Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 19 - Nukes LOL Ft. Marty Pfeiffer

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

On this episode Joe is joined by Nuclear Anthropology PhD student Marty Pfeiffer. Marty takes us through the terrifying history of man's relationship with nuclear weapons from insane chicken powered landmines, nuclear artillery, and all the times the US military almost nuked itself. Follow the podcast on twitter @lions_by Follow Joe @jkass99 Follow Marty @Nuclearanthro

Hey everybody, this episode is brought to you by Lift Big Eat Big's new workout program, The Phalanx Method. Coach, powerlifter, strongman, and historian, Brandon Morrison, took a unique approach in his creation to this three-block, six-month-long effort. Using ancient sources and modern techniques, he was able to recreate the training of one of history's most destructive military forces, the Phalanx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days a week inx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days

a week in the gym and it's brutal. I've competed in powerlifting, CrossFit, and spent way too much time doing brutal army PT. And this is the hardest thing I've ever done before. And you can do it at a commercial gym or like me from your garage. He also includes little historical tidbits every week to keep you interested and to keep you hooked. If you want to challenge yourself or just try something new, go to www.liftbigeatbig.com and enter the promo code donkey to get 15% off the phalanx method. Are you ready to become a warrior of oak and bronze? Dum-dum, dee-do-dum-dum, dee-do-dum-dum, dee-do-dum-dum, dee-dum-dum-dum, dee-dum-dum, dee-dum-dum. There was a turtle by the name of Bert.

And Bert the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He ducked and covered. Ducked and covered. Duck and cover. He did what we all must learn to do. You and you and you and you. Duck and cover.

Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends, because every one of us must remember to do the same thing. That's what this film is all about. Duck and Cover. This is an official civil defense film produced in cooperation with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. All right, welcome to another episode of Alliance led by Donkeys podcast. I'm your host, Joe.

Nick isn't here today. Instead, I have a special guest with me and the first actual, well, I guess you say expert in training that we've ever had. His name is Marty Pfeiffer and he's a PhD student at the University of New Mexico studying nuclear anthropology. So I actually, unlike other episodes, I brought someone on that knows what the hell they're talking about. Well, sometimes more than me. How are you doing today, Marty? I know you got run ragged doing all sorts of lectures and stuff. Yeah, it's been a long week. Low on sleep. But grad school life is what it is. And of course, the world continues to be a flaming mess. But stiff upper lip, the show must go on.

stiff upper lip we must you know the show must go on right um so i know for me i actually had to look into what exactly the hell nuclear anthropology is um because i've never heard of it and um so trying to create it yeah uh so what exactly is it that you study so uh the the sort of larger or hopefully it will you know blossom into a larger uh field in terms of nuclear anthropology is this overarching thing in which people can conduct research under the topic. For me personally, I am especially interested in how we create beliefs and values about nuclear weapons, how we circulate those societally, how they are challenged and negotiated. how they are challenged and negotiated. And as my dissertation project has started to evolve, it looks like most of my fieldwork or a lot of my fieldwork is going to be conducted looking at how at official sites of nuclear heritage, people are engaging with various discourses, narratives, the artifacts, and each other to create these sort of meanings. So another way of putting that would be to say that I'm really interested in

nuclear semiotics and how we use signs to make meaning and then act on that in the world. And your, your studies focus mostly as opposed to what we talk about as a nuclear weapons rather than nuclear power. Correct. Yeah. So,

and, and you, you had kind of referenced this a little nuclear power, correct? Yeah. And you had kind of referenced this a little bit earlier, right? That when first discovered, and as part of my research, I've gone through advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s, published in Physics Today and Scientific American, and I've read some of the period literature and so on. And at the time, the distinction wasn't really made as much as we do currently between power and weapons. Right. It was this overarching nuclear energy. Right. And you see that kind of now. And well, I guess Iran isn't the greatest example, but, you know, nuclear power can exist without there being nuclear weapons in some countries, right? Yeah, right.

And so this is one of those areas where it can get kind of controversial's conducted in a particular way with proper safeguards, safety, et cetera, et cetera. That said, there are and always have been articulations between nuclear power and the use of atomic energy for military purposes. Reactors tend to produce things like plutonium. Reprocessing is dual use. Uranium enrichment is really dual use. And so in some ways, I think that Iran, which you just mentioned, is actually a really good way to talk about that. If someone you, if someone is developing centrifuge technology, how do you differentiate between them when they say, okay, we're only going to use this technology for generating nuclear fuel versus we might add some more centrifuges, change the tubing around a little bit, and we're going to ramp the enrichment up to bomb grade.

And is there a large difference between the two? I mean, because as a completely uneducated layperson, I just figure like plutonium, uranium, like that's a nuclear bomb. So again, this is where it can get a little controversial. For uranium, highly enriched uranium is defined by the IAEA as 20%. The Manhattan Project's Little Boy weapon used uranium enriched in U-235 up to about an average of 80%. Generally, U.S. nuclear weapons, my understanding, have used uranium enriched in U-235 to 90%, 93%. to 90%, 93%. So most nuclear power plant fuel, depending on the type of reactor, you enrich to 3%, 2% to 4%,

and the fuel itself is completely unusable for an actual nuclear explosive device. There are some reactors that use natural uranium. The natural uranium itself is not usable for a bomb, but generally natural uranium reactors are considered a bit more of a risk because they can be used to breed plutonium. You can design them in such a way that you can remove the fuel rods after a fairly low period of time in the reactor, so you get really good plutonium out of them. The first U.S. plutonium production reactors were graphite piles with natural uranium in them and no power generation.

And then we'd take the rods out, chop them up, dissolve them in nitric acid, separate the plutonium, and then you use the plutonium for a bomb. Interesting. I read something like the Nazis had some. I tried to look into this, but as someone who's completely uneducated in nuclear weapons, I didn't really know what I was looking at. I read somewhere that like the Nazis had their own pile system that they're trying to generate nuclear power from for the purpose of creating a bomb or something like that. So this is also really interesting uh my

understanding of the um nazi program is that it never got very far in part and that they didn't actually achieve a self-sustaining critical mass like we did at uh the university of chicago in 1942 cp1 um partly because i think it was like impurities in their graphite or something like that. But the United States was worried enough about it that we actually began doing aerial surveillance as once we were on the continent looking for some of the gases produced from a nuclear weapons program, you know, just to see where they were. And after, you know, we came in, assessing the state of their nuclear weapons program, you know, just to see where they were. And after, you know, we came in, assessing the state of their nuclear weapons program

was one of those things that we did. I mean, we did this with Japan, too, but the Nazis were, Nazi Germany was never anywhere close. But we were worried. Yeah, we were worried because they had access to, right, the Czechoslovakian uranium mine, science, you know, Germany was one of the – kind of at the forefront in terms of science. I mean, the discoverers of fission were Lise Meitner, Fritz and Hans. So it was something we were worried about. of atomic bombs during World War II required a degree of

resources and industrialization that the Nazi Germany probably couldn't have mustered. And Hitler was more interested in short-term payoffs and such than this sort of kind of shot in the dark, maybe work, maybe won't work. The American

nuclear weapon program was just absolutely massive, wasn't it? Oh, uh, the American nuclear weapon program was just absolutely massive. Wasn't it not? Yeah. I've never been to, um, Los Alamos for obvious reasons. I have no reason to be there. Um, but I have heard that it is absolutely massive. Well, uh, I think it was, was it for me? It was one of the Manhattan project folk after it was over said, um, or had previously said, you know, the only way you can do this before the end of the war ends is if you turn the whole country into a giant factory. And we kind of did. I think it ended up being something like two billion then dollars.

So maybe about 30 billion now. As far as defense spending goes, it's kind of a fucking budget for these days. Yeah. As far as defense spending goes, it's kind of a fucking budget for these days. Yeah, right. The F-35 or, you know, a single B61-12 is going to be like $24 million fucking dollars type of deal. Yeah, it was. You know, they also did things a bit differently, right? So at Hanford, the reprocessing waste after they had dissolved the rods and so on like the low to medium level waste you know you

just go dig a trench and uh pour it in and like you couldn't do that now they just dumped a whole bunch of shit into a trench yep uh they would have like little irrigators that would kind of dribble it out uh there are pictures you can find of like these cardboard boxes from the late 50s you know marked with the radiation trefoil it's like they're just shoveling them into a trench somewhere and then i mean this kind of goes without saying uh but you know hindsight's 2020 uh i can assume this is a tad unsafe uh hanford is um very carefully not officially called a national sacrifice zone, but Hanford's kind of a national sacrifice zone.

You know, there's the tank farm there, which are these steel tanks that held highly radioactive waste. There are things buried there. It's a massive project that DOE is still trying to clean up. The current estimated completion date is like 2060. But quite frankly, I don't think it's doable at any cost that we're willing to pay. And this has become a point of significant controversy in the post-Cold War era with the openness initiative and the relaxation of secrecy, which has always been excessive,

I would argue, around nuclear weapons and the admission by the U.S. government that like we did some really messy fucking shit that's going to be really expensive to clean up. So they kick the can down the hallway for the next generation and the next generation. And Hanford, that is then Washington state. Yep. I thought so. OK, so funny story. I'm in Washington state. uh yeah uh you should go on the tour yeah i uh i have enough radiation in my body from staying from staying around uh main

battle tanks for quite a while um yeah i still think i'd probably do it yeah it's that well it's depleted uranium and they insist it doesn't do anything bad to you. And they would. And survey says that's mostly wrong from our bombs and everything like that. But it's it's kind of strange that this is effectively like a super fun site. And I actually worked with the I don't work for them, but I worked with the Benton County Sheriff's Office where Hanford is. And their sheriff's patch has the nuclear symbol on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that didn't surprise me at all. For a while, I think it was Richland, their high school.

And it may still be. I haven't looked in a while. But their mascot was like the Richland Bombers. They had a mushroom cloud. Yeah, that's one of the things I actually find really fascinating are how those indices, those indexes, those icons of nuclearity, especially as like the symbol of modernity and power circulate. Yeah, and it seems kind of strange. I mean, I know these things probably came to be around like the golden age of nuclear energy or whatever. of these things probably came to be around like the golden age of nuclear energy or whatever but it seems strange that they would still hold on to them in the year 2018 where we know that

these things cause massive death and destruction um so for this this is one of the things that i've i've really gotten fascinated by are uh the multiple lines of influence and thought that are involved in any particular instantiation of that sort of thing, right? So New Mexico, which has economically at least benefited in many ways from huge amounts of DOE money, and yet the population here, at least as I have observed, exhibits a real shyness about acknowledging and certainly about celebrating that outside of certain areas. So like in Santa Fe in particular, Santa Fe had, it was, I think it was from a movie or a show or something, but it was a foam replica of the trinity site monument on display publicly and it was a it was a thing like the newspapers were you know people were upset and like oh we shouldn't have this and and so on or um in albuquerque when the national museum of nuclear science and history was located in old town after it had to leave kirtland air force base after 9-11 which you know 9-11 day right um there was a

redstone missile on display and people went fucking ape shit uh because you know this this presence of the museum and especially the missile was seen as tainting albuquerque's you know heritage and its architecture and it's like oh why do you think albuquerque was one of the fastest growing urban areas back in the 50s right that is their heritage yeah that's like, well, why do you think Albuquerque was one of the fastest growing urban areas back in the 50s? Right. That is their heritage. Yeah. That's like Detroit not being like the Motor City. Yeah.

But there's a real shyness about it. And certainly the presence of the nuclear weapons laboratories in the two of them, Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico, has not been without controversy and without environmental impacts. And the relationship has often or at times been described as colonial because, you know, the people who tend to run Los Alamos tend to be from out of town. The money doesn't necessarily circulate evenly, etc. But there's just a really surprising shyness or discomfort with that nuclear heritage. I mean, I guess I can see both sides of it. I wouldn't be super proud that I came from the place that came up with nuclear bombs. But at the same time, you can be happy that you are part of one of modern man's greatest scientific achievements. Great

doesn't always mean good. Yeah. You know, and so this is, uh, right from the perspective of the people who work in the labs. And I try very hard not to in my work. And, you know, I have friends who've worked on nuclear weapons, worked in the labs, et cetera. Um, you know, for the people who work on nuclear weapons, right, their perspective is such that they are doing an important job, that it contributes to, you know, United States security, et cetera, et cetera. All of those are things that, you know, I disagree very strongly with. Right.

However, with the exception of like maybe one or two people, you know, nobody I've met who works at the labs has ever given me that like, holy fucking shit. This person's just an evil asshole. Right. And they normally, they normally don't. I mean,

yeah. You know, uh, one of the things that, so Hugh Gusterson did, um, in the nineties, his dissertation research at Lawrence Livermore,

and he examined the lab there as though it were a exotic group that had lost a critical ritual performance, in this case, explosive nuclear testing. And they were not – not everybody was happy about that. But I think that one of the things that – like, some of the folk in the lab are really pissed. But one of the things to come out of that, I would argue, is the folk who work on nuclear weapons, the folk who design them, they're people and they're doing a job. And most, the vast majority of the time, and certainly the folk I've talked to, they're doing that job because they believe that it's important, that it's necessary, and that if you're going to have them that need to have them, you know, as safe and the best ones possible and such. Again, these are all things I don't necessarily buy into, but I can certainly accept that rationale or logic. Now, if we're going to talk about like Edward Teller and his quest for, you know, ever bigger

bombs and such, like Teller was an asshole, in my opinion. I actually don't know anything about him. was an asshole in my opinion i actually don't know anything about him um i know um he was he was was he part of i was kind of going off the rails here but was he part of the the castle bravo incident is it was that his doing or uh am i thinking of somebody else i mean he was involved with right the the um big thing that led to staged thermonuclear weapons, which allow basically an infinite yield if you ever really wanted it. Because an infinitely powerful nuclear bomb is absolutely for the betterment of society. Yeah. Oh, and Teller.

I mean, there was Project Sundial, which was the desire to build gigaton size weapons. It's a lot of science fiction. Yeah. Uh, and the two were not necessarily totally separable. In fact, science fiction offered one of the most cogent and prescient analyses of a world with nuclear weapons before they were even invented.

And certainly after they were invented. Right. Um, for a while. I don't, I don't believe that, uh, Castle Bravo was teller though. That was a, uh, after they were invented for a while. I don't believe that Castle Bravo was teller, though. I'm not sure who did it, but there was a miscalculation as to how much tritium would be produced from unenriched lithium deuteride having neutrons hit it. And the amount turned out to be significant and they got you know two

to three times the yield they expected and it was right well not necessarily right next to but with in the hazard zone or the blast area of a civilization correct yeah so american nuclear testing in the pacific has been an incredibly colonial and fucked up exercise right starting yeah starting with you know 1946 crossroads test when we coerce the bikini islanders to move islands and then with uh right we just talked him into it uh so the u.s says you know they saw the value of this and they agreed but if you look at the records and you watch the video like they had no fucking clue what they were being asked to do right and they certainly didn't agree like yeah we're gonna leave and you can set off 66 nuclear weapons of over 100 megatons total

and leave large swaths of our islands uninhabitable for forever basically and the soviets did almost the same thing didn't they except they just exploded them over Kazakhstan. Yeah. So most, as far as I'm aware, pretty much everybody, I'm not as familiar with India and Pakistan's program or North Korea's while we're at it. But yeah, nuclear colonialism, like the French tested in the Pacific on their colonized peoples and also in Algeria, the U.S. did it. colonized peoples and also in Algeria. The U.S. did it. And of course, large chunks, if not most, of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex was sited on land that had been taken from native peoples. The Soviets did it in Simichalatinsk in Kazakhstan and also Nevaezem Law, which had a population of people that they displaced. The U. The UK did it in Australia and also the Pacific. I mean, yeah, we basically, every nuclear power has generally stuck the nasty shit

in the homes of marginalized peoples, which have tended to be colonized or racial or ethnic minorities. Who would have thought that imperial imperialism meeting uh what is effectively a doomsday weapon would have possibly had any bad end effects yeah normally it's so pure and good exactly right like oh this will be fine i'm sure that they'll take great care of the bikini islanders right right and to go back right and to go back to your point with Castle Bravo, you know, we did not like super leap into action super quick to help them out after the Bravo thing. I mean, I think it was a day or two before we started evacuating and then they were enrolled into a medical surveillance program, Project 4.1. So a day or two. And how long? i mean i i know like getting hit by the blast

wave or that's immediate you're gonna die but a day or two seems pretty late to help anybody that's severely affected by the nuclear bombs yeah in this case the uh the fallout so you can look at the pictures i mean there were absolutely bikini islanders who had what are called beta burns, depigmentation of areas of the skin related to exposure to beta. Yeah, it was not great. And we didn't see, and certainly the Bikini Islanders have also felt as though they've been used as guinea pigs. I personally do not believe that Project 4.1 was an intentional effort to dust them with Fallout and then to study it. But I can also understand how that thought might come into your head and be a very compelling one. Yeah, I could see that.

I mean, would that be over? I mean, because we had tested on our people before, not with nuclear weapons, but with the – wasn't it in San Francisco or something? Oh, yeah. Wasn't it in San Francisco or something? They unleashed a whole bunch of particles to track what would happen during a biological weapon or a chemical weapon attack in a metropolitan area. And that affected people badly. So I could see how effectively exploding the damn ocean in front of Um, you could see that the government did that on purpose. Yeah. So I'm not as familiar with the, uh, the bioweapons stuff

that you're mentioning, but, um, there's a, under Clinton, it was the presidential commission on the human radiation experiments. I want to say the title is a friend of mine back in Louisiana was actually one of the press people on it. And I have a he was gracious enough to sign my copy. But, you know, you flip through it and it's like, all right, the United States injected people with plutonium during the Manhattan Project. Yes. Yeah. Without their consent and without telling them to because they were trying to work out what acceptable exposure levels and such were. There were total body irradiation experiments in Cincinnati, Connecticut,

that are really problematic because they offered no benefit to the patients. There was what was called the Green Run with Hanford, where normally they would let the fuel rods sit for a while to let the most radioactive isotopes die off, decay away, before reprocessing the fuel, because that way there's less stuff that you put into the atmosphere. And the hot stuff is what you want to let die away, because that's going it to the U.S.'s developing atomic energy detection system, where we were trying to see how clouds of radioactive material would move through the atmosphere so that we could monitor Soviet testing and Soviet airspace and such. You know, they just ran a fresh load of fuel rods through and released a shit ton of radiation,

and especially iodine-131, which has a really short half-life. But, you know, it gets up taken into the thyroid and the thyroid doesn't do so great with that. That's one of the huge things that shows with nuclear exposure is thyroid cancer, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that's usually that's also one of the, you know, this is a stochastic probabilistic thing. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to ever point to a particular cancer and say, this was caused by radiation exposure. Especially when you're dealing with, you know, the potential for low doses or chronic exposure to low doses or so on. But thyroid cancer is one of the ones that it's easier to say like okay you've got a cluster you know we can tie this to this particular isotope um and here's how it moves through the ecosystem

and i noticed um a human history especially with nuclear weapons is it's kind of like giving a handgun to a toddler and that they do awful things and they don't know what's going to happen next. And all of their ideas are bad. Um, well, all right. So let me rephrase that. Not all of them,

but when they weaponize them, they got crazy. Um, and one, we're going to go over a couple of, I think favorites is a strong word because we're talking about doomsday weapons, but they're so nuts that you would expect there to be like an acne sticker slipped like

slapped on the side and um like one of my favorites maybe it's because i was a tank criminal i was in the army but uh was the davy crockett oh yeah so uh did you want me to yeah yeah um so the davy crockett was a w54 mod 2 i want to say don't hold me to do that one? Yeah. So the Davy Crockett was a W54 Mod 2, I want to say. Don't hold me to Mod 2. But it was an extremely low-yield weapon, the lowest-yield weapon that the U.S. deployed. It was a recoilless rifle for either a jeep or a three-person crew with two security. On the jeeps, you could carry a six-pack of nuclear shells um right which is really fun optimistic uh so the yield it was tested twice in the little feller shots at 18 and

22 tons um and the dod has but not doe has declassified that the nominal yield was 20 tons if you work out the curves of uh you know radiation exposure um and blast like the radiation goes it's kind of overlap um and if you look at the ranges of the weapon which were you know a couple miles a mile and a half couple miles depending on which version it was there were a lot of delivery scenarios where the people firing them would be in the like dangerous to lethal radiation exposure range and that's without even going to like hey we're going to hand these really low level echelon infantry people nukes yeah fine yeah and i've worked with and i'm not insulting infantry i'm insulting all soldiers because i was one um and i host a podcast with one um you can't go to the range like to fire your rifle

without safety briefings about like don't don't shoot yourself or your buddy on accident and you're gonna give them nuclear weapons yeah and uh you know the united states um especially under eisenhower we made a policy decision that rather than, and it was related to economics and the desire to rebuild Europe and not to spend ourselves into oblivion on defense, we made a policy decision to rely on nuclear weapons for military force rather than large conventional troops. So it wasn't mutually assured destruction as much as like plan A is also nukes. Well, you know, mutually assured destruction has never been a policy or the official policy per se. More of a

fact of life. Yeah, the U.S. has always sought damage limitation capabilities. And if you look at declassified briefing, presidential briefings on nuclear war plans, especially in the 50s and 60s, the first

target category that I've always seen is the ability of the adversary to deliver nuclear weapons against the U.S., its allies, and its forces. Because the logic is clear. If you're going to absolutely positively have a nuclear war, you need to strike first. You need to attack their weapons and you need to try and decapitate.

You're still going to die. Sure. Especially once the Russians invented the dead hand system or whatever the official name for that was. Perimeter. I don't know what it is in Russia, but yeah. But that's your only choice is damage limitation. if that's what you're going to go for. Not everybody has gone for that, right? The Chinese have certainly not developed the sorts of forces or the number of forces where they could have any sort of hope whatsoever of damage limitation against like the United States or against the Soviets and then the Russians.

against the Soviets and then the Russians. And for damage limitations, do you mean like some kind of countermeasure or a preemptive strike to try to limit the amount of weapons they get hit by? The latter. So this is where some of the instability of nuclear weapons comes in, especially if you have a large number of weapons that are ready to launch, if you have like a large number of weapons that are ready to launch, you know, like land-based ICBMs, um, or bomber, you know, presumably bombers back in the day. But, uh, if you can destroy the weapons and the command and control before they're used, that's kind of your only choice because of, you know, the bomber will always get through. Uh, and especially once thermonuclear weapons

came onto the scene, a single weapon can mean an entire city. Right. And then when the nuclear triads invented, now you have to deal submarines and aircraft and ICBMs. And it just there's no effective countermeasure to that. are like the easiest to take out right although the united states limited um that vulnerability through things like minimal interval interval takeoff uh from i think it was uh 62 to 68 we had a certain number of bombers in the air 24 7 loaded up with nuclear weapons we stopped doing that after um two very high profile yep we had numerous they're called broken arrows or something like that when they're when we lose one right why don't i know quite a few of them were seriously close calls a couple yeah so i think it's 34 32 34 um between uh up to 1980 uh so a broken arrow is a particular

accident category that involves things like there was a fire, the high explosives in the weapon detonated. You lost one like it. In one case, you know, an airplane rolled off of an aircraft carrier and like, whoops, you know, the pilot was like, oh, like that shitty way to go. had a shitty way to go. In 1966, there was a B-52 that collided with a refueling tanker over Spain. It was carrying four

1.4 megaton B-28 nuclear bombs. All of them fell. The bomber falls. The bombs are going to fall, too. Two of them, the parachutes didn't open. They hit the ground. The high explosives deton detonated scattering plutonium the spanish were understandably very fucking piss uh the other two weapons the parachutes opened one of them hit the ground

it's uh the other one went into the water we had to spend like three months looking for it those casings are actually now on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History just down the street from me here in Albuquerque. Hey, look at this time. We didn't accidentally kill the Spaniards. Yeah, right. And, you know, the gold. So that one happened. And then in 1968, there was another B-52 went down over Thule, Greenland.

All four Mark 28s were destroyed. At that point, the United States decided, like, okay, that's enough. And we stopped doing constant airborne alerts. And the number of accidents dropped. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? Who would have thought? And we lost, like, straight up, could not find a few nukes.

Did we not? Several. Yes. There's one off the coast of georgia uh there's one in the ocean somewhere um there's parts of a secondary in north carolina which the goldsboro accident in 1961 is like shit yourself terrifying um there were four switches and safeties that had to activate for the weapon to fire three of them did oh my god yeah so the weapon when it hit the ground it's one of them

there were two it sent a firing signal it tried to detonate uh and the only reason it didn't is because the pilot safe arm switch didn't fail that time but they had failed in the past pilots have also been known to like fiddle with them um and at that point and with the other oopsies in the 1960s sandia in particular got really interested that's the nuclear weapons laboratory just down the street got really interested in like hey we need to do something about this because these devices aren't operating the ways that we expected in accident conditions. So what they eventually came up with after not insignificant resistance from the military in part because they were worried about reliability and so on was it's called ENDS, Enhanced Nuclear

Detonation Safety. So you use insensitive high explosives, you wrap the warhead in a fiberglass shell, you isolate it from electricity. There's a strong link and a weak link, one for intent where you have to enter into a code, another for trajectory where the weapon has to go through its delivery sequence before it can detonate.

And the quantitative criteria are that less than one in a million chance of a nuclear yield in an accident less than one in a billion chance of a nuclear yield during the normal life cycle but that didn't come until the 70s and then the 70s there's already been icbms correct or is that later icbm started up in the late 50s early 60s uh with the atlas and then the titan ones and then the uh first solid fueled icbms were the minuteman ones which came on alert i believe in 1962 was the first one so by the time that all these almost fail like almost perfect fail safes come on for the for the strategic bombers we're not using them anymore uh we were still we still had bombers on strip alert um but a lot of the weapons you know it takes a while to work this stuff through i think that the lifespan um was generally anticipated to

be about 20 years for a design and so over time you would replace weapons with fewer safer feet safety features with weapons with more safety features in the early 1980s reagan did what was called the uh stockpile improvement plan which sought to um do some stuff with some of the more worrisome weapons so like the b53 which is a nine megaton you know the nickname for it was the crowd pleaser like nine megatons to shit yourself horrifying uh as far as i can tell the crowd pleaser yeah it's like the most that's like calling the zarbama like a little girl yeah you know the people they deal with this stuff in different ways and the sense of humor was not always um what i would have been okay with at the time i guess when you're working with weapons that

will end humanity you have to like i have gallows humor anybody who's listened to the podcast knows i have a really dark sense of humor um yeah but jesus that's a new level that goes a little bit farther, far even for me. Um, and what's interesting is, uh, I can't necessarily speak to, well, okay. So the B 53, um, when it was designed, as far as I can tell the arming process for it was basically, you know, I'm sure there was something you had to do in the plane too, but like it wasn't codes or anything. It was just, you push in a little disc and you rotate it from safe, which has a green to arm,

which has red. And that was kind of it. Uh, so in the eighties, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is nine megatons.

So in the eighties, they field retrofitted it with, um, an intense strong link, which required a code, but like, you know, it never had a permissive action link.

Um, and that weapon was in the stockpile for a long time um which is a bit worrisome the titan 2 uh you know there's congressional testimony a little bit later on in the titan 2's lifespan so that was the liquid-fueled icbm in 1980 a guy dropped like an 8 or 12-pound socket and punched a hole in the side of it. And a couple hours later, the missile exploded, throwing the warhead several hundred feet. Yeah. Some mechanic almost nuked somebody on accident. Yeah. You know, Command and Control is Schlosser's book about it. It's actually a really good book, the documentary, a little bit less so. In congressional testimony, one of the SAC people tells Congress, hey, look, these Titan IIs are assigned to specially created designated

ground zeros of soft targets, which are probably things like airfields, cities, cities near airfields, etc. But if you go to the titan 2 missile museum right you're told that no no this was designed for deeply buried hardened targets it's like maybe the bomb version but the titan 2 icbm especially toward the end of its life lifespan was aimed at people yeah i mean the i think the concept and we're getting a little off target topic but it doesn't really matter um the concept that concept and we're getting a little off target topic doesn't really matter. The concept that like, oh, we're going to use nuclear weapons to destroy equipment and material.

Oh, total bullshit. Yeah, it's your equipment and material. It's aim for his people. That's why we use them the first time on cities full of hundreds of thousands of people. Anything else is like, you know, they kind of say the same thing nowadays um which is equally ridiculous um you know the military uses a 50 caliber machine gun um it they have it labeled as anti-material you shoot it at people yeah and there's this uh this document if you ever feel like having one of those days of like holy fuck uh it's from 1977

it's called psyop targeting philosophy psyop was the strategic single integrated operations plan it was the u.s nuclear war plan um even nixon thought it would kill too many people holy shit when nixon's the good guy your plan is awful yeah uh and the first version of it was like in SIOP 63, 62, came in and it was nuke China, nuke Russia, nuke all of Eastern Europe. You know, whoever started it, no matter what, like this is what we're doing. But this 1977 document is the United States is starting to worry about or exploring possibilities of the Soviets limiting damage through civil defense. So it's a very simple question. What percentage of the Soviet population do we project that we would kill with our current war plan? How many more would we kill if we targeted population directly? Do you want to take a guess at the percentages?

The percentage of total population? I'm going to go with, I mean, the Soviet Union is huge, and I imagine they're going to target metropolitan areas. But I'm still going to say a solid 30%. For indirectly targeted or directly targeted? Indirectly. Okay. And how many more do you think it was percentage-wise for direct targeting? I'm going to go with a full outright genocide on that one. So somewhere north of 50.

Thirty three and forty four. Wow. So like the difference between, you know, now, granted, that works out to tens of millions of people. Right. And that was prompt death. That wasn't like six months later on. That was, you know, the first couple of weeks type of deal. And it didn't take into account a whole lot of stuff which would come into play. So actual casualties would have been a lot more, but it points to like, even though the United States was not targeting population per se and still doesn't target population per se, we still are going to kill, you know, 33, whatever percent of people. And that, you know, we kill enough people that if you directly target them you don't get a whole lot more out of it no i mean that that's we we probably should have learned that and we i think we did know that after world after world war ii when they're like oh we're

targeting many or arms and equipment manufacturers with firebombs and stuff like that yeah like oh whoopsie yeah whoops, we create a firestorm that killed a million people. Yeah. I mean, the thing that kind of chats my ass is this like, so in discussions about disarmament and reducing numbers, one of the arguments that I've heard against that

is like, well, then you'll have to target cities. And I had, I'm not sure what exactly his job title was, but it was at a particular conference. And this one guy from los alamos was telling me like you know the united states doesn't target cities and people we target uh military and we target industry and it's like where the fuck is it that industry yeah it's not on fucking mars dude yeah like if somebody was gonna nuke boeing congratulations you nuked seattle exactly There's no difference between the two.

Yeah. You know, so it's like we already do it. OK. So that was sort of like those gymnastics kind of get to me sometimes. I think they have to. Those those are the mental gymnastics. Like like we said earlier, these people that make these weapons are not evil. They're not evil people. But it's because they do the mental gymnastics.

They're like, we are not creating doomsday weapons that will be pointed at people. I've talked with some people who would be like, yeah, we do. And they're totally aware of that and of those targeting issues. And their argument is this prevents war. This is deterrence. That's how it works. It's not pretty. But, you know, it's also not necessarily that different from like saturation bombing type of thing. Right. So I think you can go either way on that. But I also think that you're right, that for a lot of people, there's a sanitization. And Carol Cohn in her wonderful, very funny article called Sex and Death in the R world of defense intellectuals. Okay. Now I'm interested. It's really good.

There's like a sub, a subheading of like men in ties discussing missile size type of thing. Oh God. Yeah. She talks about padding the bomb. It's actually been my inspiration for licking the bomb or licking the bombs. Um, you know,

I'm like probably the only person on Earth who knows what 15 to 20 different reentry vehicles and weapons casings taste like. But yeah, what Cohn was arguing is that, you know, it's that techno-strategic abstraction in the discourse that in part allows us to plan these things and to ignore the nastiness of it. That when you start talking about, you know,

first strikes and counterforce versus countervalue and so on, decapitation, it lets you kind of like pretend, you know, okay, I'm targeting the military headquarters and it just happens to be in the middle of a city. But the Soviets will totally realize that I didn't mean, you know, target the city and they'll respond appropriately. And, like even though i think uh that's that's definitely not new uh if you if you look back at some of their weapons like they were so insanely uh like impractical and not safe that um i i think they were always kind of like well they're gonna have them anyway and uh yeah yeah i can kind of see where some of those those scientists are coming from where they're like well you know it's deterrence because it is because nobody wants

to be the first person to be like okay i'm done with nukes because that because then everybody else is like well okay we're keeping ours um so i guess i can kind of get that uh i don't agree with it but i i get it it gets complicated right, right? Especially for me, because I am at heart, I'm an abolitionist, and we need to get rid of them because I see the maintenance of large nuclear arsenals and their indefinite retention as virtually a guarantee that they'll eventually be used and that they'll be used in such a way that our society, the world, will end as we know it. such a way that, you know, our society, the world will end as we know it. Um, I can absolutely agree with that. Um, because it, you know, it's one of those things that, uh, I think the United States is an issue here, uh, with its military, uh, and, and a lot of other nations who have large militaries like, well, we spend all this money on it. We might as well use it. And, you know, even though I'm a combat veteran and I run a military history podcast, um, and I'm super interested in military history, that's why I'm in school for it.

I am like at heart an anti-war pacifist. Yeah. But I think and you make very good points about this. Looking back at history shows that if you give these people these things, they're going to find the worst ways possible to use them, and they will use them. One of my favorite examples is the British chicken landmine. Ah, yeah. I don't know much about that one other than it was powered by chickens.

Yeah. I don't think they ever deployed it, but they definitely went through the development process and when the uk ministry of defense like copped up to it they released it on april 1st and they literally had to say we are not kidding this is not a joke we did this and um the problem was they wanted to bury nuclear landmines uh you know um and the way the gap correct like there's a way to keep back like the soviet hordes of tanks and all that shit yeah it was a way to you know yeah earth moving basically uh and once in place it would have had um anti-tamper measures like if it's it would have

been pressurized and if it's sensitive pressure change it would go off you know if you tilted it it would you know so like if you buried it and that you know right i really wonder like well what if you wanted to disarm it you know don't look at it wrong it'll go off exactly happy fun ball yes thank you um but the problem was if you bury shit in germany and the winter like it's cold and your arming firing infusing system may freeze and they needed it not to for three days and the winter, like it's cold and your arming, firing and fusing system may freeze and they needed it not to for three days. And the solution apparently arrived. That was chickens,

live chickens in the bomb to keep it warm. And there's a joke. I'd like to be in on that meeting. Oh, so, and with the British accents too. Yeah. Lord,

forgive me, but everybody's sitting around in an office discussing nuclear weapons policy and this cutting-edge new landmine that they came up with and you know the like oh we have a problem it's gonna freeze and like there was like the minister of agriculture or farming was there's like why not chickens we two birds with one stone you know a strategic chicken reserve yeah and we keep it from freezing. And there's a joke. I don't know what the source of it is, but that, you know, the UK after the Cold War was or at the time or whatever, was talking to like their Soviet counterpart and Soviet counterpart without missing a beat said, why not use piglets? Suggesting that they had done kind of the same thing.

suggesting that they had done kind of the same thing. But, you know, in less funny aspects are like Project Pluto, which has gotten some attention recently because this, I almost called them the Soviet Union. The Russians, you know, have claimed to be developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Right. The U.S. back in the day, and actually I found ads from bendix in the 1950s early 1960s where they're advertising their work on like this nuclear reactor which was for a really classified project but their work on the reactor wasn't um the torii 2c reactor but you know pluto was the supersonic

low altitude um missile and it was basically this like 500 megawatt reactor ramjet with multiple weapons on it and uh you know you'd have flown it along merrily and it would have dumped its bombs and then you could use it as a radiological weapon flying it around above enemy territory and it's just like are you people fuck what what that's around the same time that they uh did that ford designed and almost built the ford nucleon wasn't it uh yeah right around yeah it saw life and fallout so you know it survived yeah i like to imagine that meetings back in the day were like that's a great idea bob but what if we put a nuclear weapon in it like yeah good thinking john why don't we invent some kind of ramjet or a

faster jet engine now fuck it fuck it, nukes. Can we put more Doomsday weapons on this? It's like every board meeting and every large corporation and every defense contractor meeting involved Dr. Doom and shit. Who keeps paying this guy? And it was partly a way of, you know, nukes were an index of modernity. They were hot. They were considered or they were articulated into these discourses of, you know, being the ultimate weapon. They were the peak of technological development or regarded that way.

And people got carried away. I kind of see nuclear power and technology because like they put it in like medicine and drinks and cars like it's kind of like how you see now every company has like a social media account like your serial chain yeah your your serial it has blockchain your serial doesn't need a facebook but you know like back in the day, like we have this really, really nice thing. But have we put a nuke on it yet? Yeah. Like, let's figure that out. in the early 1900s, those got articulated to these discussions around like what the vital life force was and electricity and then x-rays got discovered and like, oh yeah, of course, drinking radium with thorium and daughter products is good for you. Like, why wouldn't it be? Yeah. So the FDA finally started regulating that, uh, in the early thirts after a guy named Evan Beyer, who was rich, right?

That's when we care, died in a spectacularly horrific way. And at that point, they said, all right, we're going to kind of nix some of this stuff. And there was other ways that the military used this shit. And like, so this is obviously post-World War II. And combined arms warfare has been around for generations and then got kind of reinvented as the blitzkrieg during World War II. And then the militaries had to come up with their own ways to make things even more horrific. So they decided to try combined arms nuclear warfare. Oh, yeah.

fair oh yeah um and my personal favorite because i know i know the u.s kind of did this with desert rock but uh is the soviet one and i'm probably gonna butcher this pronunciation in totskoy yeah i think it was i looked at the name but yeah something like that yeah and uh you know the soviets insisted that all they were all wearing protective suits and respirators and no nothing bad happened. The operation involved something like 40,000 people. And they said that only about 3,000 soldiers would march through the actual blast site. So they detonated a 40-kiloton bomb, which I'm assuming that is a decent-sized bomb for 1954. Yeah. Hiroshima was 15 kilotons about uh nagasaki was 20 kilotons

about um in 1954 you were starting to move toward or you were starting to get uh staged thermonuclear so it was right on that cusp of like becoming small but 40 kilotons is a big fucking bomb under any circumstances right and and like the people in charge of this thing uh they weren't dumb like the guy that was in charge of the entire operation was georgie zhukov so here's yeah uh so 3 000 people marched right through the blast zone only i think like a couple hours after the bomb went off um like the soldiers there's uh there's reported i don't know if any of them are still alive i couldn't find any currently surviving soldier i'm sure they're all long dead from cancer but uh they reported walking over the the glass that had been turned to sand or that sand that had been turned to glass uh but you

know the soviets like nothing bad happened they all had protective clothing that worked flawlessly um you know i have a hard time believing that um yeah uh right and that at all you know they they all i mean you have issues getting people to wear their dosimeters on a good day. Right. But this is like 1950s Soviet Union. So everything is much worse and more depressing. Yeah. And how much did they know about like the the implications on the human body? I mean, I'm sure they learned a lot from going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and looking at the survivors. I mean, I'm sure they learned a lot from going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and looking at the survivors. Yeah, so it's interesting, actually, because as flawed as the data is, right, because it's really difficult to reconstruct dosages and such, it's also one of the few situations where people got – you had a large population that was exposed to radiation and that you could study them.

And the U.S. put a lot of effort and money into it. By the early 1950s, you know, I would say that they certainly weren't as aware or concerned about like some of the issues with lower dosages and the chronic exposures and such, but they were certainly at the point where like, you know, the United States, for instance, um, chose not to regulate radon levels in uranium mining. Um, and we should have, and we knew that we should have because, uh, occupational related, uh, cancers from uranium mining are like one of the oldest known to medicine. And in 1952 the united states was sending around public health national health service people to start monitoring uranium mine workers because we knew it was going to happen um and they were allowed access to the

workers in part after they gave they told the uh mine owners and operators like hey look we won't tell them what we're doing and why we're doing it and the aec chose not to regulate uh those levels because you know they were worried about uranium supply um and this is this is in the united states in the 50s so yeah and i can imagine the soviets are a few years behind on that yeah you know in the soviet union so as as fucked up as shit as the u.s did the soviet union was always like hold my beer yeah um and they and they never even even with normal weapons procurement they never had the protection of their soldiers like like the protective measures for their soldiers were never at the forefront of their mind um and this has kind of shown that these guys were and they said that they all volunteered and everybody's fine

but they kind of uh played their hand when they said like oh yeah but um we'll pay you a three month salary right up front so like we know you're gonna die so uh here have a bonus um the uh yeah and you know that stuff is really hard again because it's probabilistic and stochastic processes um and how you get the dosage and whether or not like you inhale particles that stay with you for forever and you know it's really difficult um especially if you don't uh start it up with um that sort of monitoring in mind to track it over time in the case of the united states with our desert rocks oh uh sorry tangent adhd what uh one of my favorite parts of that favorite again for certain value that word of that story is the uh the soviets

burned down some of the houses in the local village from the thermal pulse from that weapon. Um, and they had to like provide new housing for those people. And, uh, that's not good. Like that was bad. And they just put people right back in that village, right? Uh,

some, uh, so, you know, again, the Soviets, uh, some people,

supposedly those people who did not want to return were provided new housing elsewhere. Uh, you know, who knows on that one yeah the united states with our desert rock exercises uh you were assigned to them you could volunteer to be one of the people in like the real close trenches and they were a mixture of like experiment and what was called psychological inoculation. So on the one hand, the U.S. government wanted to see like how would so-called normal soldiers respond to getting nuked and carry out their combat duties, right?

Probably not well. Yeah, right. And the reports after the fact all like everybody responded well. And the reports after the fact acknowledged like these were highly artificial conditions. Yeah. Probably not reflective of what was actually going to happen. One, certainly the atomic test veterans have been increasingly vocal. Granted, many are dying age and other stuff, but increasingly vocal about their feelings of having been used as a guinea pig and reporting.

increasingly vocal about their feelings of having been used as a guinea pig and reporting um you know we didn't wear decimeters or high readings were ignored and you know that they weren't provided information to their own medical stuff and so on uh the united states after the trinity test i mean there was a family in a ranch house that uh yeah they should have been evacuated, and we didn't, for secrecy. They just left the family in there to cook? Yeah, pretty much. Whatever happened to the family? I'd have to go back and look. I mean, again, it's probabilistic.

They might have turned out to be fine. They might have all died later. And again, it depends on how you absorb the dose, whether you uptake it as part of food or if you inhale the particles or such. But I believe it's Eccles book on the Trinity site is very explicit about like, yep, these people were dosed with a level that was high even by the standards of the time. They probably should have been evacuated. They weren't. And what would be is breathing it in worse than eating it, or does it matter at that point? It depends on the isotope and its chemical behavior in the body

and the size of the particle. And that stuff gets really complex. I'm an anthropologist. Right. But generally, breathing in plutonium of a certain size is really bad. Iodine-131 is oftentimes discussed in terms of ingestion because cows eat plants, it gets excreted in the milk, people drink the milk, especially children, it accumulates in the thyroid. But the bioaccumulation and the environmental circulation of radionuclides was a bit of a surprise, like many other things in the 40s and 50s to the U.S. government. And still sometimes remains so. So like at Hanford, tumbleweeds, they have deep root systems.

They suck up certain radioisotopes, then they dry up, and then they roll off-site. And they count as an off-site radiation release at that point. So you've got to put up snow fencing to catch the tumbleweeds. Digging animals like prairie dogs can disturb your burial sites and move stuff around. I mean, the Earth is in motion a lot more than we are necessarily willing to admit. And stuff moves. Yeah, I mean, I don't know a lot about the Hanford site, but it seems like the community that lives around it, regardless of what the DOE does, they're going to be at risk for a lot of bad things. I mean, there's like you're talking about the tumbleweeds and the prairie dogs and everything else.

I mean, what else? They can't make that place nuclear proof. There's no way. The big worry right now is that you'll have a plume of materials reach the river. And that would be very, very bad because they built their Hanford reactors right next to the river for cooling water. And they also stored their waste next to the river,

which in retrospect was a really bad fucking idea. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, Japan learned that pretty well. Oh, yeah, with the tsunami and the... Yeah. Yeah. In this case, it's more about, you know, it's a major water source it's an important one and you've got hundreds of

thousands of gallons of highly radioactive waste buried although we've now removed the liquid components for the most part uh you know and it can migrate again you know those double wall steel tanks and the single wall steelalled steel tanks, they leak. Surprise. Yeah, and they degrade over time. Yep. Yeah, the nuclear waste might be eternal, but the metal isn't. Yeah, 240,000 years, quite eternal. Right.

Close enough for ours. Older than any living thing on Earth. Yeah. So we're now a little bit north of an hour, which is our normal time. So in closing, what would you like? What would your message be about these weapons and what their role and controversial. At the end of the day, I would suggest that whatever you may or may not believe about what nuclear weapons have done in the past, that indefinite retention of nuclear weapons, especially large numbers that are available for use very rapidly, especially when that launch authority is concentrated in a single individual as it is in the United States system, you know, and then you get a Nixon or a Trump or whomever,

that the current path we're on is virtually inevitably going to lead to a catastrophic situation where the world as we know it will end. And I would offer that these are not magical devices that sprang out of the head of Zeus. We built them. We can take them apart. And the way that we choose to do that needs to be associated with a larger rethinking of how we structure power in the world and that continuing to rely upon violence as the way of organizing international affairs is a recipe for disaster again and again and again. Thank you, Marty, and soon to be, hopefully, Dr. Pfeiffer.

Three more years. Three more years. We will have you back on when you're a doctor to give us more credibility. How about that? I think it'll be me who gets the credibility. So thanks again for coming on. so plug your pluggables uh how can people find you on twitter because i know you have a rather large following yeah i'm at 12.6 000 now so i'm at at nuclear anthro on twitter you can also go to deusxatomica.org, which is like deusx, machina, only atomica, which is my blog, which I need to update.

And my Patreon is, you know, patreon.com slash nuclear anthro. But I spend more time probably than is healthy on Twitter. And that's also, yeah, I mean, all of us, right? Especially these days. People ask, why do you follow Trump? And I'm'm like it might be the only warning i get yeah he'll probably tweet about it before anything happens yeah right you'll see a tweet that just says lol nukes go whoosh and then you're like wait what and then

seattle's on fire so i made a uh you can make fake trump tweets and i made one of an alphanumeric sequence and um i had to label it as a jokeic sequence and I had to label it as a joke. I had to delete and relabel it as a joke because people were like, I just checked. What is that? Oh, that's good. Certainly on Twitter, I

try and make a real effort to share my research findings. I have several freedom of information acts that have come through and on my blog and my Twitter are generally where I try and make that available because I think that it's important for the public, interested and otherwise, to be able to access information about this topic. people or the mass public and you know history shows that when mass movements are involved on nuclear weapons issues it shapes the behavior of governments and during the cold war it certainly helped shape that behavior in a way that helped avoid you know a large-scale nuclear war so yeah i think we can all agree um a mass human genocide is something that none of us want. Um, and the, the argument for these weapons,

it seems like they just don't make sense. Um, we need, we need this weapon to destroy the world for self-defense. Yeah. Um, but yeah, thanks for coming on.

Uh, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Anytime. Um, if you ever want to talk about nuclear history, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I would love to have you on.

So you can follow the podcast on Twitter at lions underscore by you can follow me, Joe at J cast 99 and our podcasts always be free. But if you think it's worth a dollar, you can throw it to us on Patreon and we will actually soon have a bonus content coming out. So I look forward to that. Yeah. Products and goods and stuff. Uh, so until next time, thank you and have a good one. Hi, this is Nate Bethea and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens,

Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30 day trial membership. As it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download its title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.