Strangelove Whisperings

"I never make predictions and I never will." - Paul Gascoigne

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Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum: EP10 Strangelove Whisperings

[On the Cold War] "‘There is no civilian interference in this and no real limited options. It was, the nuclear war plan remained, you know, blow up everything, really all the way until almost the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. There was a civilian, a civil servant, in fact, in the Pentagon named Frank Miller, and this was when first Carlucci and then Dick Cheney of all people was Secretary of Defense. And before he got this job, Frank, who had been working in the State Department, immersed himself in all of these documents that McNamara's and McNamara's successors had written over the decades calling for restraint and limited options and the guidance that they sent to the, to Sack and so forth. And then he sits on the side briefing to the Secretary of Defense. And he doesn't hear anything about this, doesn't hear anything about limited options, restraint or anything and he says: what's going on here?

Cheney basically gave him authority to go make a deep investigation of the war plan and told, ordered people, in fact to let him and his staff see everything in the books. And they discovered some amazing things. So the level of overkill was just staggering. Now, we're talking about 1989 here.

The 15, there were 700 nuclear weapons aimed at a 50 mile radius around Moscow. There was an airbase in the Arctic Circle. It was a secondary air base. It was an airbase that Russian bombers would land on on their way back from having nuked the United States and it was so cold it couldn't be used for most of the year. There were 17 nuclear weapons aimed at this space. There was an anti ballistic missile site in Moscow that, we learned later, really didn't work at all. There was 69 weapons aimed at this missile site. I went, also the way target sets were targeted, for example, one target set was destroy the Russian Tank Army. Okay, well, what they did, it wasn't even just destroying just the tanks. They also destroyed the factory that made the tanks, the factory that made spare parts for the tanks, the factory that made, rolled the steel to make the tanks, the mines - I mean, you know, went on and on like that. It was just incredibly redundant. And then here came the kicker, here came the thing that blew the whole system apart.

At this point, George HW Bush was negotiating a Strategic Arms treaty with the Russians and one of Frank's staffers, a guy named Gil Clinger, asked his contact at the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, which was the division of Sacrament [sp?], actually did the mechanical targeting of a war plan. He said, you know, they're thinking of lowering number of nuclear weapons to such and such, would you still be able to perform your mission with so few weapons? And the guy said, well, no, that's not how we think about this. Because well what I mean, no, no, I understand what you mean. But that's not what we do. What we do, we take the number of weapons that are given to us, and we apply them to the targets that are on our lists.

Now, the implications of this are insane. It means that at no point, had anybody in the operational side of this, asked, well, how many weapons do we really need to perform whatever mission it is they want to perform?...

It was a completely out of control process with no, with no reference to policy or aims or proportionality. And this is what happens when you let a very powerful, highly, highly specialized bureaucracy, go completely rogue, go completely independent with no oversight even from the people who are actually setting the policies that this bureaucracy is, was set up to implement...

Reagan... was kind of a secret nuclear abolitionist. His staff tried to keep this from everybody. But this was why he was in favor of Star Wars. Strategic Defense Initiative. He might have been one of two or three people who really thought that's what that program was about, which was to try and kind of erect a shield that would keep all nuclear weapons out rendering them impotent or obsolete. First term, comes in, bruises [sp?] the budget. Does, makes all kinds of provocative statements about the Soviet Union. The NSA and CIA are doing incredibly provocative things.

And then Reagan realizes that the Soviets believe that we're setting up to launch a first strike and he says, Oh, God, we have to start dialing this back and he reaches out to Soviet leader, as you say a couple of them died. Then he goes to meet with Gorbachev. This is in 1985, in Geneva, and their first round of talks, is kind of tense, so they go for a walk along the lake and they duck into a cabin where a fire’s roaring, and it's just them and their translators and note takers.

Reagan leans in and says, if the United States were locked, were attacked by aliens from outer space, would Russia come to our defense? Gorbachev says absolutely. And Reagan says, I feel the same way about you. And so when they came back to the conference room, Secretary of State George Shultz, who had no inkling of this conversation until much, much later, wrote in his account of this that all of a sudden the atmosphere had changed completely. These two guys were laughing and joking like they were old friends.

And that's what led to the sort of pivot away from Cold War to the end of the Cold War. And this was something real to Reagan. A couple of years later, Reagan wrote a speech to the UN General Assembly. And Colin Powell tried to excise this line that I'm about to read *something* a couple of times, and Reagan kept adding it back in. And it was this. He said, if we were attacked by aliens from outer space, the quarrels and cun- disputes between us here on Earth would seem trivial by comparison"