed societies. Right.

[B]

Yeah. Because if you carry a gun, you have to have an entirely different mindset where you kind of.

[A]

It changes everything. Yeah.

[B]

You actually can't stand up for yourself. You kind of have to take possibly even the first punch.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You have to do everything possible, literally everything, to avoid violence, including taking a couple hits. Because you know that you're capable of an overwhelming capacity of violence.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it. People don't do that. Instead, they're like, isn't this sick? I've got overwhelming capacity of violence.

[A]

And that's one of the worries with, like, the nukes is when they go from. Because prior. One thing I will say, and this is something I'll even give Nixon, basically all of our leaders and all of the Soviet leaders. Right. It's a mistake to leave them out, too. This is the thing that would only have worked if both sides were similar. For all of the flaws of all of the men running both countries the duration of the Cold War, all of them had one thing in common, which is they were guys who were like, no, that would be fucked up. Yeah, that'd be fucked up. We're just not gonna do that. Yeah. Right. There's some great. I mean, fucking Reagan has some really good quotes of like, oh, like, where he's, like, having this conscience of like, I can't believe we as human beings created this nightmare system. This is so much worse than I ever knew it was. What's wrong with people? Reagan had those moments. Right.

[B]

Because he wants to punch people. Yeah, he wants that.

[A]

Yeah. He's a puncher, man.

[B]

Do the lower level of violence.

[A]

And there's a good JFK quote when this all got Explained to him for the first. Because jfk, one of the things he did is he took away the military's control of the nukes. Right. And made it. Because the military used to be have a. Basically theoretically could have made the call to launch the missiles without presidential authority. It wasn't mechanically necessary the way it is now. Right. Like the way the code system works now. You mechanically have to have the President looped in. Right. Although we'll talk about that. It's not a perfect system either. But that became the way we do it during JFK's administration. And when all of this got explained to him how this works, I think his exact quote was like, can we call ourselves the human race? Like, what the fuck?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. And they all, like, there's a lot. You get a lot of reactions like that from presidents, and that's the only reason we're all alive to this day. And that's the thing, not just with the US And Russia, but with any country that gets a nuclear power is maybe you get someone at the head of that country who can think about that and who can think about for whom. It's not an unthinkable. Right. And that changes everybody's calculus to a startling degree. Right. This is why a lot of people. There's a good book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in a pretty unsparing term. And she provides like a theoretical. And her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles for unclear reasons. Right. And I. What I don't like about it is I don't really agree with the whole the. The Kim family are, like, crazy thing. I think they're pretty rational actors. I just don't think they're thinking about the same things that other countries are entirely. Yeah.

[B]

Their backs are to the wall. Like, I'm not trying to apologize for.

[A]

Them, but, you know, I see a logic in what they're doing. I don't think they're crazy. Right. And I don't. Which is there's a. What I think is. I don't think his book is as good, but there was another book that came out a year or two previously by another, like a scholar interested in the nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction System. That was also a North Korea US Exchange hypothetical, but that didn't rely on North Korea being crazy. In fact, everyone was performing logically. Right. Basically, the premise was North Korea does something that kills some South Korean civilians. Right. I think they either shoot or they fire a missile and it hits, which has happened before. Right. North Korea has in fact killed South Korean civilians not all that long ago. Right. And as a result, the North Korean president, without seeking US approval, fires missiles at military targets, non nuclear missiles at military targets in North Korea. But the leader of North Korea doesn't know that the US didn't approve of the firing of missiles. And their system can't entirely tell what's incoming and what's not. And they see once South Korea fires missiles into North Korea, the US starts raising its alert level and North Korea becomes aware. And anyway, it's this whole cycle of escalation that doesn't require anyone being crazy. It just requires. And by the way, one of the things we found out very recently is that the currently imprisoned former president of South Korea, who is being charged with, I believe insurrection at the moment, actually did send drones into North Korea illegally without getting US approval or anything while he was president as part of some boondoggle to basically get to declare martial law. Right. So like this stuff like shit like that happens all the time and just hasn't escalated. But like we have had the first couple stages of a few different apocalypses occur. This is not crazy and it doesn't require any power. Russia, the United States, North Korea with nukes to be like a mustache twirling madman. It just requires them to all be have incomplete, imperfect information and focused on their own survival. Right. Yeah, it's good. I love.

[B]

While you're talking, I'm thinking about all the other countries that also have nukes and like their own things going on. Like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, like, like, I mean Israel and North Korea are like comparable entities in my mind in terms of being like small powers with that are like pariah states.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That probably aren't going to do something to get themselves. Like I actually could see, personally I could see a big state feeling more confident to do it, you know, but yeah.

[A]

Anyway, we'll keep talking about this, Margaret, but first here's some ads.

[C]

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[A]

We'Re back. Yeah, so we got off on a little bit of a tangent, but I wanted to get back to a point I was making which is the historical rhyming between the system, like the Mutually Assured destruction is a product of a military theory that gets born at this theory of strategic bombing that gets born at the end of World War I. Right. And that theory only exists because World War I happens and World War I is the result of a doomsday device that wasn't supposed to go off, going off. Right. You have all these like treaties and stuff that basically guarantee that if one of a couple of different powers goes to war against basically anyone around them, it will start a chain reaction that leads to a general European war. Right. And because of the way that armies work in this period, right. And basically all military wisdom at this point is based on the last war, as it always is. And the last war for Europe is the Franco Prussian War of 1870-1871. That's not literally the last conflict in Europe during this period, but it's the last big one that people are generally concerned with when they're making their predictions like this.

[B]

Germany versus France is the only way to have a European war, as far as I can tell. So.

[A]

Oh man, I mean, we have not had a good European war since those two got their shit together. And that's why I think we should start tweaking them both. You know, just, just start, see who we can make angrier at the other, you know, Germany, I hear France has been talking hella shit. You know, just set the ramp, maybe invade a little bit. Yeah, set the Ryan on fire. Fuck it, let's see what happens. Only France has nukes, so we should be fine. Anyway. The great land powers of Europe, namely France, Russia, Germany and to a lesser extent Austro Hungary knew that the instant war was declared. There was this clock ticking, right, because most of your army is reserves, right. The largest amount of manpower you have isn't your active duty. It's this, this Mass of, like, reserve troops. These guys who, when they're 18 or whatever, they're basically drafted. They sometimes serve like a year, and then for a period of time, they have to do. It's basically, they're all in the National Guard, Right? That's the norm in most of these states. You have some version of that. And so it takes a period of time to call these guys up from civilian life, to issue them their gear, to get them moved into their units, and then to get them moved to the front. So everyone is working. Not just. Not only do you have this interlocking series of alliances, but once war starts, every side knows I have to be able to get my reserves ready for active duty before the enemy can. Otherwise they're going to invade before I have my army, which means I have a ticket. Like, once the Archduke of Austria, Hungary, is assassinated, and then people start to realize that, general, European war is in play. It's not just a matter of diplomatically, can we smooth this? It's that all of my generals are shouting that, like, if we don't mobilize now, we don't know that France isn't mobilizing. Right? We can't tell they might be mobilizing. And if they're mobilizing, we only have this period of time to start mobilizing in turn. Right? That's a big part of everybody's thinking here. And that's the same with nuclear war, right? Where you don't know entirely what the other side is doing. We, the US have pretty good data on when people are. Because we have this nuts, insane, like, level of, like, spy satellites and shit like that. Although all of it has errors, all of it has things that can go wrong. Right? None of it's perfect.

[B]

Soon AI will run it. It'll be fine.

[A]

Yeah. So everyone's acting off of imperfect information. And everybody has a very limited time frame. And they're being shouted at by their generals that if we don't move in time, we're fucked. Right? The whole country could be fucked. And you have X amount of time now. They have its days and weeks, you know, in the case of these European monarchs. Right? But that's still a ticking clock, right? Anyway, we all know how World War I goes. Not great. European power is seriously hobbled worldwide. And basically, one of the things that's fascinating to me, and this is the case in a lot of wars, everyone's planning at the start of World War I is based on how the last war had gone. And everyone's planning is wrong. Germany's plan to knock France out of the war in the first couple of months doesn't work. France and Russia have this plan where, like, we'll both hit Germany on either side, right. If Germany starts some shit, we'll come in on both flanks and we'll be able to knock out their ability to prosecute the war pretty quickly. Doesn't work that way. Great Britain has this fairly small, really highly trained army that they're like, well, we can insert this into the continent if something brushes up, and it'll probably be fine. Right? And they realize, oh, no, actually, we're kind of. You have to have actually millions of guys with guns. You know, how fast can we draft all the coal miners? All of these. And Germany or Great Britain's plans are based in part on, like, we've got this great navy. That's probably all we'll need, right? Yeah.

[B]

And they have a Tolkien, and they got.

[A]

They got JRR Tolkien somewhere in there. You know, surely we'll be okay. Anyway, everyone's plans are basically wrong at the start of the war, and it leads to disaster. And so after the carnage, a bunch of military leaders around the world started studying what had happened to try to make predictions about what would happen in the next war, which is the same thing that happened after 1871. And they made the wrong predictions, but they're sure this time we'll get it. Well, we're smarter than that last generation of military thinkers. We'll make conclusions from the last war that are right, you know? And one of these guys, among the most influential of these fuckers is an Italian general named Giulio Duhay. Now, he had been born in caserta, Italy, in 1869, but his family were refugees from Savoy, which was a former Italian possession that had been ceded to the perfidious French. As a young man, he'd attended a military academy and became an artillery officer in the Italian army. He continued his formal education by studying engineering at a university in Turin. Duhet rose steadily through the ranks, and by the early 1900s, he was a member of the Italian general staff, basically their joint chiefs. Right? That's kind of the idea. He had been an early advocate for dirigibles, initially used as spotters for artillery and the like. And once the first aircraft started taking off, he became an immediate advocate for aircraft as a weapons system. Right. Now, this on its own isn't noteworthy. He was right. Obviously, aircraft are pretty important in modern war.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But very. A lot of people, I'm not. It wasn't universal There were certainly some guys being like, no, the infantryman with a rifle will be the. Always be the core of any war fighting effort. We don't need planes. There were some nuts, but most. Most intelligent people were like, obviously, planes are gonna be useful. You know, being able to have the sky seems helpful in the event of a conflict. And Duhei. But one thing that did make him noteworthy, where he was kind of seeing far ahead, was that he suggested air power shouldn't entirely be the purview of ground commanders. Right. It would effectively need to be its own kind of service. You know, and this is something. Even During World War II, there's not an Air Force in the U.S. we have the Army Air Corps, right. It's a part of the army. Duhay, ahead of times is like, no, the air power should be its own independent branch. It's different enough, right? It's like the Navy. In 1911, he got a chance to act on some of his theories when Italy went to war in Libya against the Ottomans because an awful lot of Italians had never really gotten over the Roman Empire. That's the gist of why we keep fucking with Ethiopia. Duhay's conclusion from this was. And this was like the first real world use of air combat power for Italy. And his conclusion is that in the future, planes will get better and high altitude bombing will become the number one battlefield role of planes. Right. This is not true for World War II entirely. I mean, it's debatable, right. But there's a lot of argument that that's not entirely. That high altitude bombing was not the number one battlefield use of air power.

[B]

Yeah. Wasn't high altitude bombing more like bombing civilians? Civilians.

[A]

But ideally, close air support is less high altitude because you can't do it as accurately. Right. Like, you need to be closer to not hit your own guys as much. This is one of those things. Technology has made this kind of true because, like, even a lot of what we'd call close air support today is still pretty high altitude because you can fire a missile from pretty high altitude, right? Like if, like modern, like modern weapon systems, you can shoot from higher up. But he's wrong. And in spirit, right? Which is that, like, this is not the way. Most most effective combat use of airpower in World War II is not high altitude bombing. Right. And even if you look in the. The Pacific theater, right? Like, it's a lot of naval aviation being used to knock out other ships, but it's not really high altitude bombing. You know, Pearl harbor isn't high altitude bombing. Right. Like. Like it's. It's a different kind of use of aircraft. But Duhei is certain that high altitude bombing is going to be like almost the. Not just like critical, but basically the only thing that air power will be used for. Right. And he is so certain of this that he becomes kind of an asshole about it. Right. Like he illegally orders the construction of bombers without getting like approval to actually spend the money. And it burns out his career. He gets forced into the infantry and he spends the early stages of World War I basically screaming that Italy can win. We can break this deadlock, you know, in the mountains and make the enemy harmless if we could just gain command of the air. And he calls for the construction of 500 bombers to drop 125 tons of bombs on Austria daily in order to break the stalemate of trench warfare now. Yeah. So this is the kind of thing it seems ahead of its time. Right. Because this is sort of where military thinking went. Right. Like it was certainly the way military thinkers were thinking in World War II because of Duhe, but it's not. Not correct. Ahead of its time in part. Like Italy simply couldn't have built 500 high altitude bombers to drop that kind of tonnage on Austria daily. They did not have the capacity like the Italian industry. The Italian military in the middle of World War I was not going to be able to do that. Right. It's just not a realistic ask of the country.

[B]

Yeah, they're busy not getting slaughtered in the war already.

[A]

Yeah, they don't have the spare resources. And also bombers aren't that good yet. Right. Like they will be by World War II. But Duhei is not saying this is what I mean. He will eventually say this is how the future should work. But he is also arguing we should be trying to do this right now. And Italy just doesn't have the resources or technical know how to create the bomber fleet he wants in 1915 when he's shouting about it to everybody who will listen. And he is such an asshole about this that he is imprisoned for a year for not shutting up about how incom. Because he's calling his superiors incompetent for not following through with his impossible plan.

[B]

Yeah, you don't get away with that during a war.

[A]

No, they lock him up for a while, but he keeps writing about his ideas while he's in jail. And the war gets worse and worse for Italy. And he's eventually brought back and given command of the Aviation Bureau, which shows you how desperate Italy is after the end of hostilities. He Starts work on his magnum opus, a manifesto on the future of strategic air Power. In 1921, it was published under the title the Command of the Air. Now, some of his arguments are pretty strong, right? One of the things he's saying is that, like, look at what happened in this fucking first World War. It was a shit show. Bomber aircraft aren't blocked by trenches, right? You can get right over them. You can hit targets behind the trenches, like their artillery, right? And you could maybe knock infantry out of trenches. Now, this is actually something. One of the things he'll be proved wrong, and that is that infantry in trenches are a lot less vulnerable to aerial bombing than everybody wants them to be, right? Turns out trenches are pretty good at protecting people, especially with the kind of technology they're going to have by World War II. It's better than just shelling them endlessly. But it is not the get out of trench free card that Duhei pretends it is. Right? Now, Duhei is also. He's one of a number of growing military theorists who had learned from the last war that these huge conscript armies that everybody has moved towards, like, if that's how war works, if the whole male civilian population is potentially part of the military, and the whole country is being mobilized to support the military, then you can't limit yourself to just striking troops in the field in future wars. Civilian populations. Duhay's attitude is civilian populations make continued resistance possible, and thus civilians participating in the infrastructure of war must be attacked, right?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Oops.

[B]

You know, it's funny, whenever there are these things that are technologically developed that I just would have assumed are older, like, I would have just assumed somehow that, like, bombing civilian populations is somehow older than this as a, like, I.

[A]

Mean, tactic, you know, it is like this. Duhei is not the first military leader to be like, civilians are a valid. This, in fact, is the norm in a lot of ancient warfare, right? Like, fucking a lot of times in ancient Greece, one city state goes to war against another. The one that loses does not get to keep being a city state. You annihilate them, right? You kill the men, you rape the women, right? Like, that's not every war, but a lot of wars in classical history go that way.

[B]

So I've been reading that for my show recently, and I suddenly had to realize. I was like, oh, the concept of surrender is sort of new. It's like a new technology is you actually, like, let people go home after you beat them.

[A]

It's more that it had stopped being the norm to consider the whole country to be enemies. But even during World War I. Right. Great Britain starves a million Germans to death by blocking ports. Germany, we know they can't grow. They don't have the ability to produce sufficient foodstuffs on their own. That's part of the military effort. Right. It's not as direct as bombing civilians. But it would be very inaccurate to pretend Duhei is the first guy who is like, civilians are on the table, right?

[B]

No, totally. But specifically the idea of this, like, standardized bombing.

[A]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's meaningful. Yeah, yeah. Like, I think that that is important that he is the guy writing in a book. This is the Strat. This is a logical strategy for how modern war ought to be pursued is the systematic destruction of civilian populations through strategic bombing. Right. It does matter that he's the first guy to write that out, you know, like, that's upon his soul. Yeah, yeah. Which is not to say that nobody would have thought to do stuff like this if he hadn't been around, right?

[B]

No, but I mean, just because someone else will invent the torment nexus is not a reason to invent the torment nexus.

[A]

No. Nor does it erase your culpability in making it. Now, one of my sources for this episode is an article by Colonel Everest Riccione of the. One of the more who's one of the more influential pilots in US combat aviation history. He's an interesting guy. He was a key member of what became known as the Fighter Mafia, which is a group of guys in the Air Force who argue, and this is in the latter half of the 20th century. They argue that the branch's bureaucracy was corrupt and lying about. This is right before the birth of, I think, the F16. They're saying the Air Force bureaucracy is corrupt and it's lying about how well certain weapon systems work for corrupt reasons. And as a result, they have all these complaints about hybrid role fighters as opposed to dedicated anti aircraft aircraft fighters. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not the fighter mafia was right. I'm just bringing this up because this is a guy who has a history of being on controversial sides of arguments. Right. And he wrote an interesting article about the history of strategic bombing for the Air Force, right. Where he is kind of laying out his thinking as to why Duhei was wrong. And he summarizes Duhei's arguments this way. He also believed that air forces would dominate surface forces on land and at sea, and that an enemy's ability to sustain a war could be eliminated. He preached the destruction of enemy Air power in the air and on the ground. The need is not only to kill the enemy's eagles, but also to destroy their eggs and their nests. Duhay wrote enemy aircraft production plants were defined as prime strategic targets. He believed that bomber attacks were inevitable and that defenses against them were useless. He believed that attacking populations with relatively small amounts of explosives, incendiary and gas weapons would make populations force their leaders to sue for peace. He believed that a powerful strategic bombing force could deter potential enemies from attacking. Now, a lot of this is the way very influential people in military planning still think to this day. Duhei's thinking is incredibly common, or at least a descent descendants of Duhei's thinking is incredibly common within military planners to this day. And this is the root of Mutually Assured Destruction. It starts with these ideas, right? Particularly the idea. Yeah.

[B]

That people won't put up with it from their leaders.

[A]

That people won't put up with it. That, that. Well, and that a powerful strategic bombing force can deter an attack. Right? Right. Okay. Because your ability. Because they can't be stopped. You can't stop a bombing run. Right. It's impossible. Part of his attitude is that the sky is too big. Right. You can't actually stop bombers from getting to where they're going to go. So if you have a powerful enough bombing fleet, like no one will attack you because they know they're doomed in that instance. Right. And this is basically how we think about near peer nuclear warfare to this day. Right. And that knowledge deters those sort of wars. So this is part of why people will argue Duhei wound up being right even though he did not foresee nuclear weapons. Right. In any way, shape or form. And to be clear, he's not right.

[B]

Right. He was wrong about bombers, but he was right for now about nukes.

[A]

Well, this is kind of the theme of our episodes is that a lot of people buy into Duheis theories and base their careers in the Air Force on believing that this is more or less right. And once nukes come around, that's the thing that like makes the things they had already believed true and is part of why they become such advocates for nuclear warfare. Right. Now I want to really emphasize how wrong Duhay is here because he is not making grand predictions about the distant future, nor is he theorizing about 21st century nuclear warfare or even late 20th century warfare. He is discussing the war he expected to break out in the next 20 years or so. And on basically every technical point, Duhei was desperately wrong Again, he argues the sky is so big that air power should only be offensive because air power cannot defend territory, and the only way to protect the homeland is to build an air force that can bomb the enemy into the ground before your opponent can do the same. He makes really specific predictions, arguing in 1928 that dropping a payload of just 300 tons of bombs over a capital city in under a month would be enough to end a war. This would all be proven catastrophically wrong. But for the later period of his life, Duhei is effectively the first air power influencer. His book doesn't sell quickly at first, but it becomes the bible of how to make an air force for basically all of the men who were in charge of the air forces in World War II. Like on every side, he's super influential, and that's not entirely accurate. He has his detractors, obviously, but he's massively influential. And I'm sure Duhei would have been thrilled to have had such an influence, because everyone in World War II tries out his ideas, but he never gets a chance to see that. Shortly after Benito Mussolini makes him the Italian chief of aviation, he dies of a heart attack in 1930. So by the way, ends his life as a fascist too.

[B]

Yeah, couldn't have happened to a worse guy.

[A]

Really tragic. You know who else died of a heart attack in 1930 after being made the fascist Minister of Aviation by Benito Mussolini?

[B]

His twin brother.

[A]

Yeah, sure. Or these sponsors. I don't know. Great.

[C]

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[A]

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[A]

And we're back. That was an awkward ad pivot. I'm not gonna lie, Margaret, I'm not gonna lie. But I think the audience will forgive us.

[B]

I think they will. I think they'll be able to find it in their heart attack to do it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

That's actually what I'm trying to do is make you feel better by making a terrible joke so that people have already forgotten about your bad ad pivot.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. Let's continue talking about this guy's stupid ideas about how planes work. Right?

[B]

300 bombs. 300 pounds of bomb.

[A]

Yeah, 300 tons of bomb. All you need. That'll wipe out any city's will to fight. So German war planners, influenced by duhei, built a bomber fleet that was tailored for the attack, not operations on enemy cities, but providing close support to their advancing infantry and armor. And this is, you could call this an adaptation of some of Duhe's certainly influenced by it. This idea that like air power should just be for the offense. Right. Like that's its primary purpose. And so it's kind of an adaptation. Right. England also, duhei's attitudes have a lot of influence on how the Royal Air Force is constructed in the interwar period. And England spends a lot of resources creating a bomber command that was meant to deter German action on the continent without requiring another painful mass conscription for British kids. You know, that does not exactly work out. Here's how Colonel Riccione describes what happened next. Germany then turned to the invasion of England. In its first test of Yuhey's theories, the Battle of Britain was engaged to gain air superiority for Operation Sea Lion. Britain's bomber command had failed to deter the war the attacks on England. But Germany's bomber fleets also failed to bring England to its knees. The Luftwaffe tried to gain air superiority over England. The initially frail Fighter force of the Royal Air Force under the competent command of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and using the nascent technology of radar, was able to inflict unacceptable losses on the German bombers and their fighter escorts. After the Battle of Britain was won by England, Hitler turned his aerial weapons on London to bring the population to its knees. Churchill cheered quietly. The bombing only stiffened the morale of Londoners and brought England's war effort to a higher pitch. So from the start, duhe is proven wrong just immediately on both counts about. Yes, yeah. Having a big bomber fleet does not deter enemy action. Also, you can defend from a bombing attack and aircraft are great on the defense. Having fighters to intercept bombers works really fucking well.

[B]

It's funny because, like, this is the Europe gave. Medieval warfare was a big part of medieval Europe, right. And the development of armor until you get to guns, it's like really fucked up. It's the development of armor that is the new technology that's changing. Shit, you put a fucking armored knight against anybody and they're just like, yeah, you kind of can't do anything unless you get a dagger to my throat, you know?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. No, it is the same. It takes place over a shorter period of time with air power. Cause shit moves faster now. Right, but it is the. I mean, it's the Red Queen hypothesis, right? Like everyone is constantly moving as fast as they can just to stay in place, you know, like you build up this great bomber fleet just in time to get attacked by a bomber fleet of your own and realize, actually, we probably should have had more fighters that might have been handier at the jump, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But also the Germans are learning. All you need is a bunch of bombers. We've got a bunch of bombers. Oh, shit. Fighter aircraft really fuck up bombers. Oh no. All our pilots are gone.

[B]

Who'd have thought Mussolini would have named a guy who wasn't actually as good at things as he said he was.

[A]

Who'd have thought the Italian fascist Minister of Aviation was wrong about some important points right? Now, one of the things that is important for what will come next is it is true air power is great on the defensive. And it's actually very possible to interdict and damage bombers before they can hit their targets. But not a single group of bombers on any side during the war is turned back. Right. Entirely without being able to drop any bombs that doesn't happen. Which for nuclear planning, this is again, one of these things nuclear warfare retroactively makes duhe correct on is that like, well, once you've got nuke, if you have a thousand bombers flying towards London with conventional bombs. Then. Yeah. Fighters can kill a bunch of those bombers and do enough damage that it renders like, you know, the Germans will drop some bombs in response. But you can make it be more costly for the Germans than it is for Great Britain.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If a thousand bombers each have a nuke, you're not stopping every nuke from hitting and all they need is one. Right, right. That is an important point about this is another lesson that's being learned. Right. At the same time as we're learning how wrong do he is. Once the nukes come into the picture, people are going to be looking at this data and seeing something different, which is that you can't stop a nuclear attack of sufficient size, even before ICBMs. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

The scale of destructiveness of a nuke is just so different.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. Huh. Yeah. Now, I do want to really emphasize the wrongness that Duhei was. Because again, he said that about 300 tons of explosives in a month dropped over an enemy capital would be enough to break any people's will to fight. During a single night during the Battle of Britain, May 10 to May 11, 1941, Germany dropped more than 700 tons of high explosives on London, as well as 86,000 incendiary devices. England kept fighting.

[B]

Yeah, no, they, they, they came up with a whole slogan about it. Yeah. Everyone pulled together. You have socialists like Orwell organizing in the Home Guard.

[A]

Yeah, A lot of people felt better.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is a fun story.

[B]

Gives us punk rock that people grew up out of.

[A]

That gives us punk rock. Sure. Yeah. But, yeah, that is an important point. Again, just how wrong Duhay is. Like, yeah, we took more than twice as much as he said would break any city in a month and a night. London did. And people don't break under bombing, you know, which is also going to influence nuclear thinkers. Because then the attitude becomes, well, you just have to kill all of them then. Yeah, yeah. So despite the fact that Duhei is right out the gate proven wrong, war planners on the Allied side continue to give a great deal of credence to his now badly marred theories. One advocate was Sir Arthur Harris, also known as Bomber Harris, who became head of the RAF's bomber command. He was a huge advocate of area bombing, bombing, precision bombing, which is another thing people are. The strategic bombing side also breaks down to a couple of broad schools. And as is always the case, most people are, you know, have, are a little. Take some from column A, some from column B, but there's you've got area bombing and precision bombing, right? And the idea behind precision bombing is that you can hit just the target you want, that is like the factory making bombs or the factory making planes, right? Or a barracks, and not hit the high rise apartment structure near it. Now, precision bombing is a lie, right? Especially it's not all that true today, but it's especially a lie. In World War II, right? It's a lot. Now you can kind of do it, although it never works as well as planners like to claim it does. But in World War II, it's just a fantasy, right? And so there's a lot of that gives a lot more push to people like Bomber Harris who are like, well, fuck precision bombing. Just bomb. Saturate an area with bombing, right? You accept greater civilian casualties so that you can cripple their industrial capabilities, right? That's the public argument. In private, they're saying something different. But the public argument is that this is just the way it has to work. The first area bombings by the RAF on German cities was in 1941, in 1942, and they did not work very well. Right. They're spun as wins, but on an actual strategic level, they're not huge hits. They cause some shock to the German citizenry, but they don't accomplish the stated goal, which is to damage war production. Right. And the RAF suffers high casualties because German air defenses are excellent. You know, duhei continues to be very wrong about air defense. It is possible, I mean, in Vietnam, North Vietnam. Part of why the war goes the way it does is that North Vietnam has excellent, very advanced air defenses. Right? Yeah. Something that gets lost in the hole. It was just some farmers in the jungle that beat the U.S. no, they had an army. They had radar guided missiles and everything, you know. When Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command for Great Britain, he immediately organized a much bigger area bombing campaign, operation millennium. On May 30th of 1942, nearly 1,100 Allied bombers hit Cologne, annihilating some 600 acres of the city and rendering 100,000 people homeless. Harris declared the raid a success. Yes, the British press did too. But they focused on the destruction of war industry, not the civilian cost. And this frustrated Harris in part because it was inaccurate. While dozens of factories had been damaged or destroyed, the city only lost the equivalent of a month's war production. The real cost to Germany, as Bomber Harris saw it, was human. Here's how he later described the purpose of Bomber Command. In his eyes, the aim is the destruction of German cities. The killing of German workers, and this, the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and on the battlefronts by the fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories.

[B]

Yeah, that makes sense. But it also does the same. Stealing the reserve. Like, I've. I've met someone whose family. I think it was Colne or Cologne. I just did the asshole thing where I've been to a city, so I'm like, let me use the whatever. Yeah, but, you know, it's like, I've met someone who was like, oh, yeah, my whole family was like, staunch anti Nazis. And then 80% of the family was wiped out in one night by a bombing. And then they all joined the army. And I'm like, yeah, they still joined the Nazi army, so fuck them. But, like, also, like, man, I couldn't tell you that anyone I've ever met would do anything to that.

[A]

That's just how people work. When their family gets killed in a bombing, they get pissed. They don't always. They're not their best selves, you know?

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

That's just how people be, homie. I don't know what to tell you. They don't like having their families killed by bombs. And there's as. We'll talk about a lot of debate as to the influence of strategic bombing on the German civilian population. But what we can say is that it's not why they lose. However, whatever it does to morale doesn't end the war, you know, so Bomber Harris is wrong in his primary attitude, right, as to, like, what would work to actually end the war. And he never gets called on that because we win the war anyway. And everyone kind of thinks, fuck those guys. Low key, high key. And, you know, fuck him. But it doesn't work. That is important now. There's not agreement. And in fact, a lot of conflict between the US and Great Britain over this strategy. Initially, the guys in the U.S. army Air Command do not all agree with Harris. And in fact, we keep conducting. The Brits are doing nighttime raids, which allows you to lose the least aircraft while killing the most civilians or killing the most people. We do daytime raids for a long time, which are way more dangerous because the idea is it gives the civilians more of a chance to get away. Right? That's part of why you're doing it. It's more honorable, basically. Right. Which it is. But it also means you lose a lot more guys, Right? Like it's way more dangerous. Yeah, it's a very admirable thing I think, that we're doing for a while. We're not always going to be that way. So, yeah, this, this debate really starts to erupt after this point. And on one hand you've got these area bombing strategic bombing advocates saying like, you know, I know it hasn't quite worked yet, right. Like we haven't knocked Germany out of the fight. They're not giving up yet. But if we just get more bombers, bro, it'll work. Right. And on the other side, and again, a lot of people do kind of wind up in the middle here, but the other side broadly are like, well, close air support is what's most important, right. Air power's primary use is its ability to augment conventional forces in taking and holding territory. Right. And close air support works really well. It had proved to be tantalizingly potent in North Africa and guys in the US like General Pete Cassada were bullish about its potential in a future invasion of France. An early test for the strategic bombing advocates, on the other hand, came prior to the invasion of Sicily. There's this island called Pantelleria, which is garrisoned with about 11,000 Italian troops that we need to take before we invade Sicily and then invade Italy. And I'm going to quote from an article in National Interest by James Stevenson here. The bombing of Pantelleria became an experiment, one anticipated to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that bombing would ratify what up to then had been a matter of fate, but would soon offer proof. Through bombing alone, surrender was a certainty. All these forces were assembled to test the assertion that if you destroy what a man has and remove the possibility of his bringing more in, then in due course of time it becomes impossible for him to defend himself. Major General Jimmy Doolittle said if bombing alone did not force a surrender, the Allies planned to invade the island by June 11. In an attempt to avoid the need for an invasion, The Allies generated 5,284 sorties, dropping a total of 12.4 million pounds of bombs on Pantelleria. Jesus. Did it work? Kinda. After a month of unopposed round the clock bombing, the Italians surrendered after Allied ground troops had approached the island. Right. They didn't surrender on their own from the bombing. They surrendered before ground troops came in. Now you can still say, but that still worked, right? However, there's a couple of other issues. For one, Italian defenses were remarkably Intact still, given the force deployed against them. Because nearly every bomb missed, the B17s were most accurate, with a 22% hit rate. That's defined as landing a bomb within 100 yards of its target. So the B17s hit 22% of the time. And that's our best bomber.

[B]

And that's within a football field.

[A]

Yeah. And that's still within a football field. Yeah. And our medium bomber's hit rate is about 6%. Now, this is a problem because we had been claiming very different things about the accuracy of our bombs. Back at the start of 1943, we'd had something called the Casablanca Conference, in which Winston Churchill sat down with the eighth Air Force commander, Ira Eaker, who promised the British Prime Minister that the B17 Flying Fortress, with its fancy new. We had these things called the Norden bomb site, which was like, this is the shit. This makes precision bombing possible. It's like almost. It's like a little computerized bombing system that, like, we can do things with bombs we never could do before. You can drop a bomb from 25,000ft and hit a target the size of a pickle barrel. Right. That's the promise Ira Eaker makes. Winston Churchill, when he's like, holy shit. Sitting down, he's like, we can hit a pickle barrel at 25,000ft. Now, in combat, a few months later, these things would hit within a football field only 22% of the time. Yeah. So you're getting this. This is going to be also a theme with all of the nuke stuff that the Air Force builds. They will make all these claims about, yes, it's this accurate and it's this safe, and it can only be activated if this and this and this happens. So it could never be accidentally fired. And they're like, oh, wait, but what if this thing happens? That happens every day. Oh, yeah. That could accidentally launch all of our missiles. Yeah. Are you guys going to fix it? We actually don't want to. That's the story of the Minuteman in a nutshell. But we'll talk more about that later. Anyway, with a fleet of these Eaker promised we can disembowel the German Reich and destroy its industrial capacity with no need for ground forces. Right. We can just gut the Reich entirely through precision bombing. Now, Churchill has some direct experience with aerial warfare, and he does not believe Eaker. Right. He doesn't believe him about the accuracy. And the other thing that Ira Eaker is saying is we don't need fighter escorts for our B17s because they have all these guns on them. That'll be enough to deter attack.

[B]

We get in the bomb fortress part.

[A]

Yeah, that's basically the idea behind that title. But like, yeah, because these B17s are surrounded in machine guns, fighters won't be able to. If they attack us, they won't be able to penetrate. And that's necessary because the bombers can fly a lot further than the fighters. So what Eaker is saying is we can send these bombers into the heart of enemy territory. We don't need to worry about the range of the fighters and they'll be fine. And he's going to be wrong about that too. So one result of this, the Casablanca Conference, is that the Allies put together a list of military assets. They want to prioritize destroying or disabling a task that would overwhelmingly fall on air power. These included submarine bases, train lines, fuel storage, aircraft production facilities, and other crucial war industry sites. One of the first of these targets was a ball bearing production facility in Regensburg. Ball bearings were critical for constructing aircraft and a number of other important military vehicles. Operation Double Strike was launched by Major General Eaker's 8th Army Air Force on August 17, 1943. 376 bombers plowed deep into German territory beyond the range of any fighters to escort them. Per the website codenames Operations of World War II, the mission inflicted heavy damage on the Regensburg target, but only at catastrophic loss to the force. And as much as 60 bombers were lost and many more damaged beyond economical repair. As a result, the 8th Air Force was incapable of immediately following Double Strike with a second attack that might have seriously crippled German industry. When Schweinfurt, that's the industrial facility, was attacked again two months later, the lack of long range fighter escorts still had not been addressed and losses were even higher. As a consequence, the U.S. depenetration strategic bombing effort was curtailed for five months.

[B]

Could you imagine going on a thing where you're like, well, last time we did this about, you know, one in six of us died anyway, so we didn't change anything.

[A]

Are we different? Yeah. Are we doing anything new?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No. Same plan, huh? Okay. I mean, you talk to anyone who saw heavy combat and they have stories like that where it's like, well, this went really badly, so we're just doing the same thing, huh?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That is how armies work now. This was a double failure, not just for Eaker, but for Duhe's theories. Once again, the vastness of the sky didn't stop a defending military from inflicting Severe casualties on a bomber fleet. And that despite the damage done to the Regensburg plant, German industrial capabilities were not seriously harmed. As Reich Minister of Supply Albert Speer stated after the war, no plane or tank failed to be built for lack of ball bearings. As Colonel Rich. Yeah, it just didn't work. Colonel Riccione noted in his article, the Allies failed in their choice of a target because they hadn't learned their intelligence was bad. Germany was importing ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland by this point. And it also stopped. They had foreseen this and stockpiled pre war. They had also redesigned a bunch of aircraft and shit to not need as many ball bearings.

[B]

This was for, like a Home Alone style plan they had. That was actually. The stockpile was unrelated.

[A]

It was. They were dropping it down the stairs.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Did horrible damage to the 3rd Army. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So. Yeah. Riccione writes, this was a failure both in target definition and target priority. Worse, because it was vulnerable, the 8th Air Force had become the target. Now, over in England, Arthur Harris never accepted the primary contentions of the advocates of precision strategic bombing. In October of 1943, not long after Regensburg, he stated, the aim is destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battlefronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are acceptable and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not byproducts of attempts to hit factories. Yeah. Bobber Harris. One thing you have to give him. He's very clear. No, no, no. This is about killing women and children and rendering them homeless. That's what we're doing. That's the business the RAF is in. You guys need to stop pretending that you're fucking with ball bearings.

[B]

I mean, there's an honesty to that that I respect.

[A]

Yes. The man knows what he's about. It's killing civilians, but he's about it.

[B]

Yeah. He has made his peace with whatever he believes. And he thinks that this is the lesser evil, is by doing a lot of evil and there's not a lot of evil.

[A]

Quickly. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A little before the Regensburg attack, Bomber Harris had launched a nighttime raid on Hamburg. It was the opposite of a precise attempt to destroy a specific target. Incendiaries created a firestorm that swept through the downtown area, incinerating roughly 40,000 civilians. This is like. And this is one of the. This Becomes a theory. Right? Like this is a theory put into practice. But there had been this theory that. But by dropping incendiaries in the right place in certain parts of a city, you can create these firestorms that massively amplify the damage of your bombing campaign. Right. And this is like when it. When it really works for the first time. This is going to be a massive part of our strategy when we're bombing the Japanese home islands. Right. Is creating these hideous firestorms. And this also. This becomes. I think the term is literally like bonus damage. Basically. This is like a concept of nuclear war too. Is a big part of the appeal of nuclear weapons to the people planning to use them is that you create these firestorms the size of states. And like, that's really handy. It really amplifies the amount of a country you can destroy when you create firestorms that wipe out thousands of miles of terrain.

[B]

So it has never occurred to me until this moment that the phrase firestorm. I'm aware that firestorms happen in wildfires. It has never really actually occurred to me until this moment that people artificially create them. And that's where firestorm, like, you know, a firestorm to purify. If you're into shitty hardcore music.

[A]

Yeah. Yep.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yep, yep. I mean, I think most people have learned the term firestorm from Command and Tiberian Son. Firestorm, obviously. The Tiberian sun expansion pack. That was pretty good. But some people learned it from history. I'm sure.

[B]

I learned it from a shitty hardcore band.

[A]

You learned it from a hardcore band. I learned it from Command and comics. Yeah. In November of 1943 and March of 1944, there were vast raids on Berlin which left much of the capital in ruins. And yet German morale continued to hold. This is the thing. Bomber Harris, he's more honest. But what he's saying will happen still doesn't happen. Yeah, he's wrong. No amount of bombing causes Germany to give up. By the time the war in Europe enters its end game, there were very mixed conclusions to draw from the actual efficacy of strategic bombing and precision bombing bombing. Both ideologies had suffered failures and both had claimed successes, although some of those were dubious claims of success. Months earlier, Bomber Harris had considered strategic bombing the same as opening a new front, summarized in a write up for the Juno beach center quote. Until D Day, he was convinced that bombings, if they were destructive enough, could force Germany into submission without the Allied casualties that were bound to result from a massive landing operation in continental Europe. And in Part two. So we're going to talk about what happens next. We'll get to Japan finally, and we'll start talking about the nukes. But this is all necessary. These are the foundational assumptions of the people who build the doomsday device that we all live under right now. Like this second, an incident could have started, maybe just because a radar station was wrong, that will, in 15 to 30 minutes, result in the annihilation of all organized life, human life on the planet. That could have happened, as I say this sentence. And we mostly won't know until the bombs fall. And there's really nothing. Like. One thing that maybe will comfort you is that none of the facilities we have to protect our government will work. None of them are sufficient for the amount, the tonnage, the megatonnage of explosives coming at them. That little. Like, this is a good thing about Jacobson's book Nuclear War. One thing she points out is like, yeah, there's bunkers underneath the Pentagon and the White House. Everyone will bake to death slowly, as if they're in an oven. Like, we know what kind of forces will be deployed against D.C. there's no surviving in those bunkers. It's a much worse death than the people topside will have.

[B]

Well, that's good.

[A]

That's good. Anyway, maybe that'll cheer you up as we roll out of Part one.

[B]

I appreciate this idea of, like, I hadn't put together this idea that World War I, the powder keg was intentional.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, that. That it was this Mutually Assured Destruction concept. And, like, seeing the. The through line is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Fascinating.

[A]

It wasn't as direct because it did kind of. A lot of this started to, like, this evolved accidentally out of stuff that had existed before. It was not constructed as consciously as nuclear madness, but it was something people were conscious of, people talked about. That's a reason why so many historians have discussed the system of alliances and, like, military armament schedules and like, the different, like, arming schedules for reserves as a doomsday device. Right. Because it worked that way. And it is really relevant to discuss that in the context of the doomsday device that we all live under right now.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

Cool. All right. All right, everybody. Magpie, do you want to plug anything? You got a plug?

[B]

Oh, well, if you respond to the possible imminent destruction of all things by retreating a little bit into escapism, you could listen to me and Robert and some of our friends play Pathfinder, where we're just pretending to be people in a fantasy world dealing with people.

[A]

If you don't know what Pathfinder is. It's a tabletop game thing. Yeah. Much in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons or a number of other games.

[B]

Just legally distinct.

[A]

Legally distinct. Yeah.

[B]

And if you like Weird History, I have a podcast called Cool People who Did Cool Stuff with a totally original the format. Robert, you got to try this format. What I do is I research a topic every week. Okay. And then I get a guest who doesn't know as much about that topic, but sometimes knows, like, kind of related things around that topic. And then I tell them what I've learned.

[A]

That seems like the newest idea in podcasting. Is there a producer named Sophie there that doesn't say very much, but sometimes talks a lot? That is possible. Yeah. You should actually.

[B]

Robert, you should use that part too. Get a producer named Sophie.

[A]

I'll see. I'll think about it. Mario. I'll think about it. I'll think about it.

[B]

But don't take my name. You have a decent name. Behind the Bastards. Mine's cool people who did cool stuff.

[A]

Okay. Cool people who did cool stuff. Check out us playing Pathfinder on it could happen. Here's book club. And remember, if there is a nuclear war, all of the people who got us into it will also die unthinkable deaths. So, I don't know, try to live near the center of a city and just, you know, say the things to your loved ones that you need to say. Yeah.

[B]

Tell your friends you love you.

[A]

Tell your friends you love them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Bye.

[B]

Bye.

[A]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[C]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards if a Lenovo computer for your business is on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source lenovo.com youm'll find exclusive deals on the PCs you want for your business, like the ThinkPad X914 Aura Edition and Yoga 7i 2in1. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparing and just go directly to the source lenovo.com where PCs are up to 50% off. That's lenovo.com.

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[A]

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[A]

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