invaluable experience both in staff and command functions. in combined operations in the field. this combined effort helped prove that differences in language and customs need not be a barrier working and fighting together in a common cause. moreover, the exercise demonstrated that joint operating procedures helped combat the power of aligned forces. it helped strengthen the ties of friendship between the two countries. as for the united states armed forces, exercise delawar has evidence of the effectiveness of the joint task force concept with emphasis on teamwork among

the army, navy, and air force. it is another demonstration of the ability of the united states armed forces to react swiftly to a call for help. and to dispatch a strong global fighting force to any part of the world in a matter of hours. we have shown you the planning, weapons, and materials that made this three-day exercise possible. but the spirit of operation between the participating soldiers of both countries was the true significance of exercise delawar. >> the air force base in iran, halfway around the world in the cause of freedom. this is sergeant major donald cosgrove, united states army saying good-bye from iran for this week's issue of the big picture.

this sunday night on q&a, anti-war activist on u.s. foreign policies since 9/11. the recent negotiations with iran, and the war on terrorism. >> who is isis? what are their or since. what do they believe? why are they so violence. all are important. i address them all in the book. but i think what's more important in some ways, because it's something that we can do something about, what is the u.s. policy regarding isis? why isn't it working? can we really go to war against terrorism? are we just doing the war wrong, or is it wrong to say there should be a war against terrorism at all. those are the questions that in some ways are the most important and will be the most useful. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. this weekend on the c-span

networks, politics, books and american history. on c-span live from the iowa state fair. presidential candidates speak at the des moines register's cancelled date soapbox beginning saturday at noon we'll hear from republican rick santorum and lincoln chafee and bernie sanders. sunday afternoon, more coverage with republican candidates ben carson at 5:00, followed by george pataki. c-span2, saturday night, 10:00 eastern, missouri senator claire mccaskill. and dsouza talks about his latest book. on american history tv on c-span3, sunday morning, 10:00 a.m. eastern with many presidential candidates, the fair's history and its tradition on a stop to the white house as we look at the 2008 presidential race. and saturday evening at 6:00, on the civil war, historian and

author john core stein the results victory and the closing of one of the confederacies last ports. get our complete schedule at c-span.org. next, virginia commonwealth instructor chris officer saladino to the cold war nuclear women's. he talks about mutually destruction which kept the u.s. and soviet union from engaging in open war. this history lesson is 50 minutes. >> let's to recap a little bit. we have segued. we are talk building international community. we have talked about war. we have talked about this overdetermined war, the first world war. we talked about the second world war. how military force was organized. kind of historically.

then we said, okay, the way militaries are organized look a certain way. but technology changes that. then we introduce the cold war. butted real mitigating factor for this will be nuclear weapons. today we will talk about the rise of nuclear weapons. we started talking about the rise of nuclear weapons on monday where we talk about the original nuclear arms race, the race between germany -- nazi germany in the united states to develop a weapon. and we talked about how germany was knocked out of that essentially through a bunch of circumstances surrounding their attempt to produce a bomb. had good technology. they had good researchers. and then ultimately germany loses the war. now there is a roy going on in the pacific theater and the united states is still trying to produce this weapon. so that's where we ended up. today we will talk about the

american weapon and how that became a nuclear arms race part and parcel of the cold war. understand the united states was in this competition with nazi germany and whoever else to produce a weapon explicitly. this was not a piecemeal attempt to create some sort of technology and then eventually sell it to the u.s. government. this was not a defense contract scam. it was the man chat tan project whose design ambition was to create a deployable nuclear weapon asap, as soon as possible. and the united states appropriated a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of secrecy to make this up. and it took place all over the united states. it took place in the ivy league, stanford university, the university of michigan. it took place in defense contractor factories in tennessee and in washington state.

it took place on army bases. all these things somehow coordinated together. there were strong managerial leadership. two strong leaders in the manhattan project. robert oppenheimer fgsz the scientific leader of the project. and sort of headed the scientific not just group who was working on it but had to coordinate their input. and the leslie groves, one star general, public manager. probably had a master in public administration. smart guy. but money issues had to be dealt with. secrecy issues that went beyond the single outreach. there were spice. on the other hand, by and large it was massively secret. the success of the manhattan project is not fully into its secrecy but part of it. and trying to develop the

science and logistics to make a deployable weapon. this is supposed to be a super weapon. it is just going to exist. and the idea of perhaps testing this weapon. and that's pretty scary stuff. nevertheless, a few things are very important to how this will progress. one of the things is the death of franklin roosevelt. we know that roosevelt's ideas about the war in world war ii were very clear. they were sort of direct. when roosevelt is gone, the new president by april 1945, harry truman, he's a very new president. only been vice president for a few short months. he is not a real foreign policy

guy. he has not been fully briefed on a lot of things, including some of the key components of the existence of the manhattan project. keep in mind, he's going to go ahead and negotiate the end of the second world war in his big three sum mitts with churchill, stalin and have to know more about what's going on. in fact, when truman comes into power or comes into the office by this point in 1945, we are getting fairly close to creating a deliverable bomb. and an infusion of some scientific knowledge from german scientists brought over soon after the end of the war in 1945, helps us get to the point where by july 1945 the united states believes they're ready to test. now truman is involved. truman wants to know. because we are fighting a war in the pacific theater.

we talked about island hopping the other day. there were less and less islands to hop. we're getting closer and closer and closer to the japanese home islands. and the action, the fighting. combat as bad as it ever was in the first place is getting increasingly worse. we have the introduction of kamikazes and stuff we talked about. we believe the home invasion of japan will be probably the costliest campaign in military history. we're afraid for that reality. but we're preparing for that reality. we have a planning commission working on invading japan by the middle of the summer in 1945. in july 1945, truman gets word that this bomb may be ready. in fact, july 16th, 1945, he gets a phone call that says essentially that the gadget has worked. the bomb they were going to test is called the gadget. the detonation was called project trinity. and the trinity explosion of the gadget or this nuclear weapon is is successful. on july 16th, 1945 in new mexico, the united states

detonates a bomb. we don't drop it out of an airplane. we detonate it. a bunch of people watch it. a bunch of people take readings and testings. it is a scientific event for most people. but we now have a bomb and we t' have a bomb that can be deployed. and we know what this bomb will do. what the bomb will do far surpasses what most people's expectations are. we have a nuclear weapon. we have a super weapon. we're at war with japan. we're worried about losing 1 to 1.5 million people in the next few months. so what are we going to do? the decision ultimately rests with president truman, the buck stops here. he certainly took his responsibilities seriously. but truman's decision is is in hindsight far more wrenching than it really was at the time.

not to say that the ethics and morality of using this kind of a weapon on japan would have zero ramifications and zero impact on any decision maker or on the world. but we couldn't really anticipate necessarily sort of what letting this cat out of the bag would do for the entire planet. once we drop a nuclear weapon on somebody, the world knows what it is. in fact, when truman is asked to make this decision or needs to make this decision, essentially nobody knows what it is. nobody can say, like we all can, oh, this is what a nuclear weapon is going to do. so truman has to weigh the factors. those in the military command are saying if you can end the war with a bomb, do it tomorrow, obviously. while others are still planning for an invasion of the home islands of japan.

my history professional in grad school was on that planning commission. they said we were still preparing to go to war when we heard the bomb was dropped. but we have a lot of experience behind us as well. it's not simply the united states says we don't want to invade japan. that's would be too costly. to go from the canaan and sigh pan and iwo jima, and okinawa, 100 amphibious campaigns to get to where we are today. each one in treesingly more bloody on both sides, including civilian casualties. and our experience is is probably sufficient to dictate the ability to use a different weapon, try a different path no matter how staggering we're going to do it. but back channel communications with the japanese telling them perhaps you should surrender. telling them perhaps this is not

the path we should stay on. the japanese are not willing to surrender. most are not willing to surrender at all. there is a military culture that says we fight until we lose, which is until we die. but some suggest that maybe now is the time to negotiate. but there's a sticking point. that sticking point is what will help to the emperor of japan. and the united states says through all back channels, there's no negotiation. if you agree to surrender, you surrender. they are not giving up territory. they are clearly and obviously preparing for an invasion. so truman decides to try to use the new device. the atomic bomb to end the war. on august 6th, 1945, one single b-29 bomber, which you can go see up in dulles at the air and

space museum up by dulles in this big hangar with 300 other planes is a fairly small looking aircraft called the enola gay. it's a b-29 bomber. the b-29 super fortress. state of the art. for the day, it's huge. for today, it's actually quite small. unimpressive to look at it until you realize what it did. the enola gay dropped one single bomb. the "little boy" on hiroshima, japan. one single bomb, which in 48 seconds, completely a nye lates annihilates the city of hiroshima and changes not just the war, but the world forever. the pilot became a bit of celebrity for dropping this bomb and said the crew was completely unaware. they didn't know. it was a bomb run. it went pretty much without a hitch.

things went really good. if they could high five in 1945, they would have high fived. they would have said good job. there was no real explicit clarity about what just happened until they started to look, until they felt the shock wave, until they saw the mushroom cloud rise from miles away after backing a banking turn and getting the hell out of there. we thought to themselves, what have we done? they annihilated the city. completely and totally destroyed hiroshima. you have seen the photographs. we know this. this is generations ago already for us. but the impact is still pretty intense if you think about it. because three days later we're going to drop another bomb on japan and never again will a nuclear weapon be used in anger. not on veneer, it never will. so since that time, those are the only two detonations.

and yet three days apart, the united states drops two nuclear weapons on japan and destroys two cities, killing effectively hundreds of thousands. the united states drops the bombs and hopes for a response. there are mix evaluations of the response. some of them say, well, we should have given the japanese more time to respond. others are almost absolutely certain that the japanese still were not going to cave. most now in hindsight say is the japanese are not even sure what happened on the 6th to hiroshima. communications are destroyed. it takes people to go to hiroshima and say here's what happened. then somehow report back to military command in tokyo. whatever the case, it's irrelevant today because on the 9th of august, another b-29 bomber, this one called the

"boxcar" drops another atomic weapon, a different form. the fat man is a different kind of bomb. we will talk about them in a second. on nagasaki, japan. both hiroshima and nagasaki have some military value but not that much. nagasaki far more a strategic target. nonetheless, a relatively untouched target. and keep in mind, american bombing in japan has been constant. it has been incessant. the firebombing of tokyo killed more people effectively than pretty close to what these two nuclear weapons did. those were conventional fire bombs. so it's not that the united states had not brought all kinds of devastation on japanese cities through its bombing campaign. but in another single device an entire japanese city is wiped out.

these weapons that we're dropping are atomic bombs, the a atom bomb. they are fission based detonations which we will talk about in a second. they release exponentially significantly less than most of the weapons we have today. and yet more than the biggest bomb we have, 2,000 pound bomb. 2,000 pound bomb is 2,000 detonated force of tnt, explosive power. a atomic weapon or an atomic weapon will yield in kilo tons in detonated force. what would a kilo ton be? what? 1,000 tons. you're all metric already. yes, 1,000 to bes. so 21 kilo tons on nagasaki from a single bomb. and so maybe it's not purely the force of the destruction but the force that a single bomb that only we possess is what's most important. hard to say. whatever the case, we know nagasaki is also destroyed. thousands and thousands killed in the short-term by blast, radiation, by heat.

being vaporized. many, many more later by injuries. still more by radiation. people would argue maybe even still to this day. the japanese get the picture. they understand our threat, which is we will use these bombs on your cities until you surrender. how many bombs did we have left on reserve to drop at that point deployable at that moment in time? zero. didn't matter. in september of 1945, on the uss missouri with all sort of other nations in attendance at a very

formal ceremony, the japanese signed unconditional surrender papers and the war is over. but the nuclear world has only just begun. and bizarrely or whatever, it becomes the new war in a sense. because within the next few months and effectively within the next two years the cold war is deeply under way. and in that confrontation with the soviet union that will last until 1990-91, for the first several years of that war, the united states has a nuclear weapon and the soviets don't. now, what does this weapon do? well, it blows up. massive amounts of force. but there was a test. and there were small is tests beforehand. there was a clear understanding of what the bomb would do in

theory. and then in practice it did. it realized its potential in a sense. the bomb is designed to emit massive amounts of blast force. the bomb is designed where heat pushes that force and temperatures rise to multiple thousands of degrees fahrenheit. a fireball, if you will, pushed by force. it's going to emit a whole lot of radiation that by this point in 1945 we know is deadly. we know in our testing, in our lab work, in new mexico, we know that massive releases of radiation will kill a human being, and some of our people are killed. yes. why did we use the atomic bomb on tokyo? because who would surrender? some will argue the reason we selected these cities was not

simply for the demonstration effect of, hey, we can bomb any city. there is no safe place, which some have argued today is terroristic, but also, that in some way, shape, and form, we wanted to see what the bomb would do to a target that was relatively untouched. this was not uncommon. we want to see what the weapon does in practice. also, you make a demonstration effect that says the city can be destroyed. you don't know what city can be destroyed and we're threatening to eventually annihilate all of your cities if you don't surrender. yes. what's that? debatable. because there is no deployable third bomb. the threat is there. it's implied. but the evidence, we can't replay that. we can't counter it back and say they would have. maybe they would have. hiroshima and nagasaki were never the primary targets, they were amongst a target package.

whatever the case, cold war is now kicking in. and we have a weapon that does this. and no one else has this. now, people have argued that if we look at some of the sort of influential we would call propaganda films of the 1950s where we start to not talk so much about radiation but we show sort of, you know, funny animations where people just wear some extra clothes and the radiation will bounce off you, that seems hilarious in hindsight, but it is sort of dishonest in the fact we knew from the '40s that the radiation was sufficient to kill human beings. and they would be exposed to massive amounts of that radiation. that's how the bomb worked. these ultimately are designed to do this. you're going to be killed, destroyed, annihilated. vaporized by massive eat, massive force, massive

radiation. you don't get a choice. these are fission devices. these are today what's we would call very crude, we use this word all the time, a crude nuclear weapon. i would argue that all nuclear weapons are pretty crude. but these weapons are based on fission, which is far more, let's say, simplistic in terms of its physics than the big modern weapons of today and later on in the cold war. not a physicist. if you are, keep it to yourself. here is the explanation from me and my fellow non-physicist friends here in the room of how these bombs work. talk about crude. this will be a crude explanation. these bombs use nuclear fission in the most simplistic way possible, the nuclear fission process is essentially to take a processed fuel in these cases, it would be enriched uranium or plutonium. what you want to do is trip a

nuclear chain reaction, which is going to be done by heat energy inside a container that we'll call a bomb. this will release this nuclear chain reaction and this massive amount of exponential force. pretty simplistic, as i said. where believe it has something to do with e equals mc squared and that in stein guy. einstein guy, not the bagel guy. so how do you do this? you have to miniaturize a fairly substantial detonation. a massive explosion that's going to produce maximum heat and direct that heat to a fuel base. and this will trip, this -- you have sort of principles of critical mass and the release of energy, you have to split these atoms, right? but this is super simplistic explanation.

very difficult to do, circa 1945. but you need a bomb that detonates a bomb inside of it that channels the energy of that bomb without expanding that energy to this fuel, to this critical mass, to release this reaction and then you get a massive explosion. fission is state of the art in 1945. fission is not state of the art today. although very few people still have it. so to do this requires a lot of science. it requires a lot of development. it requires a lot of money, and it requires for us a lot of secrecy and it produced this weapon that did these things that we ultimately have to say in 1945 are pleased with the result. sounds awful. but the war is over. vj day is huge. because now the war is completely over. now, it's not we've stopped fighting in europe and we have to finish in the pacific theater. the united states has effectively won this warn and american weaponry, american technology has won this war. given the advent of the cold war, that's a big deal as well. and we now live in a nuclear

world. when we talk about the cold war, we talk about the super powers, the united states and soviet union splitting the world in half and defending from each other with massive amounts of nuclear weapons. there's only one state with nuclear weapons in 1945, '96, '97, and '48. we have the bomb and we know the cold war becomes sort of crystallized. the cold war becomes the cold war over this next few years. by 1949, it's what we say hardened. the lines in europe are drawn. harry truman is saying in truman doctrine, we must contain. we have these important documents, the long telegram and the mr. x article, winston churchill saying there's an iron curtain, all of this while the united states has nuclear weapons and the soviet union

does not. yet, the weapons aren't used. again, good. but we know clearly, we discuss obviously, that it won't stay this way. our greatest fear is when the soviets will get the bombs. but one thing that the soviets do is work that much harder to get the bomb, not simply in their own science, not simply in their own technology, not simply in their own military, but they start to use espionage, and the cold war becomes a war that relies very heavily on spying on espionage. and our manhattan project gets penetrated even greater, even further. some of our secrets become part of what the soviets use to finally put their bomb together. the soviets now need the bomb. we have it. they need it. and august of 1949, we enter into a nuclear world where the two sides, the two primary

belligerents, if you will, in the new cold war, have nuclear weapons. the soviets detonate an atomic bomb in august of 1949. now, it's on. the race now becomes to produce the most nuclear weapons. and the biggest nuclear weapon. and that starts in earnest. but it's more of a technological race early on. it's not quite as much of a bulk. it's not quite as much of a let's build thousands of atomic bombs but let's build bigger atomic bombs. plenty of them. but instead of being 10, 15, 20 kilitons, massive, massive amounts of force, and threatening, posturing. but the science doesn't stop in the background. the scientists believe that we can harvest even more ideas and

create even more sort of technologically innovative bombs. and we do. in the early 1950s, the notion of nuclear fusion is investigated for weapons making purposes. and the united states are the first in that sort of chain to detonate a thermonuclear weapon. a hydrogen based bomb. the h-bomb. we detonated first. interestingly enough, what we detonate is not a bomb. it's not a missile. it's not a rocket, not a hand grenade. not a firecracker. it's too big to be deployed. we detonate a device in november of 1952, the i ivy-mike detonation is massive. footage is impressive. but we can't deliver it. it would be like dropping a house out of an airplane.

we don't know how to deliver this bomb. we don't know how to detonate this bomb, but we can show the world and our adversaries we have this and you don't. and the world where we're arms racing on nuclear weapons, we take significant lead, technologically speaking. for a very, very short time. ti. the soviets respond with their own device in 1953, and it is a deliverable bomb, and in our minds, for the first time in the nuclear arms race, the soviets take a bit of a lead. which will be how we see it for the next 40 years. the soviets detonate their own thermonuclear device. massive detonation. and the americans become increasingly more nervous. but in 1954, we detonate our own thermonuclear device, a fully deliverable bomb, a warhead.

right? we destroy the bikinbikini, nam two-piece bathing suits once and for all. who knows what they would have been called otherwise. now, both sides have this new technology and are able to deploy this technology and no one is looking now at the science of the bigger bomb. now they're looking at the science of more bombs and how to deliver the bombs, because this bomb is massive. the exponential detonative power of the thermonuclear device compared to an atomic weapon, no lest the rest of the world has no nuclear weapon, is wholly impressive. here comes the bad physicist part two. except this time, he's even worse. the physics behind these fusion devices is even more difficult to explain for a non-physicist, and even more difficult to produce for a country that

doesn't have massive amounts of time, money, and willing effort. political will. fusion detonations are pretty strange in that they require in a new set of enriched materials of atomic or i should say nuclear fuels, they require the heat source of a fission detonation to trip the chain reaction. in a sense, you need to miniaturize an atomic explosion inside a bomb casing and direct it at these new fuels to get the fusion reaction. this requires a lot more time, a lot more money, a lot more effort. scientifically, it's far more scary. the risks are much higher. the uranium plumes that come from the weapons is far more extensive. and obviously, the state that might adventure wale get to atomic status may never see

thermonuclear status. it's that much more difficult. thus, the first detonation is a massive structure. it's not an actual bomb. by today, obviously, we have miniaturized these sufficiently that i can hold a thermonuclear device, not hold it, it's very heavy, but i can stand around it. i am large, but still. so now, both sides have these sort of cataclysmic weapons. and while they do build bigger weapons, keep in mind that a smallish, a small thermonuclear device might be measured in what we would call megatons. what is a kiloton? 1,000 tons. what's a megaton? ki kiloton, 1,000 tons. what's a mega ton?

1 million tons. we're adding zero to the detonating force. so a two megaton detonation is this much more than a kiloton detonation, which is this much more than a 2,000 pound bomb, which is the biggest bomb most people have. so these two states are distancing themselves from the rest of the world in terms of what they can do to anyone else and they're fighting against each other in this cold war by producing more and more and more of these, and bigger and bigger and bigger of these weapons. fair enough, i guess. welcome to the 1950s. now, at a certain point, we realize that what we really want to make sure is that they don't use their big multiple megaton, kiloton weapons on us. what's they understand is they don't want us to use our beg weapons on them. we're balancing power all over the world. we talked about this whole idea

of balancing power. theory and reality are coming to be. we look outside the world, we see the world split in two. soviet power and american power pushing up against each other. real realism stuff. and when they gain, we have to gain and balance back. when they gain, we have to gain and balance back. nobody is going to negotiate. we're not going to have collective action, but they're building more and more weapons and we're building more and more weapons. and we realize at a certain point that the key now is to understand the new meaning of the world deterrent. for us, deterrants, in your textbook, according to what we say in class, is using a threat to prevent the other from doing what they might want to do. i'm doing to stop you from ever doing that, i'm going to deter you with my threat. if my threat is credible, you won't do it. successful detrance.

in conventional war, it happened and it failed. it might result in a big war, but it might not result in a big war. if you say i don't want your troops to cross this border and take this territory, we may not have a world-ending war. we might, but we might not. and we probably won't. but now with nuclear weapons, detd deterance becomes an absolute proposition. i will threaten you so you don't use your nuclear weapon. if my threat fails and you use your nuclear weapons. what happens next? we have new idea, but it doesn't sound very good. in fact, the nature of my threat against you for not using your nuclear weapons is to use my nuclear weapon. it's all i have. i can't say, well, if you use

your nuclear weapons, i won't sell you grain anymore. not really effective. so my threat to you is, if you dare to use your nuclear weapon, i will use even more of my nuclear weapon. if it fails, i have to use my nuclear weapon. and i know if i use more of my nuclear weapons, you'll use yours, and we're going to annihilate each other. how do we avoid that? by making it so. we don't negotiate away from it. both sides sort of independently and then collectively accept that this is where we are. that the only way to threaten someone to not use their nuclear weapons is to threaten them with ultimate annihilation and destruction and vice versy. and essentially to shake hands on it. the 1950s produced the logic of mutually assured destruction. appropriately acronymed m.a.d.

and mutually assured destruction says that, for it to work with a weapon, the threat has to be absolute. it can't be, well, if you do this, i might do one of these things. it's if you go across this line by using a nuclear weapon, i'm going to use a lot of nuclear weapons against you and destroy you. knowing fully well you're going to use a lot of your nuclear weapons and destroy me. i am willing, i am credible in this threat. which means a lot of threats. a lot of gamesmanship, a lot of what we called brinksmanship. a lot of taking things to the edge of the line. and being scared to death in the process. oddly enough, the american public and the soviet public kind of accepts this after time. those of us who are old like me remember in kindergarten, i had to go and do a nuclear weapons drill. okay, nuclear weapons drill. put our books on the table and the teacher would say put your

books on the floor. if a nuclear weapon detonates and you're on the desk, we don't want you to get hit in the head with a book. good point. we walked in a straight line to a basement, to a shelter area. we peed along the way, killed two birds with one stone. the teachers would say please, walk in a straight line and no talking. i would like my nuclear holocaust drill to be very orderly. okay. a name tag, sort of a yellow vulcanized plastic with blue writing that was deeply put in there. they said even add temperatures of 3,000 degrees fahrenheit, no matter what happens to your little body, this will stay. we'll be able to know where you were. it was tied around my neck with a string. really, a piece of string. we accepted this. this became policy and it became sort of inculturateinculturated. nobody liked it, i don't think, but this was the case from the

'50s into the '80s. we still have mutually assured destruction policies implied with the russians today. no one is going to launch anything at each other because we know what the follow-up is. this requires a lot of stuff to make work. you can't just say it. that's insufficient. in order for m.a.d. to work, we have to make sure when we say if you bomb us and try to destroy our stuff, we will be able to return fire. what we call this sometimes a second-strike capability, if you try to preempt, if you try to use your weapons to destroy us and you're successful in some way, shape, or form, we have plenty left over to destroy you again. to make this work, we have to deliver the bomb effectively. and we start working on delivery systems, and a lot of them. we start working on newer, bigger, better bombers.

right? we develop eventually the b-52 bomber, a big, giant aircraft that lately we know mostly for, what? shuttling the space shuttle, but it's designed really mostly to drop a nuclear weapon. we know it's dropped conventional weapons in places like iraq, afghanistan, vietnam, cambodia. because we haven't dropped any nuclear bombs on people again. good. we come up with missile systems. we develop the ballistic missile. ballistic missiles were not brand-new. the germans had developed them and used them effectively in world war ii. the v-2 rocket launched from france, went up, dropped on england. now we're going to develop ballistic missile systems and particularly the icbm, the intercontinental ballistic missile. in fact, the united states relies on what we call the triad, a three-pronged guarantee that no matter what you do to us, we will be able to drop

increasing numbers of nuclear weapons on the soviet union and affiliated targets, no matter what. the triad relied on these bombers, and in fact, we put bombers in the air all the time. for 30 years, there were always american nuclear bombers in the air equipped and ready to drop if necessary. so if you destroyed the land underneath them, they could go to their target. beyond the bombs themselves in the planes, we had intercontinental ballistic missiles. ours tended to be called hard missiles. silo-based. these amazing inverted tubes into the ground. we put a team of mostly air force personnel in that tube with a sophisticated computer system. and very, very sort of explicit fail safe warning systems so no would could go, hey, guys, time to launch the weapon.

in that tube was a big missile, and on the tip of that missile initially was a multiple megaton warhead. they were targeting packages already in there. all over the place. dug in rural areas of south dakota and the american desert area and the american southwest. all over the place. hard missiles. icbms. big rockets go up in the air. one stage falls away, push it to a target, another stage falls away, and then traveling the bus, and what the bus drove was a bomb. and it dropped in the atmosphere, found its target through a guidance system, and would detonate if need be. besides the bombs, and the missiles, we figured out how to launch these same missiles from submarines. and the third leg of our triad were called slbms.

still have them today. submarine launch ballistic missiles. a pretty scary thing. because from pulairs to triad missiles to the missiles on the subs today, a submarine could hold a payload of 10, 12, 24 ballistic missiles. submarine could stay deep and silent. be out of range. be unavailable for attack by the enemy. if you blew up my bombers and you destroyed my icbms in some lucky attack, two or three submarines could set up launch and each one lob a dozen one megaton tipped missiles at the soviet union and affiliated targets. so maybe only 30 or 40 nuclear missiles would hit their target. which is utter annihilation. you can't not stop us. you can't prevent us from destroying you. and we can't prevent you. they have a similar triad. they have much more emphasis on

ballistic missiles. they have mobile missile launchers. we take the lead in subs. they take the lead in mobile launchers. they have more missiles and then we have more. they have more bombs then we have more. one thing we know is increasingly we have more and more warheads. we have an arms race. they get more, we need more. balance of power. realism, got to do it. now, we need this to guarantee the second strike capability. we have to be able to say, okay, no matter what they do, we will be able to hit them again. and there's a belief that the more they have, the more significant that first hit will be, and therefore, we need more. but the reality is that a first hit will still only take out x percentage of our arsenal, leaving us with massive amounts of arsenal to hit back as well as they. so as we increase the numbers, we believe that we're just ratcheting up the level of

second-strike capability. in hindsight, many analysts say we achieved third, fourth, ninth, 12th strike capabilities, long after we're gone, missiles will still be dropped, subs will surface and go, i guess they're gone. launch more missiles. because that's what our orders are. that's what the package says. and that makes for an even scarier scenario, more incentive not to do it, but also more gamesmanship, more brinksmanship, more tension. more need for fail-safe, more need for communication with guys we don't want to talk to. we have to put a red line in there, a hot phone. what is this? you can talk directly to the soviet guy and go, hey, stop the bombs. it was a mistake, a flock of geese. we start to make fun of it. right? we'll show the movie "dr. strangelove" in one of our dinner and movie events and you'll laugh hysterically at it probably and i'll go, whew. because it's so funny it's almost true.

and bigger bombs. the soviets detonate a bomb c l called a sarbomb, 50 megatons which is like an earthquake. the soviets want to work on what's called a dooms day device. we say, ooh, that's terrible. a bomb so big no stopping what it will do. and we think to ourselves, that's terrible, and it turns out, so did we. we don't have them anymore. not that we ever really did. but there were ideas for sure. in order to make this all work, we have to demonstrate to them two key things. and they have to demonstrate it to us. for deterance like this to work, there's two key factors. the first is my threat must be capable. capable threat simply means i possess the power to do this. i can't say if you try to mug

me, i will hit you in the shins with a baseball bat if i don't have a baseball bat. so for me to say, i'll respond with all this nuclear arsenal, i have to have all this arsenal and i have to demonstrate it. i have to show you every once in a while film, footage of my nuclear test. look at that big mushroom cloud. that could happen to you. we let each other know what we've got a little bit while still trying to maintain secrecy, it's a tight balance. and i've got to be credible. i have to show that i do mean it. that i won't absorb a nuclear hit or two and say, okay, i surrender. and so we have to push where they show up, we have to show up and say you better not go any farther or we will use the weapons even though you say you will, and vice versa. this makes it not so funny, not so pleasant. this makes it far more scary, but both sides must do this so the other knows damn well that they won't back down.

and it works. weirdly enough. we continue to develop delivery systems, better technology with aircraft, better technology with missiles. better technology with lasers, countermeasures, better technology with smalling up the weapons. miniaturization. and then we get to these things called merv, developed in the 1960s and deployed in the 1970s, this technology suddenly makes this whole thing slightly exponential. it's a multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle. i'll try that again after this. aspartame makes thing s clearer for me. multiple independeny