Atomic Accountability

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

It's Hardcore History.

Dan Carlin (0:07)

Today's show is an example of one I'd really like to be doing more often, interviewing authors on interesting historical related books that they've written. But I read the books, and it's so hard when you're already reading so much for the main show all the time, to squeeze in more than one book at a time, maybe, for example, on some other subject for a Hardcore History Addendum show. So I'm sort of constrained by that. And I want to explain, not apologize, but explain why once again, we kind of have a subject that we've dealt with multiple times before, nuclear weapons. And also because the only times nuclear weapons have ever been used against people was at the end of the Second World War in Japan. Obviously, that dovetails into that story. And we've talked about that recently. So at the risk of sounding like we have become the nuclear war and Second World War in the Pacific channel, we will include other things, I promise. But I make no apologies about how much emphasis we place on these stories connected to nuclear weapons, because we don't think enough about that. I mean, I don't even think that's arguable. Anybody who spends any time at all looking into this realizes, oh my gosh, we should be talking about this much, much, much, much, much more than we do. So I make no apologies for that. The author that we're having on today wrote the sort of book that I put everything down for and grabbed right away, because it has the potential to completely change the way you thought about everything, about something you thought a lot about. I've thought a lot about the end of the Second World War. I thought a lot about the use of nuclear weapons. As I know many of you have, too. So when somebody writes something that makes you think about it in a new way, that's rare about something that some of us have been into for 50 plus years. Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction did that, I remember. I spent the next three years, I think, in a daze, continually thinking about how now this new overlay of my perspective changes all these other things in the past that I thought about this subject. This book kind of does that, too. So, when, by the way, a book like that is written, you're going to have to, you know, be a pretty trustworthy person to write it in your field, and you're going to have to cite a lot of things and have a lot of notes and be prepared for a lot of people to say, now, wait a minute, what about this? And this guy is, his name is Alex Wellerstein, and he's a professor in the Science and Technology Studies Program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He's a guy who works mainly in the history of nuclear weapons. So this is sort of his bag. And he has a very interesting story of how he came to this knowledge, and that's that he was sort of looking for some real, you know, hardcore information, you know, he wanted to find out about orders for using the atomic bombs in the Second World War. And this led him down a rabbit hole to find out just how wrong our idea is about saying things like, well, Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs, they would have called them back then to be used in this city at this date and all this sort of stuff. Now, anyone who's really gotten into the weeds on this already knows how things were sort of scheduled out and they were planning for almost an assembly line use of these atomic weapons. You know, as they came off the assembly line, we're going to fly the parts here, assemble them here, and then drop them this many days after they were some, I mean, they had those in the works. You kind of have to. That's how industrialized total war works, folks. It's a factory operation, even with atomic weaponry. But partially because of the way control of nuclear weapons has evolved over time, we sort of think about the way they would operate today in terms of the president issuing orders and all that sort of stuff. We think about that as being enforced from the very first second they were discovered, and of course, that's not the case. And it was made much more complex by the fact that the guy who ordered the program started, and who would have had some idea and maybe had some time to think about how we might organize and deal with something like this. He dies in 44 at the last minute, the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leaving in not just a vice president, but a guy who had only recently become the vice president. You know, FDR dropped people here and there when they didn't serve his needs, or, you know, he'd be better off without him, or whatever you want to say. And so Harry Truman is the new guy on the blog. He doesn't even have any contact with FDR. FDR didn't even, you know, keeps him at arm's length. By this time, FDR had been president, of course, longer than any president in US history. He sort of just owned the job. And sharing even a little bit of it with Harry Truman didn't seem to be on the agenda. Or maybe he just figured he'd get to it down the road, not knowing there wasn't a road.