Get a behind-the-scenes look at Bill Whittle’s new podcast series, “The Cold War: What We Saw”, from Esoteric Radio Theatre. With 25,000 nukes on hair trigger, the survival of the United States and the Soviet Union is a modern miracle. Heroic personal stories and high-stakes decisions provide a lesson in global suicide prevention.
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Listen to Bill Whittle’s interview with the man who wrote President Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down this Wall” speech.
12 replies on “Global Suicide Prevention: 25,000 Nukes on Hair Trigger and the Miracle of Survival”
I joined because I watched this episode on YouTube. Got a present for you, Bill. I was an ICBM Missileer in the late 80s/early 90s. My crew arrived for changeover on 28 Sep 91. The offgoing crew showed us unclassified plain text SACDIN messages which purported to be from CINCSAC, ordering the Bomber and ICBM forces to dissipate codes and safe the weapons in accordance with President Bush’s speech the night before. Our crews and command center couldn’t verify the messages and ignored them. All the oncoming crews agreed. That was 15 launch centers, each with 10 Minuteman II’s which were the really big single-warhead birds, the biggest warheads we had. Our targets were the big stationary ones; Moscow, their permanent launch centers, their biggest bases, that sort of thing. The other Wings were either 3 or 10 MIRVs but much smaller warheads. (We had 2 F-111 Wings. I never knew if they also ignored the message. Our base was the largest nuclear force in the world then.) Our Wing Commander was quite overdue at the Command Post. I remember a call from CINCSAC’s HQ asking where he was. None of us knew and we told them that. They asked why we hadn’t followed the orders. We replied we wouldn’t until they were authenticated. IIRC, it was at least 2 hours before we got proper authentication. Your present is scans of photocopies of those orders. The crew on duty when they came in kept the originals. I would have done that, too. I’ve also got quite a few photos of artwork from the capsules. Unfortunately, I double exposed film of the best stuff and the woman who was painted at Foxtrot launch control had already been given clothing because women had been added to the crew force the year before. There were some really cool ones like a Domino’s Pizza box with an ICBM going through it and the phrase about delivery in 30 minutes or less. A few years ago I saw an article from a guy who got special access to see d So, Bill, tell me where to drop the files and I’ll get them to you.
Interesting hearing Bill say about not expecting to survive the 1980s, very familiar. I grew up in a part of west London with Heathrow Airport to our southwest, Northwood HQ to our northwest and central London straight east of us. As a fourteen year old kid in 1984 knew I was going to be vapourised about four minutes into any nuclear exchange, not even a shadow on the wall. For us it was certainly a when, not an if, we had no doubt at all it was going to happen.
Really looking forward to seeing the show.
“BillWhittle.com is the reason that humanity survived.”
Wow! Talk about a great reason to be a member! I think I’ll have a button made: “I Helped Save Humanity!”
As someone who was in the military from 1974 to 1994, I can’t wait to listen to the podcasts.
This reminds me of what would happen if the Cold War resembled “Rambo – First Blood,” Sheriff Will Teasle drew first blood and Rambo finished it.
There are certain quarters that believe that global thermo nuclear war is survivable. But, to what end; power and control? Yep. That’s Satan’s goal. Ya gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
I had no idea that the host of the highly respectable “Uncommon Knowledge” wrote the words that President Ronald Reagan used to tell Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear Down this Wall”. Awesome!
LOL! “Putin loves Russia; he just doesn’t care about the Russian people.” This is this difference between Communist atheism and capitalist Christianity.
Truman had the military power to push Stalin out of all of the Eastern block nations and let him destroy his own country with communism. The world would be a better place if Truman wasn’t so gullible.
The Soviet Union fell at the end of 1991.
But if you want to measure it from Berlin to Berlin, then yes, it is 1989.
AHHH… The good ol’ days… I remember the Duck and Cover Drills…. Good Guys / Bad Guys — simpler world…. Some really good movies came out of the Cold War .. Spy who came in from the cold, for one….
one proxy war you didn’t mention is the Arab/Israeli conflict… still spanning decades… the Arab world was supported by the soviet military complex… and likely American as well… while the Israelis had to rely on the somewhat inconsistent support of France, Britain (when they weren’t actively sabotaging) and the US…
Abbas got his Holocaust denial history PHD at Patrice Lumumba… in Moscow…
Bill, Scott, If you want the power of words, the misnaming the “Cold War” of what was in fact, “The First Nuclear War” is a great example. Nuclear weapons in quantity present, a choice of “a Mexican stand off” or National Suicide consequences. Nuclear wars are different. The only way you win, is to NOT pull the trigger. SO, Nuclear Combatants, contest each other by Proxy wars and ‘triggering’ their opponents into backing down WHILE holding the threat of M.A.D. over each other’s heads.
However, NAMING IT A COLD WAR defused people and historian’s view of what happened. (to my rage)
As a soldier who was on the front line, with one of the ‘buttons’, during one of these “proxy wars” called the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a historian of these times, I agree with Bill, “the Cold War was a [THE] monumental conflict [of our time] between 2 ideas, …the idea of a society based on individuals or a society based on the state,” a monumental Moral conflict of good vs Evil.
Civilization survived because we won.
And we’ve survived. . .so far.
Sadly, we suffered a multi-decade Cold War until a president with a backbone that was stiffer than over cooked spaghetti, identified the USSR as an Evil Empire. THAT was the beginning of the end.
The moral to this story is that the USSR existed simply because they were given the moral benefit of the doubt from its inception. They were an Evil Empire from the get go. That was the undiscussable elephant in the dining room. All that was ever required was explicitly to identify the existence of that elephant and to refuse to feed it. Its fall would have and did follow very shortly after that public identification.
I always considered them the chaos mongers in the world… along with their friends and subordinates…
I still remember my shock at the medias reaction to calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. The moral equivalence brigades were such smug amoral idiots.
The only other politician to say ugly Truth out loud is Trump. The ’80s RINOs hated Reagan as much as ours hate Trump.