Show 59 - (Blitz) The Destroyer of Worlds
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It's been a long time since we've done a Blitz edition, and as a friend pointed out to me when I explained that this latest program of ours was going to be a six-hour long show that we were going to classify as a Blitz edition, he said, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not sure you know the meaning of the word.

And I laughed because he's right. These started off, this idea of a blitz show was going to be something to help us get more shows out and some nice quick ones, right? In other words, in addition to these great epics that took forever and, you know, half killed us and half killed you to listen to them, we'd have things in between and they grew too because I'm obviously, you know, I have a problem. I'm addicted to context, as one of you said.

A firm believer in the past is prologue, and that there's no good natural place to start any story, right? Everything's connected. It's arbitrary where you decide to begin things. That's how I had a show I wanted to do about Cleopatra that stretched into a six-part series on Rome, because where do you start the Cleopatra story?

The reason I chose the topic that I originally chose for today's program was because I thought it artificially constrained me. It's two weeks long. How could you possibly do a really long show on a two-week long event? Well, six hours later, here we are, and it's also a Blitz edition, which now doesn't have anything to do with the length of the show. It's turned out through evolution to be a different kind of show that focuses on different things instead of being about people or events or

or eras specifically, usually they focus on an idea or a question and then weave history around the question somehow. And usually the recipe has slightly less drama than the historical epics, but slightly more twist, as we call those musings and weird twilight zone things that sort of come with the territory with these programs.

For what it's worth, this could have been a two-parter, but we didn't want to do that to you, so you get one long one instead. And maybe in an experimental effort here to see what works, and in addition to some feedback we got from you folks, we tried arbitrarily after the fact, mind you, it wasn't put together this way, to separate the show into sections, books, book one, book two, in places where maybe there are natural breaks between

you know, stopping points or what have you. We'll see based on your feedback whether you liked that approach or not. Finally, this is a very unusual story to tell because unlike most historical tales which are about things that happened, this is about something that didn't happen but almost happened and still could happen. And it's a tale being told from the middle of the story in an unfolding series of events that are still ongoing.

And so while you can feel like you somehow have a bit of a spoiler knowing how this will turn out, in the specific case we're talking about here in this tale today, because it's an ongoing story, there's no guarantee that you actually do know the end. In that sense, this story is not just prologue for the event I originally wanted to talk about, which was the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's prologue for our own future, potentially.

Strap in, get ready for a six-hour Blitz edition. We call it by the light and airy romantic comedy style title of The Destroyer of Worlds. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's hardcore history. The Blitz edition. Anytime you hear an analysis...

of our species explaining our strong and our weak points and why we are where we are today you'll hear someone talk about human adaptability won't you the fact that we can adapt and this is something that's tied to our intelligence obviously for changing circumstances has helped us overcome all sorts of problems and walls that you might have hit along the way for civilizational growth to transcend all those boundaries and here we find ourselves in the 21st century today

alive and thriving, but with several major problems in the distance that have the potential to change that fact, unless we adapt around them. Now, given our past history, you would think that we've shown quite the aptitude in adapting, but some of these problems are

may require adaptation beyond which we are capable. Do you hit an adaptation wall at some point beyond which you can no longer change as a society, as a species, as humankind? There are things that we have done from time immemorial that fill up your history books from start to finish that would be unimaginable if we did them today. But considering our track record history-wise, what are the odds we'll never do them again?

Case in point, we currently live in an era of human history that some have referred to as the Long Peace, which began in 1945. Now, obviously, there hasn't been a whole lot of peace since 1945. There's been lots of conflict. People get bombed all the time. I mean, human violence is ongoing and continuous. But what that refers to is conflict between the great powers.

The kinds of wars you've seen from Mesopotamia onward. The World Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Hundred Years' War, the Punic Wars. I mean, it goes on and on, doesn't it? Forever. One of the constants of human history, right? Up until about 70 or so years ago. Of course, it was 70 or so years ago, 1945, where humankind...

continuously improving their weapons technology from the Stone Age forward, finally reached a point where they had created a weapon system that might be too destructive to be used. And yet if mankind has always used their innovative technology to create better weapons and always use those better weapons, what did this mean for the norms of human behavior? If mankind simply treated

the things that we discovered at the end of the Second World War the way we've treated every other weapon we've ever created, what would happen to the world today? What makes you think, though, that this is a theoretical question? There is no guarantee that the long peace lasts forever, and it's unimaginable to think about what a general war amongst great powers would even look like with the kind of technology we possess today.

humankind is 70 plus years into an ongoing and unending experiment can we handle our weapons technology and the only way this experiment ever concludes is if we find out that we can't there's a famous quote that may or may not have been said you never know about these things by the great physicist albert einstein

He's supposed to have said something to the effect, if he doesn't know with what sort of weapons the Third World War will be fought with, but the one after that will be fought with sticks and stones. One of my favorite phrases coined at a certain point during the long piece, which was attributed to Air Force General Curtis LeMay, but he swears he never said it, was bombing someone back to the Stone Age. Is something like that even possible? And what are the odds that

that we get to find out. I think what I find so interesting about both those quotes, the Einstein one and the LeMay one, is that they both invoke this idea of knocking humanity back on the civilization scale a few rungs below where we are now.

As we all know, human history, as I've described it, is kind of like a stock market and you have your ups when civilization reaches new levels of sophistication and technological capabilities and all that. And then you have your downs. And it's sort of weird for modern people to realize that there were ever people who lived in a time where their forebears were more technologically sophisticated than they were. We've been kind of on a long stock market run since about the Renaissance or really the Middle Ages.

Haven't had any downturns, you know, within a thousand or more years. Start getting pretty fat and happy and comfortable and you forget that there may be our variables out there that could do to us what giant plagues that wiped out, you know, a quarter of the population could do back in the old days. Take, for example, what both Einstein and LeMay were referring to, nuclear war between the great powers, what we used to call World War III, World

What once upon a time when I was growing up even seemed to be like a gun aimed at your head and you walked around with this all the time, a sort of Damocles over your entire society, really the entire world. Because it didn't matter if you were a neutral country during the Cold War, if an all-out nuclear exchange happened between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, Switzerland wasn't escaping unscathed, right? Just because they were neutral.

It became the first time in human history where you had the potential for a single human being. We really don't know how these things run, but the potential for a single human being to have the power to destroy tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of lives with a decision window of minutes.

By the giving of an order. You think of all of the really scary people in human history from a power standpoint. Your Genghis Khans, your Alexander the Great, you name it, your Hitlers, it doesn't matter. None of them had that kind of power. If Genghis Khan decided he was going to destroy your civilization, you were in for 10, 20, 30 years of war maybe, especially if you were China.

If Richard Nixon in 1969 decides to nuke China, you destroy 100 million people in an afternoon. Nobody's ever had that kind of power before. It's a unique new human experience, and you don't get many of those. Although the people that were there, the 400, 450 special human beings that witnessed the birth of the atomic slash nuclear age realized the minute they saw it that everything had changed.

this successful testing of an atomic bomb was of course the famous trinity bomb test from july sixteenth nineteen forty five and not only was the weapon successful which was not a given but it was more powerful than the physicists had expected and many of them if not all of them could look into the future and see

that this was a weapon that was only going to grow in power as time went on. As powerful as the test they had just witnessed was, this is scratching the surface of what this new era will provide in terms of weaponry. J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes called the father of the atomic bomb, described the moment that the bomb went off this way in a 1965 interview on a program called The Decision to Drop the Bomb. Quote,

We knew the world would not be the same. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him.

takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." All the old religious texts always have so much power to the language, don't they? And in this case,

It matched what Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists created and saw and witnessed, and that day must have been a whole slew of mixed emotions for those people. The famous Manhattan Project was a giant endeavor to build a superweapon, and some of the greatest minds in physics and sciences related to that from all over the world were brought together, massive amounts of

resources and manpower and money devoted to the project and all these people sitting on pins and needles during the test because nobody knew if this was going to work or not there were a lot of reputations on the line all sorts of of giant amounts of pressure and tension and so when the bomb went off there was a huge sense of relief and triumph but mixed emotions among some of the physicists not all of them by the way

but people like Oppenheimer for sure. And the reason for the mixed emotions was if you had already seen how the last year, what would become the last year of the Second World War, 1945, had gone, who would have thought anyone needed to create a super weapon that was much of an improvement on the technology as it was being unleashed that year in the war? I mean, in 1945, cities were being wiped off the map a couple of times a week.

cities if there's one thing the second world war proved yet again is it doesn't matter how many arms limitation ideas you want to float you know when you're not in total war how much you have these genteel ideas about how weapons will be used and when they will and won't be employed when you are fighting with everything you have against the other great powers in what's called total war and

There is nothing in the arsenal that you are not prepared to use. People sometimes point out poison gas wasn't used in any sort of major way in the Second World War, but the reason why is because it wasn't a war-winning tool. If it had been, they'd have used it. It wasn't worth what would happen in return to you for something that amounted to essentially a minor irritant in terms of the war effort. Nuclear weapons would have been a different thing. I mean, imagine if Hitler...

and the Nazis had gotten a hold of a nuclear bomb first. That's the thought that motivated a number of those physicists involved in the Manhattan Project, deny Germany the chance to get nuclear weapons before the Allies. Some of them were less enthused once they realized, well, there's no way that they're going to beat us in this race, because then all of a sudden you've worked to create a super weapon, and you've put it in the hands of human beings.

Therein lies both the problem and the challenge and the physicists when they thought to themselves about this knew it. When they talk about how we're all going to survive a world where the weaponry is as powerful as the modern descendants of those weapons that were originally used at the end of the Second World War, the physicists talk about us needing to grow as a species and

or else is sort of what's implied and i would suggest that in most of these quotes you can hear them looking on the bright side or putting the best face on the idea of now that we have these super weapons what does it mean for mankind oppenheimer himself said quote

It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, but the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain past, and beyond there is a different country. End quote. In other words, we could never quite get that peace thing right until we had the right incentive. The fact that we'll all be blown to kingdom come is the right incentive, and

you know hail peace that's putting a good face on it oppenheimer wasn't always so positive arthur holly compton also physicist wrote quote

It is hard to think of fissionable materials when fashioned into bombs as being a source of happiness. However, this may be. If with such destructive weapons men are to survive, they must grow rapidly in human greatness. A new level of human understanding is needed. The reward for using the atom's power toward man's welfare is great and sure. The punishment for its misuse would seem to be death."

and the destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years these are the alternatives that atomic power as the steel of Daedalus presents to mankind we are forced to grow into greater manhood end quote is that a nice way of saying adapt or die when it comes to altering modes of human behavior that have been a part of the story since there's been a story

Of course, not all the physicists always looked at the bright side on this question. There's a famous quote by Albert Einstein that makes him sound like he's a bit of a pessimist when it comes to the question of society's ability to adapt or die. In this question, he's supposed to have said, quote, the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe, end quote.

A gun aimed at our heads, a sword of Damocles, something we were very aware of when I was a kid. We did duck and cover drills for atomic bombs dropping, nuclear bombs, thermonuclear bombs by then. That gun is still pointed at our heads. We just don't notice it anymore because so many people have grown up in the shadow of that that they're used to it. If somebody's pointing a gun at your head all the time, eventually do you forget about it?

If you're born with a gun pointed towards your head, do you even notice it? In a way, I kind of see the ability of people to forget that that gun is aimed at them as an evolutionary success tool. I mean, why should these people be traumatized because of something that happened 70 or so years ago? They had their own lives, their own problems, their own world to deal with.

I mean, if we all had to carry the baggage of preceding generations on our backs all the time, what would we be dealing with? So in a sense, it's a healing mechanism. But is healing the same as forgetting? It seems to me one of the main things working against the idea of this long peace continuing indefinitely is we don't remember why it was so important we never have another great power war to begin with.

If the sword of Damocles has not fallen in a while, you forget how sharp it is and what a horrible mess it can leave. British philosopher Bertrand Russell once made it sound like the odds of human beings managing to avoid having to be reminded how sharp the sword of Damocles is when it comes to nuclear war seems unlikely. He wrote, quote,

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for 10 minutes. It would be unreasonable to do so without accident for 200 years. End quote. If you want to be reminded of what that sort of Damocles can do, there's only two real-world examples that you can go study that will tell you. There's a lot of scientists out there and calculations done and testing that

But the only thing that really compares, if you want to see not a glimpse into the past of a singular human experience that only happened twice to a certain group of human individuals in a certain situation, but instead you want to see what a future nuclear attack will look like, you have to look at the only two that there have ever been. The atomic bombings at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the one right afterwards, a few days later, at Nagasaki.

These days when the atomic bombings are discussed, it's often in the context of discussing the morality of dropping them. Was it right to use them at all? I find that the problem with these discussions, and I've talked about it at length in other programs, is this idea that the people involved at the time, the decision makers, had as much free range of options as people today assume they have when they didn't.

I mean, the idea that President Truman could have done something besides drop the bomb is a little bit out of step with the political realities he was dealing with at the time. Historian Gary Wills, who wrote a whole book on the power of the atomic bomb to change everything, had this to say about what would have happened if Truman had decided not to use the bombs or to have used them in another way.

The other person, by the way, mentioned in this quote is General Groves. General Groves was the military head of the Manhattan Project. In his book, Bomb Power, historian Gary Wills writes, quote, If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the bomb would be furious. The public, the

the press, and Congress would turn on the president and his advisors. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brainpower and manpower from other war projects, and all for nothing."

In addition to that, and this is often overlooked, I think, by people who talk about the morality of dropping a bomb like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons on civilians, and that's what the Japanese civilians were already putting up with on a daily basis. What the Germans had started in places like Rotterdam in 1940 and the Japanese had done in China before the Second World War even officially started had been developed into the aerial weapons we saw from 1943 onward.

And they were devastating without the nuclear bombs at all. In March 1945, months before the atomic bombs were dropped, Tokyo was hit with a firebombing raid that killed 100,000 people and vaporized 17 square miles of the capital. And by the time the atomic bombs were dropped, 50 to 60 square miles of Tokyo were gone, and it had been taken off the top priority targeting list.

Some 60 plus other Japanese cities had had the same fate meted out to them. It was a logical extension, a natural progression, if you will, of total war. It's a dynamic that would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. It's partly the reason why when we discuss another total war today, it's so scary because the idea that human beings could control what's going on is an illusion.

It has a momentum all its own. Now, there are some things that were different about the atomic bombings and that blow me away to this day. One is the instantaneous nature of it. It's hard enough, you would think, to get your mind around the changes that happened to your city during a massive late-war bombing raid.

I mean, if you have 500 or 1,000 heavy bombers flying over your city practically wingtip to wingtip, dropping incendiary and high-explosive bombs on your town, how hard is that to get your mind around? When you crawl out of the bomb shelter and see what used to be your city in ruins, how hard is that to get your mind around? But if instead of happening over a 24- to 36-hour time period, it happens in the blink of an eye, well, that's what the atomic bombs did.

The best relatively short description I've read of the effect of the two bombs was penned by author Susan Southard in her book about Nagasaki. She says that within a second of the bomb being dropped, the fireball was 750 feet in diameter and the temperature in the fireball was 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than at the center of the sun, she writes.

She says, quote,

Houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds catapulted against walls or flattened beneath collapsed buildings. Those working in the fields, riding streetcars, and standing in line at city ration stations were blown off their feet or hit by plummeting debris and pressed to the scalding earth.

An iron bridge moved 28 inches downstream. As their buildings began to implode, patients and hospital staff jumped out of the windows of Nagasaki Medical College Hospital and mobilized high school girls leaped from the third story of Shirayama Elementary School, a half mile from the blast. End quote. She then points out that a survivor emphasized that it all happened in an instant.

Think of the shock that this engenders. And there seemed to be, you know, two things in quick succession. Well, really three. First, if you saw it, you got the light. And if you weren't shielded from the light somehow, it burns you. And it looked kind of like it's been described differently, but like a flashbulb going off of an old camera, that sort of bluish white light. Then there was the blast wave, which, you know, could level everything depending on how far away from it you were.

And then there were the fires, which seemed to break out several minutes after the actual blast, as though everything were sort of heated up and it took a minute for, you know, the kindling to...

catch a light but then it did everywhere at once and some of the most harrowing stories come from family members who would be trying to get another family member you know who was stuck in the debris that was all of a sudden everywhere out as the flames approached and had to leave them i mean essentially saying goodbye as they watched their child stuck in the rubble as the flames approached it's horrifying stuff and the people who were first on the scene in both cities talk about running into

Human zombies, if you will. Silent people burned almost beyond recognition that were like in a trance. Hiroshima survivor Hiroshi Shibayama saw the explosion and ran toward the city center where the bomb had gone off and said, quote,

When we had gone about one kilometer, we were brought to a standstill by a grotesque group of people. The blood pounded in our heads again. I remember that my eyes were drawn inoxorably to the scene. The people were burned so badly that it was hard to distinguish feature from feature, and all were blackened as if covered with soot. Their clothes were in rags. Many were naked. Their hands hung limply in front of them. The skin of their hands and arms dangled from their fingertips.

Their faces were not the faces of the living, end quote. He then went on to point out that he'd seen quite a few normal air raids up close, but this was different, quote,

How could I comprehend what I saw before me now? It was not just a group of injured people, nor was it a procession of the dead or a band of ghosts. No sound came from these figures. They seemed to have given up. The pity that they engendered is beyond expression. They continued to stream past in deathly quiet. How can anyone describe them? Their clothes ripped from them by the force of the explosion, their bodies burned by the intense heat.

Some were completely naked and others had only the shirts stuck to their bodies. The injuries to their faces were particularly cruel. Unscathed and with clothes intact, I felt like an intruder, end quote. The general estimates of the casualties from the Hiroshima bomb, for example, are between 70 and 80,000 dead from the fire and the explosion, more killed later by radiation, and

and probably an equal number of people injured the nagasaki bomb numbers were somewhat lower due to all sorts of different reasons nonetheless the tens of thousands of deaths maybe almost a hundred thousand in one city caused by a single bomb was an exponential growth in the power of the weaponry

After the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, U.S. President Harry Truman went on television to try to explain to the American people and the rest of the world what this new weapon was and to essentially, officially bring the rest of the world up to speed that an entirely new era had begun, the Atomic Age.

A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold, and the end is not yet. With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase

in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Historian Michael S. Sherry says that there were overlapping feelings on the part of the American public to finding out that this new reality existed. He writes, quote,

A cacophony of reactions to the bomb's advent arose swiftly among Americans. Some stressed pride in American achievement and satisfaction in gaining vengeance against the Japanese. Truman's announcement that the Japanese, quote, have been repaid many fold, end quote, for Pearl Harbor, a minority of Americans wished the war had gone on longer so more atomic bombs could have been used against Japan. Others, quote,

Others, especially soldiers who assumed that an invasion of Japan was the only alternative to the bomb's use, welcomed the peace that the bomb had speeded, and the bomb itself as a tool for enforcing continued peace. Overlapping those other reactions was another. As in responding to the Holocaust, many Americans saw the bomb as evidence of the scourge of modern war, in the face of which the wisdom of American use seemed a minor matter.

Now he quotes a New York Herald Tribune article from the era which said, quote, One forgets the effect on Japan as one senses the foundation of one's own universe trembling. End quote. Famed CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow put it this way at the time, quote,

seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured end quote so while americans could be glad that the bomb was in their hands there was a clear sense and understanding that this would probably not always remain the case

And something like that, when you were used to having two oceans that kept you safe from anybody doing any major damage to your country of the sort that other countries were very familiar with during the Second World War, could set the foundations of your universe trembling. And this is where you begin to get this divide, this idea on the part of some that everything has changed and so the human species is going to have to shed themselves of habits they've had forever.

when people who view themselves anyway as much more firmly attached to reality, who think that what we have here is just a natural extension of technological change, working in the benefit of our side, the good side. President Harry Truman called the atomic bomb the greatest thing in the history of the world. The following year after the bombs were dropped and the war was over, there would be a famous meeting where the

scientist who headed up the Manhattan Project, meets face-to-face with the president who dropped his creation twice. Oppenheimer is a perfect example of the side that feels as though Pandora's box has been opened and he feels increasingly responsible for picking the lock on it. And it sounds like President Truman was caught off guard by Oppenheimer's guilt. There are many different

quotes of this account and they're all different in their book to win a nuclear war michio kaku and daniel axelrod tell the story this way oppenheimer and the president and the secretary of state are talking

Quote, In the course of the conversation, Oppenheimer told Truman, Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands. Truman then reached into his top pocket, removed a neatly folded handkerchief and offered it, saying, Would you like to wipe them?

After Oppenheimer left, Truman turned to Dean Acheson, the Undersecretary of State, instructed him not to bring Oppenheimer around anymore, and declared, "'Blood on his hands? Damn it, he hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it.'" A more R-rated version of the story is told in Jean-Jacques Solomon's Science et Politique, where he said, quote,

Oppenheimer, when he went into Truman's office with Dean Acheson, said to the latter, wringing his hands, I have blood on my hands. Truman later said to Acheson, never bring that fucking cretin in here again. He didn't drop the bomb, I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick. End quote. Truman could dismiss Oppenheimer, but he was far from the only atomic scientist who was gravely concerned.

Even before the two bombs were used on Japan in the Second World War, more than 70 atomic scientists signed a petition with a bunch of different things in it, but among other concerns were that the bombs were going to be used against cities and people, and they suggested using them offshore or in uninhabited areas. Truman, as we said, had a whole bunch of different pressures working on him that these scientists didn't have working on them.

But once the war was over, all of a sudden the outlook could change, because it could afford to be changed. You're not in hot blood anymore, you're in cold blood. And now you have in your hands these new weapons. What do you do with them? How do you control them? Who's in charge of them? And what if other countries get them too?

There were, in the years 1945 and 1946, a lot of tug of wars and all sorts of questions being debated. I mean, the number one for a while was, who's in charge of atomic weapons? The military? It seemed like a logical choice. Their argument was, if we're going to have to use them, we ought to be in control of them and know what we're doing. Truman is supposed to have said something to the effect of, I'm not going to let some dandy lieutenant colonel decide he wants to start an atomic war.

Eventually that power would be wrested into the hands of the civilian authorities and the president particularly. He was going to be the one who had the power to decide to push the button as it will be known later. Historian Gary Wills said this is one of the effects the atomic bomb had. It changed the American constitutional system almost quietly due to the technological changes

Necessities that the weapon required, he wrote, quote.

Lodging the fate of the world in one man, with no constitutional check on his actions, caused a violent break in our whole governmental system. General Groves had a mere simulacrum of that authority, and only for a single project. Presidents now have it as part of their permanent assignment. This was in effect a quiet revolution. It was accepted under the impression that technology imposed it as a harsh necessity, and that

In case of nuclear attack on the United States, the president would not have time to consult Congress or instruct the public. He must respond instantly, which means that he must have the whole scientific apparatus for response on constant alert, a

accountable only to him. If, on the other hand, a danger to our allies or our necessary assets is posed, calling for a nuclear initiative on his part, he cannot issue a warning ahead of time without alerting the enemy. Like President Truman, who was told he could not forewarn Japan, he must act with alone authority. The nature of the presidency, he writes, was irrevocably altered by this grant of a unique power.

End quote. So already the nature of the weapons was changing the way we do things on a national level here in the United States. But the question of how this might change things on a human-wide level was being widely debated as well. In the years 1945 and 1946, there were some very interesting, relatively unique ideas floated in the world of public opinion and governmental proposals.

There was an attempt in those years, an active attempt, to try to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, to eliminate atomic weapons from the face of the earth, and almost as if to pretend that they had never been discovered at all. Now there are two things to understand before we get into this. The first thing is, all this is occurring when the bodies from the Second World War are still warm.

And after these terrible earth-shattering wars, you often have a hangover period afterwards where people are understandably in one of these moods where they say, never again. This can never be allowed to happen again. And at the end of the Second World War, you throw the advent of atomic weapons in at the very end there. That's a definitive extra exclamation point on that never again.

And so if this seems like a pie-in-the-sky, rainbows-and-unicorns, utopian approach to things, realize that they're living at the last time the sword of Damocles dropped, and they have a justifiable fear of it. The other thing to take into account, and I'm not a historian, so you're not going to see me picking the right approach, is that this can be a legitimate proposal that we're talking about here, or this could be for public consumption purposes.

and behind the scenes realpolitik and geopolitical chess matches and business as usual can be going on. In October 1945, which is right after the Second World War ends, President Truman gives a speech to Congress, which kind of begins to deal with that question about how are we going to control these nuclear weapons now in this new atomic age.

And he gives one of these speeches where he says, you know, the hope of civilization rests on international agreements where people renunciate the use and development of atomic weapons. It's a pretty big deal. And then he begins work with the heads of Canada and the United Kingdom a month after that on formulating some sort of policy. One of my nuclear experts I was reading, Joseph Sirichioni, essentially says it's the first nuclear nonproliferation agreement ever.

They send their financier representative, a guy named Bernard Baroque, to the brand new United Nations. And on June 14th, 1946, he makes this proposal. And he does it with this very dramatic, famous language. You know, he says, we are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.

That is our business. If we fail, then we've damned every man to be the slave of fear. It's a great speech that is supposed to set the apocalyptic tone, though, that a world with these weapons out there, you know, conjures up. And the discussion talks about, you know, taking all the uranium and plutonium everywhere and everything you would need to build these bombs and putting them in a central location under an international sort of a security situation where nobody could get their hands on them and you couldn't have these weapons anymore.

Now, if you're one of these people that thinks in terms maybe that the physicists were using about people growing into greatness, maybe you could see this as an example of that. These are human beings treating this with the respect and rationality that it deserves and eschewing all of the normal power politics one would expect. You know, 5,000 years of human history would lead you to believe that

And truthfully, from a humanitarian viewpoint, the United States offering to essentially give up their monopoly on atomic weapons. I mean, when in the history books does somebody do that, you know, with a super weapon? We've got the only one, but we'll give it up for this humanitarian cause.

Now, here's the catch, sort of. The United States said they would do this as soon as everyone else had renounced them and all the materials had been put into a central location and all of the agreements to make sure no one was cheating and building these weapons on the side were in place. And then as soon as that was done, the U.S. would give up all their weapons, too. Well, there was a little counterproposal made by the people that were going to begin to be

the other superpower in the world for this next 40 years after this period that we have called, and the history books all label, the Cold War. And by the way, there's a decent number of historians who believe it's a Cold War instead of a hot war because of the existence of atomic and later thermonuclear weapons. Our former wartime allies, but we weren't exactly buddy-buddy with them before the war, the Soviet Union.

The seeds of the suspicion that will explode into rabid animosity in just a few years are already apparent in 1946 and the Soviet counterproposal to the United States, Britain and Canada saying, let's all just renounce the use and development of these weapons. And as soon as we can prove you've all done that, the United States will throw theirs away. And the Soviet Union said, why don't you throw yours away now?

since you're the only one that has any and then we'll figure out how to keep the world from developing anymore after that that's exactly the kind of attitude that anybody studying human history forever would expect right many out there would say that's just rational absolutely don't get hoodwinked there was a belief on the soviet side that what the united states really wanted to do with this arms control agreement if you will is extend the length of the monopoly that they had

on atomic weapons let's make sure no one else can develop any and then you know we'll have a longer period of time where we're the only ones who have them but it began to sort of lay the groundwork for what we would see in the future a three-dimensional geopolitical chess match where the board itself is booby-trapped with nuclear weapons

And no one knows where they are on the board, so every time anyone conducts a major move, everyone tenses up. The board itself was determined by where the armies were when the Second World War ended, and there are some notable trouble spots. The number one geopolitical trouble spot on this chessboard? Berlin, the former German capital.

At the end of the war, Germany is divided. The eastern half is under the control of Soviet forces, the western half under control of the United States, France, and Great Britain. All four of those powers are sharing jurisdiction and occupation of the former German capital in Berlin. The problem is that Berlin is geographically speaking well within the Soviet zone of control in eastern Germany.

The Soviets control all access to the city. A couple of roads that the Soviets watch over carefully is where all the supplies come in from the West. It's an important piece on the chessboard, but it is a piece that from the beginning of the game is effectively held hostage. The most important piece the Soviet Union has on the chessboard is the Red Army.

The Red Army is constructed differently than armies in the West were. It's an army that was meant to slug it out with German forces, with tanks, with heavy artillery. It is a hammerhead sledgehammer of an army. It is full of veterans and their commanders are well-versed in how to use the very large forces that they possess. When the war ends,

The other powers, like the United States and Great Britain, quickly start demobilizing their forces. The Soviets demobilize forces to a degree too, but the Red Army stays where it is, large, powerful, threatening.

And the Allied forces really have nothing on the ground in terms of an army that can stand against it. When asked what the Red Army would need to advance into, I believe it was Switzerland, one U.S. commander said shoes. I mean, the belief that it could just advance all the way to the Atlantic in 1946 with little to stop it was widespread. The chess pieces on the West Side, though, were...

compensatory they balanced out the red army to some degree the west had the great air forces and naval supremacy and they also had the atomic bomb the problem that the united states found itself in in terms of a dilemma is the only thing that they had that they knew could blunt the red armies you know march to the sea if it came to that were atomic weapons

It may have been early on too valuable a piece to give up. Of course, let's remember, the Red Army was not sitting on the edge of Soviet territory defending the motherland. They were perched basically along the farthest extent that they had taken over in wartime and were occupying unwilling populations of people who before the war were living in their own countries, places like Poland.

and Romania and Hungary and the Baltic states and a lot of other places were now occupied and were being incorporated slowly but surely into the communist bloc. This became a bone of contention and something that would have kept good relations from breaking out probably in any case. The other issue that divided the two sides after the war was ideological.

and that should come as no surprise i mean the 20th century is such an ideological century anyway and in the 1930s you had three giant different ideological blocks sort of competing with each other fascism communism and the democratic free market west the war essentially eliminated the big fascist powers

leaving a dynamic that, as historian Gwen Dyer points out, diplomats from hundreds of years ago would have understood. They would have predicted a war between the Soviet Union and the United States based on power politics alone. I have to bear this in mind because growing up when I did, the idea of communism versus democracy was such a huge part of the equation that it's hard to rule that out or minimize that

But as Dyer points out, it's a lot like the role religion played in the wars of the 16th and 17th century. It's important and it makes a big difference. But if you took that out of the equation, you probably would have had the same competition anyway. He writes, quote,

The United States and the Soviet Union have no common border, no claims on each other's territory, no history of national animosity. They're not even serious rivals for trade or resources. But their post-war confrontation was perfectly predictable and widely predicted as soon as the probable outcome of World War II became clear around 1943. He said, quote,

Our gravest error in the late 20th century is to overestimate our distance and our difference from the past. We believe that the present round of competition between the great powers is different from all the others in history, that it is invested with special significance because of its ideological dimension and because of the appalling consequences if it were to lead to war, as all such other competitions have eventually done in the past. End quote.

He then goes on the list that both sides can use to point to the other and say, well, look at all these provocative things you've done. And then he says, quote, each side has an ideologically watertight explanation for why the adversary behaves with such persistent wickedness and aggression. But none of the post 1945 developments would seem surprising to a 17th century Spanish or Ottoman diplomat.

Neither communism, he writes, nor liberal democracy would mean anything to him other than as a useful label for the players, but he would have no trouble understanding why the victorious alliance so quickly fell apart. They almost always do after victory because the winners are the biggest players left on the board. Hence, they automatically become the greatest potential threats to each other's power. End quote.

Now, who am I to disagree with Gwen Dyer's excellent point about power politics? Yet at the same time, as someone who grew up in that era also, it's hard to discount what the dread and disdain here in the United States for communism, the impact that that had overall on events. There's a Foreign Affairs Magazine review of Stephen Whitfield's book, The Culture of the Cold War,

that I thought was an interesting description that sort of spanned the width and the breadth and then sort of the weirdness as you look back on it now decades later of the entire affair. It says about the book, quote,

a lively and well-documented account of how the Cold War both produced and was sustained by super patriotism, intolerance and suspicion, and how these pathologies infected all aspects of American life in the 1950s. Entertainment, churches, schools, old

older readers will remember and still be amazed younger ones will find this a readable introduction to a bizarre aspect of the american past end quote and you know looking back on it there was something bizarre about it and i didn't even exist in the time when it was at its most bizarre the 50s the 1950s at the same time

And I've said this before, I wish that there was this potion or serum that you could drink that would allow you for a moment to feel what the people living in that era felt about this ideology that to many of them seemed little better than what Hitler and the Third Reich was offering and whose

desire as they saw it to extinguish freedom all over the world was about the most evil thing they could think of when you are fighting the most evil thing you can think of there's not a whole lot of things you're not willing to use to win case in point atomic weapons there's another element that's involved in this story that contributes to how bizarre it looks as we look back on it now

It's something that for a great many people was an article of faith at the time period, which we know to be false because, well, what they were worried about happening never happened. But they don't have that luxury. And every era has its conventional wisdoms that it has to use in factoring out how to make decisions. We are as trapped by our own as they were by theirs. But a great many people, and it's hard to quantify exactly how many,

But it spanned the entire spectrum from world leaders and decision makers to the intellectuals down to the farmers and the ma and pa operators of hardware stores in middle America. It was this idea that war with the Soviet Union wasn't just a possibility, but that it was an eventual inevitability. And that colors your thinking in ways that

that if you don't believe that or if, as we do, we know that that wasn't what was going to happen, it looks insane because you consider things that don't make sense outside of that context. For example, if war is going to happen eventually, more than 5,000 years of human political and military history tells you it's better if it happens at a time and at a place of your own choosing.

and also when your advantages are maximized and your adversaries are minimized. Since the end of the Second World War, no greater disparity in weapons technology has ever existed than when the United States had a monopoly on atomic weapons. Now, it should be pointed out that there were those even at the end of the Second World War, Patton famously and legendarily, the American general, had suggested that since World

You know, we already had our stuff all over there. Everything was mobilized. Everything was at the height of how we ought to fight that war with the Russians right now. But he was a notoriously gung-ho general. But even stone-cold pacifists will be tempted by this temporary window of opportunity that exists if the one atomic power on the planet exists.

wanted to kill the other potential one by strangling it in the cradle. And no one knew how long the window of opportunity was going to last. Expert opinions differed. President Truman is supposed to have asked J. Robert Oppenheimer how long he thought the monopoly would last. When do you think the Soviets will get the bomb? He's supposed to have replied, I don't know. To which Truman is supposed to have responded, I know, never. But Truman didn't explain his thinking on that, whether or not he thought perhaps

that the collective minds of mankind would come to their senses and international agreements would fix this problem, or because he believed World War III was imminent and the Soviet Union would be wiped off the map and your problem would disappear in a giant mushroom cloud. The military head of the Manhattan Project, General Groves, thought it was going to be two decades before the Soviets got the bomb, but concerned scientists and even pacifists thought

were worried enough to consider the potential value of a preventative nuclear war. Bertrand Russell was jailed for opposing the First World War as a pacifist, wrote right after the Second World War, quote,

Russia is sure to learn how to make it, the atomic bomb. I think Stalin has inherited Hitler's ambition for world dictatorship. One must expect a war between USA and USSR, which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years and leave a world without civilized people, from which everything will have to be built afresh, a process taking, say, 500 years.

There is one thing and one only which could save the world, and that is a thing which I should not dream of advocating. It is that America should make war on Russia during the next two years and establish a world empire by means of the atomic bomb. This will not be done, he writes.

He then gives a speech pretty much right after that time to the British House of Lords. I'm quoting this, by the way, from Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone, a wonderful book on one of the most famous scientists associated with atomic power, John von Neumann. And he quotes Russell as telling the House of Lords his nightmare scenario that would turn a pacifist into somebody that wanted a preventative nuclear war to be started and

On his advice, he told the House of Lords, quote, As I go about the street and see St. Paul's, the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament, and the other monuments of our civilization, in my mind's eye, I see a nightmare vision of those buildings as heaps of rubble with corpses all around them, end quote. When Russell, who's one of the more intelligent people of the century,

theorizes that the next war which he sees as imminent will leave people uncivilized and that civilization will have to be rebuilt anew and it will take 500 years to get back to where we are now think of how apocalyptic that is now humankind obviously faces these sorts of threats periodically in fact we still face this one now although we don't think about it much

But I mean, everything, for example, from global warming to some meteor hitting your planet or anything like that constitutes a grave potential threat. And the dynamics of each one is different. So our reaction is different. Climate change, for example, because it needs to be figured out via mostly things like data and observation and science that it becomes an arguing ground for people with vested interest.

These people had a different situation going on. The dynamics around atomic weapons had just been proven and seen. Basically, the attitude was, if you don't want to end up looking like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and here are some pictures, by the way, if you didn't see it, we have to do something. And doing something was a conundrum that these people found themselves a lot more trapped by than we would find ourselves trapped if we invented atomic weapons yesterday.

It is one of those little vagaries of history, isn't it? That a lot of these things happen at a time period where everyone is still all traumatized and stressed. Not when you really want to hand the new powerful super weapon over to human beings. Let's let the human beings heal a little bit. I mean, if you discovered atomic bombs yesterday in a laboratory and we were talking about it today, how different might our approach to them be?

You know, oh, these are terror. These could really do some damage. We better think about this. But, you know, nobody's ready to kill each other. We're not sitting on the knife's edge of tension. When Bertrand Russell gives that speech, remember what's going on in this guy's memory banks. Remember the life experience that he's forming his decision-making with, which is the best line I think a history teacher ever gave me. He says, remember what these people have seen. Their life experiences determine how they formulate decisions

you know the best reaction in any given situation or the approach bertrand russell was born in 1872 into a completely different world and the reason it wasn't the world he was born into anymore is the two worst world wars in history destroyed it twice the first one was so bad

That they had this entire period afterwards where humankind said never again, not the first time nor the last time, and built up whole structures and treaties and arrangements and deals and everything. The League of Nations is just one example to see that this never happened again. And instead, within 20 years, it did and it was worse than the first one. And at the end, it ended with atomic weaponry.

So if you're Russell in 1945, a month or two after the war ended, you are suffering from historical post-traumatic stress disorder, and so is everyone around you. So when you wonder how atomic bombs might be used, you're thinking they're probably going to be used like the last two things I saw happen within living memory. And it's going to be a lot messier than any of that.

The other thing that these people had going on that I have to continually remind myself of, and it would be again so different if we developed these weapons yesterday, is that the two sides that are the, shall we call them the tip of the spear in the Cold War, the USSR, the Soviet Union, and the United States, both entered the Second World War as the result of a devastating surprise attack.

Barbarossa, the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and then in December 1941, of course, Pearl Harbor. Imagine the next devastating surprise attack happening with atomic or nuclear weapons, and then remember that these people had already seen that movie just a few years ago.

The other thing that they were absolutely certain that they had learned from the Second World War and the time leading up to it had to do with appeasement and how tough you had to be on people. And all of these elements combined to create a dynamic where everyone was on a hair-trigger alert, and now they had these weapons that were so dangerous on one side. And this was key. In 1946...

In northern Iran, when the Soviet Union did not leave as quickly as they were supposed to, President Truman is supposed to have threatened to use an atomic bomb on them and then seemed pretty darn happy when they got out real fast. In other words, the idea that when you have this super weapon, you can impose your will on other people is really, really seductive. Truman's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.

explained the advantage that the atomic bomb gave the president and the united states and the west in poker terms he said that when it comes to world power the atomic bomb was the equivalent of a royal straight flush that is a hard geopolitical hand to avoid playing isn't it

I mean, what would people from earlier eras had done if they had nuclear weapons and a monopoly on them? Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, a bunch of Chinese emperors, Japanese daimyos, or, heck, Hitler. Here, here's 50 atomic bombs, but don't use them! If Oppenheimer and those physicists who were talking about human beings having to rise to another kind of level of evolution in order to avoid destroying themselves, you can see why.

Because actually imagining them in the hands of most of history's great figures in the past would sound like the prelude to a nightmare. It occurs to me maybe that question could be phrased a little differently and examined also. I mean, if the physicists were talking about a new level of human understanding being necessary to live with this sort of technology, maybe it's not fair to imagine atomic weapons in the hands of some of the most sociopathic leaders in history.

How would humankind in general in the past have dealt with something like this as perhaps a fairer comparison? If you could go back in my famous time machine, a very large version of it, and bring back nuclear weapons and some technicians to set them up and, you know, show them what button to push and everything. Do you think a people from the Bronze Age or the Iron Age nukes their adversary?

If you give Hannibal nuclear weapons, explain what they do, set them up for him, hand him the button and say, if you push this, all of Rome will be gone and there'll be walking zombies with their skin hanging off and thousands dead and all that. Does he push it or does he say, maybe I should think about this? It's interesting to wonder about the development over time of human ethical systems, but also something based on if you want to suggest the species learning, how about the idea of imagining Hannibal as

with that nuclear weapon, having gotten a chance to already live through things like the First and Second World Wars, to have experienced Verdun and Stalingrad and gas and atomic bombs used in warfare, and then hand him the weapon and say, maybe now you understand the mess this sort of Damocles will leave. Do you still want to nuke Rome?

I'll tell you what's fascinating to me, and again, it's part of the human condition. I'm not sure you could get around it. Is at this moment, and maybe this is the kind of stuff the physicists were talking about also, at this moment when it's all on this like doomsday clock knife edge, and in 1947, scientists will inaugurate the doomsday clock because it's showing how close we are to destruction because of atomic weaponry and all that. Doesn't matter how close it is, though, to striking midnight, it's

We're still playing politics in the world's democracies because that's how democracies work. To go back and read the political pressure on a guy like Truman...

that the opposition party uses against him and the typical political dynamics of trying to appeal to rural voters and swing states. And it's insane how it changes a dynamic that you would really wish humankind could sit in a room and coldly and dispassionately with about one ounce of concern about the politics of it and think about this issue that bedevils us, right? And maybe all humankind, maybe all succeeding generations, if you want to take it to the logical nth degree of hyperbole.

But no, we're still going to call the president soft on communism because it's going to help us in the congressional elections in a place like New York, and we're darn close to taking the Senate back. But how else can a democracy run? I think, and I don't think this is an unusual statement to make at all. If you look at U.S. history, there are certain time periods where the country fundamentally changes. There's

It's almost like a body part breaks and we replace it with something else that's reasonably similar if you want to fool yourself and dress it up, but has been altered irrevocably and is unrecognizable to previous generations. The founding of this country and the change from the Confederation to the Constitution is one of them, in my opinion. The Civil War and Reconstruction is another one in everybody's opinion, but it's

If you look at the period, and people would have different dates on this, from about 1946 to about 1952, you see the United States government transformed. Historian Gary Wills and we described this.

Him talking about how the presidency and the power of one person to decide to go to war in a window of minutes changed that aspect of presidential power. But then he goes on to list things that people who know American history all know anyway. All of the famous national security decisions and things like the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine and all these different things that when taken as a whole and when you look at them on the list, it's amazing how many happen in the space of a few years. Create the national security state.

And you should know my own biases before I go farther because I do have them in this case. And it's worth factoring that into your thinking when you hear me. But I talk a lot about politics. And in my opinion, the United States made the wrong course change during this time period and became a different country, a country much less connected to the one Americans believe that they have when they study what I like to call the myths of America and the Constitution as a lay person would understand it.

I think September 11th and the 9-11 attacks is another one of these periods in U.S. history, and I think you see a similar dynamic then as well. In neither case, by the way, do I hold the decision makers accountable for having made the decisions at the time. I think it was inevitable, for example, that any U.S. administration, given what's going on, would have freaked out and overreacted after 9-11. I think the same is true in this period we're talking about here between 1946 and 1952. It is the later period

Generations afterwards that I'm upset with for not fixing it. But the problem with historical memory is if trends go on long enough, whole generations are born never knowing what needs to be fixed because they never lived in the time before the change occurred. If you wanted to say today, we need to go back and fix the things that we did between 1946 and 1952 that Dan Carlin thinks were overreactions, how the heck do you get back that far?

And a more critical question for a person like me is, what if we like it better this way? So please note my biases at the outset.

But this new national security setup that was developed from about 1946 to about 1952, it's when the CIA was created, the NSA, the entire structure of government that we know today that protects secrets and spies on the enemy and keeps us safe. I mean, you know, it's our world now, and this is when it happened. It seems to run counter to

to the very things that some of those scientists were saying we were going to have to do if we were going to avoid World War III, where they called for a new level of human understanding, whatever that is. And I don't pretend to understand exactly what these physicists wanted who said things like this. But you got the opposite with the national security state, whereas some of these famous physicists, some of the most famous physicists,

We're saying in 1945 and 1946 that we should tell the Soviets about the bomb right when we started making it or that we should give them the nuclear secrets after the war. Think of how crazy that sounds to us today. You know, with our modern mentality, we should just give the terrorists all the nuclear bomb secrets.

That sounds insane, doesn't it? And it sounded insane to a lot of the military class after the Second World War. We executed people in U.S. history for turning over nuclear secrets, and some of our physicists were suggesting that that's the sort of level of understanding that will take us to a new world where we can ease tensions so we don't have World War III. That's a pretty hard evolutionary tool to have to fight against because you have to combat your own fear.

And as I think I've said before, fear is one of those evolutionary developments that has probably saved more lives in human history than anything else I can think of. Normally, it's a very good thing to have, right? Sabretooth tiger comes at you back in caveman times, run or kill it or whatever you have to do. Then protect yourself because you're afraid from sabretooth tiger attacks and put up fences. And the fear thing is not a bad condition. It helps with security.

But if the very things that have always helped with security threaten not just your existence but civilization, can you turn that evolutionary tool off if that's the only way to survive? As I try to play with counterfactuals, you know, what-if scenarios in this period, imagining it turning out differently than it did, I can't think of any that sound like they would be rationally imaginable.

Take, for example, the military in this situation. What are they supposed to do after the Second World War? Pretend they don't have a bomb if you're the United States? Or if you're the other side in this growing distrust that will turn into the Cold War, if you're the Soviet Union, do you just pretend the United States doesn't have an atomic bomb? How does that work?

Like we said, it's, for the president of the United States, almost too good of a hand to resist at least threatening to play. I mean, that's just politics, right? That's just foreign policy the way it's always been handled.

And if you look at this from a strictly, you know, age-old power politics viewpoint, historian Michael Howard does a great job of just setting up the way the military saw this thing to them, and we're speaking of them as a whole rather than some of the individuals and even perhaps some of the various services, more on that in a minute, you know, saw these things because that's what they're paid to do. Howard wrote, quote,

When confrontation developed between the Soviet Union and the West shortly after the ending of the Second World War, the military on both sides foresaw business as usual. The Soviets planned to advance their western glacis to the Atlantic to deny to the Americans the use of air bases in Western Europe, while the Americans hoped at least to retain bases in the British Isles, Spain, and the Middle East from which to bombard the Soviet Union and then in due course destroy

in quotes here, liberate Europe for a second time. He continues, quote, the peoples of Europe knew nothing of these plans and would have shown little enthusiasm for them if they had. Next time, remarked a French prime minister who did know about them to his American colleagues, you will be liberating a corpse, end quote. The problem you face in 1946, 1947, quote,

If you're the United States military or Harry Truman, and maybe you've already threatened to play that royal straight flush on the Soviets in northern Iran once, the problem you have is you have very few of these bombs, although no one knows that, and you have no good way to deliver them. The next couple of years, the military and...

Harry Truman and the government of the United States will focus on a system to deliver Armageddon, if that's what's needed.

Its official name was the Strategic Air Command, and it was part of this brand-new branch of the United States military known as the Air Force, which used to be a part of the Army, and it was part of an entire reorganization that was also a part of this post-Second World War transformative period that changed U.S. foreign policy and the whole design of government, the new Department of Defense, the new Pentagon. It was all part of this. And Strategic Air Command's job, if called upon to do it,

was to destroy the Soviet Union's major cities with atomic weapons, and in the process, kill tens of millions of people. The mind sort of reels, doesn't it, when you think of how quickly we went from that, well, to us today, it even looks like a rainbows and unicorns place, of trying to craft legislation to rid the world of the scourge of atomic weaponry, to a year and a half, two years later, when the president says,

has to deal with the approval of Air Force plans for winning World War III that involve as the key part of the strategy something commonly referred to as the atomic blitzkrieg or atomic blitz. Trying to explain all the various things that go into why these decisions were made is complicated. And one of the main reasons why is how recent all this is. As we've said before,

You know, reality is complicated. I don't have to tell you that. Social, cultural, economic, individual forces. I mean, a thousand things working on us in every direction all the time. Well, that's pretty much how it's always been. But you can't always see it in the sources. So when you go back to like ancient Egypt and you look at what historians write about that, they don't have access to all the information that would flesh out the reality of those people the way we feel it now.

consequently history seems much more simple because the minor strands that are all interwoven around events are not visible back then but the closer you get to now the more visible those minor threads become and it's impossible to quantify the importance of this thread over that thread for example as i said earlier he would love to think

In a situation as important potentially as nuclear, you know, global nuclear war, that we would have philosopher kings sitting in quiet rooms discussing with the most intelligent physicists and ethical people in the world how we deal with this situation. But instead, the normal things that impact humankind are at work here too, despite the stakes. We said politics in a democracy a little while ago, but it's more than just politics. How about such politics

banal concerns as budgetary questions and inter-service rivalry to name just two for example i think you could make a pretty good argument and a lot of people have that the number one reason that you have an atomic blitz style strategy as the plan to win world war three should it come during this time period has more to do with budgetary restraints than anything else

And you, again, would wish that you had your philosopher kings and everything in the back room not worried about anything banal like politics and budgets and what have you. But reality intervenes, which is why this whole argument about having to change humanity in order to survive in a post-atomic world is so difficult. As Einstein said, the atom changed everything but our modes of thinking. But it's hard to change your modes of thinking. I mean, think about Harry Truman after the war, right?

Harry Truman's got to cut the budget because it's spending a fortune because it was just in the biggest war in history and it was doing the lion's share of funding. Can't stay at those levels, right? Can't live at those levels. So Harry Truman has to cut the military by what he figures is going to be 70% after the war while still having to be able to fight World War III should it come. And as we said, a lot of people thought it was imminent. How do you do that?

Truman brought in business people who, you know, opened up their business books from college that just said, listen, it's all about prioritization and consolidation. There's no reason for all this redundancy. First of all, you know, you should just combine all these services and have no Air Force and no Navy and no Army, just one whole military defense structure. You hear this argument all the time in this country. You hear it in other countries, too. The services hate that because they all have a lot of pride in their own service and sometimes a little bit of antipathy toward the other ones. What's more...

You had a whole new branch of the service out there, the U.S. Air Force that had just been created, and all of them competing for an economic pie that was going to be cut by 70%. As you might imagine, in any country, in any time period ever, you know, the knives came out.

And the backbiting started and the services had to get up there and essentially argue for why they were relevant and why they mattered and why they should get a larger piece of the economic defense pie. And it was the Air Force that ended up winning the argument. They went to the president and they basically said, if I can simplify this, there's only one branch of the service that will win World War III for you and it's us because we're the ones who will send fleets of bombers over to the Soviet Union and bomb them with atomic bombs. Boom.

This was a very contentious period in U.S. defense history. Again, it's part of that entire era where the big change occurred between 46 and 52. But the services in some of these cases were fighting for their very existence. I mean, the second defense secretary, a guy named Louis A. Johnson, who was totally on board with this, let's get rid of a bunch of branches of the service idea, is supposed to have said this, quote,

End quote. He then goes on to cancel this giant supercarrier the Navy was building, and as you might imagine, things just go ballistic.

It leads to something that's considered to be one of the more unusual and serious, because there hasn't been a lot of them, revolts by a branch of the service in American history. It's often referred to as a mutiny in some spheres. It would be a very strange mutiny because usually the mutiny is from the lower levels of the Navy to the higher levels. This involved the highest levels of

of the navy who came to the defense of the service by arguing for all sorts of things that you would understand you know they're just trying to make themselves look relevant and of course the navy can do this and no one else can but the unusual argument that they also brought to the table and they brought it out in congressional hearings in the in a way that when you think about it is just shocking was they questioned the u.s strategy of atomic bombs on moral grounds

In something known as the Revolt of the Admirals, in congressional testimony, a bunch of war heroes from the Second World War, I mean, guys like Chester Nimitz and everything, came out and in arguing essentially that we don't like your plan to just go and drop atomic bombs on cities and that's how you're going to win the Third World War, but at the same time, you know, defending their own branch of the service, they decried the entire idea as un-American and immoral. As Eric Schlosser writes in Command and Control, quote,

At congressional hearings in October 1949, one high-ranking admiral after another condemned the atomic blitz, arguing that the bombing of Soviet cities would be not only futile, but immoral.

They advocated precision tactical bombing of Soviet troops and supply lines, using planes from American aircraft carriers. Admiral William F. Halsey compared the Air Force's new bomber to the siege weapons once used to destroy medieval castles and towns.

"'I don't believe in mass killings of noncombatants,' Admiral Arthur W. Radford testified. "'A war of annihilation might bring a pyrrhic military victory, but it would be politically and economically senseless.' The harshest criticism of the Air Force came from Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstee, who had toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war."

He described the atomic blitz as, quote, random mass slaughter of men, women, and children, end quote. The whole idea, he said, was ruthless and barbaric and contrary to American values, quote, we must ensure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect, end quote. Once again, hard to quantify and really know how much of the Navy's opposition to use of atomic bombs as the war-winning weapon

thing you base your strategy on was because their service didn't have any and how much of it was based on moral grounds the complaints would be notably muted when submarines could carry nuclear weapons it should be noted later on but the admirals bring up a key moral question that people will wrestle with for decades as a matter of fact they still wrestle with is there an ethical way to fight an atomic or nuclear war is there a way to bomb cities and civilians with atomic weapons

and have it still square with american values and the values of the you know freedom-loving west as it would have been known back then in general i mean they're fighting a bad guy as i said that you go read the literature at the time it is clear this might as well be you know the third reich again and joseph stalin might as well be hitler now little known fact here in the united states but the soviet union will mellow out a bit after stalin goes away but this is the hardcore era still

He is considered to be a ruthless guy, and communism appears to be on the move. But if you kill tens of millions of civilians using atomic bombs in order to thwart the evils of a totalitarian superpower, how much evil do you get splashed on you in the process? And what if you strike first?

That's the second thing that came into play. Even pacifist Bertrand Russell for a little while was thinking that the United States should strike first to keep the bomb out of the hands of guys like Joseph Stalin. Interesting to think about what our history books would look like today and how it would treat the subject of a preventative nuclear war had the United States acted on that kind of premise back in the day when Bertrand Russell was making those speeches. By the way, in all fairness to Bertrand Russell, he would change his opinion later on this.

Nonetheless, I can't imagine the history books treating it all that nicely today to try to explain away all those deaths to keep the Soviet Union from getting an atomic weapon. One is reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche's line about be careful when fighting monsters that you yourself do not become a monster. It's a tough ethical dilemma, isn't it? And from my own standpoint, I find this period fascinating because if you think about the ethical dilemma maybe of putting...

a handgun that's loaded into the hands of a five-year-old boy that's kind of what i feel like this period is here maybe the most dangerous period in atomic history because it's the one where we're still trying to figure out you know if if oppenheimer is right and we have to grow into a new higher version of ourselves to survive this is the period of like adolescence can we do it before you know we shoot something and it's a period where the tension is mounting at such a pace

I think Michael Sherry, the historian, says that the drumbeat of crisis and initiatives was relentless during this time period. You go look at a timeline and it's one thing after another. Bam, bam, bam, bam.

And remember, those are the things that make it into the history books. That totally discounts what the people in that era, reading their morning newspaper on a day-to-day basis, would have had to contend with. All the rumors and lies and threats and maneuvers and things that might happen but never turned out to be true, they sweat that out on a daily basis. So if you're talking about these things that sound horrific to us today that anyone would even consider, you don't understand the threat those people thought they were facing.

The fact that we know that their worst nightmares won't come true can't be allowed to blind us from the position that they found themselves. And remember, we have the luxury of knowing how things turn out. It changes everything, doesn't it, though? It makes it very difficult to put ourselves back in those shoes, and I want that serum that instantly allows you to go, oh, my God, I'm so scared that the communists are going to take over the world. You know, when I was growing up in the 1970s,

There was something known as the domino theory of communism. And it was this idea that it spreads from one country to another and that, you know, as soon as one falls, it subverts the next one over there. And it was supposed to explain this exponential growth of

of communism in the world and why you needed to be concerned about all these little countries you would say well who cares about this little out-of-the-way place if they go communist it's not exactly like they're in the center of the world you know what why do they matter and you say oh you don't understand it's the domino effect they will subvert the country next door and then you can't let it get a foothold and in the 70s when i was growing up you were beginning to think that that was crazy although there were still a lot of proponents but the reason it looks so out of whack is

is because in the 1970s when I was a kid, things had stabilized. That was a theory developed by people that were watching reality unfold back in the era we're talking about now, where it did look like dominoes were falling, and it looked like they were falling quickly.

And there were a couple of different kinds, covert and overt, for example. At the beginning of 1948, the Czechoslovakian government is overthrown in a coup and they become part of the communist bloc. One of their famous ministers found at the bottom of a multi-story apartment dead in an apparent suicide out of his window, which many people believe now was suicide.

nothing but russian agents tossing them over the side but that began to give everything sort of a very uh spy underhanded clandestine you know the enemy within sort of feel and communism was different than fighting nazism you didn't have to worry about nazism as an intellectual contagion very much whereas communism was something that could appeal to downtrodden peoples everywhere including in your own countries

So all of a sudden you had a new enemy to deal with, potentially some of your own people to change things to, as everyone knows, a couple of red scares, if nothing else, the McCarthy era, and some legitimate problems with, you know, people who were spying because they had an intellectual affinity for the beliefs of the Soviet Union. And I get letters from communists all the time saying, you always portray communism in such a terrible light. All we can go on is the examples we have.

If they don't match the potential of the classroom theories, well, I can't help that. I can only tell you what the Joseph Stalin regime was like. And it wasn't pretty. And if you want to point out the problems that the West has, I'm going to agree with you on all of them. But there's still no comparison. In this case, the Soviets just were ruthless. And the United States and others argued that you had to meet that kind of ruthlessness with a similar sense of resolve.

And some of this resolve required the ability to push back in places. A couple months into 1948, Joseph Stalin does something that tests the resolve of the West, if you will, in a way that is so challenging it's like calling your bluff in that high-stakes poker game. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod in their book, How to Win a Nuclear War, say that by this time period, Harry Truman has already threatened the Soviets four times.

with a nuclear bombing. Maybe bluffs, but never came to a head because the Soviets gave in. On June 24th, 1948, a pretty darn good geopolitical chess player himself, Joseph Stalin, makes a move that basically calls the entire nuclear bluff of the West and shuts down all the rail lines and the land routes that were supplying West Berlin.

the place occupied by the French, the British, and the Americans that they shared with the Soviets and that was deeply inside the rest of Soviet Eastern Germany at the time. Only allowed to exist because Stalin allowed food and everything to go through. On June 24th, 1948, he stopped allowing that and then basically looked at the United States and the rest of the world and in his own geopolitical way said, check.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself that we are overplaying the poker and chess analogies a little bit because they are things, by the way, that can always be applied to diplomacy and foreign affairs and realpolitik and all that. You can always compare those things to chess matches and whatnot, but nothing so fits the model as the Cold War. And in fact...

In due time, an alternative approach to Oppenheimer and the physicists' idea that we're going to have to grow as a species or we're going to wipe each other out will begin to be developed along the lines of things that we call today game theory and that were already underway in the minds of people like John von Neumann and others, developing ways to see if we could use our intelligence to not drastically lose the game. If humans had to adapt or die to their new weapons technology,

Was the only kind of adaptation that was going to work an evolutionary one? Or if that was impossible, did humankind have a backup plan for living with this sort of technology? In this case, what Stalin had said in a foreign policy sort of terms is, are you really going to start World War III over this?

All I did was say you could no longer have access to a city deeply behind the border in our territory, or at least where we're in charge of defending, our zone, our sphere of influence. We haven't attacked anybody. You'd be attacking us first. What would world opinion say? You're going to start World War III over this? And if you do, not only will the war start, but we'll start with wiping out all of your forces that are in Berlin now.

an appetizer for World War III, if you will. How do you respond to that? And especially in this period where, once again, it's hard to get into the minds of these people, but everything you read talks about how much both sides in this Cold War thought that they learned from World War II and the lead up to that. The whole idea of appeasement is ever present in the discussions, right? Hitler proves the point for every...

maniacal aggressive dictator everywhere right they're all like hitler so everything that would have applied to hitler applies to everything else and in the sense of a joseph stalin you cannot show weakness so do you start world war three over this well the wheels were in motion and very soon a solution on the ground apparently by a local commander who started to have food flown into berlin because apparently stalin wasn't going to shoot down airplanes i guess they found pretty quickly

And very quickly, Harry Truman saw that as the life preserver thrown to him. Right? What are your choices? Start nuclear war or let Stalin get away with it? Well, what about we don't start nuclear war either? We just start supplying the city. Now, what are you going to do? Your move. See how this game thing works so well in this situation? I'm not going to start nuclear war first. And what will be known as the Berlin Airlift, by the time it's finished and it'll be ongoing for more than a year,

the United States and the other Western allies will fly in 1.5 million tons of coal, fuel, and other necessary products for everyone in West Berlin with nearly 200,000 flights into the city. It's an amazing achievement and was an easy out to avoid World War III. But worth noting that during the crisis, especially in July 1948,

discussions and real discussions were had amongst the United States, the president, his advisors, about whether or not you start nuclear war over this. And they're fascinating to go back and look at. You begin to see this big divide between those who think that nuclear weapons are this special class of weapon that you must treat totally differently than any weapon that's ever been invented ever, and those who think it's just a bigger bomb. For the purposes of our story here, which is more about humanity adapting to its

you know, weapons capabilities.

The 1948-1949 Berlin Airlift Crisis is key because it's the first time that you get the rubber meets the road practical questions that hadn't really arisen to this point. It's almost like you have to have the crisis before people will actually sit down in a room together and debate questions that should have come up a long time ago like, what can we really accomplish with these weapons? What can you do with them? Now, everyone understood that you can threaten with them because they'd already done this before.

By the way, it's a strategy known as escalation dominance, and you don't need atomic or nuclear weapons for that strategy. It's always been used, actually. It just works very well with atomic weaponry, but it's basically the idea that you're willing to take it to the next level. You really want to fight over this? We'll nuke you. And if the other side doesn't have nuclear weapons, well, that's the end of that game, right?

The problem is, is that that's a bluff game. And what these people are asking now, having played the bluff game three or four times already since the Second World War, is what if we're forced to play this hand? What does that mean? And then getting to the really practical realities, things like do we have the planes in place? How many bombs do we have? What are we going to target? And if we target those places and destroy them, does that get us what we want?

These are the kind of things that had been sort of compartmentalized and talked about in various branches of government. The Berlin Airlift Crisis brings all these people together with the president to have really fundamental discussions of the sort that hadn't happened before, and you could see these broad differences of opinion. The military men, by and large, are under the impression that when we go to World War III, we're just going to use the new weapons too, the way we used the old ones. And some of the other people, for example, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Littlenthal,

He's part of the group of people that are counseling Truman in this key moment during the Berlin Airlift crisis not to use the nuclear weapons. The July 1948 meeting between Truman and his various advisors is talked about in the Chio Keiko and Daxel Ross book and they write, quote,

In his journal that day, Lilenthal, the Atomic Energy Commission head, wrote that Truman, quote, greeted us rather solemnly. He looked worn and grim, none of the joviality that he sometimes exhibits. I rather think it was one of the most important meetings I have ever attended, end quote.

The authors continue, quote, At the meeting, some, like Lilenthal, expressed reservations about using nuclear weapons. Secretary Royal, however, spoke for the hardliners when he said, quote, We've been spending 98% of all the money for atomic energy for weapons. Now, if we aren't going to use them, that doesn't make any sense. End quote.

But even those who are trying to figure out maybe that you can just use these weapons as a bluff have a problem themselves.

They want to deter with these things in something strategy-wise that will become known as deterrence. Their problem is that for that to work, the other side needs to think that you would use the weapons. So you can't publicly come out there and say, these are the most awful things in the world. We would never use these weapons because then you can't threaten to use them anymore. And then they have no utility if you're one of these people who believes that you won't really use them. You won't play the hand, but you'll threaten with them.

But in order for the threat to work, people have to believe you'll go there. As one author I was reading pointed out, where he said, if the bomb's too terrible to use under any circumstances, it has no deterrent value. So even if you're one of those people that would never foresee the use of atomic weapons, you can't say that because then they're no good at all.

This becomes the main conundrum of using the bomb, but during this period there's one main part of the conundrum that we understand today that's missing. Because if World War III breaks out in response to some event connected to the Berlin airlift in 1948, only one side is going to have atomic weaponry used on them. If you're the American public and you're sweating out these increasing tensions,

you can at least comfort yourself in the idea that in the era of atomic war in 1948, you're still safe from being nuked because your government is the only one that has the weapons. In 1949, that will change, and that will change everything. Part 2 of The Destroyer of Worlds.

1949 is a terrible year in terms of the Cold War. The only thing that keeps it from being, say, the most terrible year in all world history in terms of danger are technological limitations. You give 1949 the same technology we had in 1969, and I think it is the worst year ever, most dangerous. A lot of things happen in 49 that make people very edgy. I mean, for example...

after a long-running civil war with an intermission during the second world war the chinese communist finally gained victory in their civil war over the nationalists the nationalists go over to taiwan the communists declare a communist country and all of a sudden soviet russia the largest land power in the world in terms of actual geographic size has added to it a country roughly the size of the united states geographically

and with the largest population in the world communism just took in 25 of the world's population and added it to its ranks that's how a country like the united states or the uk would have seen the situation to zero some game and all of a sudden communism just took china and we lost it be a big political debate in the united states for a long time which party in the white house lost china as though china was ours to lose 1949 is also the year nato is formed

in an attempt to begin to cobble together a European defense strategy from a whole bunch of countries still trying to recover from the damage of the Second World War. Remember, only one country came out of the Second World War, major ones anyway, any better off than they went into it. That was the United States. Everybody else was recovering. Certain countries like the Soviet Union from really grievous wounds. And that's partly the reason why the estimates may be on how long it would take the Soviets to get their own atomic bomb were so off.

How did they do it so quickly? The military head of the Manhattan Project, General Groves, didn't think that the Soviets would get it for 20 years. They got it 16 years sooner than he thought they'd get it. Now, there's no doubt that espionage played a key role in helping, but it doesn't change the fact that it took the Soviets about the same amount of time it took the United States, the UK, and the Canadians in the Manhattan Project to build their bomb. On August 29th, 1949, in the Central Asian deserts,

The first Soviet A-bomb test goes off. The United States finds out from a monitoring plane that was just sort of keeping track of radioactivity. Joseph Stalin, not the kind of guy to come out and announce anything about anything. The USA, though, thought he was going to. So after debating whether or not they should tell the people of the world that the Soviets were an atomic power now.

One of Truman's advisors specifically mentioning the panic after the War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles and saying that the whole thing might cause a panic, but in an attempt to sort of get ahead of the Soviets if they were going to announce it and to put the proper spin on it, Truman came forward and basically said, the Soviets have it and this is why it's so important to control these kinds of weapons. Thus ends that tiny little period at the beginning of the atomic and nuclear age.

where atomic power rested in the hands of merely a single country it's somewhat amazing given the state of human affairs that with its monopoly one country didn't use that weapon to dominate the world so maybe one could suggest that in an ethical sense it showed human progress but perhaps bertrand russell's line about how long you could expect a man to walk across that tightrope would say hold on they haven't had to do this for very long

First round goes to man's ethical and evolutionary growth because we avoided bombing the Soviet Union when only one country had the bombs, but now two countries have the bomb. How's that going to change the dynamic? Well, it takes the fear level and exponentially confounds it because now all of a sudden the United States has to worry about having the same thing happen to it that places like Belgium and Germany have had to worry about forever.

now the us isn't going to get invaded in the old-fashioned sense but what's the difference if eventually some other power can just ignore the fact you have a couple of oceans protecting you and turn your cities into smoking heaps of rubble the united states hadn't faced anything comparable to this since the british burned the capitol building in the war of 1812. psychologically it would affect any power the united states though with this extra sense of invulnerability it's always had was in a unique place in its history

now the other side becoming a nuclear power does a couple of things first of all it closes the circle in terms of creating the dynamic that we have lived with ever since this dynamic of both sides being able to do incredible amounts of damage to each other at least theoretically very different dynamic than only one side being able to do that the other thing that happens in a geopolitical sense

Is the era of the United States having that MasterCard, as the Secretary of Defense had said, the Royal Straight Flush, that's over with. The window of opportunity, as another advisor had said this period when the U.S. was the only nuclear power, that's over with too. And predictably, the question of how to respond ran the gamut.

with even sober humanitarian-type scientists trying to figure out if all of a sudden the balance of rational thought had swung towards the idea of, well, now that they are a nuclear power, we should nuke them while we can. In his book Prisoner's Dilemma, author William Poundstone quotes...

Harry Truman's science advisor, a guy named William Golden, who penned a letter where he tried to imagine how a man from Mars might view the geopolitical situation. In other words, somebody who didn't have any human skin in the game, just from a purely dispassionate outside observer's viewpoint. And he wrote about the Soviets having the bomb now and the way that the U.S. and the rest of the West should respond. And he said, quote,

This brings up the matter of immediate use or threat of use of our weapons. Let us not delude ourselves. To bring about a true international control agreement with Russia, we would have to use them. The consequences would be dreadful indeed, even though I assume that the Russians have so few A-bombs now that they could do little or no damage to the USA, even if they could put them on target. In theory, we should issue an ultimatum.

And use the bombs against Russia now, for from here on we inevitably lose ground. And this is true no matter at how much greater a rate we produce, no matter how much more potent weapons. For once Russia is in a position to put A-bombs on our cities, no matter how inefficient those bombs may be and how few in number, she is in a position to do us unspeakable injury. That we can retaliate a hundredfold or wipe out every Russian will not repair the damage. So

So a good, though immoral, case can be made by the disinterested man from Mars for our shooting at once. End quote. He then goes on to say, however, we won't do it, of course, no matter what the alternative, because the public would never support it. The last comment is fascinating again, because you're again tempted to see it as some sort of an ethical evolutionary change. I mean, would the ancient Bronze Age civilizations have hesitated a minute? I don't know.

Of course, if one wanted to look at it in a more cynical way, maybe you just say, no one wants to be living on what will turn into a nuclear battlefield if such a war breaks out. So when your country talks about starting one or being the first to introduce such a weapon, I think maybe there's just a survival instinct that kicks in and maybe the people from the Bronze Age would have understood that perfectly. But we come to another one of those moments now where

a fork in the road, a decision between maybe what you could call doing things the way we always have for all the right reasons and acting in a way that would sort of defy your expectations given human history. And it's what do you do now? What do you do if you're the United States and you just had your atomic monopoly destroyed? Human nature and all of human history would say you try to go get another monopoly.

You continue work, right? You develop the next system. You regain dominance and superiority in that field. Nobody wants to be the one who's the last person to invent a machine gun or something like that. You could lose a war that way. The last nation to get an air force, right? But if you are already struggling to try to figure out how to handle, you know, not having catastrophe strike in a world of atomic weapons, how sort of against the grain can

from an einstein or an oppenheimer viewpoint as it sounded talk about making a super super weapon the super was actually the nickname for the next level in human weaponry development that was already theorized and that work had already begun on a weapon that would make the atomic bombs of hiroshima and nagasaki look like nothing

Weapons that required a bomb like the bomb used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a primer for its main explosion. A guy named Edward Teller is most famous for association with what will be the weapon that makes atomic bombs obsolete.

A guy like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who one of Truman's aides said was too much of a poet and not enough of a hard-headed realist. But the kind of bomb that a guy like J. Robert Oppenheimer would say is farther than we should go. We should no longer develop more powerful weapons than the ones we have. But think about how much that runs against the grain of human behavior. Could we, if faced with extinction, decide to cap weapons?

weapons research and development we will never discover anything more powerful or deadly than this how do you shut off information like that how do you keep someone else from developing it

These are the age-old problems that humanity has always had to deal with. And right after the Soviets demonstrate that they too are now an atomic power, Harry Truman has to wrestle once again with all sorts of forces and uncertainties. And he's in a brand new era of human history with no roadmap.

This is a guy, by the way, who had been vice president for like five minutes when Franklin Roosevelt died and who had cried saying he wasn't up to the job. He's dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan, ended the Second World War in effect, and now he's called upon to face these kind of pressures. It's crazy. One can only, whether you think he did a good job or not, have some sympathy for

for the haberdasher from Missouri, which is what this guy was, the artillery captain from the First World War. Truman is not one of the great minds of history, one of the Marcus Aurelius-type leaders. He's just a pretty normal human being put in a situation where he literally is making decisions about whether or not we can build stuff to destroy the world with and whether or not that's a good decision. After the Soviets blow up their first A-bomb, Truman asks for some help and some help

and he gets the wise men together. It's not exactly Philosopher Kings, but it is the physicists who invented the first weapon. A bunch of them, anyway, led by the guy Truman's aide thought was too much of a poet, J. Robert Oppenheimer, obviously quoting...

text from the Bhagavad Gita, so maybe there's a point there. Nonetheless, puts him in a room in October 1949, says, should we develop the next level of weaponry above atomic weapons? And is it possible? And if we did, would it help? And do we need a Manhattan program for the next superweapon, the one that makes our current superweapon obsolete? And the physicist went in a room, talked about this, and issued a report. And the report by the physicist said,

Don't build this weapon. This weapon, by the way, is something today we call a thermonuclear bomb or a thermonuclear warhead, a hydrogen bomb, thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and described by nuclear expert Joseph Cirincione as the equivalent of bringing a literal piece of the sun down onto Earth.

There is no upper limit to their power. In the report, Oppenheimer and friends, essentially now five years after the atomic bomb was dropped, have a chance to see how humanity's dealing with it. And they've decided maybe, in reading between the lines here, that we haven't evolved enough yet.

For something like the hydrogen bomb, the report says, quote, we believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon until the present climate of world opinion changes. End quote. Is that code for until we evolve more? They also seem to be suggesting that this is a chance question.

To provide an example on how we can break the patterns of the past because we have to to survive, they write, quote, End quote.

There's that poet Oppenheimer and his rainbow and unicorns coming out again. The people around Truman might say the great Enrico Fermi and another physicist penned an even more apocalyptic response. They didn't think that the one that I just read to you goes far enough. They wrote this, and I'll quote it in its entirety because it is shocking. They are basically saying this.

You are inventing weapons that can now do the equivalent of creating giant natural catastrophes. If you could turn on, for example, the ability to cause a massive tsunami or something. Fermi and his colleague write, quote, A decision on the proposal that an all-out effort be undertaken for the development of the super cannot, in our opinion, be separated from considerations of broad national policy."

A weapon like the super is only an advantage when its energy release is from 100 to 1,000 times greater than that of ordinary atomic bombs. The area of destruction, therefore, would run from 150 to approximately 1,000 square miles or more. Necessarily, such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective.

and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature, it cannot be confined to a military objective, but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground, which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity, even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country.

It is evident to us that this would be the view of peoples in other countries. Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world. Any post-war situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unresolvable enmities for generations. A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The post-war problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present."

That's pretty harsh, and you can say to yourself, well, you know, some of these physicists live in their own unreal world. But David Lilienthal from the Atomic Energy Commission, one of the people who pushed back against the idea of using atomic bombs during the Berlin airlift, wrote in his diary about the way the government was leaning, and it was not in the direction the physicists wanted when he said, quote,

More and better bombs. Where will this lead? Is difficult to see. We keep saying we have no other course. What we should say is we're not bright enough to see any other course. End quote.

So you run into the people that give you the old Machiavellian reality, which is we've got to build these bombs because the other side is going to build them too. And the last thing you want to do is be the last person to own the next level of weaponry, which makes total sense given our history. What the physicists are telling us is that everything you learned in your history, everything that's been pasted onto your DNA from thousands of years of human evolution since cities first cropped up is obsolete now.

And you can either change that standard template, you know, by which you gauge what you should do in any given situation, or you can find yourself a victim of a weapon that makes an atomic bomb look like a conventional bomb. Truman, as usual, had many more pressures weighing on him. David Lilenthal in his diary also records a statement by Senator Brian McMahon.

who described sort of the mood that the American people would have if they found out that the Russians had an H-bomb, but the United States didn't. He said, quote, why, a president who didn't approve going ahead on the H-bomb all out would be hanged from a lamppost if the Russians should get it and we hadn't. End quote. Kind of hard to argue with that logic, isn't it? It's the same logic we'd operate with today.

And it's hard not to be struck here, isn't it, when you consider this strange divide between the level of the intelligence of the people that were put together to create these superweapons versus the level of intelligence of the people whose decision it will be whether or not to use them?

the political class in these democracies and republics for example but let's remember as that statement by that senator points out how heavily influenced they are by public opinion if we're living on a knife edge over how these weapons are used and how wise we can be about them do you really want that decision devolving down to the average joe and jane level

The counterproposal, by the way, by physicists like Oppenheimer over why you don't need to build this super weapon is that you've reached a maximum threshold when it comes to the power of these weapons to do anything. They offer the idea that you can just use atomic bombs to deter anyone who's got any weapon greater because you don't need anything bigger than that.

They may say we'll drop a hydrogen bomb on your city that's a thousand times more powerful than your puny A-bomb. Yes, but the puny A-bomb still basically takes out the city. You're trading cities for cities. And what Oppenheimer and those guys were saying is that once you lose a city in this deal, and once you're trading city for city, you have the deterrent value you need to stop somebody else from attacking you with any kind of weapon. This is the beginning of the ideas of nuclear deterrence.

And you begin to see the introduction into this debate of a civilian class of intellectuals

who become sort of the alternative to the rainbow and unicorn poets like Oppenheimer's approach, where they want us to become different people than we've always been. The other side of that coin is these people who would say, we're not going to change, and it's too hard to change, and the system isn't flexible enough even if we wanted to change, so we're going to have to learn how to live with these weapons as intelligently as we can.

and big civilian thinkers started to meet with each other starting in about 1945 right after the first day bombs were dropped at the end of the second world war and they began to coalesce in groups and meetings at major universities places like yale for example and these experts would come from a wide range of disciplines i mean social scientists political scientists physicists of course but also people like the civilian leaders of agencies david lillenthal from the atomic energy commission was there

And they would debate these fundamental questions that simply, you know, had to be answered in this new era. I mean, first of all, could you use these weapons? If you used them, did that make ground war and tanks and armies obsolete? What would World War III be like? All kinds of fundamental questions. Now, the problem for these people is that all of this stuff...

is part of what you normally consider to be the responsibility and the prerogative of the military leaders. You don't tell the general how to use his weapons. That's not your business. You tell me where to go and what to do in terms of winning, I'll take care of it. But now the weapons were so powerful that many of the big thinkers out there argued that simply using them had huge political implications.

Something you could not delegate to a general on the ground who might think he needed atomic weapons to blow up the entrenchments on that enemy hill, not realizing that he could lose the entire war of global public opinion by doing so, right? In other words, the use of this most powerful weapon had to be in the hands of the supreme leader, whomever that might be.

Well, in 1950, that's still Harry Truman, by the way. And in January 1950, after reading the report from Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists saying, don't build the super bomb, Truman decides to build the super bomb. The reasons given and the people around him who've given the reason, they all revolve around the same thing. Again, easily understandable stuff. You can't be outgunned.

Truman even mentioned the psychology of it. I mean, even if you believed the idea that Oppenheimer floated, that you can just use A-bombs against their H-bombs, the psychological effect on the American people was unacceptable. So it was a standard understandable response. They're going to get it, so we have to have it. And, you know, the way you can kind of reliably test to see if this is something that, you know, if there was such a thing as collective human DNA, I mean, for the species as a whole, that it's in there somewhere, right?

can you imagine humankind saying no to a more powerful weapon system i mean i'm sure there's groups on the planet there's a very peaceful group of people in that part of the world they would say no but as a whole when you think of the powers at the very height of you know importance can you imagine them saying you know yes we know that's a much bigger and more powerful weapon than we have but we're okay with what we currently possess we don't need that bigger weapon it's

I mean, if the aliens landed tomorrow and we found out the biggest weapon they had, destroy the galaxy in the blink of an eye, was the X-14, there are going to be people on this planet right away that say we have to have an X-14. They'll walk all over us if we don't have one, even if we don't know how to use it, even if it might destroy the galaxy. As long as we have one, they can't just roll all over. They have to take it into account. We become a player. We will not be subject to escalation dominance.

psychologically it's important for those aliens to know we have an x14 too here's the thing though the truman administration at the time that he approves going ahead with this hydrogen bomb still hasn't figured out how to use the great power of the atomic bomb they're still trying to figure out what you do with that because it's so powerful and yet now we're going to move ahead with something that's hundreds of times more powerful than that

Truman has taken the pistol out of the hands of that five-year-old who was trying to figure out what to do with that and handed him a machine gun instead. He still doesn't know what to do with it, but at least it's a lot more powerful. And that's kind of where we are because in this period between 1945 and 1950, the

When it's this theoretical period punctuated by lots of scares and near misses and threats and all that, people are trying to figure out what you can really do with these things. Oppenheimer and his folk had said you don't need anything bigger than an atomic bomb. The problem is during this time period there is no chance to do what will later be called counterforce, really. Counterforce means using your nuclear weapons against the enemy's military targets. At this stage of development, you are lucky to use them against anything.

You use them against big things, cities, with people. These are city-destroying weapons, and that's what you use them for in this period. The question, though, that more political minds are asking during this period is, does that get us what we want? I mean, if the thought is that you're going to kill millions and millions of people, do you end up with an outcome, you know, in the end, that was better than what you had before?

And then, of course, a really important question during the entire period of the Cold War and even up to now is, does the other side really think you do that? Remember, there are really, during this period, two kinds of people when it comes to nuclear weapons. The kind who thinks you can use these things and who plan to and the kind who thinks you can't use them. But even those people think that they still make up a part of what you can use to threaten other people.

I mean, the best use of this tool, as many theorists during this period thought about it anyway, was that it created something where you could tell someone else, do that or else, or don't do that or else, you'll get nuked. Remember, Truman did this several times after the Second World War and before 1950.

But in April 1950, Truman is presented with a document that will become one of the most important and yet very little known actually documents in American history. It's called NSC 68. And it did a lot of things including pushed forward some of the hydrogen bomb development stuff. But what NSC 68 did in paragraph after paragraph is spot the holes in this entire defense strategy.

The fact that you basically were relying on a threat, and if the threat were called, you either had to nuke the other side and kill millions of people or back down. Well, other powers could test that. They could try to find a point underneath the threshold of when you would use these weapons. I mean, what if somebody just sort of gobbled up their neighbor a little at a time? When do you nuke them?

Allies were worried about this too because they were starting to think that maybe the United States would be willing to use nuclear weapons for themselves and their own protection but if it was somebody in Europe that they said they'd protect maybe they don't nuke anyone for that maybe they don't kill millions and millions and millions of Russians if the Russians invade West Germany that kind of thing would make the West Germans nervous for example.

One of the things NSC-68 said is that the risk that they were running right now with their strategy of nuke everything or nothing was, quote, the risk was having no better choice than to capitulate or precipitate a global war, end quote. In other words, they had no flexibility at all. It was nukes or nothing.

And so NSC 68 becomes this document that advocates a huge increase back to spending on conventional weapons, tanks, planes, you know, naval ships, all the other stuff, but doesn't back off the nuclear stuff either.

In other words, whereas before the budgetary choice was between this or that, now it's this and that and everything more. This becomes the document that begins the giant military buildup in the U.S. in the role as sort of the policeman of the free world that we still live with today.

Now, initially, Truman looked at this thing and we are told by the history books thought this was going to be horribly expensive. And Truman tended to be fiscally conservative. And he sort of put it on hold and thought about it a little bit. And then in June on the 25th, actually, 1950, the North Korean communists invaded South Korea. And what that meant was that all of a sudden and moving very quickly and hard to get your mind around and react and debate and deliberate,

What had initially seemed like it was too much money to spend for Truman and probably Congress and the American people, I think it was something like a virtual tripling of U.S. defense expenditures, seemed like a no-brainer. Now that all of a sudden, for all intents and purposes, as far as anyone could tell with quickly moving events, the fuse for the Third World War seemed to have been lit.

The Korean War, as it's come to be known, is so fascinating and has so many things involved with it that have nothing to do with the great powers. They would make a wonderful discussion all by itself. I'm going to really resist going off into too many tangents and try to stay on the focus, which is that it's a completely different sort of challenge than trying to live with these amazingly powerful weapons and the temptation and the fear and the uncertainty that they bring to the table, this new thing.

in peacetime even with all the threats and the scares it's an entirely different matter to try to deal with the temptation and fear and uncertainty involving them in wartime and let's also remember the very other human elements involved that are operating sort of underneath the scenes here

There are a lot of people who have invested reputations and viewpoints and all sorts of things into the efficacy of these weapons and what you can do with them and what sort of game changers they are. And so now we were going to find out, you know, whether they were right. Were all these pronouncements and positions taken in peacetime going to play out the way the advocates and opponents thought they were going to play out now that we have a real live fire situation going on?

And if there was ever a conflict that would tempt a leader to use atomic weapons, the Korean War seems tailor-made for it. Because eventually, it will settle down to an almost First World War style, very little movement kind of stalemate. But initially, it is an absolute bar brawl between

where the momentum swings wildly from side to side and there's crises after crises and each side gets into their own trouble. I mean, initially, the North Korean communist forces with tanks and people that had fought in the Chinese Civil War just swarm down and start smashing the South Korean forces, driving themselves towards the water. I mean, this is going to be a Dunkirk with no place to go, if you catch my meaning. They outnumber them. They have armor. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why it happened.

Now, Korea had been just sort of getting the idea of independence down after being occupied by Japan. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviets, you know, occupied the top half of the country, basically the West, the bottom half of the country. They put in governments that they were friendly with a communist one in the north and a non-communist one in the south.

and then kind of sort of looked elsewhere while the whole Berlin thing is playing out. I mean, there's bigger fish to fry. As a matter of fact, when the Korean War breaks out, there's a large contingent of people that thinks that this is just a diversionary feint. Sure, old Joe Stalin does a little move in Korea. The entire free world moves their military forces there. We get bogged down, and then he invades in Europe. A lot of people thought that. The historian John Lewis Gaddis makes a very interesting point.

saying that if this hadn't been a World War II-style attack with tanks and the whole thing going over the border, basically an open and overt challenge to the post-war idea that we're going to have collective defense and there's never going to be another Hitler and aggressive war is never going to win again, Gaddis says if this...

Attack had been more like the way the Vietnamese were very good at attacking 15 years after this, where they were they would send in guerrillas and it would be subversive and slow and infiltration. And you never know where the decision points are that the Americans probably wouldn't have gotten involved at all. But this was a challenge and somebody had to stand up to it, or at least that's the way.

It looked to Truman, who was just in the major stages of codifying one of the policies he's most known for instigating. It's something called containment. There were several different views on how you handle the spread of communism from the domino effect. The one that was eventually part of NSC 68 was called containment. Don't let it spread any farther. There were other more aggressive ones like rollback or another one that liberation was what some of the far right hawks wanted.

But containment is what sort of became the policy of the United States. And if that's going to be your policy, even if you thought that just meant you were going to give money and aid and help certain governments, now you had a situation on your hands where if you didn't act and you didn't act soon, South Korea was going to disappear and it was going to be a fait accompli. It wasn't going to matter what you said. There wasn't going to be two Koreas anymore. You weren't going to be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You know, in like three days, the capital of South Korea falls. What are you going to do?

And there were so many other things we have to remember were ongoing at this time, the importance of which has faded in the 70 years since. But remember, this is five years after the Second World War. These people had...

begun to think that they had made war illegal for lack of a better word they had once again built structures what they thought were new and improved structures over the last world war structures the league of nations proved to be you know a toothless tiger so now we had a new and improved version of it called the united nations and this is a real test for the united nations

Truman involves them, you know, basically right away. They start debating what to do. And as fate would have it, and it never went this way again, the Soviet Union happened to be boycotting the U.N. at the time, so they were not there. Now, as we all know today, what we would have expected to happen, given our understanding of history, was

was that when this question of what should we all do about this Korean War thing came to the UN, the Soviet Union, as friends and backers and fellow communists with the North Koreans, would have used their veto, which several members of the UN are on the Security Council permanently and wage and have a veto that they can use and often do. The Soviet Union would have vetoed the whole thing and everything would have been muddled and there wouldn't have been any unified effort. But because they happened to be boycotting at the time, they couldn't do that. And

And the U.S., with a bunch of other nations, got an agreement together to go in and save South Korea quickly. And the U.S. and other countries became really a United Nations army, at least in terms of the marketing. I mean, there was a United Nations flag that flew on some of these tanks. It's never been quite this way again. The implication was that all of a sudden you were going to have a global world army that could go in and do things like this.

In addition, Truman puts in charge one of the heroes of the Second World War, Douglas MacArthur, right? The guy who so famously in the Pacific said, I shall return. And then eventually he comes back and he goes, I have returned. And I mean, he's Eisenhower famously said he studied dramatics for years as a subordinate to MacArthur.

So MacArthur's put in charge of these forces. They're rushed over from Japan. These are a bunch of guys who've been sitting in Japan enjoying themselves for a few years. They're not exactly crack combat troops when they get there, and there's not many of them. And the Air Force comes in and the Navy gets involved. And very quickly, you find out that that Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson that said, we'll never need another amphibious operation. You don't need a Navy was back.

about as wrong as you could be because when the korean war broke out and within five days the united states is trying to be there on the ground to save south korea from falling and they just don't have what they need straight up when they get in there and now it looks like they're going to get defeated with the south koreans it's just a terrible situation and becomes the first moment where you think god you know if you had some really good tactical nuclear weapons during this period you could see some places where you just love to use them but they don't have that right now

But over and over again, the situation will change. Eventually, there'll be enough forces built up so the UN forces can start pushing back and creating a larger perimeter. And then MacArthur, in maybe the greatest move of his career, lands an amphibious operation in your face, Louis A. Johnson, at Incheon behind the North Korean lines, cuts them off, begins to...

you know, push back up now towards North Korea. So we've gone from defending South Korea to now moving in and invading North Korea. And there are warnings. Be careful. You're approaching China. They might not like that.

Even though MacArthur is supposedly finding Chinese dead people when he goes over and looks at what should be North Korean dead people, he tells President Truman, don't worry, the Chinese aren't going to get involved. And secretly later on, you find out he's not scared of them anyway. So they don't have the logistics. You know, what are they going to do? Blah, blah, blah. Nothing's going to happen. And he continues to move forces closer to their line. And then they whack him with like 200, 300,000 guys. Boom.

And the war changes again, and now the Chinese have entered the conflict. Think of how quickly this escalated from a North Korean-South Korean affair to something where you now had the United States of America and a multitude of its Western allies, the great powers of the West, facing off against red China on the Asian mainland, backed by the Soviet Union.

I mean, we started this on June 25th, 1950. Within a couple of days, the U.S. and the West are involved. By September, you have the Inchon landings and the whole complexion of the war changes. By late October, early November, the Chinese are in it, but not officially. And that becomes part of where you begin to see this evolving into a very post-Second World War form, a form that is largely dictated by

by the existence and possible use of nuclear weapons this is when it becomes apparent that to keep this from becoming world war three all the major powers that would be needed to fight world war three are doing their best to create some plausible deniability so that nobody has to admit this is world war three i mean one of the interesting theories out there is that if you don't have nuclear weapons in the world during this time period

Maybe there's a decent chance this does turn into World War III, but you can watch Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in Red China, and Harry Truman all bending over backwards to be able to tell the world, no, this isn't war.

In Truman's case, famously, you know, when the fighting breaks out and it's the worst since the Second World War, pretty hard to deny what's going on there, you know, isn't war. And the reporter says to the president, he says, President Truman, is this war? Are we at war? And Truman famously says right there, no, we are not at war. And so the reporter counters with something like, so what is this? Is this like a police action? And Truman famously says something to the effect of, you know, yeah, that about sums it up. And forever after, it's been called the police action.

As though the proper label on this thing puts a limit on it. It's not just about marketing either. There are real changes. I mean, if Truman calls this anything besides a war, does he have to go to Congress and ask them to declare war? This is another thing that a bunch of modern historians are suggesting was seen by the people around Truman as kind of a quaint relic of a pre-nuclear age.

His secretary of state and people like that, not huge fans of, you know, more people being in on the decision making process. And Truman was able to put troops in harm's way without ever having to ask anyone else's permission. I mean, historian Gary Willis said the decision to intervene in Korea was made amongst Truman and a tiny group of advisers around himself.

The reporter asked that question about are we at war because normally you would know there'd be a big declaration. Congress would do it. The country would be all in. They'd ramp up for the war effort. They'd use everything in their power. They'd demolish the other side and they'd come home. But can you do that in a nuclear age? The reason the Korean War is germane to this story is because, well, here's the way historian John Lewis Geddes explains it. Quote,

The outbreak of fighting in Korea in June 1950 provided the first hard evidence. The Korean War demonstrated how awkward it would be to use atomic bombs, even in the most desperate military circumstances. From this perspective, they proved to be irrelevant to the outcome of that conflict. But from another perspective, they were of critical importance, for Korea determined how hot wars during the Cold War were to be fought.

The rule quickly became that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would confront the other directly or use all available force. Each would seek instead to confine such confrontation within the theaters in which they had originated. This pattern of tacit cooperation amongst bitter antagonists could hardly have emerged had it not been for the existence on both sides of nuclear weapons."

In order to give them some plausible deniability and basically say, we're not at war with the United States. You don't have a Chinese-American war going on. Mao and the Chinese labeled their hundreds of thousands of Chinese army troops volunteers. As though you almost don't even know what's happening. What? There's hundreds of thousands of our people in Korea fighting? Well, who knew?

And eventually, when the Soviet Union, who kind of deliberately doesn't get involved, I mean, they kind of stay away from this instead. I mean, you got to be careful because the Soviet Union and China have signed a pact, a defense pact. So if it looks like China is attacked, automatically the United States is now at war with the Soviet Union, too, which the Soviet Union doesn't want.

So they're not getting directly involved. They're staying as far away as they can. And when eventually, almost because they're shamed into it, they have to send pilots to help. They make the pilots, you know, they paint the planes like they're Chinese volunteer planes. They give them fake names. They tell them if they're captured, you know, you say you're a Russian living in China. They tell them don't fly over water because you might get caught. I mean, the whole thing is a disguise. Now, it's not fooling any of the other countries, right?

This is essentially to be able to say that this is not the kind of war where we need to use nuclear weapons, although the temptations keep coming. I mean, there'll be a point, for example, when 11,000 soldiers, most of them American, in sub-freezing temperatures are surrounded around the Chosin Reservoir. And there are people that will go to President Truman and say, you know, Mr. President, we'd like to use atomic bombs.

I keep trying to remind myself that Truman is the first human being to ever have that sort of question put to him, to have that kind of responsibility dropped in his lap. And you can't fake understanding the ramifications because he'd already done it twice.

But that's a heck of a thing to put on a human being. And Truman, as I said, didn't just cry when he got the job. He basically said, I'm not a big enough man for it. I'm not a big enough man for it. And yet he's the first man in human history to have this kind of responsibility in his lap. There was a 1952 article in Fortune magazine where a writer I like named Hedley Donovan did something which I think is really cool, where he zoomed out sort of and imagined the

Harry Truman's power at this stage in world history would have been viewed had we been looking at it from 500 years ago or something. If we were treating it like we would treat the Carolingian Empire or the Byzantine Empire or something in your history books, right? Because we tend to treat modern history totally differently. We look at it through a totally different lens. And Donovan's article puts this in terms that we could recognize if we were talking about events from a thousand years ago when he writes, quote,

A Californian named Robert Carney now commands the greatest striking power in the Mediterranean world, the seat of the classic empires of Alexander and Caesar Augustus. Admiral Carney directs all NATO forces in Southern Europe and the U.S. 6th Fleet.

In northern and western Europe, the old realms of Charlemagne and Napoleon, extraordinary military and political influence is held by a Kansas man, Dwight David Eisenhower. In Korea, the bridge and battlefield of half a dozen Oriental imperialisms, the largest western army ever lodged on the Asiatic mainland, is led by Matthew Ridgway from Virginia.

All of these officers are answerable, of course, he writes, to a native of Independence, Missouri. If the President of the U.S. were ever tempted to think of himself as Emperor Harry I, there is no evidence that he has been, he could look about the world with considerable personal satisfaction. End quote.

And yet several times in this war, he will be asked to unleash the sort of hell that none of the people who ran those earlier empires could ever dream of being able to inflict. And it's noteworthy that he turns them down essentially every time. This is kind of a great, interesting psychological question to which there is no clear answer, but there are lots of speculations, as I said, as to why...

Truman doesn't drop this bomb. If it's going to help him out of this jam and he's got a lot of political pressure at home, why doesn't he do it? Well, this becomes another place in history where it depends on who you believe. Now, as a fan of history, I simply read all of these different ones and I try to pick the ones in my head which I think are the most, you know, logical or make the most sense. But oftentimes, you know, they all kind of have a good point. I mean, in How to Win a Nuclear War, Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, amongst other people,

suggest that the reason truman didn't use nuclear weapons in korea was because he didn't have any extras to uh people who subscribe to that theory the reason isn't moral at all it's simply that the surplus doesn't exist and if this really is a feint and the soviet union's just trying to get all our attention over to asia and then they're going to attack in europe you're going to want all 300 or 400 atomic bombs in your stockpile so that's one attitude out there

there's another view that they're particularly unsuited to this kind of warfare where you have these individual chinese peasant type infantrymen carrying all they need on their backs over the hills and you know scattered numbers i mean nuclear weapons not really set up for that there's another school of thought that they're afraid of using them and having them not be as scary as everyone thinks they might be maybe hiroshima and nagasaki were the best place to demonstrate them in terms of scaring people

The most effective conditions you could use them under, maybe anything else might be underwhelming, so they're scarier if you don't use them. There's all sorts of theories, but I can't help but notice a certain pattern, and that's that if you look at the first three U.S. presidents that have had to grapple with this amazing amount of power, they have often had to do so at odds with their military advisors on several occasions. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, they all will have their advisors saying, we think you should use these things sometimes.

And they will all say no. It's fascinating to think about that. And again, one is forced to confront our past and ask if this is how we would have behaved in earlier generations or earlier human eras in the same circumstance, or whether or not this is indicative of some sort of evolution or growth. And if it is growth...

Is it ethical growth? Are these people becoming more ethical than the people of the past? Or is it intellectual growth? Are we becoming intelligent enough to manage these unbelievably sophisticated and dangerous weapons? I can't answer that, but I can say one thing for sure. It's on a collision course, and you don't have to be a genius to see that.

with the principal way that the experts fight wars during this period. Remember, Truman is trying to adapt to this new atomic age. He's got generals in charge of forces fighting complicated wars on a nuclear booby-trapped geopolitical chessboard who were born in the 1800s. MacArthur does not want to worry about which chess pieces he wants to use on this nuclear booby-trapped chessboard or what squares he can and can't move to.

he's used to having a free hand and he and truman clash over what he can do truman is creating something that will be known as limited war whether he knows it or not during this time period

The general that he personally put in charge of all these forces, and they're not just American forces. There's Australians, there's Turks, there's Brits. I mean, it is a multinational UN force headed up by this guy Truman put into place and a guy who has famously said and will during this entire crisis in war, there is no substitute for victory. When I was a kid, it was widely thought that Douglas MacArthur wanted the power to use atomic weapons himself against his adversaries in Korea and that Truman wouldn't let him.

but none of the modern histories seem to think so. They point out that he didn't want to use nuclear weapons, but he did want to be able to fight the war in Korea the same way he'd fought every other conventional war with the standards and the attitudes towards victory that he was accustomed to using. The problem was is if he did those things, he would cause the Third World War to break out most likely. If you're Truman and you're playing this knife-edge dangerous game, it's way too much of a gamble.

MacArthur didn't want any rules telling him what he couldn't do to fight a war and win. And when he said this enough publicly that he disagreed with the president's policy, to the media, he had to go. And, you know, once again, when you think about the bravery involved here with Truman, not a Truman fan particularly,

But his poll numbers were much lower than Douglas MacArthur's. Douglas MacArthur was a hero to a lot of people, and there were a lot of people that just plain didn't like Harry Truman. After he fires MacArthur, MacArthur comes home, and a half a million people come out to give him a ticker tape parade. Most of the newspapers come out for MacArthur. I mean, if you're Harry Truman, you just made the biggest negative move of your entire presidency.

and it took an amazing amount of guts and you and you paid forever for it probably cost you another term and yet it was the right decision you can say in hindsight because if macarthur had been allowed to do what he wanted and a third world war had broken out imagine how different our history is today i mean all you have to do is look at what the plans were right or the assumptions of what the plans were in some cases

Western military leaders assumed that the Red Army would simply launch attacks across from their bases in Eastern Europe into Western Europe and roll all the way to the Atlantic. Think about the destruction that that entails right there.

U.S. plans involve the use of this most dangerous of all human weapons ever invented. No, not the nuclear bomb, because remember, that's a component in a weapons system. You still had to be able to deliver the bomb. This was the problem the Soviets had during this period. They may have had like 10, maybe 20 of these bombs.

they didn't have an adequate delivery system but they had no strategic air force they didn't have a way to bomb anybody yet they were working on it but it wasn't a real threat the real threat was that the red army would just crush all opposition all the way to the ocean

The U.S., however, would unleash Strategic Air Command, who had a bevy of different plans that they had on paper and variants of every plan. They had plans like shakedown and off-tackle and all these kinds of things. But what these plans had in common was a massive atomic blitz using about two-thirds of the atomic weapons in the stockpile right away, the same day, actually, in most cases, and then keeping about a third in reserve to go re-bomb places that needed re-bombing.

During the period we're talking about here, it's something like 200 bombs. Maybe 300 bombs. Maybe on 20, 30, 40 Soviet cities, a bunch of these cities to be bombed multiple times. It's millions and millions of people, though, any way you look at it. And you wonder what the history books would look like today with the photos and accounts of the survivors of, let's just say, 35 Russian cities bombed.

after they had been bombed on the same day in the world's first atomic war, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki on steroids, I guess. And, you know, I've often felt that, especially my own people, Americans, but maybe a lot of other people too, don't look carefully enough at what these weapons do because there are overtones there.

that people tend to push away because we're human. In the United States, when you'll talk to people about the atomic bombings of Japan, there's a defensiveness that often comes up because they assume you're trying to heap some sort of guilt on them and they will get defensive and point out the things the Japanese did or many of the other elements involved in what the conversation about atomic and nuclear bombings usually break down towards. And it keeps us

from examining the most important part of the story, though. Not the past part that can't be changed, but the future part that needs to be understood when we are talking about doing things that might lead to the kind of outcomes we've only seen a couple of times before. And those outcomes are so important. And I'm struck by the fact that even people who were living through them at the time and trying to survive...

realized that they were essentially guinea pigs of a new age and tried to write things down so we could benefit from it today. But in order to benefit, we have to look at it. History makes you look at things. There's a part of me that thinks there'd be something beneficial to walking a lot of people around the death camps after the Second World War where people were exterminated just to remind them.

History forces you to look at these things and realize that this isn't just some weird occurrence one time. This is what happens periodically. These are the stakes. Be aware of them and know what can happen. There was a diary kept by an amazing doctor at Hiroshima, a guy named Dr. Michihiko Hachia.

And in his diary, first of all, he's a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb. But then he goes on to the nearest hospital and he begins treating people. One of the things that's so terrible about these weapons is because they create an almost natural disaster, the first responders and the people that have to help all the damaged people are themselves victims and their facilities are part of what's damaged.

So you compound a difficult situation by killing all the doctors and nurses and destroying the hospitals at the same time. But in a move that just shows how sometimes, like in this case, it's scientists, but there are other peoples and professions also. In this case, this Japanese scientist realizes as soon as he's not having people literally dying at his feet, and it's like four days later or something,

he tells the other doctors that we have to start writing stuff down the data is going to be really important to people in the future because there hasn't been many people who've lived through this yet in other words this guy was already thinking beyond the war to posterity and knowing that actual data on live subjects in real world conditions will be rare and important for the future

he puts that in his diary i found that amazing and heartwarming but it doesn't help us if we don't use it so you have to look at this stuff straight in the face and then say when you're talking about nuclear war you're talking about this and you're not talking about it happening to some foreign people you don't know you simply have to put the faces of your own friends and family on the victims and imagine that instead hiroshima survivor asimakoshi

was in the bathroom when the hiroshima bomb went off and the bathroom collapsed around her and she finally got out with the help of someone else and found her sister dreadfully injured mostly from the heat of these bombs that's one thing they had that the regular conventional bombs didn't there was almost a flash some people describe it like a bluish white like a flashbulb flash and it would burn you like the worst sunburn all the way to the bone you've ever seen and

But funnily enough, it was so quick that if you had clothing on, especially light clothing, you could be perfectly protected under the clothing and your skin falling off everywhere else. And this woman describes getting out of this bathroom after it collapsed around her and what happened next. And remember, this could be your wife or your mother or your sister or your daughter. Quote,

Looking around for my sister, I saw her lying sprawled in the corridor, the right side of her body covered with terrible burns. She had probably been washing her hands, with her right hand stretched over the wash basin when caught by the searing heat. I put my sister on my back and fled barefoot to Hajiima Park. Her face was festering from her burns and her right eye was hanging out.

I pushed the eye back into its socket and tried to use a gauze mask to hold it into place, but her ear had melted away and there was nothing to attach the mask to.

Her mouth was twisted to the right, and she could do no more than whimper for water, only the first syllable of the word emerging distinctly. On reaching Hijiyama Park, I laid my sister down on the ground and set off to search for my children. The fires were still burning fiercely. In a streetcar that had been burned bright red, surrounded by people already killed by the fire, I saw a woman still holding on to a strap and calling for help.

The intense heat prevented me from approaching her, however. There was nothing I could do. To a man sitting on some stone steps, I said, "'Come on, let's get away from here,' and pulled him up by the hand. But as I did so, the skin came away from his hand, and he fell slowly to the ground. I could see his shadow imprinted clearly on the wall behind him where he had been sitting."

Many people called out to me for help or water. Unburned because of having been in the lavatory, I could only bring my hands together and apologize to the people I passed as I searched for some sign of my children. As it turned out, none of those who left that morning ever came home again. Not my five children, my grandfather, my sister Michiko, or my cousin.

Not a bone remained for me to find and treasure. Our house burned down so that I had not even a photograph to remember them by. My sister Hisako drew her last breath four days later on the evening of August 10th in agony from her massive injuries. I will never forget the expression on her face when I tried to give her a drop of water. I was alone. End quote. That's not meant to be a tearjerker.

That's meant to be an example that you multiply by the number of people who are involved in these catastrophes if they happen. When you think about what people are afraid of, understand that this is a science fiction dystopian type of nightmare story until it comes true. And in this era, the possibility of it coming true at times appears to be about the same chance you're going to get a

heads or a tail when you flip a coin and you know another interesting study into the into the human condition can be made if you ask about the kind of people who advocate this as a viable and useful strategy because you might say to yourself well you know who would do this who would plan for this who could sit down and actually say no this is what we're going to do if the imminent third world war happens and it will so this is what we'll do who does that

you have to say well some kind of mass murderer right wants to kill people but that's not how the people that do these things see it they have what two people on the far other side the rainbows and unicorns oppenheimer poet side think is an abhorrent way of viewing things but there are a lot of people here that are making calculations about relative disasters

You'll see this later on, too, when you'll get these people at these think tanks that will say, you know, that they're trying to reduce the number of dead in a nuclear war from 40 million to 20 million. And other people think that simply even trying to do that is morally reprehensible. We should be talking about having no millions dying, right? But if you read the accounts of people like Curtis LeMay, the very famous leader of Strategic Air Command, the one who will be

Turned into a stock character in the 1960s movies and whatnot. Dr. Strangelove, failsafe. They all have a Curtis LeMay type, the cigar chomping Air Force guy. LeMay's attitude was one that you saw amongst a lot of generals, and especially these First and Second World War people, who saw the major nasty part of modern war as being its length.

and that because the casualties mounted every day like a meat grinder, anything you could do to shut that down and limit the length of time the war went on was humanitarian by its very nature, even if what it took to do that was a shocking amount of violence in a very short time to shock everybody into peace.

LeMay did not like what was going on in the Korean War. He wanted to unleash his heavy bombers as he had over Japan in the Second World War, and he testified afterwards that it would have been, I'm putting words into his mouth now, the more humanitarian approach. This is the philosophy of strategic bombers, and believe it or not, it's based on humanitarian ethics.

and just to show you how ingrained it is it is not ironic when they name nuclear weapons delivery systems as they've done more than once with names like peacemaker and peacekeeper the the new bomber that will carry out these nuclear destructions of places like the soviet union if it happens in 1950 and 1951 is the brand new b-36 bomber which is nicknamed

The peacemaker. LeMay said about the all-out bombing campaign that they didn't do at the beginning of the Korean War. Quote, So we go on and don't do it, and let the war go on.

Over a period of three and a half or four years, we did burn down every town in North Korea and every town in South Korea and what? Killed off 20% of the Korean population? What I'm trying to say is, if once you make a decision to use military force to solve your problem, then you ought to use it.

End quote.

So when you wonder about the kind of people that could carry out these kinds of war aims, which may sound apocalyptic to you, these are people flying planes called peacemakers who firmly believe that their way of war will end up being more beneficial to everybody in the end. It's a similar point of view to Douglas MacArthur. It's the traditional modern 20th century military point of view.

Total war saves lives. Limited war prolongs the nastiness. But once again, American presidents, heads of the Soviet Union and China, the heads of the Western NATO countries, they have a lot of things to worry about besides this idea of total victory. Take, for example, the idea that perhaps a total or even partial defeat in an atomic war might have been something in the back of their heads.

Nonetheless, the way the Korean War ends up is something that either side of that total war versus limited war debate could probably use as ammunition in their discussion. The friends of Harry Truman might say, listen, by middle of 1951, both sides are at the armistice table talking and working out a deal, to which the friends of Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur might counter by saying, yes, but the talks will go on for two years and soldiers will die on both sides the entire time.

To which the Harry Truman supporters could then reply, yes, but we didn't get World War III. Boom, game over. What do you say to that? Yes, the situation in Korea was a nightmare. Lots of casualties, lots of dead, lots of civilians. I mean, bad all the way around, but it wasn't nuclear war. Presidents are often forced into making lesser of two evil choices, and in this case, got to be pretty darn bad of an outcome for nuclear war to not be the greater evil.

And in 1952, the greater evil is getting worse. I think you have to say that Harry Truman deserves a lot of credit for getting us out of his entire terms in office without us ending up bombing anyone with nuclear weapons after the Second World War ended. Because I think it was a flip of a coin whether or not we did that. Remember, all he would have had to have done is listen to some of his military advisors, and he would have.

As Truman's term in office winds down, you can see that it's easy to say that if the world is playing a three-dimensional geopolitical game of nuclear chess, they're playing by the rules laid down by Truman. And let's be honest, the people that he was playing nuclear chess with also, Joseph Stalin and the Soviets, it was a takes two to tango situation.

And between the two major sides, things are hammered out. And there's, you know, input from Europeans and third world nations. I mean, this is a global effort to cobble together a way to deal with what is becoming an ever increasing threat and a threat that is moving so quickly that the sheer speed of technological change is one of the most destabilizing parts of the entire equation. At what point do you get used to this?

I mean, we've been pondering the question about whether humans can adapt to their weapons technology. But let's remember that once upon a time, people didn't have to adapt this quickly. Throughout most of human history, the pace of change was much less quick than it is today. If you could take 1950s atomic technology, give it to the ancient Egyptians and say, this isn't going to change very much for the next 15 generations. Take some time, figure it out. Does the extra time they get help them do it? Or, I mean, is just thinking of ancient Egyptians with...

You know, nuclear technology, too weird to even contemplate. The point is, is that, you know, I try to, again, remember who these people are. Truman is a grandfather surrounded by other grandfathers. You ever had to help your grandfather with tech stuff, right? This is a guy who is sitting there listening to different nuclear physicists describe the pros and cons of different ideas and pushing different points of view, and he has to decide which one he agrees with. Why do I have an image of

of him having to call his kid in college to come home and help him figure out where to turn the nuclear bomb off. I can't find that button. Truman kind of looks like the tweener president from the non-specialist technical era to the one where you have to referee competing arguments between physicists like Oppenheimer and Teller. Requires a different kind of mind, a different kind of an approach, and maybe a different kind of background.

As I said, I feel kind of lucky we got out of that era intact. But when you look at the last year of Truman's presidency, 1952, you can see the tsunami of dangers mounting in the distance. And you just it's hard to have confidence that the haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, who's already exceeded expectations, you know, and his flexibility in an atomic world, hard to see him flexible enough to deal with some of the things 1952 brings on. I mean, for example,

Here's a guy whose advisors and administration helped craft, as we said, the rules for how you play this global chess match. But it's always been a two-player game. And in October 1952, the United Kingdom explodes their first atomic bomb. Now they're in the nuclear club. Now it's a more than two-person game. That'll change your dynamics, especially when...

You know, the part that really bothers everybody about the UK test becomes clear, which is that they won't be the last power to join the nuclear club. In a few years, are you going to have 10, 15, 20 powers with atomic bombs? So in order now for humans to adapt to this new weapon, they now have to adapt to more people having it. So the dynamics get much more complex. Now you add to that the change in the power of the weaponry.

Less than a month after the United Kingdom demonstrates that they're an atomic power, the United States demonstrates that they have the technology and it works to build the super bomb. They actually exploded only a couple of days before the U.S. presidential election. And the power of the bomb is stunning, truly paradigm shifting. The test occurs on an island in the Pacific. When it explodes, there's a fireball more than three miles wide.

There's lightning crackling inside it. The crater's more than 6,000 feet in diameter. The hole's more than 150 feet deep. It's somewhere between 400 and 500 times more powerful than either of the bombs that were dropped in the Second World War. 400 to 500 times more powerful. And what's kind of interesting about this period compared to our own is how much of this weapons development is psychological.

Again, to have a psychological edge on your opponent, to be able to use things like deterrence effectively, everyone had to know you had these weapons. And so today you would imagine governments wouldn't even tell anybody about any of this stuff. But the United States announced these things. We have this weapon now. We have that weapon. Because that was important to its ability to be used. The problem with something...

like the thermonuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb, is that they're so powerful now that they're in effect working against the idea that you can use them for deterrence, right? The bigger they get, the less willing your enemy or adversary is to think you'll use it. Joseph Stalin is quoted as saying that he thinks, you know, in Pravda, he said that public opinion and the peace movement around the world will reign their governments in.

No one's going to use a megaton, you know, powerful weapon on us because world opinion won't stand for it. And there's some truth to that. But if you're the military and you want to use these weapons or you're the intellectuals and the political associates of the president and you want your deterrence to still bite and work, how do you deal with that dynamic, right? That the weapons are so powerful no one believes you'll use them. You make smaller versions of them.

It's a decent argument to ask whether the most destabilizing effect of inventions from 1952, I mean, you could make an argument for all three. Is it nuclear proliferation starting? Is it the invention of the super, the hydrogen bomb? Or is it the beginning of the revolution that we call today tactical nuclear weapons or battlefield nuclear weapons?

And the funny thing about it is some of the people who worked on it, I mean, Oppenheimer got roped into this, thought he was doing a good thing. I'm going to create smaller weapons because if I create smaller nuclear weapons, the military won't be tempted to use the bigger ones. Turned out he was wrong about that. He had a famous quote, though, when he years later tried to explain his thinking. And he said, to understand where I was then, you would have had to have seen the Air Force's war plan for 1951. He says it was the most goddamnedest thing I ever saw.

So it scared him so much, 500 atomic bombs dropped on Russia, that he thought, I'll give them something they can use instead of those. It turned out, as most thinkers assume today, that tactical nuclear weapons open up the door dangerously to an escalation very quickly to the very big bombs that Oppenheimer hoped would never be used because you'd have the smaller bombs instead. Honest mistake, though. We're in new territory here, technologically speaking, aren't we? Another reason maybe you don't want Truman running the show.

He's done about as well as maybe you could hope for. So the guy who wins the presidency in 1952 is a very interesting choice for this era. And I think more and more historians are realizing it now. When I was a kid, I had kind of a different view of general and now in November 1952, President-elect Dwight David Eisenhower.

It's interesting. I saw a couple of historians I was reading were speculating, and it's not far off from a decent speculation, maybe, that partly what the United States was going for here in terms of the electorate was they had just had a president and a general sort of disagreeing about how you fight this war in Korea and all these questions about nuclear weapons and this whole new world and everything. What if you just got a person with military experience, put them in the top job, and then when the general is arguing with the president, the president's a general too. There are some people who speculate that Dwight Eisenhower was kind of

Feeling like he stepped down in terms of responsibility when he took the American presidency for a job because he was coming down from like commander of NATO. He was the general of the West, as one writer I was reading called him, the general of the West. Now he's just merely the president of the United States.

But Eisenhower is an interesting guy. His administration, by the way, will follow a lot of the same cycles that the Truman one did and the administration after him will, too, in part because they'll find that they have a lot of the same pressures and disincentives and incentives working on them that the previous administration also did. And you often try to adopt the obvious solution in those cases, which is.

Each one did successively. So as we said, the Truman administration seems to have established a pattern that will be followed by subsequent administrations. In Eisenhower's case, though, a bunch of things happened basically right at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration that completely upset the geopolitical chessboard in ways that give him the

Well, both opportunities and dangers that Truman never had to face. Start with the fact that pretty much right after Eisenhower actually takes office, January 20th, 1953, Joseph Stalin dies March 5th, 1953. And he doesn't die today.

like a long, slow, lingering death where Russia has lots of time to prepare and the Soviets have lots of time to prepare for what you're going to do afterwards. He has like a stroke or something. So it's here today, gone tomorrow, or here today, on my way to going very soon. But what the hell happens in the Soviet Union if there's no Joseph Stalin? This guy's been running the show personally so long in that country.

that there's a logical question that happens, and it happens right when Stalin, debilitated and immobile and paralyzed from the stroke in urine-soaked pajamas, lay on his floor, unable to communicate. His underlings are outside his room, you know, outside the door talking, going, what do we do? There is no logical successor to Joseph Stalin. There was no organized system that dictated, well, here's your vice premier who takes over.

Once upon a time, all that stuff had been around. Stalin had come up in a system with lots of brilliant intellectuals and people from the original revolution, people like Lenin and all those other great people. Stalin killed a lot of those people on his way to power. And for more than 20 years, he could easily say the same thing that Louis XIV, the French king, famously said about, you know, his relationship to the country. Louis XIV said, I am the state. The state is me.

And Joseph Stalin could have been the poster boy that came up when you Googled the phrase cult of personality. As a matter of fact, one of his successors will call it just that. And yet the problem is, is that this guy's personality was completely infused on his country. A country, by the way, as we've pointed out before, badly traumatized by a surprise attack in the Second World War.

You add to that the Stalin view of communism, which is also paranoid, which, again, maybe just finely tuned self-defense antenna at work here instead, but that the non-communist powers were going to try to take you over. Add to that that you'd already been surprised attacked. Add to that that you're a paranoid dictator type anyway. And isn't it interesting that that is all infused with

on the player that the historical roll of the dice just manages to give the free world when you have your first ever nuclear chess match who do you play joseph stalin

it's going to be a little machiavellian right you're not going to be all peace love poets and robert oppenheimer when you're playing that guy and by the way uh i've got quite a few books on the soviet side of this story and the problem with the soviet side of the story is once again it's all stalin and you you can't figure the guy out so you're taking public statements and this and that but the question that was put to several people like andre sakharov and others that had been involved in the soviet nuclear program

is what if the U.S. had gone the whole, you know, full force Robert Oppenheimer ban this stuff route? What would the Soviets and Joseph Stalin had done? And to a man, they all say, oh, it would have been seen as weakness. Stalin would have pushed forward with his weapons program. He would have, I mean, first of all, he wouldn't have believed it. He would have thought that behind the scenes, it's all happening anyway. In other words,

If the U.S. and Britain and NATO and all of them had gone into a Robert Oppenheimer dream mode, that would not necessarily have had any sort of real reciprocation from the other side because the other side was Joseph Stalin. And as of March 6th, 1953, for the first time in the nuclear age, it's not.

Truman never had the opportunity to deal with anyone else. When Stalin dies, new things happen. The world changes a little bit. And Eisenhower has a chance, for example, to come out with a proposal that's known as the Adams for Peace proposal. Now, I have to make a disclaimer here. Nothing can be trusted from this era. Nothing.

We alluded to this earlier. For example, these presidents from Truman to Eisenhower, they will all have two faces to them. And I don't know which one is real. They will have one face where they will say, you can never use these weapons. I mean, Eisenhower famously said you couldn't have a nuclear war. There aren't enough bulldozers to scoop up the bodies from the streets. And yet you'll have other statements where they will say they do not ever question our willingness to use these weapons.

So you have to say it for deterrence to work. But did they secretly believe that you couldn't use these weapons or is it the opposite? That, you know, some of these depends on how cynical you are as a writer. But some of these writers and historians will say, no, no, the plan the entire time was to nuke everything. But you just can't say that in public. So you get up there and have an Adams for Peace program where you talk about working together to ban these terrible weapons.

I will say this. I can't imagine our leaders today having something like Eisenhower's speech to the United Nations where he, in 1953, laid the whole situation out. Now, whether this is some sort of cynical geopolitical move, you know, that's a public relations ploy or whether he's serious and it's hard to know. Eisenhower was a deep and interesting and complex character.

But everything that we've been talking about in this program is stuff we know now. The people in the time period are just as whiplashed by technology as Harry Truman was. And in 1953, Eisenhower, remember this is right after the hydrogen bomb concept is proven, lays out the stakes to a bunch of people who maybe didn't realize exactly how threatened they were. I feel impelled to speak today in a language that, in a sense, is new.

one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare. The atomic age has moved forward at such a pace that every citizen of the world should have some comprehension, at least in comparative terms, of the extent of this development.

of the utmost significance to every one of us. Clearly, if the peoples of the world are to conduct an intelligent search for peace, they must be armed with the significant facts of today's existence. My recital of atomic danger and power is necessarily stated in United States terms, for these are the only incontrovertible facts that I know.

I need hardly point out to this assembly, however, that this subject is global, not merely national in character. On July 16, 1945, the United States has set off the world's first atomic explosion. Since that date in 1945, the United States of America has conducted 42 test explosions. Atomic bombs today

are more than 25 times as powerful as the weapons with which the atomic age dawned, while hydrogen weapons are in the ranges of millions of tons of TNT equivalent. Today, the United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which of course increases daily, exceeds by many times

the total equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theater war in all of the years of World War II. A single air group, whether afloat or land-based, can now deliver to any reachable target a destructive cargo

exceeding in power all the bombs that fell on Britain in all of World War II. That's from the famous Adams for Peace speech. And Eisenhower, like Truman before him...

will evoke the specter of the world's great cities lying in ruins, the cultural achievements of the past, of thousands of years of work to build up to, destroyed, mankind having to arise from the ashes of a radiated and destroyed civilization, just in case you were unaware of the stakes.

But there are so many different ways you can view people, right? We all understand that. And modern history and close to modern history makes it the most apparent because you can find statements from all these people contradicting themselves. They'll have private statements versus public statements, diaries that they write in that they assume will someday be published versus secret diaries that they never want anyone else to see. What is PR versus what is behind the scenes?

I mean, when Harry Truman talks about the terrible things these nuclear weapons can do, he's the same guy that gave the go-ahead to make them. When Eisenhower gives these speeches about these existential dangers mankind faces, he is at the same time solving a budgetary problem by deciding to rely on a strategy with nuclear weapons that will be known as massive retaliation.

so which eisenhower do you buy or is it some sort of blend of the two and listen as we said good luck getting to the core of any of these public figures they're so multi-layered that to know you actually had what they really believed that'd be tough to do in any time period add to that the fact that as we all know when history compresses these human beings into one-dimensional figures you lose so much of the nuance i mean imagine

If you made it into the history books 100 years from now, how much your life would be compressed into a few bullet points? And did that sort of really give the true picture of you? I mean, even J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dean Acheson's too much of a poet, wasn't always too much of a poet. He was often opposed to nuclear weapons, but not always. Sometimes his opposition was moral, but sometimes it was technical.

And sometimes he saw good applications for nuclear power and weapons. So he's been turned into an archetype by history as well, even by me. So let's bear all that in mind. And even with all that said, Eisenhower is unusually confusing and misleading on purpose. In his book, Ike's Bluff, author Evan Thomas weaves in...

Eisenhower's near addiction to strategy card games and you know draws that into Eisenhower's conduct of world affairs and how he handled the various cards in his hand if you will and dealt with the uncertainties involved in other people's hands he was I guess a huge poker player but an even bigger bridge player and bridge I guess is played by all sorts of generals and politicians and strategists

they feel that it better represents the great geopolitical game than chess does because in chess you can see all the pieces openly whereas in a card game your hand is known only to you the adversaries have their hand secret you don't know what's in the deck you have to do a lot of bluffing and this is where eisenhower's you know deliberate opaqueness and confusion and misleading nature and ability to uh

bluff his way into various situations seem to correspond to being a master bridge player. I mean, if you're going to have somebody sit in the chair to represent your side in this historical, psychological game of strategy and uncertainty for the very highest of stakes, don't you want a gamer? And it sounds like when you're talking strategy games, Eisenhower was one and he was good, right?

He's got a new opponent, as we said, and you've got to be breathing a sigh of relief because facing Joseph Stalin in the octagon at that game when he really didn't even have nuclear weapons. Imagine him during the 1950s when he really did get the ability to just start striking the U.S. Well, perish the thought. He's gone, though, replacing him in the chair as one of his subordinates.

And it's a fascinating guy to be playing against during this era because now you have the general of the West. Finally, the West gets in there with one of these heavyweight candidates. Okay, bring on your best shot. And their best shot is a guy named Nikita Khrushchev, who I love. Nikita Khrushchev is one of the great success stories you're ever going to find. It's like a forget the Abe Lincoln log cabin story. I mean, it's Nikita Khrushchev was born a peasant.

The only reason that he finally is running one of the two great superpowers in this era is because of the Soviet communist revolution, the Bolshevik revolution that topples the czar, you know, before the first world war is over and totally upends that society and puts people in power and authority who were, you know, mucking the manure out of the barn when they were teenagers.

Nikita Khrushchev is a peasant's peasant. He uses all the terminology. He'll be at the big meetings with the and he's always using these peasant sayings that are supposed to be deeply philosophical and no one else in the room has any idea what they mean.

That's who this guy was. So the United States had the haberdasher from Missouri running the nuclear arsenal for a while and trying to adjust. The Soviet Union's about to gain the kind of power where maybe they could begin to actually, as opposed to theoretically, threaten the United States with atomic weaponry. And that gets given to a guy who was born a peasant. And he's just fascinating.

I mean, this is a man who's got a huge challenge ahead of him. And we certainly in the West never understood this was all going on. And it's still not well understood, including by me, maybe least of all by me. But Khrushchev was part of a group that comes to power in the Soviet Union intent on, perhaps you could say, guiding that state to a soft landing from Stalinism.

This was not some consensus, though, and there were powerful entities in that state vying for leadership also that adhered much more closely to the old Stalin line. Professor David Holloway, in his excellent book, Stalin and the Bomb, talks about how it was really the pressures caused by the reality of nuclear war that

that forced some of these leaders to take a different look at even their orthodox communist, in this sense, very Bolshevik and very Stalinist view of, well, the entire world reality. Because Professor Holloway says that it was Stalin's conviction and it was connected to his views on Marxism and the inevitability of a war between the imperialists and the communist states that within 10 to 20 years, World War III was coming.

And of course, as everyone was awakening to, World War III was going to mean nuclear weapons. It was going to mean devastation. A 1955 war plan that the U.S. had commissioned to check out how many people would die if the U.S. carried out their proposed strikes against the Soviet Union when World War III broke out and the number came back to be 60 million. And a decent number of those people coming from the countries like Poland and Hungary and all those places that were sort of under the thumb of the Soviets. So how do you even justify that, right?

Sorry, you're a captive person right now, but we're going to nuke you in order to free you up eventually. Burn down your village in order to save it. But Holloway talks about Khrushchev and his group getting power and beginning to talk about things that are famous in the history books like peaceful coexistence. This violated Stalin's view, Holloway says, of the inevitable war that was coming. Because if the inevitable war that's coming is Armageddon, well, that'll mess up your long-term planning, won't it?

and halloway writes this about khrushchev and his people trying to walk back communist ideology in order to prevent it from inevitably running into global thermonuclear war he writes quote

By asserting that capitalism and socialism could coexist for a long time, the new leaders of the Soviet Union were rejecting Stalin's vision of another world war within 15 to 20 years of the end of World War II. Peaceful coexistence, in quotation marks, was defined as the alternative to nuclear war, as the policy that had to be followed if nuclear war was to be avoided, end quote.

Holloway then tells a story that Khrushchev had told about meeting the much more hardliner Mao, the leader of China, and Mao is still talking in terms of the soon-to-come all-out war against the capitalists, and Khrushchev already seems to be now...

have moved on from that. This is part of what starts to create a schism amongst the communist states, almost the way you would see religious break-offs two or three or four hundred years before this era, when all of a sudden a change in religious doctrine or dogma messed up enough people so that we're going to go this way and you're going to go that way. The United States and the West saw the communists up to this period as a monolithic bloc who took their orders from Moscow, and now all of a sudden they're

Some of these communist countries are beginning to have disagreements with each other. Some of them are geopolitical, but some of them are ideological. But according to Professor Holloway, people like Khrushchev see this as something that is simply bowing to reality in a nuclear world. He says, quote,

Peaceful coexistence did not mean ideological coexistence, however, nor did it entail renunciation of the struggle with imperialism. But that struggle had to be conducted in such a way as to avoid nuclear war. End quote.

in other words the new leaders of the soviet union are also trying to figure out how you operate under the old rules in a world where you have nuclear weapons and where they are increasingly getting more and more powerful

The Soviet Union explodes its first hydrogen weapon. Well, you'll get a disagreement about this. August 12th, 1953 is a good date for this. Some of the real nitpickers will say, well, that's not a true hydrogen weapon, and they'll get into the physics of it. Nonetheless, over the next year or two, the Soviets will refine the weapon to a point where no one will argue anymore that they too are a thermonuclear power. The equation in terms of the global dynamics will be altered, though,

by the big U.S. test that goes off on March 1, 1954. This is a test, by the way, that was not supposed to be this large and instead turns out to be the largest explosion ever set off by the United States. To this day, more than 15 megatons. It's called the Bravo Test.

This time the fireball was like four miles wide. I mean, everything just gets bigger and larger. But what made Bravo so completely over the top in terms of waking up the public to a level where the alarm buttons really were raised on a wide range of

of demographics you know whereas before if you were a european living on a likely nuclear battlefield you were always aware what might happen to you if you were a person living in india with not a care in the world of these cold war events at this particular time period you would notice what a lot of the rest of the world noticed about the castle bravo test it was a radiological disaster

And because it was so much larger than experts had predicted, this opened up the door to being wrong about some of this stuff. There were physicists who had worst-case scenarios in their nightmares from before this period that thought if you did this wrong, the whole atmosphere could catch on fire and all these kinds of things that sound crazy, but I'm not a physicist, so I don't even know if that's possible. But this test showed that just because you cordon off what you think is a safe area and you try to make a zone where you can see what these weapons can do doesn't make them safe.

They cordoned off a zone and people outside the zone got radiologically sick more than 100 miles away. Famously, a Japanese fishing boat outside the exclusionary zone was bombarded with radiation. Immense amounts of fallout went up in the air. You know, when these tests happen in these Pacific coral reefs and whatnot are atomized, for lack of a better word, and turned into like micro dust particles and blown up into the mushroom cloud up into the atmosphere, all of them are radiated.

And when they fall back down to earth, they can make you, well, sick and die soon if you're close by. But even if you're far away, it gets into your water, gets into your milk, gets into your food chain, starts affecting people. And after the Castle Bravo test, the rest of the world began to watch this.

the giant geopolitical card game or three-dimensional chess game between the great powers as sort of a spectator audience. And in this particular game, the audience made a difference. And both sides tried to appeal to the audience. The audience in this case, metaphorically speaking, is global public opinion.

something that really comes of age in this period, in part because the whole understanding that nuclear weapons use, even just testing on the part of a single global power, could affect everyone. All of a sudden, everyone had skin in the game. And by the way, the era of colonialism was over for the most part, and major countries like Britain and France and others were shedding their colonies, their former colonies and their former possessions,

And these places were forming their own governments and had sovereignty of their own, you know, for a change. And they kind of sometimes looked at the Cold War the way the man from Mars that we talked about earlier would. As outsiders who were only worried about the idea that, listen, I don't care what your beef is with each other, just don't pollute the world that we all need. And this new power block mattered, increasingly so, as communication and mass media allowed people to be involved in the conversation.

and all of a sudden you had groups of people that could be used in this discussion over how we go forward in terms of how we learn to cope with our weapons technology the group of scientists the einsteins and the bertrand russells and the oppenheimer types could all of a sudden appeal directly to world opinion and try to harness it to push more for their viewpoint of how you adapt to these weapons systems you adapt to these weapon systems in their opinion

by getting rid of war not getting rid of the weapons of war because it's their opinion that you know if the weapons are there and we just pledge not to use them eventually someone's going to grab one make one whatever you need to do especially if they're losing the third world war so that they don't now these scientists are saying we know it's going to be tough but you're going to have to stop this whole policy of war that you've been using your whole civilized history

and they issue something in 1955, again, aimed directly at global public opinion. They do it in a press conference, how modern is that, where Bertrand Russell, our old friend who, before the Soviets got the bomb, had these nightmares of London lying in ruins and thought maybe we should nuke the Soviets first. He and Albert Einstein, in one of Einstein's last gigs, and others would get out there and push something nonstop

known to history as the Russell Einstein Manifesto. And it starts off with Bertrand Russell telling the media this line. This is a good way to start off a piece. If you want to say, basically, just so you know, we're directing this towards global public opinion and we're on its side.

The manifesto began with Russell saying, quote, I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories, meaning of their manifesto, to the notice of all powerful governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive, end quote. The piece then goes on to talk about the power of nuclear weapons. It then goes on to talk about how

They understand that the idea of getting rid of war sounds pie in the sky, but the power of these weapons has changed everything, including the power to pollute. But they then go on to say, as pie in the sky, if you will, as the abolition of war sounds, you must keep your eyes on what failure in this realm would mean. It's very similar to this idea of

Sending people to go look at the death camps five minutes after the liberation happens. The manifesto says, quote, The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term mankind, in quotes, feels vague and abstract and

End quote.

They then go on to explain why that's a pipe dream. The point is that all of a sudden, these scientists can appeal directly to the general public out there, and they can position them as a block of power opposed to the governments of the world who are continuing to act the way governments of the world have acted forever. The Russell Einstein group of scientists has found their block of support, and it's international in nature.

Now, there are other great intellectual thinkers out there who will form the counterpoint to these people. And we've talked about them already, these people that started, you know, getting together at major universities to places like Yale and whatnot, these other intellectuals who don't buy this idea that we can change so fundamentally that we could outlaw war. And they begin trying to think of how, once again, you live with these weapons in a way that more closely corresponds to how history has shown we're likely to behave. And if the worst happens...

How do you somehow mitigate the worst-case scenario? Earlier, we had said that Eisenhower was a good strategic card game player, and if you were going to be involved in this kind of a global game, if you will, didn't you want to have a gamer in that position? But in a country of hundreds of millions of people, why would you stop playing?

at one good gamer. If you were playing a chess game for the survival of the world on your side, wouldn't you want all your intelligent people getting together somewhere and analyzing it? Studying the game, if you will. Analyzing every move and possible counter move. Every variable that might crop up. I mean, if it's a card game and we're holding atomic bomb cards in our hand and somebody draws an ace of clubs in a minute, you know, what do we do?

Those people began to coalesce after the Second World War, these amazingly intelligent intellectuals, and will eventually find themselves working together in places like the famous Rand Corporation. But they didn't start that way. They started by essentially asking the kind of questions that are a function of the time. The sort of higher questions of the sort that got Truman in trouble with MacArthur over war aims, right?

I mean, famously, one of these people who are the founding fathers of what today we would call civilian defense intellectuals was a guy named Bernard Brody.

And Brody will famously get involved initially with all this just because the Air Force asked him to look at some World War II bombing results and to analyze them. But this eventually led to Brody asking fundamental questions like, okay, well, how big are bombs do we need? To do what? In order to achieve what? And all these deep questions that in general the military guys weren't thinking about because this wasn't part of their gig.

In Korea, MacArthur's job was to win the war, not to figure out the political situation afterwards and all this, but all these people arising in the nuclear era, these intellectuals were pointing out that there is no separation between those things anymore. How you fight the war will determine so many other things. For example, one of the big problems that Brody had with the entire war plan that guys like Curtis LeMay had come up with, you know, nuke the Soviet Union all at one time, quickly as possible, get it over with.

was that you lost every bit of leverage that you might have brody argued that the game goes on even when nuclear weapons start falling and that the way things turn out you know the difference between maybe 100 million lives could be how you play the game once the bombs start falling now here's the thing all these people at the rand corporation and these defense intellectuals are often characterized as a combination of like mr spock and sheldon cooper from the big bang theory

People with great mathematics and economics backgrounds who are so great at crunching numbers but often seem detached from the real-world blood-and-guts reality, you know, of what they're studying if the worst-case scenario happens. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue with some of the things they say. For example, you know, Brody had famously said early on that, you know, cities as hostages, you know, your adversaries' cities held hostage is a lot more valuable than having a bunch of corpses made.

LeMay's plan created corpses. Brody wanted to preserve flexibility even after the atomic bombs dropped, and he pointed it out this way. Fred Kaplan, in his 1980s classic The Wizards of Armageddon, discusses it. He says, quote,

Brody reasoned that the final surrender of the Japanese in the Pacific War resulted not from the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but from the implicit threat of more atom bombs on their way if the Japanese did not give up then. Likewise, he writes, the Soviets would more likely stop fighting after receiving some destructive blows, knowing that if they did not stop, their cities would be the next targets to get hit.

If, however, we blew up their cities at the very outset of the war, the bargaining lever would be blown up along with them. Hostages have no value once they are killed. Consequently, the Soviets would feel no inhibitions about blowing up American cities in return. Hardly an outcome that would serve the interest of American security. End quote.

It's a combination of coldly, dispassionately logical and at the same time, in its own way, especially when compared to the atomic blitz plan that the Air Force had in place, humanitarian. These are the people that will coalesce and Brody is one of them. Herman Kahn is another. John von Neumann will be involved and von Neumann has been called by some people the most intelligent man who's ever lived.

I think that's very debatable. But, you know, if you're anywhere in that conversation, you have an incredible mind. And in the 1920s, von Neumann famously, in a poker game, devises the modern version of what you could call the mathematical theory of games because that's what they did call it. Today we just call it game theory. The standard definition of game theory is a mathematically precise method of determining rational strategies in the face of critical uncertainties.

Sounds like it might be pretty useful in a game, doesn't it? Or a war, for that matter. Or a war game. There had been antecedents, of course, before von Neumann. Others worked on it afterwards, including von Neumann some more. But by this time, these are the kind of people that want to employ those kinds of theories to analyze this game. But they're going to run into the same problem again.

that those intellectuals who want to see mankind evolve away from war are running into. The speed of the pace of change. Everything keeps evolving so quickly that the minute you may think you have this atomic poker game figured out with one deck, somebody decides, okay, now we're going to play with another deck added to it. It upsets your paradigm on a regular basis. It's arguable, but perhaps the biggest destabilizer between 1950 and 1960 is the growth of missile technology.

Which, you know, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviets and the West were both scouring Germany as they occupied it to grab as many Nazi scientists as they could because in a couple of key areas, German scientists were ahead of the West and the Soviets. Missile technology, for example, they've been using at the end of the war a missile called the V2 against places like London.

And suspiciously, for about the next 10 years, some of these missiles would look like carbon copies of the V2. The United States would grab one of these scientists, a guy named Wernher von Braun, who would, of course, be influential in the U.S. space program later. The space programs themselves of both the Soviet Union and the United States had, we'll call it dual-purpose technological applicability, because when the Soviets launched the first satellite into space, Sputnik, in 1957,

Some people worry that the Soviets are now ahead in space technology, but a lot of people understand that if you can put a satellite in space, you know, at the tip of a rocket, you can put a bomb on the tip of a rocket and send it to the United States. The real key change for me reading all this material was the modern material makes it clear that even though the time the United States was most frightened of nuclear war hitting them when they were building bomb shelters in the backyard in Nebraska...

The Soviet Union probably had very little chance of launching an attack on the U.S., as we said earlier. First of all, any attack during that period would have involved aircraft, and the United States had a wonderful defensive air force that could have shot down anything, but it's missiles that change that. They also start putting them on submarines, which changes everything, too. The difference between 1950 and 1960 in terms of trying to control and corral the threat and the growing instability...

is night and day as nuclear expert joseph serencioni points out after discussing the atoms for peace idea that eisenhower threw out there there'd also be a summit in 1955 between eisenhower and khrushchev trying to to break the tension somewhat nikita khrushchev even came to the united states in the late 50s and visited led around by vice president nixon and the press in tow sort of to get to know you and both sides to to sort of humanize each other a little bit

But for every decrease in tensions on one hand, there was something on the other hand to make up for it. And the complexity and increasing power of the weapons just made the job of anyone who wanted to control these things darn near impossible. Listen to Joseph Cirincione run down the growth in weapons technology in the 10 years between 1950 and 1960. He wrote, quote,

While Atoms for Peace was promoting nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, the U.S. military was equipping their troops with thousands of nuclear weapons, adapting them for use in nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear mines, nuclear artillery, and even a nuclear bazooka. This infantry weapon, called the Davy Crockett, would fire a nuclear warhead about half a mile.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union developed strategies to fight and win a nuclear war, created vast nuclear weapon complexes, and began deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles and fleets of ballistic missile submarines.

The effective abandonment of international control efforts and the race to build a numerical and then a qualitative nuclear advantage resulted in the American nuclear arsenal mushrooming from just under 400 weapons in 1950 to over 20,000 by 1960. The Soviet arsenal, likewise, jumped from five warheads in 1950 to roughly 1,600 in 1960. The United States was ahead, but afraid.

End quote. When you think about the situation that Harry Truman was trying to cope with, you know, from 45 to 52, and what seemed complex at the time, look at how all of this stuff makes that look like a card game with a single deck. And by the time Eisenhower leaves office, he's playing multi-level chess or atomic poker with nine decks, you know, going at the same time. But he's grown with it.

He's learned how to play this game. He started and stepped in at a time when it was much less complicated. Truman showed him his hand, says, this is what's in my hand. This is what we think is in his hand. This is my strategy. Good luck. And handed his hand of cards over to, you know, one of the great gamers. A guy you would say if you had to handpick them might have been uniquely qualified for this time in this place. But he's also the head of a system that

that doesn't pick their people based on qualification the person that gets to sit in the chair and play the other side you know with the world as your stakes in the card game or the chess match is chosen by the electorate and they could choose anybody 1960 will be dwight eisenhower's last year in office the constitution mandates that you get no more than two terms his time is up

He's done anyway. The presidency wipes people out anyway. He's had health problems. I mean, it's time for someone new. The problem is, is who is qualified to take over the game from Eisenhower? And what if you get someone in there who plays poorly? You know, voters in the United States have always had a lot of responsibility.

but when they were voting say for president roosevelt for re-election in 1940 they weren't voting for the most dangerous human being of all time when they go to the polls in 1960 to vote for someone to replace the retiring dwight eisenhower that's exactly what they're voting for for all his power and authority in the 1930s and 1940s franklin delano roosevelt didn't have atomic weapons so couldn't have taken us to nuclear war like presidents after 1945

What's more, he operated in a constitutional framework that, especially for the big wars, required the involvement of other people. The Congress, for example. He couldn't do this by himself. 1945 and the advent of atomic weapons changed all that. The Truman administration took that power to themselves, rightly or wrongly. They had some good reasons, but you can disagree about them. But it solidified the power to use these extraordinary weapons in the hands of a single human being.

No one's ever had that kind of power, and U.S. presidents from 1945 on are infinitely more dangerous in a worst-case scenario than they were before then. And we Americans tend not to think of our own people as scary and dangerous, but you can bet that in other countries in 1960, places that might be on the receiving end of a worst-case scenario...

People, for example, living in the old Soviet Union, those people certainly would have recognized the potential danger of the most dangerous figure in world history, a person that will be determined by the particular whims of the U.S. electorate. Of course, the problem one might ask is if you have issues with that, who would you rather have pick that person? And think about it carefully because the power of that person is getting worse.

more scary all the time. The president that succeeds Eisenhower will be the first one to control the U.S. nuclear arsenal in an era where a push-button holocaust becomes possible. During Eisenhower's time, had nuclear war broken out, the vast majority of it would have been fought with airplanes dropping bombs.

The next president of the United States is going to have enough intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed so that, you know, you have the metaphorical, because he really would just give an order and a code and all that. But the metaphorical red button, as they call it, you know, becomes a reality during this era. Think of how dangerous that human being is. He's a person that's going to have to make a nuclear decision, potentially with only minutes to debate and decide it. What human being is qualified for that?

What sort of qualifications, if you could mold your perfect president and steward of that kind of power and authority, what sort of professional or educational or personal background would you want? Would you want someone who was a politician controlling the nuclear arsenal?

with their finger on the button, or maybe you think that's something that you could trust a business person more, someone more attuned to the questions of profit and loss and corporate survivability. I mean, maybe there's a lot of things you could argue that that would be beneficial. Or maybe, maybe you want someone who thinks about nothing but this geopolitical atomic card game all the time, and you want one of those mathematical economists from someplace like the Rand Corporation. Put them in the White House.

Or maybe you want to go a totally different direction. You need someone who's got the more big picture humanity side of this, like the people at the Russell Einstein manifesto said, remember your humanity and forget the rest, right? You want one of those guys. Maybe you want a philosopher or maybe you want someone who's very religious. Maybe you want a Gandhi type president or the first Buddhist president. I realize it's a long shot, but you know, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Or maybe you want to recreate the Eisenhower years and get yourself a general. Although, you get term after term after term in the White House occupied by a military leader starts to look a little wiggy in a democratic republic, doesn't it?

what's more what made eisenhower so particularly i thought suited as i said for the role wasn't that he was a general and because of that he was a super hawk it's because he carried the credibility of being a general and was actually less hawkish than his military advisors a lot of the time sometimes they would want to be more risky and more muscular and it would be eisenhower that would say no

And had Eisenhower instead been a civilian like Truman, maybe these, you know, incredible World War II guys who made up a lot of the military advisors in this era, they were big, powerful, charismatic figures themselves. They may have steamrolled another civilian like Truman, but during this critical period where we were trying to get the formula right, the guy who stood in the civilian role and protected the civilian role was himself a military guy and could push back against the generals because, you know, you can't accuse Eisenhower of not understanding the military situation.

But now Eisenhower was leaving. Who was going to have the ability and the background to stand up if the generals were to push again in a hawkish direction? The consequences for voters getting this wrong in 1960 are enormous. It's probably at this point if the man from Mars we've been using as part of our discussion here is watching the 1960 election where he's not going to be able to figure out we human beings at all.

Because in the mind of any Mr. Spock type character, they're going to look at this and logically figure out that the only thing Americans should care about is getting the Sword of Damocles question right. But that's not how human beings function in any system where they're allowed to have an opinion. It will be one of the concerns that factors into their decision over who they vote for for most dangerous man in all human history. But it will not be the exclusive thing. I mean, they are going to care about domestic issues too. It might be a tax question that determines who they vote for.

It's probably going to be an issue of what party they are, where some Americans are going to vote reliably for the Republican candidate, the other for Democrats. Even the sort of Damocles can't prevent party loyalty from coming into play. Finally, and this is the part that I would imagine would really confuse the man from Mars, the question of personal charisma and glamour and likability will come into this. And you will think to yourself,

Well, of course, that's just how these things function. But if you back off and look at it from an outsider's viewpoint, what if that becomes the reason you vote for the person who plays a really poor game of atomic poker? Nuclear bridge, three-dimensional geopolitical nuclear booby-trapped chess, and of course,

As these international groups like the Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein group might point out, it's also a heck of a lot of power for American voters to make a decision that impacts the people around the world who have no say at all in the decision. The people that we were talking about in India do not care about the U.S. tax rate at all in the 1960 election, but they sure as heck hope that the proper person is put in charge of the nuclear arsenal.

Or look at the Central Europeans, who are right smack dab in the center of the crosshairs if nuclear war breaks out in Europe. What assurances do they have that the American people aren't going to vote for a president based on, you know, who's better looking? Well, in 1960, the better looking candidate wins. He's also by leaps and bounds the far richer candidate. He's the less experienced candidate. He is the younger candidate, which is saying something different.

Because Richard Nixon, the Republican former vice president under Eisenhower, is a mere 46 years old, which is young. But his opponent who wins is John F. Kennedy, and he's a mere 43, still the youngest man ever elected to the office. He's a kid.

the 70 year old eisenhower and his old people you know walk off the stage and turn over the nuclear launch codes to a kid a playboy a millionaire playboy father's money estimated i thought i read in forbes magazine like 300 million dollars it's so much it doesn't matter whether it's adjusted for inflation or not dad was an ambassador his earlier history of how he originally made that money a lot more sorted than being an ambassador

The son was a swinger. I mean, played around with guys like Frank Sinatra and those guys dated a lot of girls that weren't his wife. A lot of people knew that and the press didn't talk about that much, but had one of these families that was so beautiful and photogenic that Life Magazine and Time Magazine and all these things that gave all the public exposure to him free of charge helped him out a ton. All the photogenic nature of it all helped a ton and everybody can understand this. That's just politics, right?

But is that something that's outdated by the time we're picking your leaders? We'll give them the sort of power that Richard Nixon, don't feel bad, he'll get to be president too, just not in 1960. We'll brag about in 1974 when admittedly he's got a few more missiles under his belt than Kennedy will have, but he'll tell the press in 1974 and this should wake everyone up to the disaster you would have if you voted for the wrong person because they'd have this power too. Nixon quipped to the press that

I could go into my office and pick up my telephone and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead. The real danger in the system created to manage nuclear weapons is that there is no margin for error. It is a one strike and you're out situation. How long do you trust the electorate and the political system in general because after all the electorate can only choose the candidates who do well in the political system.

How long do you trust them to do this without making some sort of a terrible mistake? In the 1960 election, when John F. Kennedy becomes the President of the United States, there's a significant number of people that think that a lightweight has just been given control of the nuclear arsenal. And unfortunately, for world events upcoming, one of those people is going to turn out to be Nikita Khrushchev. He's going to be wrong about that.

But that's what sets the stage for disaster. It's those kind of miscalculations, that's the exact word Kennedy used, that JFK thought might lead to war. Because by this period, it's becoming apparent that neither side wants that. So how could you have a war if neither side wanted it? A mistake, a miscalculation, something unforeseen. In the book Inside the Kremlin's Cold War by Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin Pleschikov,

It's interesting to read exactly how much Khrushchev was hoping Kennedy would become the president, but not because he thought he was weak, but because he thought he might be another Franklin Roosevelt, someone who could reach out and you could have another relationship the way Stalin and Roosevelt's relationship was seen to be.

Khrushchev apparently, and I didn't know this, did everything he could to help Kennedy get elected. Told KGB officers in Washington, you know, analyze the situation. If there's anything you can do diplomatically or with propaganda to help, do it. Called Kennedy his president after he was elected and told him at the first eye-to-eye meeting they ever had, you know, I got you elected.

Now, trying to figure out the motivations of the Soviet leader in this situation is as difficult as it is for any of these other politicians and people we've been discussing, right? The layers to the core of the onion are impossible to discern.

But Zuboff and Pleschikoff in Inside the Kremlin's Cold War seemed to indicate that Khrushchev was excited about Kennedy coming to the presidency, not because he was happy to have some sort of weakling or lightweight, at least compared to Eisenhower, who was a heavyweight's heavyweight in office, but because he realistically believed that his sources told him that Kennedy was a pragmatist, which he was, not an ideologue. Maybe you could deal with a man like that. Zuboff and Pleschikoff write, quote,

Khrushchev was prone to optimistic and often wishful thinking, and in the early months after Kennedy's election, he had an irresistible temptation to see his, his as in quotes, new president in the best light. He tried many channels to convey to Kennedy that his presidency could open up a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations, end quote.

Now, detractors and hardliners would say it's all part of a plan, he's just gonna figure out a way to work this kid, and that might be true too, it's recent history, you can't always tell. But it seemed like there was this honeymoon period, and the honeymoon period lasted pretty much up until about April, because in April something happened. If Khrushchev thought he was going to get to turn to an absolute clean slate new page after the Eisenhower administration,

It's hard to believe he would really think that because he would be not taking into account the fact that nobody gets to start off with a clean slate, especially not in the U.S. political system, where, as we've said, this is a tag team game of atomic poker. And in the same way Eisenhower had to take over Truman's hand in mid-game, Kennedy has to take over Eisenhower's hand in mid-game. And Eisenhower has some crappy cards. Let's lay that out there right now. He warns Kennedy about them, too. He says, Laos, going to be some trouble, just warning you.

Kennedy would find that next door neighbor Vietnam ended up taking more of his time and attention. Eisenhower also handled him the one card everybody knew was danger. He handed him the Berlin card, which was once again hot as hell. Khrushchev would say about Berlin that Berlin was the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.

He was squeezing it in the late 1950s, and it became one of the two closest times the Eisenhower administration came to nuclear war. The other was over a couple of islands off the coast of China. But you hand that card over to the new young president, and then he handed Kennedy a new card, an unexpected card, one that has become more and more important, but it's in a weird place. It's Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coast.

normally a place the U.S. would not be looking for trouble. During this era, as we said, they see the whole freedom-communism battle as a zero-sum game. If communism wins some country on the edge of the earth, that's a big deal. So how the heck it ever snuck into Cuba? Well, it's a good story, a little off the beaten path for us, except as it relates to this great game. But in the late 1950s, the government, the autocratic government,

strong man style government of fulgencio batista is toppled by some revolutionaries led by a guy named fidel castro and you may recall his lieutenant's name shea guavara for a very short period of time no one knows what these guys are about but then they end up by hook or by crook there's disagreements about this aligning themselves with the socialist side of the world

This is a huge problem. And as far as the Eisenhower administration was concerned during their last years in office, it had to be dealt with. They had a plan, a CIA plan involving exiles from Cuba who were going to hit the beaches at a place called the Bay of Pigs and overthrow that Castro government.

But Eisenhower was going to leave office before the plan was ready, so Eisenhower handed that card to John F. Kennedy, and only a couple months after getting into office, the new kid, during the learning curve, decides to go ahead with the Eisenhower plan because the CIA says it's good, the military wants to do it, basically. So Kennedy does it, and it fails.

Kennedy took a ton of personal heat for not stepping in and overtly helping more when the CIA-backed Cubans got into trouble, but he was trying to preserve the same sort of figly fiction in Cuba, that it was a Cuban-on-Cuban thing that the Chinese and Soviets had been trying to preserve in Korea, that new way you fight wars during the Cold War. Most of his biographers, though, assert that

But Kennedy learned something from this, that it changed him. He had already had leanings in this direction, but it changed him. See, Kennedy was a Second World War veteran. He was no Eisenhower. He commanded a little PT boat with like 15 people on it, but while he was commanding it, it got cut in two by a Japanese destroyer that rammed into it, and he lost two men instantly and had...

It was a highly publicized and used for his political gain story, but it was essentially true. He rescued his own crew towing one wounded man by his life vest with the rope attached to the life vest in his teeth as he swam two islands miles away. See, that Harvard swim team experience comes in handy.

But Kennedy had said that being a lowly lieutenant, sort of on the ground, on the scene, taught him how out of touch the people he called the brass hats, the military leaders back in Washington, were with the realities of what the troops were dealing with.

And that attitude, a common soldier's attitude on the ground, by the way, was reinforced after the Bay of Pigs disaster when he got advice from the CIA and his military advisors that he thought was expert opinion. And in one sense, it was. But that doesn't mean it's right.

Kennedy would be shattered by what happened at the Bay of Pigs. He was supposed to be crying afterwards. He was out of sorts for a long time. Advisors during meetings would catch him staring off into space saying, how could I have been so stupid? Biographer Robert Dalek writes, quote, how could I have been so stupid was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He

He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed, he later told advisor Arthur Schlesinger, that, quote, the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.

End quote. The experience taught him, quote, never to rely on the experts. End quote. He told journalist Ben Bradley, quote, the first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions on military matters were worth a damn. End quote.

You know, it's tempting to say that there was some luck here, historically speaking, that Kennedy got this lesson reinforced at such an early time in his career before things really heated up and the stakes really got high. Because only a few months into his career, Kennedy has decided that you have to be skeptical of expert advice sometimes. In this case, though, his acceptance of an Eisenhower-type plan made him look a lot more like the previous administration.

and this happening right before the meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, put the whole kibosh on the honeymoon between Kennedy and Khrushchev, as though one spouse had cheated on the other after only a couple of months of marriage, and if anybody was likely to do that, well, John F. Kennedy. Nonetheless, he went into this summit right after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to meet Khrushchev eye-to-eye. In every book you will ever read on the subject, no one can resist saying,

and we won't either, obviously, the visual and background comparison of these two guys when they get together. Could you find two more unlike people from their physical differences? I mean, John F. Kennedy's could have been a... He's the glamour president in terms of looks and charm and all that kind of thing, and he's like the money man. I mean, he's a propaganda stock character if you're doing this for the Soviet newsreels. I mean, he's the money man from the Monopoly game, right?

And Khrushchev is a peasant, but he's one of these peasants who's sneaky and he's a survivor and he takes great pride in being able to outwit people who should know better than he does. He has no real formal education. He has, however, a background in life that is formidable. Zuboff and Pleschikov describe the two men's first face-to-face meeting at the Vienna summit starting on June 3rd and ending on June 4th, 1961, this way, quote,

Khrushchev met with Kennedy in Vienna as a prima donna meeting with a first-time starlet.

I heard you were a young and promising man, Khrushchev greeted the 43-year-old president. The difference in age was almost a quarter of a century. This generation gap grows into an abyss if one thinks of all the milestones of Russian history, as well as the personal experience that had shaped Khrushchev, and of which Kennedy had only limited understanding. The only two links between the leaders were World War II and the nuclear polarization of the Cold War."

Khrushchev had already decided after the Bay of Pigs fiasco that Kennedy was weaker than Eisenhower, something he could have probably assumed. But now he thought he detected something. At the Vienna summit, he put his theory to the test. At the summit, for two days, he put the hard press on John Kennedy, and Kennedy stumbled.

He came in with a lot of proposals that sounded just like the kind of guy Khrushchev was looking for, a typically first-year president with all the idealism that comes with it and the sort of understated implied idea that surely reasonable people can sit down and settle our differences, and ran into a buzzsaw. Kennedy described the experience to James Reston of the New York Times, who

He said that the summit meeting had, quote, been the roughest thing in my life. He just beat the hell out of me. I've got a terrible problem if he thinks I'm inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas, we won't get anywhere with him, end quote. Khrushchev said Kennedy was too intelligent and too weak. Once again, when you read the history books on this, it's amazing how many of them use Khrushchev.

poker or some sort of strategic game to describe the situation because there's so much brinkmanship going on and so much bluffing and so much testing out of your opponent in this case khrushchev between the bay of pigs and this summit has determined now that he's dealing with a much more immature as one of his aides said american leader far more immature than eisenhower in inside the kremlin's cold war they write quote

After the first day of talks at the Vienna summit, Khrushchev's advisors, who waited for his return in front of the Soviet embassy, asked him about his impressions of Kennedy. Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively. Kennedy, he said, was no match for Eisenhower. He lacked the broad horizons and the statesmanship of the earlier president. End quote. But this changed Khrushchev's view of the man and what he could get away with and what he might decide to try.

which is exactly what Zubov and Pleshikov say. Khrushchev told his advisors when some of them said, maybe we should kind of listen to this and maybe that will mean better relations. And Khrushchev told them that the favorable situation must be exploited.

In other words, Khrushchev originally went into this whole thing, maybe trying to diffuse tensions, saw that he was faced with what he thought was a weak president, a weak player on the other side of the table, couldn't turn down the fabulous opportunity that the role of the historical dice seemed to have delivered to his side, and so began to play the game the way you would have played it in a pre-nuclear era, the way Machiavelli would have told you to play it. But as Kennedy theorized, when neither side wants war...

you're likely to have one break out over some miscalculation. Khrushchev was making a dangerous one by thinking that Kennedy was weak. He was now going to play his hand based on the assumption that that's the kind of man he was competing against. What happens when that gaming strategy runs smack dab into the fact that you have misjudged your opponent? Perhaps apocalyptically so. Part 3

of the destroyer of worlds. The people from the Bertrand Russell side of the evolve to deal with our weapons technology debate would say that the problem here is the game itself is too dangerous because it involves brinkmanship. That's how it's played. That's why everyone, including me, compares it to a game. The rules were laid out very openly by U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the middle of 1950s when he said, quote,

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into a war. If you try to run away from it, if you're scared to go to the brink, you're lost. End quote. But when the brink is Armageddon, how often can you go to the brink and know you're not going to tumble over the edge? Kennedy will come into office...

as like the dream candidate for the defense intellectuals in places like the Rand Corporation because he will bring in people that think that the Rand people have it right.

Kennedy will bring in people from outside the government structure. His defense secretary will be a guy who headed up Ford Motor Company. So you're bringing in some of the business people to take a new look at all this and say, we've been doing it this way for a long time. Is this the way we should do it? And a lot of those people like Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, thought those ideas that the Rand people were pushing about, you know, it's like a bunch of different cards and you have to play them strategically sounded logical.

The Kennedy administration is famous for one of the biggest changes in all of nuclear history of something called flexible response. Traditionally, you go from Eisenhower's massive retaliation to Kennedy's flexible response. I used to be a little bit better talking about this before I read some of the newer books by people like Francis J. Gavin that basically say something like flexible response was much more for PR than what it really was on the ground.

The idea that you could tell the people on the nuclear battlefield in Europe, hey, don't worry, we won't go to nuclear weapons at the very first option, had all sorts of benefits, whereas Kennedy and Eisenhower and Truman all kind of thought that if nuclear war breaks out, everybody's going to use everything they have anyway. This game of being able to throw a few bombs out there, stop and see what happens sounds good in the classroom, but in reality, that's probably not what's going to happen.

Nonetheless, that's what they're known for. A new look at the security strategy when it came to using nuclear weapons right at a time when Kennedy's up against a guy who is every bit as good of a bluffer as Eisenhower was. Khrushchev's a fantastic card game player, too.

And as historian John Lewis Goddard points out, he uses rhetoric and bluster and bluff to cover up for his own side's weakness. Because what the United States doesn't know when Kennedy gets into office talking about a missile gap where the Soviet Union has more missiles than the United States is that the Soviet Union is woefully unprepared if nuclear war came tomorrow. So when Khrushchev says they're turning out missiles like sausages in Russia, you have no choice but to believe him.

The way that the U.S. has been finding out what little they could about what was going on is with these overflights of Russian territory with these amazing high-level reconnaissance planes called U-2 planes. But you have to sort of dart in and dart out real quickly. The radar shows that you're there, but they're flying too high for the Russians to intercept. But they cause international incidents, and eventually they start getting shot down by missiles.

And when those pilots fall into Russian hands, you have real international incidents. And that was happening during the Eisenhower administration. But in 1961, Kennedy orders the satellites, which are relatively new, to take a look at the Soviet Union and tell him what they see. And over a period of several months, they look down and they come back and the experts brief the president and say, they've got like four intercontinental ballistic missiles and they're not even ready to go.

They've got these nuclear submarines, but they're all in port. And basically they come to the conclusion that if you wanted to, all these nuclear problems with the Soviet Union could go away because we could nuke them now and stop them dead in their tracks. It would be over. A preemptive war would solve this catastrophe we all have looming where mankind could be bombed back to the Stone Age. What a tempting idea that would be. And the really attractive part...

was the potential to knock out the other side's weapons before they could use them, rather than nuke their cities. In other words, you know, like disarming your opponent by shooting the gun out of his hand. That sounds a whole lot better than launching a holocaust to keep yourself safe, doesn't it? The idea also worked well with some of the policies that the new administration had about using nuclear weapons, something that would be known as the counterforce strategy and the no-cities policy.

And not for the last time, something that was intended to make people feel more safe about nuclear weapon use had the opposite effect. Kennedy's defense secretary explained the counterforce idea that now the weapons technology we had would allow the United States to target the weapons of the Soviet Union instead of their cities. The truth is we would still target their cities. They just wouldn't be the first option.

This was supposed to make people in cities think, okay, well, the United States is a humane country, which it is, and it would never target cities if it didn't have to. And after all, this will return, you know, the battle to the battlefield where it belongs, and they'll only be using them against the military forces of the other side. There were two problems with this. One, people quickly realized that that makes them much more usable. As horrible as it sounds, the idea that you would kill millions of innocent men, women, and children in these cities is

is a deterrent if you think well we'll just use nuclear weapons against soldiers well that's who weapons are supposed to be used against so does that make it a lot easier to start using them and then have it grow out of control where you do use the big weapons on cities does it even matter isn't it bad enough if you just use them in the military capacity

The other problem is savvy people realize something really quickly. If the point of using these weapons and targeting them at the enemy's missiles is to hit the missiles so that those missiles don't hit the United States, you have to shoot them before the other side shoots theirs. You don't want to hit a bunch of empty missile locations and launchers and silos after the missiles are gone, but that means you strike first.

The dynamic was turning into one like a Old West gunfight where two gunfighters are gonna draw on three and everybody's worried that eventually you're gonna get into a situation where what prevents the other side from drawing on two? As long as it disables the other person or kills them before they kill you, are you going to really question the moral issues? Which led to a whole need to develop what was called a second strike capability.

In other words, something that said, we can kill you even if you kill us after you kill us, or we can damage you enough so that this whole thing isn't worth it. In other words, for deterrence to work, you would eventually have to have something that Robert McNamara, Kennedy's former head of Ford Motor Corporation, would develop. He called it assured destruction. Today, we often call it mutual assured destruction, or MAD for short.

But this was a concept that was fully understood in the 1950s. It was the missiles that turned it into the kind of reality where people would start talking about the potential advantages if both sides had a doomsday device. And eventually the Soviets would have something called the dead hand, you know, with the exact same rationale powering it, which is we really don't want to have to kill you after you've killed us, but it might prevent you from killing us in the first place if we do have something like that.

This whole question of how you deter the other side and the weirdness of the entire mental construct of nuclear deterrence, you know, is going to enter the Dr. Strangelove phase of weirdness during this era where they will have debates over whether or not you should ever respond with a nuclear response if deterrence fails.

Herman Kahn, who is also associated with the Rand Corporation, who will be one of the main inspirations often cited for the Dr. Strangelove character, you know, will talk about the red button, you know, the nuclear launch button, the metaphorical one. And he will say that people will have real discussions about whether or not that button should actually be connected to anything. Now, he says it's important that the other side thinks it's connected to something because

But the idea was that if somehow nuclear deterrence failed and the other side launched their nuclear missiles at you, the humane thing to do would be to not respond, right? You've lost the war already. There's no reason to kill them too. Now, I should point out Herman Kahn did not feel that way. He definitely thought the button should be connected to something. Nonetheless, he was sort of showing us

the kinds of conversations that these theorists are having, right? The sort of questions that will come up. They're academic in nature, theoretical, until they're not. But tensions begin to spike after the Vienna summit. The last line Kennedy will ever say face-to-face to Nikita Khrushchev is in response to some of the things that were said at that meeting when he walks out and says, it's going to be a cold winter. And he's right.

The situation in Berlin will get extremely serious. At one point, there will be American and NATO tanks facing off against Soviet tanks over the dividing line between East Berlin and West Berlin. And then the Soviets will put up a wall to stop a flight. I mean, the whole thing becomes a nightmarish disaster and problems are narrowly averted. The tensions will also increase to the point where both sides do away with the

unofficial moratorium they had on nuclear weapons when everybody started getting worried about fallout you know they put a little temporary damper on testing these things and then boom everybody starts up again both because if you're going to have tension skyrocket well you've got to make sure that your nuclear deterrence remains credible and that means testing at the same time it was a great way to send a message the united states will test 98 nuclear weapons according to donovan webster in a month in 1962 in a month

Now, that's sending a message, because if you haven't figured out whether it works or not after the 91st test, you know, you're just playing around. The Soviets have their own way of rattling sabers. They like really, really big sabers. And Khrushchev tells his physicists, including Andrei Sakharov, that he wants a 100-megaton bomb. Remember, the United States' test that was the radiological—I mean, that was 15 megatons, Castle Bravo—

And when you try to figure out megatons, I'm no mathematician, but the power grows exponentially. You can't just say it's 30 megatons instead of 15, so it's twice as powerful. It doesn't work like that, especially with things like the thermal radiation part.

which is highly underrated. I just read a whole book on that that says for the entire time nuclear weapons have been around, everyone has underestimated the most dangerous part of them, which is the fires that they start because they're hard to measure. So you don't study those, you study the blast. So as scary as they are, that's all based on blast evidence. According to Lynn Eden, they're probably many times more deadly than that once fire is taken into account.

Andrei Sakharov is supposed to have had, with Khrushchev, an Oppenheimer-Truman moment.

A moment where the physicist, the real deep thinker who's thinking about the ramifications of his creation, goes to Khrushchev to try to tell him, maybe we shouldn't make a 100 megaton bomb. Remember, it might take a lot more guts for someone to do it in that system than in, say, the United States context, because before Khrushchev was Stalin, and telling Stalin something like this could be bad for your health, so already you see that it's a much more open situation. But Sakharov goes to Khrushchev and says...

Maybe we shouldn't explode this bomb. It'll jeopardize future relations and the test ban treaties that we were unofficially having worked for us and gets told this by Khrushchev, quote, Leave politics to us. We're the specialists. We have to conduct our policies from a position of strength. Our opponents don't understand any other language. I'd be a jellyfish and not chairman of the Council of Ministers if I listened to people like Sakharov, end quote.

Of course, anyone who grew up in that era will note automatically that that's exactly the sort of thing we here in the U.S. would have said about the Soviets. Can't be a jellyfish in front of them. In other words, Khrushchev understands the way it's all played, just as Eisenhower did. I mean, these people...

would make Machiavelli's honor list. They're good at the game they play, but the game is different. And Sakharov at least manages to talk Khrushchev down from a 100 megaton bomb to a 50 megaton one. Because if all you really are trying to do here is rattle a big saber, 50 megatons is as big as anybody would want, even for intimidation purposes. Now, slightly over 50 megatons might have been

Just about half what Khrushchev wanted, but as John Lewis Gaddis writes, quote, even so it was big enough. The single largest blast human beings had ever detonated or have since on the planet. The flash was visible 600 miles away. The fireball, now quoting somebody who saw it, quote, was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. It seemed to suck the whole earth into it.

End quote. And Gaddis continues, The mushroom cloud rose 40 miles into the stratosphere. The island over which the explosion took place was literally leveled, not only of snow, but also of rocks, so that it looked to one observer like an immense skating rink. The entire spectacle was, quote,

Fantastic, unreal, supernatural, end quote. One estimate calculated, Gaddis writes, on the basis of this test, that if Khrushchev's full 100 megaton bomb had been used instead, the resulting firestorm would have engulfed an area the size of the state of Maryland, end quote. Surely nobody would ever use a weapon like that, but calculations can go awry.

With the ramping up of tension during the 1961-62 period, Khrushchev attempted to do something that if this were really a board game of the kind I always enjoyed playing when I was younger, a board war game, a more complicated version of something like Risk, would have been an awesome move. But with the stakes of something like Tsar Bomba and Castle Bravo and all these multi-megaton bombs involved...

It's hard to see how people could justify the worst-case scenario. But under the pre-nuclear rules, Khrushchev makes a move that is so bold that there are quite a few people that think this is the kind of thing that gave him a reputation as a gambler, that got him in trouble after this period with the other people in Russian leadership who had some say in the matter, because there was a recklessness to it. But my goodness, if we were really watching a game instead of life, you have to admire the chutzpah.

When nobody's looking, Khrushchev solves a bunch of problems he's got in one fell swoop by secretly beginning to put nuclear weapons onto the island of Cuba. In many ways, it's a brilliant idea, but it all hinges on a single, very slender read, and you can see why maybe his cohorts thought him a gambler or reckless, because that read was, you've got to be able to get the missiles into Cuba and activate it, ready to go,

before the U.S. knows they're there. Because if the U.S. finds out, the entire plan falls apart. And when the stakes are global thermonuclear war, how are you comfortable hinging a plan on such a narrow, slender reed? And not just that, it's not like the U.S. isn't paying attention. There's been a conventional arms buildup going on in Cuba now for months. So the U.S. is watching. It's become a political issue. There are midterm elections in November.

Back in September, only about a month and a half ago, the rumblings were so loud about possible nuclear weapons that Kennedy issued a public statement showing strength and resolve, you know, typical Cold War rhetoric, and drew a line in the sand and told the Soviets there would be the most grave ramifications if anyone did anything like that. And then Kennedy went publicly and privately to the Soviet diplomats and said, now, you're not putting offensive weapons there, right? And they go, oh, no, we're not doing it. No offensive weapons at all. So you can imagine how he felt.

And you can also imagine how much gasoline has now accrued around this situation when Kennedy finds out that he's been lied to and that his opponents who charged him with being naive and saying you're putting the country's security at risk and the Soviets are going to put nuclear weapons on that island, when he finds out that's exactly what they've done. There's a reason that this crisis begins at such an intense level from the very first minute, and that's because the stage is set for it.

On October 16th, in the morning of 1962, Kennedy's advisors bring him photographs. The photographs show the construction of missile sites underway in Cuba. The U.S. had been watching weird activity involving, you know, Russian handlers offloading ships. I mean, there was suspicion, but these U-2 photos confirmed everyone's worst fears, and that's that

Within a very short period of time, Kennedy's CIA advisors thought maybe within a week you were going to have operational missiles 90 miles or so off the U.S. coast. The minute that Kennedy realizes the reality of what he's looking at, a dynamic starts. And in the back of your head, a mental stopwatch should begin ticking because the pressures will start to mount instantaneously.

Many historians point out that Kennedy was handing out a best-selling book to his subordinates during this period, and you've probably read it. It was Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. It's a book, of course, that deals with the run-up to the First World War, and it's really about a dynamic.

and at the beginning of the dynamic you have decision makers who are in charge of making moves on the great chessboard and they have some control and they can do things but that somewhere along the way all of the forces and elements involved begin to turn the decision makers into historical passengers as well or just along for the ride and who find the range of their possible decisions and moves

so curtailed that at times they appear to have no good options and kennedy was fascinated by this dynamic apparently and thought he saw elements of it come into play over berlin already now he was about to take part in something very similar although from a time constraint that run up to the first world war took a month and everybody thought they had no time to react kennedy was going to have nowhere near a month because the move by khrushchev to put missiles in cuba

makes the next move the united states is if they don't do anything whatever khrushchev is up to progresses farther the u.s has to do something and they don't know how long they have to do it the fog of war will drive this crisis dynamic because right away the first thing everyone wants to know is are any of these missiles anywhere ready to be fired

And we found those missile sites. But what missile sites haven't we found? Are there warheads on the island? How many? Is there more stuff on the way? But to accompany these critical uncertainties is one thing that U.S. policymakers know for sure. And that is that every moment you wait, the situation is getting worse, regardless of what it might be now on the ground in Cuba, because we don't know that, but we know it'll be worse for us tomorrow. And that puts an incredible amount

time pressure on all these events the attitude is that even if you sleep things are getting worse so the need to move and do something is exerting a huge force on the people who have to make these decisions in a way that solves the problem without creating a bigger problem in this case the bigger problem would be world war three and as the president will have to remind his advisors the other side has a hostage

What if they decide to kill their hostage if we do something to solve our problem in Cuba? Remember, the hostage is West Berlin. And as Kennedy will also point out to his advisors, trading Cuba for West Berlin is not a good trade, and the Europeans definitely wouldn't think it was a good trade. Within hours of seeing the photos of the construction sites in Cuba, President Kennedy calls a meeting of what will be known as the EXCOMM.

It's really just a group of handpicked national security advisors along with some other influential voices that Kennedy wanted to hear from, including the attorney generals, who happens to be his younger brother, Robert. That's his favorite advisor. I think there was about 13 of them. And they convened the first meeting before noon on October 16th. And they will begin to discuss how you react to Khrushchev's move, right? The ball's in the U.S.'s court here. What do you do?

And at one point, Kennedy will remind the participants that we're talking about the potential for strikes on American urban centers that could create 80 to 100 million casualties. He says you're talking about the destruction of a country, not to mention any casualties elsewhere in the world. Has there ever been a more important series of conversations ever? And if you're in a position like John F. Kennedy is in this situation...

With that kind of responsibility hanging over your head and the judgment of history to deal with, wouldn't you want to cover your ass somehow? Kennedy, without telling any of the participants in the EXCOMM meetings, taped them. His brother may have known, but no one else did. About 10 years later when this all came out and we found out that several presidents found taping systems useful, and you can see why, it upset some of the participants in the EXCOMM meetings who felt a little betrayed.

At the same time, it's like a gift from the gods for historians because you can be a fly on the wall. I mean, literally hearing the secondary conversations and the coughing and the people coming and going through the door as though you're there when at least one side in this crisis period that will last almost two weeks is making the most important decisions in world history.

And what's crazy when you listen to it is it's a combination of boring monotony that could put you to sleep and subject matter that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Because it sounds like an office meeting, even during the most stressful periods, nobody's screaming and yelling. It sounds like a traditional business meeting at a board of directors. But when you listen to what they're saying, at one point, I mean, they'll be talking about

casualties that are at second world war levels in an afternoon with stakes that high you would love to wish in a perfect world that that was the only thing decision makers took into account how do we avoid you know casualties on that scale and destruction that apocalyptic but it wasn't the only thing on their minds on either side

It's funny because it's been more than 50 years, and now looking back on this, we kind of have that man from Mars perspective because all of the individual concerns of the era have faded in importance, right? It's not our day-to-day existence. We have our own concerns. The only concern from that period that matters to us now is that they avoid World War III because imagine how different our time today would be had they failed in that.

But for them, there's a slew of things acting upon their choices. Very big things and very small things, at least from the man-for-Mars perspective. I mean, some of this is driven by John F. Kennedy's political reality and the November midterm elections. That seems nuts today. If something like that had influenced, you know, how global thermonuclear wars history turned out, can you imagine what the verdict of history would be?

Nonetheless, this is why those people like the Albert Einsteins questioned our ability to live with these weapons while still playing the game under the old rules. Because you get into situations like this. And then once you do, you can't always get out. After a day or two, Kennedy's considering four options to deal with the construction sites in Cuba. Option number one is an airstrike against them.

Option number two is a general series of airstrikes across the island, much bigger affair, but it would help you deal with all the unknowns. It would help get rid of the defenses so that when you had to fly over more times, it would be easier. Option number three is a blockade. Have the U.S. Navy surround the island and say, we don't know how many nuclear weapons and missiles are on the island, but we're not letting anything more in. Option number four is a general invasion of Cuba by the U.S. military.

Now, while he's considering these options, things get worse.

this is also part of the crisis dynamic but you think you're on top of the current situation where you have these medium range nuclear weapons in cuba because they've measured the size of the launching pad areas and they figured out these are for medium range weapons and all of a sudden they find more missile construction sites as they fly over with more u-2 reconnaissance planes and these are built for bigger missiles they're going to be what are called intermediate range

ballistic missiles now on the island too, which will reach almost all of the United States. The Soviets don't have a ton of the missiles that can go from Russian territory to American territory, but they have a ton of the medium range stuff that's been threatening Europe for a decade now. That's what they're moving into Cuba, as one military advisor will say, giving them a quantum leap in terms of their ability to nuke the United States.

Kennedy will point out, though, this is a temporary thing. They're building these missiles, you know, every day that can reach from Russia to the United States. So in a matter of time, does it really matter if the missile that destroys Washington, D.C. started in Moscow or Havana? But it ratchets up the pressure even more. Eventually, Kennedy decides on what he calls a limited action for a limited purpose. He's going to put a blockade around Cuba so that it doesn't get any worse, but

He's essentially going to throw the card down and tell Khrushchev it's his play now. The problem with such a move is that it does nothing to deal with the missiles that are already on the island and that everyone's facing this crushing time problem and pressure with because no one knows when they're going to be operational. What do you do about those?

Kennedy wanted to take them out, but he can't figure out how to do it without potentially prompting World War III. I mean, there's Russians working on those weapons. What if you kill them too? How many Russians can you kill in an airstrike and not prompt World War III? Or just the taking of Berlin, which would do the same thing. On October 19th, Kennedy goes into a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his big military advisors, the heads of the Army and the Air Force and the Marines and the Navy, and tells them his plan and

to do a blockade with no airstrikes. And all of a sudden, it's apparent that you have a huge problem on your hands because the military disagrees. And I don't think, you know, we're going too far out on a limb to say that it looks a little like what you were seeing at the end of the Truman administration with the strains they had with the military over who controls this stuff and where the lines of demarcation between civilian and military control are.

Seems like things took a hiatus for two terms of Eisenhower, the general president, and now with the kid who screwed up the Bay of Pigs and screwed up the Vienna summit. I mean, the weakling, this is how the military looked at this guy. This one admiral on the joint chiefs of staff, I think said he was a skipper for a small patrol boat. I mean, they didn't respect him and he was starting to not respect them very much. And when they heard his plan was a blockade with no strikes against the missile bases that were already under construction,

They pushed back hard. The pushback was led by Air Force General Curtis LeMay. And as many of Kennedy's biographers indicate, Kennedy seemed a bit intimidated by LeMay, but who wouldn't be? Author Michael Dobbs writes of LeMay, quote,

Anecdotes about LeMay became the stuff of Air Force legend. Crude and petulant, he used to show his contempt for his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff by belching loudly and leaving the door open when he visited their private toilet. When a crew chief asked him to extinguish his ever-present cigar to avoid igniting an explosion on board a fully-fueled bomber, LeMay growled, it wouldn't dare.

Asked for a policy recommendation on Cuba, he replied simply, fry it. End quote. This is what it's like to be a fly on the wall when Curtis LeMay tells President Kennedy that he needs to be invading Cuba right now.

As for the Belen situation, I don't share your view that if we knock off Cuba, they're going to knock off Belen. We've got the Belen problem, Sarah, in the state anyway. If we don't do anything to Cuba, then they're going to push on Belen and push real hard.

because they got us on the run. If we take military action against Cuba, then I think that... What do you think their reply would be? I don't think they're going to make any replies. We tell them that if they're in a situation just like it's always been, if they make a move, we're going to fight. I don't think it changes the Berlin situation at all, except they've got to make one more statement on it.

So I see no other solution. This blockade and political action I see leading into war. I don't see any other solution. It leads right into war.

Boom! That's a shot right there by LeMay, and everyone in the room would have known it was. President Kennedy's dad was often tarred and feathered for being associated with the British appeasement policy of Hitler, and that's what LeMay was accusing Kennedy of right there. ...population down there.

After a contentious 45-minute meeting, the president leaves the room and the military advisors begin talking about him, bad-mouthing him, not knowing that Kennedy's been taping the meeting and the tape hasn't stopped. And that's all on tape, too.

This is the way historians Sheldon and Stern put it, talking about the defense secretary and another person leaving, leaving the military heads. Quote, McNamara and Taylor departed, leaving LeMay, Shoup, and Wheeler behind to talk as the door closed. Away, they believed, from prying ears, the remaining chiefs voiced their disdain for civilian control of the military and left little doubt who they thought should be in charge of military decision-making. The hidden tape recorder, of course, continued to turn.

End quote. In their defense, these people have two things to worry about. One is keeping the United States safe. The other is making sure that if the worst case scenario happens, what President Kennedy calls the final failure, nuclear war, the job of these generals and military leaders is just beginning. They have to win the nuclear war. So everybody's trying to do the same thing.

The president is pretty sure that if he follows the advice of his military leaders, he's going to get you in World War III. The military leaders are pretty convinced that if President Kennedy continues on the course he's on, you're going to have World War III anyway, and the U.S. is going to be at a disadvantage when fighting it.

Historian Sheldon Emster said, quote, After the meeting, the president told his aide, Dave Powers, that he was stunned by LeMay's cocky certainty that Khrushchev would do nothing if the U.S. bombed the missile sites and killed a lot of Russians. Quote, These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor, JFK fumed. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong. End quote.

All the modern historians will say that the XCOM tapes have changed the way this crisis has been viewed. It's amazingly clear, though, that John F. Kennedy, like Eisenhower and Truman before him, but from a much more difficult position, maybe, pushed back against, in this case, unanimous military opposition. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous that Kennedy's idea of a blockade with no airstrikes was bad.

His ex-com advisors, his civilian advisors who fluctuated in their views and changed, were mostly sure that Kennedy was being far too weak. And when he finally informed a few members of Congress, two of the biggest bigwigs in his own Democratic Party essentially said, are you crazy? Can't just do that and wanted to do things more along the lines of what the military wanted to do. This 45-year-old guy defied all of them.

Every time I start thinking that individuals don't matter in history, I remind myself that there are examples like this where the odds-on favorite thing to do would be to have a president follow the advice of his military advisors. All it might have taken for things to go sideways is for somebody to have merely done that. It's a little hard to believe, isn't it?

Now, at this point in the story, when things are getting very scary, the world is unaware of this. The Russians themselves are not completely sure what's going on in the United States. Kennedy has one of his people hand a note to the Russian ambassador explaining what's about to happen and then goes on national television to tell the world that the United States has found nuclear missiles in Cuba and this is a big problem. The Soviets had gotten word a couple of hours before Kennedy's speech.

that it was major and that it was going to have to do with Cuba. And at that point, the Soviet leadership got together. And as diplomat Vasily Kuznetsov pointed out, quote, Khrushchev shit his pants, end quote, because all of a sudden it was clear that that slender little reed upon which he had built this audacious, reckless gamble of his, the part about the United States not finding out about the missiles till they were operational. Yeah, that slender reed broke.

And as Alexander Fersenko and Timothy Naftali write, quote, Khrushchev let the frustration of the moment show. To the men in front of him, most of whom had experienced the Russian Civil War and all of whom had endured the Second World War and survived Stalin, Khrushchev bared his soul. It is tragic, he said. They had come so close to having a deterrent force in Cuba, so close to making this kind of a nightmare unimaginable.

Now, not only was a U.S. invasion of Cuba possible, but so was a nuclear exchange involving the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Khrushchev was determined to show resolve. Quote, they can attack us, he said, and we shall respond. Articulating what was on everyone's mind in the hall, he added, this may end in a big war. End quote.

Kennedy told the world in his speech about the weapons in Cuba, said he was going to launch a blockade, which they called a quarantine because a blockade is an act of war too, a quarantine of future weapons, and then asked Khrushchev in a global forum, as the world was now awakening to the fact they were in the middle of a potential thermonuclear crisis, to step back from the brink and try to work for the future to avoid Armageddon.

I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination and to join in a historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.

by returning to his government's own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba, by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis, and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions. Before Kennedy is even done speaking.

strategic air command will have moved up its alert status to defcon 3 and we'll have bombers in the air which they kind of do all the time anyway to a degree but everything begins to go on heightened alert ships begin moving into the caribbean there's already maneuvers underway with the very suspicious code name of well it's castro spelled backwards i wonder how many people that fooled

and the mechanisms of war that Barbara Tuckman would have recognized as beginning to shift into gear in 1914 as the wheels begin to ground toward that particular blueprint for Armageddon, things began to follow a parallel path on October 22nd, 1962. Kennedy's speech to the world did two things pretty much instantaneously.

The first thing it did was confirm what the Soviets were already suspecting, and that's that the U.S. had found their missiles. The second thing the speech did was, in one fell swoop, inform the world that there might be a nuclear war in the very near future. And I'm fascinated by this. I tried to figure out some sort of analogy for something that might be as disruptive, you know, every single day as you pile on the pressure to our allies

in a civilizational framework or keep society together as a nuclear war during the Kennedy administration. And I thought, what would do the same thing? Well, the same thing would do the same thing. If you found out this week there might be a nuclear war, it'd be a very similar test case scenario, I would think. The only other thing I could think of maybe that would compare in terms of potentially shaking the foundations upon which we, you know, don't run out in the street and smash each other in the head with a bottle. I'm

If the aliens showed up, right? If like in all those movies, the giant, you know, multi-football field size spacecraft parked themselves over our cities, I think the same sort of shaking us to our civilizational foundational roots would happen. Nonetheless, if you thought you might not wake up tomorrow and most other people around you were having the same sort of thought, how does that change things on the ground in your little world?

how does that impact the water cooler discussions at work the next day how does that change your travel plans for the near future i mean there are plans for example even for the most important in the society take the president for his family to get out of dodge in case nuclear war happens and jackie kennedy will famously say she didn't want to be evacuated she wanted to and if it was going to happen she wanted to die with the children in washington with the president

Now, there were even plans. And once again, this shows you how real this is, what to do to get the president out of the White House if he's in the White House when the White House is nuked. They'll go in there apparently with like, you know, acetylene torches and get him out and then bundle him into a radiation suit real quick, Michael Dobbs says, and then hustle him into a helicopter for evacuation.

But it gives you an idea of the stakes here and what people are forced to contemplate. Like Bertrand Russell and those other scientists had said, imagine your family dying in front of you agonizingly while you yourself do and everyone you know in your community. These are thoughts that people almost never have. I would also suggest that there's a huge difference between

when people worry about a a true nuclear war versus our main worry today in the 21st century when it comes to nuclear war a lone attack by a terrorist group so a single bomb goes off in a single city and that would be a nightmarish disaster don't get me wrong but it won't shake the foundations of the society because the entire society will then turn and help that place deal

But what if it's 12 cities at once that get nuked? Or in the case of the nuclear war plan right now in 1962, Moscow is slated for like 100 nuclear weapons on that city alone. So you wonder how long it is before society turns into one of those cities

you know, sort of a dog-eat-dog and everybody starts, you know, pulling out their stored ammunition and their canned goods and people start thinking there's no, you know, nothing to live for, so I'm not going into work tomorrow. I mean, when does it start to break down under the pressure?

In the U.S., lots of army units. I think I read that it was the biggest in the country amassing of troops since the Second World War begins to move down to Florida in case they're needed for a Cuban invasion. All the food and all the canned goods start sweeping off the shelves. I mean, there's a lot of people quoted who remember this time period as the will we be alive next week time period.

i mean bob dylan famously said he was going to work quickly on the song he was writing at the time because he was worried he wouldn't be able to finish it wanted to get as much down on paper before tomorrow maybe the most poignant line i've ever heard in the missile crisis as it's called was secretary of state dean rusk when his aide dropped him off and said see you in the morning this according to sheldon m stern by the way and then rusk who's this really you know unflappable sort of you know emotionally stable guy said i hope so

see you in the morning i hope so and the aide said i didn't think about it at the time but he says contemplating it later for that guy he said and i'm quoting here that was the emotional equivalent of screaming the first major crisis moment appears right after the us establishes this quarantine with their ships and the first of the soviet ships approach it there's like two dozen of them and the world is now glued to this in real time

I'm not sure there's ever been anything like this in the coverage of news where, I mean, they're waiting on street corners for the next edition of the newspapers to be delivered. Back in the day, there'd be several daily editions and nightly editions. They're waiting outside places like Times Square and reading the electronic lit-up crawl on the side of the buildings, and they're watching all three U.S. broadcast networks give this the 1962 equivalent of wall-to-wall coverage.

hokey little maps behind walter cronkite with little paper ship counters occasionally being moved closer and closer to that line of quarantine even the president and his people were watching this coverage too and everybody's sort of holding their breath and it seems to me this is quite a bit different than something like edward r murrow's famous live radio broadcast from london as the bombs are dropping on the city during the blitz because unless you lived in london

This didn't have a direct impact on your life, whereas you could be in the heartland of the United States or for that matter, the heartland of the Soviet Union or for that matter, Central Europe, just about anywhere.

And what you're watching here in real time may determine whether or not you wake up some morning this week, whether your children grow up and have a future. I mean, this is the stakes are hard to imagine. I mean, as H.W. Brands points out, he's writing a book about sort of political theory, but he points out how this changes the entire equation from anything we ever had in previous history. He writes, quote,

When people had labored toward distant goals in the pre-nuclear era, they could console themselves with the knowledge that though they might not live to see their objectives realized, their children or grandchildren might. If the goals were beyond human grasp, each succeeding generation could at least approach a bit closer than the one before. The invention of nuclear weapons changed the situation entirely.

Now, he writes, there existed a real possibility that the whole human experiment would be cancelled midway. In that event, not even future generations, because there wouldn't be any, would know how things turned out. Under the nuclear cloud, the meaning of human existence grew murkier than ever. End quote.

If we were still trying to today reach the standards of living that they had back then because we were still working our way back up from the rubble of World War III, would any of the concerns that these people had that to them were important seem worth it?

I mean, this is something that exposes a bunch of things where you could, if you were grading humankind on how well they were doing adapting to their weapons technology, you'd give them an F because they've overlooked basic fundamentals. For example, as this crisis unfolds and you just want to scream to the participants, do something, they can't even communicate in real time one-on-one. John F. Kennedy can't talk to Khrushchev.

When you think about all the time they had in the 1950s and the scares and the threat level rising, don't you think one of these people theorizing about what would nuclear war be like and what would every move be like, don't you think somebody would have said, we have to have a hotline? We're going to want to talk to the opposite number if a crisis dynamic starts. But they didn't. In an era now where we could expect world leaders who were ratcheting up the tension toward nuclear war to be able to text each other,

khrushchev and kennedy are communicating via letters the diplomatic equivalent of snail mail and it'll take half a day from the time you know one side writes the letter gets it hand delivered to the other side after cabling it has to be translated and then read it's half a day a lot can happen in a real-time crisis in half a day

As these Soviet ships approach the quarantine line for this big face-off, the U.S. Strategic Air Command's alert level is raised to DEFCON 2 for the first time ever, and if public assurances are to be believed, the only time since. DEFCON 1 is all-out nuclear war, by the way. Soviet strategic arms expert Steven Zaloga says that

At the same time, Soviet forces, strategic forces were moved up to high alert for the first time ever as well. So now you have in many theaters around the globe, these two militaries, the two most powerful militaries in all world history and their allies rubbing up against each other militarily. I mean, in the Arctic, in Europe, in, I mean, this is everywhere, Asia over Japan. The potential for something bad to happen unintentionally skyrockets.

So do all the variables, by the way, as well. I mean, think about how much easier this whole thing must have been for a guy like Kennedy before the world knew about it. Now every press outlet in every big city and small town in America, not to mention the rest of the world, has a headline related to the decisions you're currently considering right now. If you weren't feeling the pressure before, the media combined with public opinion combined with the political realities and democracies all over the Western world

can criticize you and offer alternatives and cause all kinds of problems i mean the stress level becomes so acute it would be hard i think to find a moment in human history where human beings on such a wide platform i mean not one place at one time but everywhere have been under this kind of pressure just my opinion but i mean normally it's localized if if you're about to be taken over by the mongols in your city you feel every bit as worried but it's just in your city

This is everybody holding their collective breath. I mean, you want a variable that would have been hard to model at the Rand Corporation ten years before this time? How do you represent with a letter like X somebody like Fidel Castro? A fervent revolutionary who fully seems ready to die for the cause here if necessary. He's pretty gung-ho and he puts pressure on Khrushchev like the allies on the West are putting pressure on Kennedy.

He's a hard guy to account for, isn't he? And if this was really a show about the Cuban Missile Crisis, we'd be talking a lot more about the Cubans, but it's more about controlling your weapons technology. And Khrushchev apparently has to tell Castro something very similar to what he told Mao years before, which is we didn't get into this struggle against imperialism just to die, as the line of Soviet ships apparently keeps moving toward the quarantine zone.

The media has a countdown going. I mean, that's how tense this is. Everybody's, you know, biting their nails, including Kennedy and his advisors in the White House as these ships approach the line because what's going to happen? I mean, a confrontation at sea and how quickly could that get out of control? Everybody's really worried. In his book, An Unfinished Life, about John F. Kennedy, presidential biographer Robert Dalek quotes Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, who was in the room with them and they're all sitting there waiting for this, you know, crisis moment to occur.

As the countdown continues, and Dalek quoting Robert Kennedy, writes, quote,

The president's tension was reflected in his appearance and physical movements. Quote, this was the moment which we hoped would never come, Bobby wrote later. Quote, the danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all. These few minutes were the time of greatest worry by the president. His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth, and he closed his fist.

His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust? And had we done something wrong? I felt we were on the edge of a precipice, and it was as if there was no way off." And then Kennedy gets a couple of messages in relatively quick succession that appears something's happening on the seas, and maybe these ships are slowing down. They're not sure, but maybe. And then maybe they're stopping. And then maybe some of them are even turning around.

This is the moment where, you know, the air goes out of the room like a balloon and Secretary of State Dean Ruska is supposed to have said, you know, we had a game when I was growing up in Georgia where two people would have a staring contest and, you know, eventually you lose when somebody has to blink and he goes, well, the other guy just blinked. And this moment will go down in history as the time the other guy just blinked and Kennedy faced down Khrushchev in this, you know, contest of wills and at the last second, Khrushchev turned his ships around.

Now, we now know that that's not what happened, but the people at the time didn't know that. As Michael Dobbs points out in a great line, he said Khrushchev did indeed blink, but he blinked 30 hours before, and it took that long for Washington to see it. Khrushchev had actually made the decision not to challenge the quarantine with any ships carrying nuclear missiles or weapons pretty darn soon after Kennedy announced the quarantine, but he didn't make that public knowledge.

He kept rattling sabers and threatening to run the blockade and push the envelope the entire time, all the while knowing he had no intention of running that particular risk. Historians have long differed on how you should see this move by Khrushchev, not to openly challenge the blockade. He'll still go through with ships that don't carry banned material in the U.S. and his ships will play a sort of a

consensual dance of convenience to avoid now that they've gotten off the crisis hook temporarily having things get out of control again but a lot of historians will say that this is a crushing humiliation for Khrushchev to have to back down like this especially after he said publicly and to Kennedy in letters I'm not backing down

And apparently, Khrushchev's military advisors are coming to see him similarly to how JFK's military advisors see Kennedy. Not a lot of respect on all sides. So that's playing into this. But there are other historians that will portray this more like a counter move, very similar to the ones Kennedy has been making, the ones that say, I'm not going to be the one to start nuclear war, but so many of my active choices would do so, I'm going to do more of a passive choice.

right i'm not going to invade cuba i'm not going to launch attacks against the cuban missile sites i'm just going to throw up a quarantine your move mr khrushchev khrushchev says i'm not going to challenge the blockade i'm going to pull those ships back but i'm going to continue to work on actually redouble my efforts to speed up the work on the nuclear weapons and missiles that are already in cuba your turn mr kennedy

Now we get to this point in the story where I can't help but think about the unquantifiable variable that is the human element again. Little things that would be so hard to model, you know, in the old game theories. Things like sleep. I mean, how do you quantify lack of sleep? These people are putting in 20-hour days now every day.

they're not eating well i mean john f kennedy's bad back is supposed to have troubled him so much at the vienna summit that it may have influenced how things went okay we're not talking about one person now in this situation we're talking about the collective frazzledness of everyone on all sides and khrushchev isn't leaving his office he's sleeping on his couch in his clothes day after day after day think about the little things too that you wouldn't even consider

Unless you were in that situation, all these people that have not a single spare minute in their day still have to wonder about how am I getting my family out of this area if nuclear war happens? My wife has 10,000 problems she's calling me about because she can't figure out how to get evacuated. But when I mean, these people have all these worries that if it was just a single individual, even if it was the leader of a country, you would think, well, that's a variable the system can work around.

but it's happening to everyone all at once all at the same time and you can't quantify you can't say it affected things 20 more towards bad decisions because how would you know but you can reliably say that if you compare the performance of the system all the individuals together working you know on day one to how they're operating collectively by day 10 that we're going to see a diminishment how long can people in the situation go before you're starting to make really poor decisions

more for fatigue and stress overload reasons than anything else. Again, if you're the Rand Corporation trying to model how things are going to go in a real-world situation, you know, what's the value you plug in for X for that? And then there's the ultimate variable in this equation, the one everyone recognizes because it's so obvious. The two human beings who have the power and authority to unleash nuclear war, who in fact...

If things go wrong in the near future, have the responsibility to unleash it. Kennedy and Khrushchev, how'd you like to be in their shoes? I mean, a sociopath might like the idea of having nuclear weapons and all that that entails, but that's not the kind of thing most people look forward to having to use. It creates a huge amount of stress, as you might imagine. Anyone running for high office, especially in a place like the United States,

has a sort of implied promise that they can get the job done and understanding that the job of being the president is going to require decisions on your part that will get people killed. It's unavoidable. And killing bad guys, for example, and terrorists and those sorts of things, there's a lot of people that could sleep very well at night, you know, without on their resume. So no problem there. It becomes a different situation when you're thinking that maybe in the next week you're going to have to

issue orders that would fry millions and millions of non-combatants and women and children and old people and even animals and poison the earth i mean there's a lot into these decisions that's a lot for one human being to handle it's a lot for the society to handle but because as we discussed earlier this is not a power that was seen to be something that because of the way the technology worked could be a group think decision it was something that had to be made by a

And I don't even mean in a non-trustworthy sense where they're going to nuke people like some terrible tyrant of old, but more the stress level. And if you get lucky with the people that you have there at any particular time, what makes you think that over the long haul you're going to continue to be lucky? This is Bertrand Russell's comment about walking the tightrope for a couple hundred years.

Truman did it, Eisenhower did it for two terms, and now in 1962, at the end of the year, it is starting to look like the person walking across that tightrope is going to fall. How'd you like to be the person that had to push the button if that happens? And there's a part of me that likes to imagine that this is like the ultimate fail-safe mechanism in the system.

Those last human beings who actually have to do the equivalent of pushing the button. Maybe at the last minute, they rebel. And they say, I won't do it. I won't destroy humankind. And it becomes the wonderful end of the movie where everyone goes, see? See? You thought we couldn't handle that, but at the last minute, humanity won out. Sort of like a human version of that red button not connected to anything that Herman Kahn mentioned.

The problem is, is most of these situations, by the time they get as far as you would have to get before people were thinking about pushing the button, are out of people's controls by that time. That's what the Barbara Tuchman World War I book is about. And that's what begins to happen in this story, too. Because after Khrushchev pulls the ships back from the quarantine and continues work on those missiles, though, that are already on the island...

They start writing letters to each other, Khrushchev and Kennedy. It actually starts on the 23rd, but they continue on, and they're fascinating. You can watch the tone change with the ebb and flow of the crisis, and as the stress level and alert statuses and progress towards an invasion of Cuba maybe ratchets up, you begin to see both these politicians trying to find a way out.

Both of them are seeing their options constrained now. The door to getting out of this mess is closing, and their ability to control the situation is slipping out of their hands. And they know it. By October 25th, the day after the non-face-off at the quarantine line, Khrushchev is getting all sorts of information that makes him think an invasion of Cuba is imminent. The president of the United States has this clock going off because the missiles are continually being worked on and the pressure caused by that.

Khrushchev's got his own clock an invasion of Cuba is imminent what are you going to do about that and he knows something that not only does Kennedy not know but no one in the west knew until the Soviet Union fell and its records could be made available to historians in the early 1990s Khrushchev knew that there were battlefield nuclear weapons operational on Cuba put in place to destroy any landing imagine like the D-Day landings of the second world war if the defenders had nukes

Now they're small, each one about the size I read, 60% of the power of the Hiroshima bomb or something like that, but they have several of them. Imagine the carnage something like that would have created. And how do you back out of that problem and avoid World War III if it goes that route? So Khrushchev and Kennedy begin the period in the Cuban Missile Crisis I like to call the haggling holding a hand grenade period.

Because both of these guys have to get a deal together before the forces driving them toward nuclear war become unstoppable. On October 26th, Kennedy receives a note from Khrushchev that seems to propose...

a way out of this crisis. Now, some historians have suggested this was a desperate note written nervously, but not everyone agrees with that. It's clear, though, that Khrushchev thinks that an invasion of Cuba is coming. He worries that the military has taken over from JFK, and so he offers a compromise on Cuba.

He makes the case that the only reason the weapons were put in Cuba in the first place is to deter a U.S. invasion. He said, you've already invaded once. That was the Bay of Pigs. He says, your CIA is constantly harassing and causing problems over there. That's called Operation Mongoose. And he's right about that. He says, if you will publicly proclaim that you won't support any more of that, you won't invade the island, we'll take the missiles out.

Then he writes about the blockade and the ongoing crisis, and he says to Kennedy in famous language, quote,

If you have done this as the first step toward unleashing war, well then, evidently nothing remains for us to do but to accept this challenge of yours. But if you've not lost command of yourself and realize clearly what this could lead to, then, Mr. President, you and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will become.

And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it. And then the knot will have to be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly what dread forces our two countries possess.

Therefore, he writes, if there is no intention of tightening this knot, thereby dooming the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, let us not only relax the forces straining on the ends of the rope, let us take measures for untying the knot. We are agreeable to this. End quote. So in the early evening of October 26, 1962, the first ray of hope appears right before time runs out.

kennedy's military advisors do not trust khrushchev they think this is a ploy to gain more time to get his missiles operational and let's remember that kennedy has misjudged the soviets in the past and these other people have been right so if you're kennedy you must think to yourself maybe i'm wrong again at the same time if we look at it in a certain way kennedy had just received a personal letter an emotional letter as some people describe it

from the only other person who is actually in the same position he's in you can be the closest advisor to the person who actually has to push the button and it's not the same thing khrushchev understands what kennedy's dealing with and vice versa neither man it looks like wanted to have to do this the only way to stop this is by going to the other person who also doesn't want to do this and say you know what if i do this can we can we call this off

it must have been a certain mental sense of relief where kennedy saw this i mean there's maybe not time that's the problem and you see in the x-com tapes that kennedy's trying to get this done let's move it along let's move it along on the morning of october 27 1962 saturday october 27 1962 kennedy and his advisors will get together to discuss that letter and the ramifications and can we get this deal done where we say we won't attack cuba and they get the missiles out these missiles that they haven't even publicly acknowledged are there

And then everything begins to go wrong, which is why they call this day Black Saturday. Black Saturday starts with a press report that's handed to Kennedy in the morning as he's, you know, discussing last night's letter from Khrushchev. This is a public statement by Khrushchev, like on the radio kind of thing, where he announces to the world the way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis and sort of, you know, acts like the Olive Branch peacemaker type.

But the way out is not the same deal he offered Kennedy the night before. His way out is a much more difficult deal for Kennedy to do. Khrushchev tells the world that we will take those, I don't think he said missiles because they still haven't publicly acknowledged, but he basically says, you know, the things that everybody's having a problem with will be removed from Cuba if they pledge not to invade Cuba and if they get their own missiles out of Turkey, which are as close to us as Cuba is to the United States. Boom.

There's no better example of that old adage that the light at the end of the tunnel was instead an oncoming train? Because the bottom drops out of everything here, because Kennedy can't do that. He certainly can't do that before the timeline for airstrikes or invasion runs out. The reasons why he can't do it, though, are the sorts of things that those people...

Like those scientists who would talk about now that we have nuclear weapons, we have to have a one world government. So you don't have multiple governments interacting with each other in these dynamics. This is what they're talking about because Kennedy is fine with Khrushchev's public proposal. He had wanted to get these missiles that Khrushchev says you must remove these missiles from Turkey. He wanted them out before this crisis even happened. They're obsolete. They just cause trouble. He wanted them out. But now that Khrushchev has made it part of the deal, he's

Kennedy can't accept it without looking weak, without looking like he's kind of willing to sell out the security of his European allies to buy him some security in the Americas, looking like he is rewarding this move by Khrushchev to place missiles 90 miles off the U.S. coast, a move he's been vilifying in the United Nations for more than a week. He's trapped by a geopolitical dynamic that the pharaohs of Egypt would have understood.

The game is the same game it's always been. But the consequences of making a wrong move in the game now are exponentially greater than anyone's ever dealt with before. And that's what's changed everything. Kennedy's trapped because he's playing a new game by the old rules. But what if that keeps you from being able to stop thermonuclear war from breaking out? And once again, every time you think you can't get any more pressure, right? How much can the people at the center of this story handle if

All day long you're going to get more. One of the first briefings in the morning has the CIA telling the president, we think those medium range, at least some of the missile sites are now operational on Cuba. Boom. Have you waited too long? Here's another piece of ammunition for the military hawks to use against you in arguments. And then the militaries of both sides having rubbed up against each other all over the world on high alert for days now, sparks start flying.

and in a situation as combustible and explosive as the one you're already dealing with this would appear to be fatal there are naval incidents involving soviet submarines that the u.s navy's chasing around cuba they don't know that those submarines have nuclear torpedoes by the way

There's a U-2 reconnaissance plane up in the North Pole in the Arctic that gets off course and strays over Soviet airspace. Soviets send fighters to deal with it. The United States up in that territory up there sends fighters to deal with them with missiles armed with nuclear weapons.

Over Cuba, there will be a low-level reconnaissance flight of planes that is hit with anti-aircraft gunfire. More ominously, a U-2 flying over Cuba to keep tabs on those missiles that the U.S. absolutely has to do is shot down by a surface-to-air missile, a SAM battery, and the pilot is killed. Now you have blood in the situation. Not just that.

In order to sort of keep the military hawks at bay, several days ago, Kennedy had laid some lines in the sand saying, this is when we will act, don't worry. And one of the lines in the sand was, if they shoot down a U-2 plane with a surface-to-air missile, we will go take out those surface-to-air missiles. Now the military said, guess what just happened? What are you going to do about it? The president's brother, Robert, who was at these meetings and with him in private talks all during this time, would write that at this moment,

When the crisis was at this stage, he felt that, quote, the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling, end quote. The bridges to escape were crumbling. Kennedy would say in a couple of days that at this point, there was a attack scheduled for Cuba to start with bombing raids, hundreds of them,

except for Monday or Tuesday. Remember, it's Saturday. His own advisors can't make up their mind what to do in the current situation, so Kennedy will famously send his brother Robert as a back-channel negotiator without telling anyone. Robert will go in Washington, D.C. to the Soviet ambassador. He had gone to the Soviet ambassador a few days before during this crisis, but was his normal combative, feisty self-assertive.

This time, the Soviet ambassador says an entirely different man was in front of him, basically trying to explain the plight his brother was in, and, I'm not sure it's fair to say pleading, but there was a desperation in all this. There are many descriptions from different people and views, none of them are

quite exactly the same i like the one you should take with the most salt because it's from khrushchev's own memoirs quoting his ambassador de brinen who was having this conversation with kennedy and khrushchev writes quote robert kennedy looked exhausted one could see from his eyes that he had not slept for days he himself said that he had not been home for six days and nights

The president is in a grave situation, Robert Kennedy said, they say he said, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact, we're under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. Probably at this very moment, the president is sitting down to write a message to Chairman Khrushchev. We want to ask you, Mr. DeBrennan, to pass President Kennedy's message to Chairman Khrushchev through unofficial channels.

President Kennedy implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the peculiarities of the American system. Even though the president himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the president is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict.

if the situation continues much longer the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power the american army could get out of control end quote the publisher of my 1970 copy printed in boston had a footnote inserted right there to point out that this was obviously a misunderstanding that the soviet leader had about the american system and how it worked

But truthfully, you wouldn't have had to have like a military takeover of the government to achieve basically what the Joint Chiefs wanted, which they were unanimously opposed to the president's approach on this in order to get their way. If they had gone to the president's opposition in Congress, for example, and told them that they were unanimous that he was, you know, absolutely taking into the country to existential danger and they leaked that to the U.S. media, it would be like a giant veto over the president's policy. Public opinion would have forced him into a different route.

And if they had gone that route, it would have been simply because they, the experts, unanimously talking amongst themselves, had decided that the president had literally put the country in terrible danger. And by the way, while most histories portray Kennedy as this wise, sage guy that saved the world in this situation by pushing back against at times unanimous counter-opinion,

There are other views. I mean, historian Gary Wills savages him, essentially accusing him of being the one who was responsible for this time bomb situation to begin with. So the fact that he got you out of it means little since he's the one who set the bomb. And Wills points out that if you want to give anybody credit for this, give it to Khrushchev.

He's the guy willing to suck up the humiliation here so that we don't have nuclear war and go home with his tail between his legs and not tell anybody that he actually got the missiles out of Turkey that were threatening my citizens. So he can't even claim credit for that. More hardheaded other historians will use that same rationale by saying what you really mean to say is Khrushchev was completely outgunned. And at this time, the U.S. military would have crushed him, especially in that part of the world. He had no choice but to back down.

regardless it's hard not to look at the two individuals in this crisis khrushchev and kennedy and think regardless of the role they may have played in getting us to here once they did they took the most cautious route out

One of the historians I was reading had a great way of framing it. He had said, if this was a gaming scenario and you could run it a hundred times, how many times would it turn out that you would have nuclear war? How many times would it turn out that maybe, we forget about this, that if Kennedy had listened to his military advisors, Khrushchev would have backed down, an invasion of Cuba somehow would have happened, and the Cubans would have been freed, and Castro would have been gone, and all. I mean, there's a bunch of scenarios where it can go.

But if you're going to the casino to put your bets on something, and the best case scenario is you could win a fortune, the worst case scenario is if that little ball on the roulette wheel lands on the wrong spot, my goons take you out in the back and shoot you in the head. Do you even play that game? Or do you just play as cautiously as you can saying, listen, I know this is not a strategy that's going to get me a win per se, but the worst case scenario is so bad, I'll be happy if I can just avoid that?

when khrushchev hears from his ambassador basically that the u.s government will get those missiles out of turkey but they'll do it quietly but that you can have a deal he's all over it because he was thinking he wasn't going to get a deal that good anyway

He's a little bit worried about letting Kennedy know he accepts the deal before this Cuban invasion happens. That's how close we are here. So instead of spending a half day getting a letter to him, he goes right on Radio Moscow and proclaims, we're in, we're accepting the deal. And he keeps quiet the part that needed to be kept quiet, right? The system that we have here of interaction between nation states requires that certain things happen.

be done in ways that help people save face and preserve their political opportunities and whatnot khrushchev understands this accepts the terms and from this moment on the tension begins to drop i mean kennedy says just a couple of days later he feels like a new man i mean i had a airstrikes ready to begin tuesday i mean they just they know how narrowly they dodged a bullet here

And worth noting that when he went a few days later, this according to biographer Robert Dalek, to congratulate and thank the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of all the military entities in the country on their help during the crisis, they were mad. Admiral Anderson said to him that we've been had.

The essential point was that this too is a stalling thing. Who the heck thinks the Soviets are going to get the missiles out of there even now? General LeMay from the Air Force called it the worst defeat in the country's history and said we should still invade Cuba. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara says this reaction on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff left Kennedy, quote, absolutely shocked, end quote, and, quote, stuttering in reply, end quote.

Within 13 months, Kennedy will be dead. And the vast majority of theories concerning his death, including the traditional lone gunman theory, all have very close connections to the island of Cuba. Khrushchev's loss of power that will be coming will also be connected to Cuba and this whole affair.

traditionally the idea was that his counterparts in the soviet leadership considered him to be a reckless gambler but it's more complicated than that nonetheless the only person who would stick around despite hundreds of assassination attempts for decades he just died recently as fidel castro and if the histories are to be believed out of the national leaders making decisions during the cuban missile crisis

He was the most in favor of using nuclear weapons. Castro's views would mellow with time and with the acquisition of more insider information about what was going on behind the scenes. But this Cuban Missile Crisis is the best case study that we've ever had about what it's like when the Sword of Damocles begins to drop. Seventeen years after the debut of nuclear weapons, it was a nuclear near-miss.

And there's a lot you can learn from that. American historian Martin J. Sherwin calls it the biggest non-event of the 20th century, which is interesting because we normally think of history in positive terms. This was done. That happened. But sometimes the most important things are the things you avoid. He writes, quote,

In a century replete with unspeakable disasters, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 came terrifyingly close to producing the greatest disaster of them all: nuclear war, the final failure.

The irony of this non-event is that averting it was the most important event of the 20th century, so it is necessary both to learn how and why the United States and the Soviet Union nudged each other to the edge of the nuclear abyss and to understand how a suicidal plunge over it was avoided. End quote. The lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis are...

controversial and argued about and often depend on one's political viewpoint or what country you come from.

It definitely scared the leaders of these countries. I mean, Kennedy and Khrushchev will both change their tune in a number of different ways. Kennedy will revive some ideas from the Eisenhower administration that never had a real kick in the pants to be implemented. You know, it was tough to get past a whole lot of other problems. Well, a nuclear scare can all of a sudden, you know, move mountains in front of you. And Kennedy and Khrushchev will start the process of

a creation of a nuclear framework maybe you could call it humankind's attempt to adapt to their weapons technology but frameworks for limitations on testing safeguards put in place to help ease the next crisis situation a hotline for example and the beginnings of an understanding

that if you can you should begin to put controls on these weapons so that they don't spread to everyone and you can begin talking about how to reduce the numbers of weapons that the two biggest holders have in their stockpiles the united states and the soviet union on that last front it will be a failure for quite some time and that also means

is as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, famously a Soviet diplomat will say to an American, "You got away with it this time, but you'll never get away with it again." And the Soviets will race to produce enough intercontinental ballistic missiles so that they are never on the short end of that numerical disadvantage again. By the middle 1980s, the Soviet Union will have more than 40,000 nuclear weapons.

and the United States somewhere over 30,000, 70,000 plus nuclear weapons. And that's just the two biggest powers. And while adding a hotline is going to help the next time there's a crisis situation, the one big safeguard that nobody can figure out how to implement is still a glaring problem. The fact that the responsibility for you still revolves around a single human being.

Ronald Reagan wrote after his presidency that that was the big realization that really hit him right when he became president, that he and he alone controlled these weapons, and the amount of time he had to talk over decisions with people about using them was minuscule. He wrote, quote,

The decision to launch the weapons was mine alone to make. We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack, but everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis. The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our east coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six to eight minutes.

Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon? How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? End quote. Reagan, along with every other American president since Eisenhower, has had a man following him. As he went from place to place, the man carries a briefcase. Inside the briefcase is something nicknamed the football.

It's the nuclear codes for launching a nuclear attack. In fact, I've read that the person with the football is downstairs from the president while the president sleeps, and they time him routinely and regularly to see how long it takes him to get from the bottom of the stairs up into the president's room so he can launch a nuclear attack if necessary. The number of nuclear accidents is in the dozens,

Those are called broken arrows by the United States. The number of false alarms and near misses is scary. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there have been a couple particularly scary ones. Perhaps the scariest since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that's an opinion question, is something known as the Norwegian rocket incident that happened in 1995. That's four years after the Soviet Union fell.

when a rocket launch caught the Soviet Union off guard and their higher-ups put in front of Boris Yeltsin, the leader of Russia at the time, their version of the football, opened it up and asked him about the nuclear launch codes. Now, those who remember Boris Yeltsin remember that he was known to enjoy happy hour from time to time.

So maybe we can consider ourselves fortunate that either he hadn't enjoyed it yet when confronted with this decision, or maybe that he had. But he decided not to respond, prompting the unusual thought in my mind, did Boris Yeltsin just save the world in 1995? Followed by the scarier thought, how the hell is the world in Boris Yeltsin's hands at all?

To many people alive today, Boris Yeltsin in that era is an age ago, and people don't think about nuclear war between the great powers very much anymore. In fact, they don't think about war between the great powers much anymore. And yet history would seem to indicate it's the key danger we should worry about.

The only thing that could really kill 100 or 150 million people in the next couple of years is an asteroid hitting the planet or a nuclear war between the great powers. What's more likely? Well, it depends. There's a lot of people who argue that nuclear weapons have kept the peace since the Second World War, that the reason we didn't have World War III is the fact that everybody realized what would happen if we did.

there's a lot of argument about that and i'm not going to go into that subject but i would like to point out that there are tripwires everywhere and this idea that a nuclear war between the great powers is sort of a thing of the past ignores the fact that on the geopolitical three-dimensional chessboard that is currently in use by the great powers nuclear weapons are everywhere

In fact, just to name one potential flashpoint, and this doesn't involve any of the many other countries now that have nuclear weapons, but the United States is pledged to defend with nuclear weapons more than 25 nations, any one of whom, if they're attacked, could lead to the same sort of dynamic and the crisis situation and the pressure and the lack of options for

that john f kennedy and nikita khrushchev faced in the cuban missile crisis history does not teach you what the right moves in those circumstances are because the variables always change but it does teach you that you will have far less control over the situation than it appears that you will when you're looking at it in a detached theoretical way that's why they call it a crisis right

As I said, human beings are 70 plus years into an ongoing experiment to see if they can adapt or evolve to handle their weapons technology. So far, so good. But let's remember that we are a long way from the edge of this tightrope. These may not even be the most powerful weapons we're creative enough to invent, but

And the systems we have in place still have human beings involved, which is one of those variables that makes it tough to think that we can go, oh, another 130 or so years and have the human story end with the words, and they lived happily ever after.

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