Alex Benesch and Jeff Nyquist talk about the real aspects of nuclear warfare, missile shields and the feasibility.
Transcript
Nyquist: I’m here with Alex Benesch, Friends and enemies, talking about a possible nuclear war. And what is a nuclear war? How is it fought? Do we understand what that is? So welcome, Alex to the program.
Benesch: Hi, there. Yeah, I think the most primitive answer that you can find is the opinion that it’s not doable because it would result in nuclear winter, which is not a real thing, actually. But at least it would cause just unacceptable losses on both sides. So this is what many people believe, and I think that many people sleep better at night if they believe that that it’s so unlikely to happen because, you know, nobody could really win it.
Nyquist: And just to give a little background, people think you can’t have a nuclear war because the debris and the smoke and everything thrown up by the explosion of a bunch of nuclear weapons is going to blot out the sun. It’s going to prevent sunlight. It’s going to cause an ice age, a nuclear winter scenario. Everybody’s going to die then because the planet’s going to freeze up. It’s completely fabricated. In the early 1980s, Yuri Andropov, his KGB, assigned scientists to this nuclear winter theory. They fed it to Western scientists. They believed it. Carl Sagan was part of the TAP study. It was a number of scientists that got fed this, and they did the study using computer models, very much like we have with global warming today. But the problem was: It’s it’s garbage in, garbage out. Whatever data you put in is what you’re going to get out the other side. So it’s it’s really kind of a farce. And of course, I was really interested in this when I was in graduate school in the late eighties and up to 1990, I spent a lot of time in the lowest level basement of the UCI Research Library. In the lower basement was the fallout shelter. It was built with federal money in the sixties. But that’s where they put all the nuclear war books, all the research. And so, of course, what’s interesting is that one of the Soviet scientists that was involved in this project for the KGB of of creating this fake science for nuclear winter, he actually defected. And of course, he was kidnapped by the KGB in 1985, when he attended a scientific conference in Spain. They basically kidnapped him and he was never heard from again. So they got him back. They were pretty angry with him that he exposed it. But actually a number of scientific studies were funded by the government. There was all this concern because of the study that Carl Sagan and other scientists were involved in. So I actually read the extremely boring scientific study about nuclear winter, which came out around 1989, 90. The conclusion of the study was absolutely unforgettable because they put it for the layman in very, very solid terms. They said that, yes, you could get a nuclear winter effect in a nuclear war, but you would have to build a nuclear weapon that could break the earth’s crust. The weapon itself would be as large as the Empire State Building. Wow. Okay. So in order to get the weapons grade uranium, there’s not enough uranium on the earth to build this weapon. So you’d have to go to the moon, mine the uranium there and bring it back to the earth. And it would cost more than the gross domestic product of all the countries in the world combined to build it. Then you could detonate it and cause nuclear winter. But these little firecracker weapons that we have basically or even a 1 to 250 kiloton bomb would be a firecracker compared to doing this. We couldn’t do it. In World War Two, in terms of smoke and debris, the allies dropped the equivalent of 600 atomic bombs in conventional explosives on Germany. And this did not create any kind of cooling effect on the Earth’s climate that was measurable.
Benesch: If a nuclear warhead is rated as 20 kilo tons, what does that mean?
Nyquist: Okay. A kiloton of TNT, basically the equivalent.
Benesch: Imagine a ton of TNT, that’s basically a pallet. It’s a shipping pallet. A thousand tons is a kiloton. Yeah. Okay. You have a thousand of these pallets. So that’s just to give you an idea what that means.
Nyquist: And that’s just a pretty small one. But of course, what people don’t understand is it’s not as powerful as you think because there’s something called the cube root law. That is because space is three dimensional. The explosion is sent in in three dimensional space. So the more explosive you have doesn’t mean that it’s that much more powerful because you have to take the cube root.
Benesch: Yeah. So it’s not a shaped charge, a conventional bomb which directs the force in a certain direction. It detonates in the air. And I don’t remember exactly what height. The energy goes into all directions.
Nyquist: And the bomb that hit Hiroshima, for example, is thought to be about 17 to 20 kilotons. What happened in Hiroshima was it wasn’t the direct heat and or radiation that killed people. It was the shock wave of the explosion. The Japanese had very flimsy houses. They built them very inexpensively. So the shockwave knocked the houses down like in an earthquake. And the electrical wiring or anything caught the houses on fire and then it burned. The people trapped under the debris of the houses burned to death. So you had now within the blast radius of the Hiroshima bomb over 200,000 people and 100,000 of them died. So it only killed about half the people within the blast radius. In fact, if you were in a solidly built cement and brick building, like the hospital that was directly below ground Zero, nobody in that hospital died because the building didn’t collapse. So this is kind of the physics of Hiroshima. Nagasaki killed less people because the bomb was not centered properly when it detonated over the city. So there were only like 50,000 casualties in Nagasaki. So and I think some people have argued that the Tokyo firebombing actually killed more people than the bombing of Hiroshima. But I’m not sure I think they’re not totally sure what the casualty figures were.
Benesch: So and to just interrupt you for a second. The atomic bombs were supposedly used to shorten the war because they did calculations and projections on how long the war would continue on with conventional means. And they projected the losses on both sides. And these projections were quite large. So this was kind of the rationale behind using the atomic bombs, to actually have less dead people.
Nyquist: Well, actually, the rationale is something of a lie. And there was congressional testimony on this. There are some tremendous interesting things. And there’s a book titled “No Wonder We Are Losing”, written by a great anti-communist whose name is escaping me. Now, he was a lawyer who was involved in the Senate Security Committee investigations, so he knew Senator McCarthy rather well. He wrote this book. This book came out in 1958. No wonder we are losing. And he put in the book testimony because he had been an intelligence officer in the US Navy during World War Two, and he was intimate with the whole surrender thing. There were very few Japanese prisoners of war during the war because the Japanese were taught to fight to the death. Yeah. They had gathered the officers, the most intelligent, most informed people that they could among the prisoners, and they treated them really well. These Japanese guys, they were very suspicious. They were very hostile. They were very indoctrinated against us. But they treated these prisoners well. And of course, these Americans spoke the Japanese language. And they said to these Japanese officers, look, we want to end the killing. We want to end the war, we need Japan to give up. But what would the conditions be? These captured Japanese officers said: We will not surrender unconditionally. A lot of people don’t realize this. They think Japan’s surrendered unconditionally. But you’ll notice that the emperor is still there in Japan. It was not unconditional. These officers said, look, the emperor is revered. He’s a god. We would only surrender if the emperor was sacrosanct. Right? Their condition would be that the emperor stays. And so this Naval intelligence unit created this report using the help of these Japanese captured Japanese P.O.W. officers. They sent the report to the State Department, to experts there. And they said, wow, this is fantastic. We need to show this to the president. And so they got to a meeting in May of 1945. They got a meeting with President Truman, and President Truman said: Okay, we should do this as soon as possible to save lives. Truman said: “Well, I have to pass this through the generals, through the command. And, of course, they got all the American commanders, the defense secretary at that time. There was the head of the office of War Information, who was a very famous left American journalist. There were a lot of communists in the Office of War Information. And Diana West exposes this in her book, American Betrayal. But the head of the Office of War Information made a stink and said: We can’t let the emperor off. We can’t. We have to fight the war. And so George Marshall, the chief of the American generals, said, well, let’s table this for a while, which was an extremely damaging move because they could have had peace with Japan. So Marshall got Truman to extend the war. So the battle of Okinawa took place, which was extremely bloody, 13,500 American dead. And of course, Japan suffered all this additional bombing and they were going to use the atomic bombs. They had agreed that Truman would issue this peace offer to the Japanese at Potsdam, when Truman was going to meet with Stalin. And the British leader. That Potsdam meeting happened after the atomic bombing and after the Soviet Union had invaded Japan’s territory in Manchuria and grabbed it. So basically extending the war allowed the Soviets to get into the Far East, to get into China, to invade Manchuria. They basically captured the Japanese biological warfare project in Manchuria. They captured whatever the Japanese were working on in terms of atomic weaponry there. And of course they captured the Japanese armies there and gave their military equipment to Mao. And this allowed Mao to win the Chinese Civil War four years later. The atomic bombing of Japan happened because the war was extended to allow the Russians, the Communists to get in it.
Benesch: Okay. So it was not a magical solution to end the war.
Nyquist: No, no, it wasn’t. It was a tragedy. And General MacArthur privately was sick about it. And you will read about his private comments to people saying that this was a travesty, that the civilians were bombed in this way. By May of 1945, the Japanese navy was sunk. There was only shambles left of it. Most of the battleships were gone and the fleet had no pilots really. The Japanese submarine fleet was mostly sunk, the Japanese merchant Marine was sunk. They were an island. They were going to starve. They had no way out. You didn’t need to use atomic bombs on them. And of course, this is a great shame that America was the first country to use atomic bombs. And they were used on civilians. And by the way, Soviet propaganda has made a great deal out of this. But I believe Diana West’s book shows that it was communist subversives in the US government that basically were behind pushing for this atomic bombing.
Benesch: If the Soviets had been tested in a certain way, they would have used atomic weapons as well, we might surmise. But of course they were handed quite a bit of territory after World War Two. They got, you know, American equipment from the Lend-Lease program to fight Nazi Germany and so on and so forth. Russia got handed Ukraine, Poland, East Germany. So the Russians were not really tested that way in the years to come. So there was not that need for them to use nuclear weapons.
Nyquist: So then as soon as they had nuclear weapons in 49, guess what started the following year? Communist North Korea invaded. And it was it was Stalin who authorized that invasion. We know that.
Benesch: Oh, and didn’t American generals think that some nuclear weapons should have been used against North Korea and China?
Nyquist: The discussion about using cobalt bombs and salting the ground so that it would be permanently impassable. There were all kinds of crazy schemes talked about. There were people in the forties that wanted to do preemptive strikes on the Soviet Union so they wouldn’t get the bomb. But Truman and the establishment said this was wrong. They were our allies in World War Two. We did not start a war with our former ally. If they want to be bad, then we can play off that. But we’re not going to do that. I think that was a wise decision on the part of Truman.
Now, what’s really interesting is that we didn’t know how fast the Russians were building up the nuclear bombs; we didn’t have that many. And they were atomic bombs that weren’t that effective. And in fact, they did studies on the Korean War about widening the war into China. It was determined that atomic bombs would almost be useless against the Chinese in their military because they’re running around and they’re just changing places and spots.
Benesch: And if I remember correctly, the Chinese troops were not really well equipped. Well, so they were running around in, you know, insufficient clothing. And so you’re dropping a very expensive bomb on some very underequipped, poor soldiers. So that’s not necessarily a good way of using American resources.
Nyquist: Yeah, the Chinese army was just huge. They even had mortars without mortar stands. So they used men’s backs. They used mass assault tactics where they would have people with bayonets and rifles, bolt action rifles, just charging machine guns. I knew Korean War veterans who recounted these mass attacks, a surgeon of the seventh U.S. Army Regiment, who I knew personally, he was operating on soldiers.
They were under an attack that they were about to be overwhelmed. And it was a mystery to him why the officers blew the whistle and pulled back because he thought they weren’t going to make it. They were surrounded and they were this regiment got trapped behind Chinese lines. The Chinese, of course, had attacked in massive force unexpectedly in in very cold weather. And you had the battle of Chosun. You had a lot of American units enveloped; you know, this was a U.N. force mixed national force. The Turks got surrounded, fought tremendously, but got captured. A lot of American units got surrounded and captured. But my friend’s regiment got out. They fought their way out in a in an absolutely frightening scenario. He wrote a book called Bloody Snow about it. But this the Eisenhower administration, when he came in the Korean War was still raging. And Eisenhower became president in 1953. And Eisenhower had determined that anthrax was the best weapon used on China, anthrax released from submarines using coastal air masses, because, as you know, coastal air can move inland at night as the warmer air over the land rises, the heat rises. It sucks in the coastal air in the late afternoon and early evening. And of course if you salt that air with anthrax, then China’s coastal cities would be inundated and you would create mass casualties. They were preparing the submarines and the anthrax for this. They had perfected anthrax by that time. By 1923, the US government did a study in about the Korean War, about widening it. Eisenhower wanted to know what happens if we widen the war because he he did not want to mess around in Korea. We’re not going to bleed there forever. We’re either going to get rid of the communists now or we’re going to have peace. And of course, the study showed that if you widen the war against China in the USSR, the war would last ten years. It would cost 10 million American lives. And our allies would abandon us in Europe, but we’d win the war. And of course, it would be an atomic war using those early atomic weapons. At that time, the US Air Force really had tremendous supremacy. And it wasn’t until around 1960 that the US Air Force, very grudgingly, was kind of politically embarrassed by a report called On Thermonuclear War, done by the Air Force’s own think tank by Herman Kahn. The study was done by the RAND Corporation. That was the Air Force think tank.
And of course, you had had before that the Gaither Report, which was which Eisenhower only partially accepted, which said that, look, we have to build fallout shelters. Yeah, this is towards the end of Eisenhower’s second term. We have to basically indoctrinate the population and train it to survive a nuclear war. And Eisenhower was a bit of a liberal. He didn’t want to do that. He said: If we take all this concrete and build all these fallout shelters, we won’t be able to build freeways and shopping malls. And when the Eisenhower files of the national security meetings were declassified, I think in the late eighties, early nineties, John Lewis Gaddis, the Cold War historian, he wrote a book called The Law Peace, in which he has excerpts of these in which Eisenhower is explaining to John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state: I wasn’t bluffing in 1953. I would have widened the war if they had come to the table. Of course, Stalin wanted the war. Stalin wanted to fight World War three with Eisenhower, but Stalin’s immediate subordinates didn’t want to, and he was going to purge them. But they got him first. So World War Three didn’t happen. In 1953. The Communists knew that Eisenhower was going to widen the war.
They didn’t want to die. They wanted to live longer. Yeah. So the war didn’t take place. Stalin was removed. And of course you’ve got testimony of Stalin’s bodyguards in the 1990s. His last living bodyguard saying, Khrushchev removed us from the guard details. So this whole episode. So Eisenhower told John Foster Dulles, if we avoided the war now, now we’re going to beat the Communists by living better than the people in the Soviet Union. Thus you have things like the kitchen debate between Vice President Nixon and Khrushchev in a display of American standard of living displayed in Moscow. You’ve got Eisenhower saying, Look, if we show them a better life, the Russian people will want that. And so they had the theory that communism was going to collapse on its own; just deliver the goods. That was actually the theory that Eisenhower came up with of how we’re going to win. Interesting. The first time in history a country is going to win a struggle with a major superpower and by living better.
Benesch: And so Stalin is dead. The atomic arsenals get bigger, you get better submarines at some point, you know, the rockets are so advanced you could fire them from a submarine reliably. Both sides are starting to build these silos, the fixed silos. And they also develop these more mobile systems, truck based systems that you can move around. This was of course more of an issue here in Europe where the Russians have these systems on trucks and they can constantly move them. At some point you have a preemptive strike against the enemy’s nuclear arsenal.
Nyquist: So they had mobile systems I think in the late 1970s. They deployed the road mobile SS20s . And of course we developed our Pershing system.
Benesch: Yeah, so, so technology becomes more sophisticated. Some of these rockets are very large and they can fly very far. The payload is pretty big and so you can get more payload to the target and then you’ve also got the smaller systems. But if you have a fixed silo, that silo can be destroyed by the enemy. So this all goes into the calculation. You have the mobile systems and then you have your submarines. There are constantly moving.
Nyquist: The triad was submarine based ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons or strategic bombers with nuclear weapons and of course, land based ICBM missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles. And those were the most accurate. The land based missiles were the most accurate, fast moving system. Most of our missiles were initially based in North Dakota, and I think in Arkansas, Arizona, Montana, different places in the country.
Benesch: Okay. So the concept of a nuclear war that grows along with the technology and of course, it becomes more complex with technology. So let’s just explain the base concept before we get into the more advanced stuff. Both sides were always afraid of a massive first strike, a surprise attack. So you shoot a large volume of these missiles with no prior warning. You should shoot them at the enemy. You want to take out the enemy’s silos. You want to take out mobile systems and you also, if it’s in any way possible, take out submarines, and then you brace for the counterattack and you hope that the counterattack would be as small as possible. So that’s the simplest base concept, correct?
Nyquist: Yeah. There’s a big advantage to attacker who gets a surprise attack. In one of the Soviet books, it says the best defense for a nuclear weapon is to fire it first. So you want to fire your missiles as soon as possible against the enemy. So it’s a it’s all about counter force attacks. You want to destroy the enemy’s nuclear arsenal as the enemy is trying to destroy your nuclear arsenal. So initially, nuclear war isn’t about hitting cities. It’s about hitting other nuclear weapons. The objective is what’s called nuclear supremacy or superiority, where you end up with the preponderance of missiles. And now you can start threatening the enemy cities and demand surrender. You only have ten nuclear weapons left and we have 600 left. For example. That’s kind of the ideal situation for forcing another side to surrender. But the Soviet theorists quickly realized that this was an inadequate theory. The United States probably would not surrender.
This was what a Colonel argued. He said, No, I don’t think they’re going to surrender. The KGB and GRU officers who knew America best agreed with it. The Americans are not like Asians. They’re not going to buckle. They have freedom. They’re used to a certain way of life. They’d rather die than give up. And so this was a problem for the Russians in their war preparations. Now, initially there was just bombers in air forces to deliver the weapons in the fifties. America was vastly superior to the Russians in this. But then with Sputnik, the Russians were initially ahead. They put the first satellite up. They put the first man in space, first dog in space. But after that, you had the missile gap. Both sides were developing these rockets, initially conceived as ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles. If you can put something in orbit, you could put a warhead on it and it could strike a target.
And this is very fast moving. You can watch one of these missiles from Russia. It could reach the United States in a little less than 30 minutes. And there’s no way to stop it. It’s moving so fast. There’s no means of defense. A fighter plane can’t intercept an ICBM that’s going 17,000 miles an hour.
Benesch: And the Soviets became obsessed with trying to find out when NATO was going to do a preemptive strike. So there was this operation RYAN, I think it was called, when the Soviet intelligence actually used quite a bit of their their resources. It was an operation to detect anomalies, signs that NATO was preemptively striking. And it almost became like this manic sort of divination because they were trying to figure out the West’s pattern; you know, what’s normal, what’s not normal. So they were scouting NATO offices and other places. They were counting cars. In the parking lots.
Nyquist: They had a number of markers for showing that the West was preparing for nuclear war. One of the markers was: Is the West stockpiling gold? Is the West stockpiling food and fuel. Are they starting to amass resources for a prolonged siege. A nuclear war is like a siege. I talked to a KGB officer who was involved in that Ryan project, and he said it.
We recognized immediately this was coming from the army, wanted them to do it. And Andropov was then the head of the Soviet Union. He and the KGB realized this is bogus. They had no evidence of Americans preparing a nuclear strike. They knew it was nonsense. The army kind of got into trouble because the Army was insisting that America under Reagan was going to strike and that they needed to strike first. There was in 1983, these Able Archer exercises.
The Soviet military leaders, Defense Minister Ustinov and the generals were saying, look, they’re going to use this to start a surprise strike. They’re going to use their weapons to hit Moscow. And Andropov developed a sort of skepticism when the KGB came back and said: This is complete nonsense. The Army’s lying. Andropov became worried that the Army was going to try a coup against the KGB in the party, that once they had them in their bunkers, they were going to kill them in their bunkers and that the army would then take over. So what actually happened was the orders went out for the Soviet military to prepare for a first strike against the West. There is a book about this called War Scare. The Air Marshal was the head of the Office of Soviet Analysis. They were watching this going on in real time and they were discussing it and saying, is this just a drill? Why are the Russians getting everything ready to attack? And what Peter told me was a lot of our people, our analysts, just didn’t believe nuclear war was practicable. And they just they wouldn’t tell the military here. The commanders in NATO were saying: What’s going on; they are readying their air forces in the in the Warsaw Pact. There was all this activity. And we literally were not preparing in response. And what Peter told me is he said if they had gone ahead with an attack, we would have been caught flat footed. They would have won World War three. But mysteriously, the Soviets were at the point where they could have wiped us out and they just stepped back and went back to normal status. And it was only later a KGB officer told me what really happened, that Andropov was suspicious of the generals taking over the regime and use nuclear war as a way to take power. So he stopped it. And from that point on, Andropov and Gorbachev purged the smartest generals from the Soviet military. It’s why they’re so incapable today.
In 1987 6 to 8 colonels and generals were killed in a helicopter crash. This helicopter was filled with nothing but Colonels and Generals? And you had the Mathias Rust a flight into Moscow. If you remember, the young German pilot who flew through the Soviet defenses and landed.
Well, this provocation allowed the removal of the top air defense and Air Force Soviet Air force generals. So there was this systematic purging. And they would replace them with these nobodies stationed in the military districts that were of no importance. Saratoga writes about this in her book about this war between the KGB and the army and of course, Gorbachev was the protege of Andropov, of the head of the KGB.
And so in this struggle between the KGB, the party and the army, the army lost, obviously. And the only reason we didn’t have nuclear war was this paranoia in the Soviet system. And of course, the KGB had its long range deception strategy, its strategy of faking the collapse of the Soviet Union and subverting the West.
But their fear of their own military led to this disabling of their military, which I don’t think was their intention. But a bureaucratic machine doesn’t always understand what it’s doing. But it’s interesting to know the brilliance of Marshal Sokolowski, who was the editor of this book, it came out in 1962: Soviet military Strategy. This is the RAND Corporation translation.
It’s their theory and their understanding. They had tremendous clarity about how you fight and win a nuclear war. The hydrogen bomb was developed in the fifties, both by the Russians and the U.S.
We had the first one, big as a house. We detonated the first hydrogen building. They detonated the first workable hydrogen bomb. So we were very neck and neck in this race. And of course, with the hydrogen bomb in the ICBM, you had this this super fast, super destructive super weapon which changed everything. And so Herman Kahn’s study in 1960, which the RAND Corporation put out, was very controversial.
Herman Kahn was the leader of the group that did it. It caused such a firestorm that Herman Kahn left with a bunch of other people and set up the Hudson Institute. But the most controversial aspect of the thermonuclear war study was the economic analysis of the study. What Herman Kahn determined was that if a hydrogen bomb war happened with thousands of hydrogen bombs, if every major urban area in the U.S. was destroyed, the United States standard of living would recover within 5 years after the end of the war. Five years, minus certain goods, provided you practiced free market economics and you did not institute some kind of socialist system.
They had this calculation that destroying the cities is not as bad as you think because the rural and small town areas of the country were the real basis of the economy. The real basis of national life is the agrarian, small town life.
The cities actually were constituted by the farms and the small towns, and they found that the skills possessed by people in the countryside, in the small towns were greater than those possessed by people in the cities, greater in terms of recovery. Because in cities you have a more division of labor where everybody is a specialist in doing one thing.
But in the small towns in the countryside, your farmer is a jack of all trades. He knows how to fix it and knows how to plant. He knows how to tinker here and there. And so you have this this greater range of skills, actually. And they said if you had a weapon that destroyed the countryside and left the city standing, the cities would fall apart.
Benesch: Who needs the Starbucks restaurants, who needs some of these other stores that serve no real purpose.
Nyquist: The RAND study was unpopular because they said that the United States Air Force had no defense against ICBM attack. The Air Force was clinging to this myth of American Air force invincibility. And they didn’t have any defense. Now, Edward Teller created a model of a defense which became the Nike missile system in the 1960s. There were Nike missile bases all over America. So what was Nike? Well, the Russians tested something like it in 1962 under Khrushchev.
They tested a successful ABM system. It it was not about hitting a nuclear missile with a conventional missile. You send a nuclear missile up with a hydrogen warhead, you fire a nuke against a nuke.
They tested it in Central Asia. They sent a missile to a test range with a fully armed hydrogen bomb. And they sent another missile with a hydrogen bomb to intercept it and to see if it could disable it. Now, they had a bit of an accident because they were watching this test and they didn’t realize that even at the rate, you know, 50 miles away, that hydrogen bomb flash could blind people on the ground.
Oops. They had a number of their technicians inside just blinded actually by watching this test. But they learned a great deal. The intercepting missile only had to get within 40 miles.
So the radiation and EMP effect fries the boards, the warhead components. So when the warhead reached the test range, it didn’t detonate, it was just a dud.
Benesch: The boards inside a nuclear missile has target coordinates saved on it. They have a primary target, a secondary target. If the data is gone, it has nowhere to go. And also there are very, very peculiar sensors inside of that rocket. The sensors are supposed to determine if this rocket is properly fired or if it is being manipulated by somebody else. The bomb wants to know if it goes into orbit and then goes down and the bomb will actually shut off if the bomb thinks it’s being tampered with on the ground. So if you fire a nuke against nukes, the enemy nukes can’t cope with it, apparently.
Nyquist: That’s right. So these Nike missiles were superfast missiles. The Russians determined that it was the X-ray radiation spectrum of of a burst in space that could have the greatest effect. So they created x ray radiation warheads that could then be effective in the line of sight within hundreds of kilometers.
I mean, you’d fry satellites. Of course you would fry everything within a certain radius. And you could in fact fry a whole cloud of warheads. You know how we have multiple independent the targetable warheads. A Russian SS 18 missile could have as many as 27 nuclear warheads on it, and those warheads would be a cloud of warheads.
And if they were in the bubble of this X-ray radiation counter blast, they would be all disabled, neutralized. And Edward Teller had gone to President Kennedy about this. Meanwhile, Khrushchev bragged, you know, about their successful tests of this ICBM interception system. And they were so they were learning and within the atmosphere later the neutron bomb warhead was ideal for neutralize incoming warheads.
So let’s say it got past you through this part of its flight. It got back and was entering the atmosphere, heading for the target. You could still stop it if you had a neutron warhead detonate within a certain distance of it. So this whole idea of hitting a nuclear missile with a conventional missile, which the we got into, is just silly.
It’s just outrageously silly to have to hit a missile with missile. I talked to Bill Lee who was a big expert. He wrote a book called The ABM Treaty Charade, it came out in 1997 where he talked about this issue. And I met with him in 1999, a couple of years after he wrote his book to talk to him about this whole issue of atmospheric detonation of warheads to stop incoming warheads.
And he said it’s perfectly workable. You know, unfortunately, we disabled our Nike system and the environmentalist movement and people in Congress said, no, you’re going to blow holes in the ozone.
Benesch: So basically what people know as Reagan’s SDI or Star Wars program, was supposed to intercept a nuclear missile with a conventional missile.
Nyquist: Yes. Which is insane. It was a waste of money. And of course, directed energy weapons was the other thing. There were long conversations with the Russian scientist Victor Kulish, who worked on his the laser scientists. He wrote a book on laser physics that is really quite brilliant that you can get on Amazon.
He defected over to the United States at the end of the Cold War, and he lives in Ukraine. Last I talked to him, he was in Kiev. But Kulish was working on this directed laser and they had some successful tests where we found some slag from things they’d hit that had fallen into Scandinavia.
I think in Sweden at the time. George Keegan, the head of Air Force Intelligence, went public with that. I think he got fired over it around 1975 or 76. But they were trying to make this weapon. But as Kulish told me, Kulish had a visionary experience where God spoke to him and said, I’m not going to let you build this weapon.
If you try, people will die. And he had this belief that God prevented them from having a super weapon. They were very determined to get this weapon. And so it’s a very strange tale that he tells, he’s rather a mystical person.
And he says everything in nature is a God system, which is rather intriguing. So if people want to look at Victor Kulish, you can find his name. There’s a Wikipedia article on him and he’s also on Amazon. And his book actually goes into the physics and the theory, this God system theory that he had, which caused him to spontaneously have a kind of visionary experience.
He was a true believer in communism at the time. But what’s really intriguing here, though, is that the US just was not able to make any progress in this area that we know of. We know that the US has some laser weapons and they’ve been mounted an aircraft which Obama retired. And on Navy ships. And we know it has some capacity to intercept incoming missiles, but the energy requirements are high and you have EMP possibilities if you are able to launch a surprising strike.
And we should talk about the evolution of the nuclear war fighting theory in a minute. People talk about the radiation hazards. Let me just discuss that for a minute. People think the radiation is world ending. There was a novel that was turned into a movie with Gregory Peck called On the Beach. And this movie depicted a full blown hydrogen bomb war in which the long term fallout would go around the entire planet.
It would kill all life on Earth. It’s true that the studies have shown that it’s completely false. I’ll give you an example. The Australian government in 1980 did a study about a full blown hydrogen bomb war where 40,000 warheads would be set off in the northern hemisphere. And they said, there would be a few more leukemias and cancers in Australia, but the overall Australian cancer rate would go down because the import of tobacco from the US would be cut off.
Benesch: Oh my God. It’s like the nuclear winter thing, right? It’s where some people spread these ideas that it would be the end of everything.
Nyquist: Yeah. But it’s the communists spreading these fear stories because they thought if we didn’t believe these fear stories, we wouldn’t develop a large nuclear arsenal capable of winning a nuclear war, defending ourselves.
That way they could get the dominance, which is what they’ve been working on since. Anatoly Golitsyn, the defector in 1961 who was part of KGB think tanks and part of organizing the KGB for this long range deception strategy, wrote in his memos to the CIA about this, a surprise strategic attack on America, a nuclear Pearl Harbor.
In 1984, in his book, New Lies for Old, he explained how they were planning this collapse of communism that would get us to lower our guard. This documentary film producer had gone to this communist meeting six months after the fall of the Soviet Union, where there were 1500 American communists meeting. And these were older guys in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and they were talking about using the environmental movement to disarm or collapse America. And of course the whole reason for collapsing us is that if we’re collapse, we can’t have a nuclear defense.
So then they could just point their nukes at us and say, well, you’re done now, you have to give up.
Benesch: Russia and China are very competent at stealing, all kinds of intelligence, especially technological plans, designs and that sort of stuff. But once they steal those plans, they actually have to make these things and they have to make the components.They have to train their technicians, their engineers, every complicated bit. It has to be made from other bits and they require special machines and they’re made from bits. So it is quite an undertaking, you know, to conduct a nuclear war. Even before the attack against Ukraine some other analysts were concerned about this as well.
Russia not only needed fresh citizens, which were right around the corner, in Ukraine, but the Russians also needed the industry of Ukraine because in the Soviet days, Russia invested quite a bit in Ukraine to build up these industrial centers and train everybody. And so they were making all kinds of things in Ukraine for Russia, even missile components, rocket engines.Some of the the components for nuclear missiles and servicing nuclear missiles and all that stuff was done in Ukraine. A large number of Soviet scientists and engineers were Ukrainian. And so in 1991, USSR is officially over. Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons. But the production of all these things is still takes place in Ukraine.
The Antonov airplanes. Then in Crimea, they had the shipyards that were making submarines and other warships. And there were so many things made in Ukraine and in 2014 when Russia took Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, these exports then stopped.
So there was a moratorium on further weapons related exports from Ukraine to Russia. And this massively screwed up their calculations. And then we saw Western analysts look at how well the Russians were coping with this.
The Russians announced they had these very ambitious plans that were going to move production to Russia and be self-sustained within a couple of years. But they did not produce the the target number of helicopter engines. They did not produce enough of this, did not enough produce of that.
Nyquist: Wiithout the Ukrainians, their ability to produce advanced tanks was even affected. Right now they’re producing T60 tanks. 3000 of them. This was quite a quite a problem for Russia. So what I’m hearing from my sources is that it was a kind of general collapse across the board of production.
Of course, there is the corruption in the Soviet defense industries. And I know from talking to Ukrainians with engineering and science background that there were attempts to lure them to Russia for years. Russians wanted them to move to Russia, to come to Moscow to become part of their scientific and technology projects. And by the way, in the Russian scientific cities that exist throughout the Russian Federation, there are many foreigners, foreign scientists and engineers working on secret weapons projects.
And you maybe saw Putin’s presentation of the super sophisticated advanced weapons that Russia was developing. You know, the the 200 megaton tsunami weapon. Poseidon, the directed energy weapons, allegedly all kinds of fabulous missiles and hypersonic missiles and so on.
And we’ve actually them shot down some of them, which is intriguing. But the big problem that the Russians have, of course, is that their basic military is oriented to nuclear war. So they thought because of their numbers and because of their speed of attack, they would overwhelm the Ukrainians and they did not do so successfully. Then they tried artillery, which they did not succeed at and of course.
But they could not use their nuclear weapons on Ukraine, their tactical nuclear weapons, because the Ukrainians are supposedly their brother slavs and they’re liberating them from this Nazi government that’s being imposed supposedly by the CIA and NATO.
And, you know, Peter Pry told me, there were 20,000 soviet tactical nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War. And they didn’t to our knowledge destroy any of them. So the tactical are the smaller ones. So we’re talking one to ten kilotons. They fire them from artillery, but they can also fire them from aircraft and put them on missiles because the Russians have missile artillery with a 90 kilometer range or more.
And so they this is what they would use to bombard positions. Their general theory of how to fight a nuclear war is in Sokolovsky’s book. And it hasn’t changed. And the Chinese almost certainly have the same idea.
And it says, both camps strive for the same goal which is total victory. Of course, they will imply the most decisive instruments of war above all, many nuclear weapons. In order to annihilate the opponent or force them to surrender in the shortest possible time.
This is Soviet military strategy. The destruction of the army in the field and the destruction of the enemy’s warmaking capacity in the rear, the enemy’s command and control. And so on. The annihilation of the opponent’s armed forces, the destruction of targets deep in his territory and the disorganization of the country will be a single continuous process of the war.
The need to defeat the aggressor. Defeat the aggressor as thoroughly and quickly as possible, which requires that he be deprived of the military, political and economic capacity to wage war.
The Soviets were saying, we’re going to destroy all of the American bases in a first strike. We’re going to wipe them all out, wipe out the American command. Some intelligence showed that they would hit all the US state capitals, hit every state government and hit Washington. So the US has no governing structures at the state or the federal level.
Fortunately, we have county government so we can reconstitute ourselves from that. But the Russians, their biggest vulnerability is that they are a highly centralized system. They’re a top down system. And so we developed a strategy in the 1980s. We developed these tunneling missiles. So the Russian leadership, they go to these deep underground bunkers. So we developed missiles that could tunnel hundreds of feet underground and detonate and destroy the bunkers.
This really frightened them. This was real deterrence, killing the leaders. So the Russians just dug deeper. They built several of these underground super cities that are more than a thousand feet underground, some of the more famous ones that they’ve worked on continuously throughout the 1990s. They had 50 to 60000 people living in these underground cities.
These cities in the Urals are connected by underground rail tunnels, their entire copper industry, their nuclear construction industry, all kinds of vital strategic industries are underground in these underground city complexes. So they could carry out a war from underground.
Benesch: And what are the limitations of that digging in strategy? Because you must have enough tunnels to the outside world. So you can bring outside what you produce underground. And so what what do you think are the shortcomings of that strategy?
Nyquist: By 1975, George Keegan publicized satellite information. Since the early 1960s, the Soviets had spent more than the equivalent of like $1,000,000,000,000, some astronomical sum, on tunneling. And they they’ve continued right up to today. What Keegan revealed was that Moscow bunkers had a 100 feet of earth, then more concrete. And underneath Moscow there are 76 bunkers, each the size of the Pentagon to house all the different government and military ministries.
It was an incredible shield system to protect the government underground. And it’s connected to the subway system. And every building built after like 1962 or 63 in the Soviet Union was built with a blast shelter as its bottom storey floor. Many of them having tunnels leading to other buildings and the subway system, but not all of them have sufficient tunnels.
So the problem you have is people can get trapped in these tunnels. Because the tunnel entrances get attacked, they get caved.
Benesch: The Russians would quickly have to move key personnel into these safe bunkers because without the engineers, without the professionals, they can’t function in these underground systems.
Nyquist: Yeah. And since they’re a top down system, if anything happens to their leadership, they can’t function. So the bunkers of the leadership, the preservation of government structures is the key. And they want to protect their population. All the largest Soviet cities have this methodology.
You look at Kiev now, you’ve got the same things underground. They wouldn’t be able to kill the government even with nuclear strikes because they’ve got that deep bunker system under Kiev from the Soviet period.
You see Zelensky’s in these different bunkers and tunnels. There’s rumors of us having tunnels under Nevada, under Colorado, in the Ozarks, up to Arizona. There’s been books published about alleging where these tunnels are in the US. I’m a little bit dubious but if you’ve ever been to Cheyenne Mountain, if you’ve been to Colorado Springs, this is where the North American Air Defense Command was located in a mountain. Well, according to Peter Pry and others, this is not even hardened. 20 years ago, a Russian general visited Cheyenne Mountain. They’d shut it down for a period and then they opened it again. They askes, is this your real headquarters?
Benesch: Come on, show me the real thing!
Nyquist: But there were rumors when I did a speaking tour in Colorado. I spoke in Colorado Springs in Denver in 1998. They were rife with rumors. My listeners told me of these underground tunnels and these people going to work and disappearing into shacks in the mountains. And you’d see hundreds of people park and they disappear into a shack. And they believe there were elevators. They’re taking them deep underground. And there were rumors that the Denver airport connected to this system.
Benesch: The conspiracy buffs, they had a field day with all this. People can’t believe anything they see on the Internet; they call them the deep underground military bases, the dumbs. But it’s what other countries do as well. I mean, North Korea has been doing this. They’ve created this sort of anthill. They try to have these underground structures. They have these long range guns they can retract into a mountain, and then roll them out, fire and retract again. I did a report like two years ago or something where I was compiling, material on how popular bunkers have become. So it’s corporations. I think even Donald Trump once owned a significant bunker or something. And other famous Americans, at some point, they either built structures or they bought structures that already existed. So it’s a thing. And these these larger corporations in Europe, especially German corporations, they’re interested in bunkers. And and let’s not forget what the the National Socialists did. They tried to move production underground as well, of course, not against nuclear weapons, but just to protect against regular bombings. So they tried to make all kinds of stuff underground. They had to constantly move and shift production.
Nyquist: Now back this business of the tunnels collapsing and people being trapped in the rubble. Their problem was what are they going to do with people trapped under the rubble? So outside of Russia’s cities were special units with special rubble clearing equipment to rescue the people trapped under the buildings.
And these are actual units that exist to this day. And in fact, if there’s a major earthquake in India or Pakistan or somewhere, you’ll notice the Russians are the ones that come in to help rescue people from under the buildings. But the Russians maintain these special units outside their cities in the event of a nuclear war so that if there’s no intense radiation, they just go in and they rescue the people that are trapped in these fall out in blast shelters.
With a hydrogen bomb from the U.S. where they strike Moscow and knock the city down and cause massive fires, the people in the underground protective shelters might not be able to get up through that rubble. And they would also need to get supplies.
But the other thing that the Soviets did is that they one of their mandates was to have five years supply of grain stored in these underground sheltering systems under the cities and elsewhere, so that they would have enough to feed everybody. Now, how well did this work? In what shape was it in after the Cold War when Putin first came in as prime minister in 1999, when the second Chechen war was going on? There were a bunch of meetings that took place and there was a joint press conference that Prime Minister Putin held with the top generals discussing some of this stuff. Very interesting. One of the things that amused me was that they were concerned about that America needed gun control because too many Americans own firearms. Now, why are the Russian generals concerned with this. It was amusing to me knowing their strategies for a future war, but one of the things they were looking at then was the underground bunkers. They thought they need to get these things in shape.
And they had conducted a general inspection of the underground bunker system. And this is where Sergei Shoigu came in originally. I think he was one of the people that did this inspecting, and they found that there had been water seepage. Because you’re so far underground, you’re reaching the water table. And you got big rivers around Moscow and Russian.
Benesch: And it’s Russian engineering, after all.
Nyquist: It is Russian engineering after all. So I think a lot of the grain that they’d stockpiled was probably ruined. A lot of it was bad. They had to empty it. And so they fired the guy that was the minister that was in charge, the emergency ministry. And they put a new guy in charge.
And I think that Shoigu was a troubleshooter for this. This is why he ultimately became a defense minister. And they were fixing a lot of the tunnels. And I think they just had an enormous mess on their hands. But then under Putin, when he became president, they reestablished the civil defense education in the high schools and secondary schools, and they started bringing back all of this. They’re educated to know what to do to protect yourself from fallout and biological warfare. They are given first aid classes and what to do and.
Benesch: Of course, the kids learn how to disassemble and reassemble an AK rifle and all that.
Nyquist: So this was all normal under the Soviet Union.
And of course, in America we had no suits. We had the duck and cover drills when I was a kid. And of course, people make fun of that. And I have to be rough with the people that make fun of duck and cover.
Benesch: It’s actually a thing. It’s a thing.
Nquist: Look at the blast radius of a hydrogen bomb if it strikes a city. Within a couple of miles of that blast, everybody’s going to be fried and killed. It’s flying debris that will kill you at a certain distance. Look, most of the blast area is the blast effect. And how do you protect yourself? You duck and cover because it’s flying debris if you’re standing upright.
Benesch: And the immediate amount of radiation, if you are behind a concrete wall and if you can get out of dodge, that helps a lot.
Nyquist: Look, most of the radiation is going to be absorbed by the roofs of the buildings from the direct blast. You want to be facing down with your eyes closed because that flash from a hydrogen bomb explosion will blind you permanently. It will destroy your eyesight. So you want to cover your eyes, your face, you want to be on the floor, you want to be under something solid because it is like an earthquake.
What do they tell you? Get under something. This is how you protect yourself. So making fun of that, that is just plain stupid and it’s subversive.
Benesch: I mean, there have been studies done on this and there are guidelines. I mean, people can download these guidelines from the Cold War online. I forgot what the title was. Some very important government facility, I think where the researchers assembled this guideline. And everybody could get a physical copy of it or now you can download it and they will explain to you how this works. So if if you have a basement, that’s great. And outside of the immediate high volume of radiation after like 24 to 48 hours, that radiation is not your problem anymore. Then you have to worry about the fallout, the radioactive dust. And once you survive that problem for about four weeks or whatever, then there’s a good chance you will be fine and your family will be fine. I mean, in Germany we saw a complete abandonment of all bunkers. So there are no Cold War era bunkers anymore that are functional. There are no new bunkers. There’s nothing here. They just have a concept of using these underground parking garages, you know, larger parking garages and use them as sort of a fallout shelter.
Nyquist: Now, it’s it’s better than nothing, especially in the city’s parking garage.
Benesch: And of course the cities have more people crowded in smaller spaces. So you know, you have to move them into these parking garages. Now of course it would be nice to have bunk beds, to have food ready and to have all the stuff ready in those parking garages. And that’s a whole another problem. I saw footage years ago, you know, when the Crimea thing happened, where selected reporters were allowed into these secret storage facilities for the national Grain Reserve or something like that.
And they’ve had it for for decades. But most of what they store is loose grain. So it’s a standard baseline storage facility. And they have these giant vessels full of grain. And so there’s these boards running across these vessels at the top. So you can walk on these boards and you can take samples and see if the grain is still good or not. You know, if it’s too moist, if it’s full of fungus or whatever. And so the Americans, by that time, they had switched to these freeze dried foods. They’re using the freeze drying method, which was originally developed for the space program.
We over here in Germany, we actually sell storable food made in the United States and it’s made in Utah. They have the larger facilities so they can actually make large amounts of freeze dried food. And Americans are not so reliant on, loose grain.
Nyquist: You’ve got a huge population there in a fairly small area, fairly close to Russia. Now, we haven’t discussed how the Russians envision a war in and against the United States. And if you read Sokolowski in other books, they will say something like the war has to be immediately transferred to the territory of the enemy. That means they’re going to invade the United States. And yet, in my latest article on my website, I quoted a Czech defector who had trained in Soviet military academies in the USSR in 1955. His testimony before Congress was that Russia did indeed plan to invade the United States, and when he defected, he brought battle maps that the Russians had of the areas in the United States that troops would reach.
Benesch: Yeah, same here. They know every everything about every city where what building is, where what is made.
In the Cold War in the United States, people thought of cannabis as sort of a communist conspiracy. And of course, the left was laughing at this. And people nowadays, when they watch some of these old public service announcements on the Web, they laugh at it. But listen to these military experts today. Listen to these active duty people. They have trouble finding young men that are capable for military service because of A, obesity and B, cannabis. Those are the two main problems.
So, so many young people, they smoke so much cannabis, they are not capable of military service. And so, yeah, maybe there was something to it, right? To the communists, cannabis conspiracy.
Nyquist: Yeah, there, there very well might have been. The first strategy for invading North America was under Stalin since Stalin was was planning World War three and wanted Eisenhower to widen the war to China.
Stalin had prepared a force of 50,000 men to invade Alaska. He prepared that in 1951, 52, according to John Lewis Gaddis, the Cold War historian. And of course, Gaddis thought, you know, Stalin must be nuts because could he hope to make this work? But as we saw, we thought the Chinese weren’t going to invade, intervene in Korea, and we didn’t realize we were going to have military defeat inflicted on us by a Chinese army made with bolt action rifles and mortars that didn’t have their own stance.
You know, you can make on the cheap an effective army if you’ve got enough people to throw in, at least in those days. And of course, we’d kind of disarmed after World War Two. And the Korean War sort of taught us that we needed to rearm. It could have very easily turned into World War Three then.
And we’re at this point again because the balance has shifted against us. And I wondered, you know, in the 1980s when I met Colonel Lunev, who knew the Russian military plans, he was trained as a planner. I asked him about this World War three plan, and I’d read these Soviet textbooks, and I knew that it involved North American attacks.
He gave me this overview and you would be fascinated by this, that if World War Three was going to happen in the 1980s, Russia had this three echelon attack strategy.
Russians believe in depth. You have the first strategic echelon, which is all the forces that are immediately deployed in peacetime along the front line. And you have the second strategic echelon, which is kind of towards the rear, and they mobilized. And then you have the third strategic echelon, which was the decisive one. So they had this idea earlier in World War Two, so that the German army overran the first strategic echelon.
They had two more levels behind that the Germans had to encounter as they advanced. So the first strategic echelon of Russian forces drives over NATO’s nuclear minefields. NATO had planted tactical nuclear weapons in the approach zones along the border where the Soviet tanks were going to, and the Warsaw Pact.
They didn’t give it much publicity. Because it would have been unpopular in your country to say that they had planted nuclear minefields along the approaches. And of course, the Russians regarded the Hungarian, Polish and East German armies as fairly worthless.
So they were going to drive those armies along with the existing forces, Russian forces, over those minefields and detonate the minefields and destroy their own army by clearing the mines with their feet, so to speak. It’s madness. And then the second strategic would be the one armed with the tactical nukes.
They would then advance against the NATO forces and exchange tactical nuclear weapons so that both sides would annihilate each other’s forces in this incredible mass attrition battle using tactical nuclear weapons. Then the third strategic echelon would come and there would be no NATO forces left alive and the Soviets would sweep over Europe, going all the way to the English Channel, all the way to Gibraltar in Spain, and they would own it all.
And I said to Lunev: And then what? And he said: Well, we grab all the shipping in Europe and then we invade North America. And of course I was already deducing from what I was reading, that the Soviets would immediately invade North America.
And I had deduced from the number of Soviet paratroop and Marine divisions that they would immediately invade with five Marine and five paratroop divisions, they would seize key locations. And he confirmed this was the case, that the nuclear strikes would hit America. But the initial forces, these ten divisions, would grab key places to open up the country to invasion.
I read Colonel Schiano’s book, he was a pessimist about all of this. Lunev thought that there would be tremendous Soviet casualties invading. And I said, really? After America’s nuked, wouldn’t they just be parading through surrendered territory because Americans would be demoralized by being nuked? He said, no.
He questioned this initially. He had been trained to work in the Far East, but when he met Americans and worked in the U.S., he realized that Americans were different than Asians. They have a different psychology. And he said that the fact that Americans own firearms, is key. These first divisions of Soviet troops, Marines and paratroopers are light armored infantry.
He said: Within two weeks, we estimated that your civilian population would basically render these formations useless, militarily useless.
Benesch: Yeah, I think it was it like 200 and 250 million modern firearms, civilian owned in America.
Nyquist: Yes. And a lot of people here with military training. And of course, there’s access. We have arsenals, National Guard arsenals. We have a more advanced weapons. And these ten divisions, they’d last two weeks at the most and they would have to be reinforced. And that the problem is that reinforcement during a period of nuclear exchange is where the U.S. Navy ships would escape. I had discussions with Mr. Wang of Lord of Media last year who had access to Chinese war plans, and he was the one that released the 57 minute recording from Guangdong.
It was a civil military fusion meeting about preparing China for World War Three against America. And one of the things that Mr. Wang got a hold of was the code list of code words. You know, like when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the fleet received a radio, a weather report, east wind, rain from a certain radio station in Japan that would tell them to go ahead and do the strike.
Yeah. East wind, rain. Well, they had these code words made out. I was told there were 20 of them for attacking the United States in the Pacific when this war was going to begin. There were code words for China’s strategic rocket forces to hit naval targets.
Benesch: What about those rumors over the decades that communists would smuggle nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons components to the West? I mean, in public you saw some information concerning the United States, where I think the FBI was searching for possible instances, but they didn’t really find anything. Now, in Europe, this would be quite a lot easier, I think, to smuggle nuclear weapons to to Western European countries.
Nyquist: The story came out about 20 years ago. I think that a journalist, an elderly journalist at the time who had had lunch with President Kennedy after Kennedy came into office, had this astonishing private conversation with President Kennedy about the subject. He couldn’t publish this, he couldn’t use it. It was off the record. But then he he did publicize it later. He said that Kennedy had confided to him that the Russians had used diplomatic pouches to smuggle in the components of a hydrogen bomb, and it assembled a hydrogen bomb in the attic of the Russian embassy in Washington.
Benesch: I always thought it could be conceivably done because it is not that big, the different components. Yeah. A
Nyquist: It was known to the Kennedy administration. So Russia, in order to launch a surprise strike on the United States, they didn’t need to send a missile to Washington to blow up to kill the president.
They just detonate the one in the attic of the of the Soviet embassy.
CUT
While we’re talking about Kennedy because I did I posted two videos on on Kennedy a couple of days ago, you know, marking 60 years, 60 years after 60 years after the after the assassination. And I was I was debunking sort of the I was debunking sort of the the left wing propaganda.
I was debunking I was debunking the, you know, some of the conventional conspiracy stuff that was going around. And I explained to people that, you know, Kennedy Kennedy was in many ways in his whole cabinet, you know, there were quite a few anti-communists in there. And they did the whole spectrum know the Kennedys were fans of covert operations against, you know, communist communist states and rebel know rebel insurgency movements and so on and so forth, and also the whole Vietnam thing.
So of course, Kennedy didn’t know what the perfect answer was of Vietnam. Neither did other people in the administration. So we had different people with different opinions. And then they got themselves involved in Vietnam. So it’s not what the tells you, because the mythology sort of tells tells you that, you know, Kennedy was sort of Kennedy was totally different then, you know, his his administration and all these other circles and these right wing circles killed him because he was against them.
And so it’s kind of this this communist communist fantasy lore about declaring JFK their guy, their martyr. So do you think about what do you think about Kennedy and his approach to nuclear war and Soviets? Well, I about the Kennedy assassination. You want to really know the truth. Gerald Posner’s case closed is the very best. It’s definitive. It is absolutely definitive.
And it’s it’s a rather thick volume. And I’ve I’ve studied this I did a series of articles about this over the summer because I thought it was so important because, you know, you had this thing, this Tucker Carlson coming out and saying the CIA killed Kennedy and yet Bobby Kennedy, Reagan. And this is this is really, you know, so many intelligent people are not very well educated and believe this conspiracy theory, this this half baked rotten stuff that is that is, quite frankly, generated by communist active measures, because they want us to misunderstand our own history and it and blame ourselves.
Remember this everything bad in the world that ever happened is the CIA that did it. Yeah. We never did anything wrong. It’s all the CIA. And so the real problem is this this fake history. And of course, Kennedy look, you can go on YouTube and you can watch Kennedy’s speeches, especially his speech when he was nominated by. The Democratic Party, I believe their convention was in Los Angeles in 1960.
Look at his speech given in Los Angeles in 1960 when he was nominated president. That is a Cold War speech. Yeah, Kennedy ran to the right of Nixon. Kennedy said the Eisenhower administration was soft on communism. Oh, and guess what? He wasn’t exactly wrong. And he was promising civil defense. You know, Kennedy got a civil defense bill passed through Congress, but he did not get it passed through the Senate.
Yeah, but they were beginning to try to. So Kennedy was more dedicated to fighting. And I mean, his father’s his father was pretty right. His father was super right wing. And originally Kennedy’s father wanted his his oldest son to become president, but he unfortunately died in in the military in the military coup in World War Two. In the military, when something something blew up or something or the other.
And they were using a very dangerous explosive to German bombers. And it was kind of experimental. And if the plane shook too much, it would detonate. And it surprised me. It surprised me a bit that, you know, Kennedy was dead. Kennedy was, if you know, a candidate of the Democratic Party and other Republicans. You know, it was it was a bit of a slick move, I think, you know, just to create the sort of slick anti-communist that you could sell to the masses.
But he he called communism a monolithic, world wide conspiracy. And when and when when these newspapers in America when they published some damaging leaks, you know, publishing stuff about covert operations and, you know, that’s when not only did Kennedy give that speech, you know, in front of these news paper publishers where Kennedy said that be careful what you publish because you might be aiding, you know, the communist monolithic conspiracy, Be careful.
And he also went around there, you know, went behind their backs and sort of kind of used the CIA to find the leaks, which was, you know, it was a gray area. I mean, the CIA was not supposed to operate on American soil. But if they’re looking for, you know, a communist networks in the newspaper world, you know, what gives?
So that was Kennedy. He was an anti-communist. Oh, yeah, he was. And this is the thing about Teddy. Teddy went against this and a Bobby played games. Bobby Kennedy knew that the communists had killed his brother. And when you see Posner book, like there was a there was a book that also came out this summer by a guy that was friends with the Oswalds.
He spent the summer of 62 with Marina and Lee Oswald, and he got to know them. And when you understand Oswald, look, I’ll give you this little snippet about about Oswald. Oswald’s mother was a mobster. Mm hmm. He she basically he didn’t have a father because his mother was such a monster. And so Lee Harvey Oswald and his brother Robert, they they were raised by this monster mother.
The monster, I guess you’d call her. And. And she was the classic malignant narcissist. And Lee was her baby. Lee was the younger brother. Lee was her baby. She mind melded with him. So part of its normal adjustment comes from this pathology relationship he had with his mother. And Posner goes into it and other books go into it as well.
And in fact, it was so pronounced, you know, when when Oswald shot Kennedy, that first weekend, Kennedy was shot on a Friday. And and of course, who shows up? And of course, the FBI want to interview Marina Oswald and the Secret Service ended up CIA. Secret Service was disgusted by the FBI, by the way, but they did a very unprofessional job.
The Secret Service seemed to have handled it all very better. And one of the Secret Service agents, because Lee Oswald’s mother showed up, you know, when they were, you know, trying to debrief Oswald’s wife and the lady she lived with and other friends of the Oswald’s who have made their own accounts. And one of the Secret Service guys has found his mother was so obnoxious.
He goes, I know why Oswald turned out he did is, my God. Oh God. I mean, it’s so obvious. It’s so obvious. Yeah. And it is. Yeah. And I mean, what about this? You know, when after Oswald returned from the Soviet Union, because he hated there or for some other reason, when he returned from the Soviet Union, he was hanging around with, you know, different people.
He was trying to be this, you know, this agent and infiltrate anything he could. And he was singing around with this the Morgan Shield character, I think it was called. Yes. In fact, it’s been speculated that do more in shield was an agent of of the of the Soviets. Yeah I mean I think the the Soviet defector Ian pot soup I think he believed that the morning show was KGB.
I think well Edward J this is a weird story and you go to Epstein Epstein was a big investigator of the of the Kennedy assassination, and he had interviewed James Angleton, formerly the the head of the counterintelligence office of the CIA. And he went when that when Congress was reopening the Kennedy investigations in the seventies, a demand shock was going to have to testify.
And so he demand shelved. And this is this is just bizarre. He’s interviewing him. He’s trying to get down to brass tacks about what’s going on here. And they break lunch, demand shield goes home and he he’s killed. He dies during lunch, unable to cut in the middle of the interview. And of course, Epstein kind of explains this bizarre scenario.
Why how he died in the middle of it. Like, yeah, something I want him to talk to Epstein it you know because he was one who knew the Oswalds knew the truth. You know, the, the famous picture of Oswald standing with the gun rifle. Yeah. Murder weapon, the man liquor, Carcano rifle. That picture was taken by his wife, by Marina Oswald.
Mm hmm. And there are several prints of this, right? A Yeah, there’s been people who have tried to claim that it’s a fake, but experts have looked at and said, no, it’s it’s all consistent. They even took pictures of people at that same location with the sun in same position, knowing that it’s not a fake picture, it’s real.
And his wife initially, his wife lied about it because she was afraid of being implicated. But she eventually came clean. And one of the things that you find out from the people that were with Marina, when, you know, Marina saw Lee in jail and and she saw him in jail and she came out in the her friends that were there said she thought he was guilty.
She thought he’d done even though he sort of denied doing it to her. She knew that he had done it. And also he knew that he had taken shot at General Walker. Yeah. He tried to kill this military officer at the back of General Walker’s house. Yeah. Yeah. And also in Dallas and also what people seem to forget is that, uh, Kennedy, Kennedy’s father, almost died in a terrorist attack.
Wall Street. This was the Wall Street bombing, you know, a couple of decades earlier. So he was knocked down by the blast and there were like 40 dead people and a couple of hundred injured. And they try to find out who did it. And it looked like anarchists and communists. So these things are likely know these these things happen.
The the the posner goes through the shooting and all of the allegations that there was a conspiracy. He debunks them very capably one by one. And you you really have to read the book to understand that. I mean we’re talking about dozens, dozens of witnesses. Take, for example, Lee Harvey Oswald went to work that morning with that rifle.
Now, if he wasn’t intending to kill the president, why did he bring a rifle, his own rifle, which they know he purchased for $12 and something sense for money order house in Chicago that that rifle he brought to work. Now he didn’t have a car. He carpooled. So he had it all wrapped up in the people he was carpooling with, said Lee.
What what have you got there? Oh, it’s curtain rods for my wife you know. Yeah, it it wasn’t it was a rifle. And he he brought it in to work with him. There were witnesses around, there were employees of the School Book Depository building on the floor beneath him when he fired his three shots. And they heard them very distinctly, they were right underneath them.
There were people across the street that were able to look up. There were people in the motorcade who look up and saw the rifle being withdrawn back into the window. And of course, they found the murder. He had hidden it on the on that top floor of the School Book Depository and ran downstairs and pretended to be, you know, eating lunch downstairs.
And then he left the building before it was sealed. He got away and of course, he was stopped by Officer Tippit, who he tragically murdered and shot dead right there on the street. And what’s really terrible, especially for Tibbets widow, was all the conspiracy theories accusing Tippit of being in that conspiracy with Oswald and also the big Hollywood movie JFK, done by Oliver Stone.
And of course, Oliver Stone became you know, Stone became the body of Vladimir Putin later. So that’s how that went. Oh, yeah. He’s a great friend of of Putin. And and of course Vladimir Posner of on Russian TV. But but it it if you look at it Oswald’s behavior after he shoots Tippit you know, he runs into a theater that somebody across the street I think it was in a in a business across the street saw him running without paying and and had heard the sirens because of the shooting of Tippit.
The police responded. People immediately called the police and all police officers been shot. They surrounded the theater. They came in and Oswald tried to shoot a police officer in the theater. When they apprehended him, they had to struggle with him to get the gun away from him. So this is not the behavior of an innocent man, of someone who’s being framed for a crime.
Yeah, this is this is the behavior of a criminal. Yeah. And he was I mean, he was tested in the military, I think earlier in his in his career as a young man, he was tested with an IQ of about 100. So he was he wasn’t smart enough to look through the communist, you know, baloney. But he had this sort of this sense of initiative.
You know, he was he was you try to be very busy and he was aggressive. Yeah, he was he was taking the initiative. And I think that’s why he was you know, he was he was recruited ultimately because he he showed the initiative, but he wasn’t too smart, you know, It wasn’t to as much. Yeah, well, you know, there’s a German documentary about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. I had it linked on my site. It’s extremely well done, and it shows that Oswald had met with Cuban officials, intelligence officials for his escape route. Or was it for his escape route? It was probably his instructions to do the assassination because it Castro had discovered a friend of his was a friend of Castro’s, was recruited by the CIA, a Brazilian, to assassinate Castro.
And at this guy was actually interviewed in that German documentary. Fascinatingly, he was living in Spain at the time, but they had a CIA had stupidly hired him to shoot Castro with the rifle, with the telescopic sight. Sounds familiar. And of course, he immediately told Castro and Castro went to the Brazilian embassy and he said, hey, you Colombian, come here.
And there was a Colombian AP journalist there that he knew. And he said, I want you to to write this down. I want you to report this. I know the Kennedy brothers want to kill me. And basically said it’s a two way street so I can kill them, too. Right. You know, and it was Imagineer, the president of the communist president of Cuba, and the Kennedy brothers have signed off.
And we know it’s a fact they signed off on assassinating Castro. And so you know that the Kennedys have sent assassins to kill you. What’s your only chance to survive? You have to kill them first. Really? That’s that’s the bottom line. And also, the Soviets could always find people, you know, two different people to recruit. So, for example, wasn’t Sirhan Sirhan a Palestinian, uh, if I remember correctly, was a communist in fact, in his diaries that they found in his in his residence, A were like, you know, I want to be a good communist.
How can I be a good communist kind of thing? He was he was trained by the PLO. PLO is basically an extension of the KGB Communist Party and the KGB trained. I mean, Yasser Arafat was trained in the Soviet Union. He had a close liaison. Is he on the tape with the Romanians who had kind of I mean, Arafat wasn’t even Palestinian.
He was actually born in Egypt, but he pretended to be a Palestinian. And the Romanians sort of had Egypt under, as is their assigned area to cooperate with. So the picture paper talks about Arafat, homosexuality and his how the Romanian Secret Service taped his sex sessions with his bodyguards, where he would play lion and lamb with them. It’s very typical of the communists to rely on homosexuals.
I think we’ve discussed this before and to rely on aberrant personalities for their operations and their ability to use information warfare allows them to, you know, mask all kinds of of activities and to hide the realities about these personalities. Yeah. And I think what I think the lasting damage of, you know, the the JFK assassination mythology, I think the lasting damage is that this false narrative can be attached to the Abraham Lincoln narrative or a distorted Abraham Lincoln narrative.
And this can then be tied to any future narrative that’s needed. So, for example, if Donald Trump, because he’s an older man, if Donald Trump gets a heart attack or if somebody is somebody else who is who’s fairly popular, has a heart attack or has, you know, a car accident, the the conspiracy circles are going to go into overdrive and they will say this is exactly the same thing that happened with Kennedy and with Lincoln.
And so because Kennedy was was a CIA conspiracy, that’s why this thing now is also a CIA conspiracy. So now you have to fight your own government and you have to fight the system. And I this is something that is always lurking. So any time somebody is built up, you know, like Trump was built up, especially with, you know, conspiracy traditional conspiracy media, which then bled more and more into mainline Republican circles, If this hype is generated, that’s a very dangerous thing because, you know, is a human Trump is a person.
You know, he’s he’s he’s like, what was it? He’s like 80 years old or more than 80 years old? Well, no, he’s he’s nothing or he’s 76. Nixon 70 years, 76, 77. So if something happens to him, anything if if there’s some some personal feud going back, you know, 20 years, if somebody, somebody does something to him, you know, if some if some actual lone nut, you know, shoots and shoots at Trump, the conspiracy machine is going to go into overdrive, is it not?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. No, this is extremely damaging. See, and this is the thing. When we talked about UFOs before we had I was going through some quotes because I was working on an article ago with our video on esoteric system in UFOs. The you have these fabulous quotes from Hill and Valley about how people can be made to believe anything.
Yeah, basically. And this is a lesson. I mean, Veley said the whole some of these UFO things have have taught him that people will can be led to believe anything, however incredible it sounds. And of course this is this is actually the truth when we you look the people that believe that 911, you know, that a missile hit the Pentagon, not a plane.
Mm hmm. I mean, it’s incredible that people believe this. And I have friends that believe this, but sure, they’re pretty mad at me for not agreeing with them. Yeah, I was covering this. Oh, I was. Yeah, I was covering, you know, like, a week ago or two weeks ago, I was. I was doing a report on Robert Baer, you know, who worked for the CIA, and.
And he’s interesting. Yeah. And he’s still is is still hunting moles because, I mean, you put this book out and I think it was 2021. It was. Was it the search for the fourth man there was still looking for not just him. It was high ranking people in the CIA, they were still looking for high place moles, even after Aldrich Ames or, you know, Hanssen with the FBI.
It’s a never deal. And so and so. BAER Baer was explaining how I mean, and he’s explained that for a long time. You know, he’s said that because of these moles that were exposed at some point, because of these moles, many operations were shattered and the United States was, you know, sort of blind in terms of the Middle East because of all this, you know, because of this intelligence failure.
And so this is you know, this is stuff that that directly impacted the investigation before 911 into these you know, into these hijackers. You know, when they when they were going to American flight schools, they wanted to learn how to fly a commercial airplane. They were not interested in start starting, you know, starting a plane, landing a plane.
This was picked up by the FBI. And we know exactly what people want. Agents reported this to the higher ups and they stuffed it into a pile of 3000 other leads and they assigned to people to handle that pile of leads. And so imagine three people handling 3000 documents. I mean, this is the problem. It’s the needle in the haystack problem.
You’ve got so much chaff, you’ve got so much hay and you’ve got a needle in that haystack. And they just simply the the problem is knowing what’s important, knowing what’s significant enough that that’s the big intelligence problem because you can generate activity. You can generate this chaff. And and a lot of diversionary operations exist for that purpose. That is, people will be looking over here and they won’t see that what you’re really doing is over there.
Yeah. And this is just a classic problem. Like if, if, if you did have if you did have these undiscovered moles still and they ruined an investigation, I mean, call it what you want. I mean, some people, they go crazy with this term inside job because they mean, well, the CIA did it. But if you had if you have Soviet moles, if you have Russian moles still and they sabotage investigations, I mean, yeah, you could say that’s inside help for these terrorists.
So it what you want. I mean, it’s interesting to see that people in in traditional conspiracy circles, they even hate each other when they don’t agree because some people said, you know, this was a let it happen on purpose scenario or somebody somebody was, you know, fudging the investigation before 911, letting it happen then. So other conspiracy buffs say, no, if you believe that and we hate you, then you’re you’re you’re not a you know, a truth or and so they even hate each other.
But, I mean, I think that Robert you know, I think the Bears approach was was quite reasonable because if these moles destroyed intelligence operations in the Middle East and and so on and so forth, I mean, that is a huge problem I mean, guess what’s going to happen if you go blind in these important areas? And I mean, it’s I mean, for for the Russians, it was the ultimate for the Russians, it was the ultimate payback for Afghanistan.
You know, when the Russians failed in Afghanistan to, you know, to it was payback, stick it to the Americans and then blame the Americans completely or most of the United States government blame them for 911. And I mean, immediately after 911. I mean, in retrospect, in hindsight, immediately after 911, I think that’s when, you know, the Russian networks over here, the propaganda networks, they started to become really, really active.
They had infiltrated to the truth movement or the conspiracy circles. They became very active, you know, putting the blame against all kinds of people in America. But they were not yet promoting explicitly. They waited until 2008. So in that that golden era, you know, this was sort of like the Bush era was the golden era for the conspiracy movement, because now it had the Internet, 911 had happened, the Patriot Act, Iraq war, Afghanistan war.
So this was the golden era for the conspiracy movement. But this is already Russia was active in that movement, but they were not openly promoting the Russian regime yet. This only happened starting this only started in 2008. That’s when they started to, you know, praise Putin and praise the Russian regime more and more. And notice how it is that when some major event happens, whether it’s the Kennedy assassination or 911 or name one, you will that it’s our so we don’t have an enemy.
We’ve never had an enemy know our enemies. And no, I hear this passionately because service our enemies in Washington are enemies. The CIA. So they don’t conceive of China or Russia as enemies. They’re oriented toward the enemy within. And of course, the Russians do have an enemy within, but they’re us against each other. So Americans will want to be slaughtering Americans.
Yeah. Which which takes us to Igor Panarin, the KGB colonel who taught at their KGB academy, who was assigned at the end of the Cold War towards the end of the Cold War. This thing of studying a future civil war in America and actually scenarios for it, and discussing how it would happen and people would come up the bananas saying, Yeah, you know, Americans are being divided.
Americans are going and he is giving presentations as recently as like little more than a decade ago. You know it is it is almost are actually creating the conditions for Panarin scenario essentially and I think this he is really kind of giving away their blueprint. Yeah. Because it’s almost like a like a self-fulfilling prophecy what this propaganda is doing.
So it’s they’ve they frame everything beforehand. And so no matter what happens, it fits one of these preconceived narratives. As I mentioned before, you know, Trump has a car accident or Trump has a stroke or Trump has a heart attack. This will be used as, you know, as sort of the big incident to get people super mad and.
Just stop believing in, you know, peaceful means. And and and also when you know, you can have more Islamic terror attacks, you know, sponsored by the Russians in America. Well, and then you could have you could have, you know, militant Mexican groups or Latino groups in America starting something. And no matter what what happens, this will then be blamed on the government.
They will say the new world order, that this the globalists did this. And so you have to fight the government and the Russians will help you. Yeah. We should also discuss in terms of World War three, this idea of great terror and what Viktor Suvorov has written and what Colonel Louis told me, which is along the same lines, Viktor Suvorov wrote a book called Spetsnaz in 1987.
It was published the UK. And in the in there’s a chapter called Spetsnaz is Third World or No Spetsnaz. His First World War, I think, is the title of the chapter. It’s towards the end of the book, and he discusses something called Great Terror. And he says that in Win in World War Three, there’s something they call the Overture.
And the overture is the period before World War Three where certain things are done in preparation of that war. And one of the things that they had planned was to have the West attacked by a terrorist group or groups that are not connected to Moscow. Yeah, and these terrorist groups would then strike with terrorist blows so hard that the West would divert its intelligence and military assets away from the Communist bloc, away from the Soviet Union, and commit everything to fighting these terrorists.
Does that sound familiar? Yeah. Sounds like 11, doesn’t it? Well, it was before 911 and had this conversation with with Lou Nava. I was in Washington and we were about to do a TV thing in Washington and he was a big on smoking. So we went out back and he he smoked. And I said, well, you know, I’ve I it’s all right.
You know, I’ve read all these Soviet books and I know that surprise attack is the idea of striking the first blow. But I don’t know.
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Nyquist: How do you get away with a surprise nuclear attack? I was told by a Russian source: If you ever hear that Arab terrorists have attacked American cities with nuclear weapons, don’t believe it. He said, It will be my people. It will be Spetsnaz. They will be pretending to be Arab terrorists and it will be completely diversionary. And of course, Lunev was tasked with finding the secret spots to hide nuclear weapons.
And he said they would use the narcotics trafficking routes with the bribed people that were looking the other way. They’d use those to smuggle weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear weapons, by the way, but chemical and biological weapons as well. And, of course, this was what Suvorov was saying.
And and I said to him: What would follow these diversionary nuclear strikes against certain cities? And he said then some weeks or months later, the nuclear missiles from Russia would come. Why such a long wait? It’s because that’s how long it would take for our society to go into chaos. For example, if you hit cities, people will flee the cities and the economy would cease to function.
And if the economy collapses, what happens to the men manning the missile silos, the guys in the submarines?
Benesch: It all starts to break down because they have families, they have obligations, they’re paying off their houses, they have to take care of their kids.
Nyquist: And this came as a kind of a revelation to me. That kind of filled in some of the blanks of how this worked. One of the things Suvorov said, was “watch out for corruption”. We’ve talked about how many people have been blackmailed or have taken money from the Russians. And of course, there’s the red cocaine operation, about which Joseph D Douglas Junior wrote the book “Red Cocaine” in the late eighties. There’s massive corruption through the criminal communist networks in the West. What the communist plan to do, according to Suvorov, is release all the dirt that they have accumulated on Western military people, politicians, celebrities, everybody. All the dirt they have in their files would release all at once into the public sphere.
Now, the purpose of this release would to be completely convince the people in Germany, America, France, Britain, to convince us that our leaders were scum and we can’t possibly trust them. And they would do this release on the eve of war. So this is definite. If this release happens and you see it real time, you’ll know the nukes are coming.
Get to your basement, get to your basements, because it’s coming within a period of days or weeks after these releases, because that’s part of the unleashing of chaos and the unleashing of dissatisfaction, causing the people to turn against their own governments.
Benesch: We talked about moles before but we haven’t really talked about the future role of high placed moles and traitors in relationship to a nuclear war. I mean, if we judge by these previous moles, you know, Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Kim Philby, I mean, this was some significant stuff because wasn’t it Hanssen or somebody else who gave all these Navy secrets away, you know, submarine secrets?
Nyquist: Oh, no, that would be Souther. John Michael Souther. I’m maybe getting the first name there wrong. He was one of the most damaging nuclear war related spy. A naval enlisted man who was in Naval intelligence. He worked in Italy when he was in the military, and his wife thought he was having an affair. Of course, he had all these communist books. He was he was an ideological communist and his wife divorced him.
So he was seemingly having an affair. And his wife then later thought, wait a minute, he’s a spy. He wasn’t having an affair. So she reported him to the Office of Naval Intelligence. She said he was fascinated by Lenin and by Marx. And look at these books that he had that he left behind. When I divorced him, I, I thought he was having an affair. I divorced him. But he’s really having these clandestine contacts, I think the KGB. And you know what? The Office of Naval Intelligence wrote “Disgruntled ex-wife”. Souther became a civilian contractor for the Navy’s nuclear war. The sort of planning centers. All of the deployments of our ballistic missile submarines and carriers and all of our ships and the nuclear command ship for the nuclear war for the US Navy, all their positions and their maneuvers in the plants, he leaked it. He gave it to the Soviets, I think it was in 1985. He felt that he was going to be caught. He fled to the Soviet Union, where I think they gave him the rank of colonel in the KGB. But he committed suicide. I forget what year it was. It was in the late eighties
So that treason had war winning potential, a shift of balance of power. The Soviets could have won a nuclear war with that information, is basically what one U.S. admiral said later. There’s a book on this called Merchants of Treason. If people want to read about how many enlisted men and officers were traitors, it goes into the hundreds in the US military that betrayed us to the communists during the Cold War.
Benesch: We also talked about several of these famous traitors. We also talked about Louis Mountbatten, which was sort of a a special case because. The book War of the Windsors focuses on him for the most part. Lord Louis Mountbatten had communist contacts.
He had contacts with the Soviet Ministry of Defense. And the Brits were getting suspicious of him. The French were suspicious of him. The FBI was suspicious of him. And he was a special case because of his standing, his position, he could always claim to entertain his own channels of communication, you know, just to to have people to talk to in order to lower the risk of a world war.
Many people have used this excuse. They were saying they had their own channels of communication to the Soviets, you know, off the books, off the record. And those channels were to lower the risk of a world war.
Nyquist: And of course, this goes back to George Marshall, who was the chief of the American general staff during World War Two. There’s a book. It’s a biography written by a journalist who had been the Soviet foreign minister before Molotov, just before Stalin aligned with Hitler and was designated to be the ambassador to the United States in 1941, right before Pearl Harbor.
And this book has a fascinating story of how Ivanov flew from the Soviet Union to India to Singapore, to the Philippines, to Hawaii, just a week before Pearl Harbor or days before Pearl Harbor was attacked and where he talked to all the British military officials in India, which was part of the war against Japan. He talked to the British officials in Singapore, sat at the dinner table with General MacArthur in the Philippines, and went to a party with Admiral Short or a general Short, and Admiral Campbell, the commanders at Pearl Harbor, and then flew on to the United States and landed on the morning of December 7th at Washington, DC, and was greeted by George General George Marshall and Admiral King. And why is this significant? Because that morning when Marshall was meeting with the top Soviet official, then in the United States, just arriving, he lied. Marshall lied to Congress and he lied to his subordinates. He said he was out horseback riding, which he certainly was not.
He was actually meeting with the Soviet ambassador that morning of Pearl Harbor. Whoops. And of course, then when he got back, when they had the intelligence showing that Japan was about to attack the United States within hours because they had broken the diplomatic cipher of the Japanese and they had seen that on Saturday, they were told to destroy their cipher machines and to prepare to clear out the embassy, which meant that war was coming.
And it was it was 1:00 Washington, which was 7:30 Hawaii time, which was just as the sun was coming up in Hawaii, right when the planes would reach it. And they were starting to put two and two together and this intelligence officer had gone looking for General Marshall. We have to warn General Short, the commander of the Army, air forces and troops in Hawaii, and Admiral Kimmel, the commander of the US Pacific fleet.
We have to warn them. And of course, that warning was somehow sabotaged. Marshall delayed and hemmed and hawed. And then finally, when he sent the message, the system wasn’t working properly. So he sent a Western Union telegram, which the boy carrying the telegram reached Kimball on the golf course, just as the bombs were landing on the fleet.
And why did Marshall then lie to Congress about and didn’t admit he was with the Soviet ambassador that morning and he lied to Congress the second time in at the end of the war. When the war ended in December 1945, he was called to testify again. And they had learned that he was not horseback riding.
And he said I misremembered. I was with my wife that morning. So there’s been these connections between certain American officials and high level generals. I mean, Milley admitted that he had this backchannel to the Chinese recently when Trump was president so he could prevent a nuclear war right.
We get the same problem.
Benesch: We had this German agent; at some point he was recruited as a student at a university, recruited by Soviet intelligence. And they encouraged him to seek any job with NATO basically. And so he got his degree. He got his job, and then he gave he gave the Eastern Bloc the whole defense playbook of of Western Germany in the Cold War. So basically the whole thing. And when he was exposed, he said what basically every caught spy says. That he did it to balance out, you know, the power, between the east and the West, because he saw the Americans were ahead.
And if one side is ahead, that’s dangerous. That leads to World War. Wouldn’t it be better if it’s more in balance, in an equilibrium. And so he tried to create or help this equilibrium. And so his actions were supposed to prevent war, not encourage it. And he was leaking the defense plan of Western Germany
Nyquist: The US had decisive advantages over the Soviet Union, and as the Eisenhower study during the Korean War, showed that we could have defeated the Soviet Union. It would have been a terrible sacrifice, but we could have won.
So there was an imbalance. We’ve been way ahead of of Russia. And you can see the problems with their army now. But the thing that is, is that we’re always misinformed. We’re always filled with communist sympathizers or sympathizers with Russia and China. Businessmen are bought off. Let’s make a deal with these people. We can do business with these people.
Basically, the Russians and the Chinese the communists have weakened us by other means. And now the imbalance is the other way. The West just simply tires of this game. We just want to live our lives. We just want to have our supermarkets and our shopping malls and our way of life.
We don’t really want to fight a nuclear war. This isn’t the case with China and Russia, as we see from the secret speech of Chiyo Chan and all of these Soviet military textbooks. I mean, that these Soviet leaders have said for years that nuclear war or future war with America is inevitable. The Chinese leaders say the same thing.
Now, what they say to cover themselves is, well, maybe there is a way to not make it inevitable because the imperialists, you know, they’re going to inevitably start World War three, because that’s their nature. This all pure projection, they know perfectly well they’re getting ready for it. They’d like to think that they can make us surrender or give up without a fight.
Benesch: I see different levels, different tiers of anti-communism. So the most baseline tier is, for example, when you point at overt leftists, communists. You know, they’re there, they’re out in the open and you point out what they’re saying, you comment on what they’re doing and you talk about that. So this is sort of the easiest anti-communism that you can do. And I think that many people are stuck in this very simple first level of anti-communism. But what happens when communists pose as something else?
If you only know the baseline anti-communism, you will fail if they use more advanced techniques. So there’s that.
Nyquist: There’s a joke about a Southerner. They were discussing this other senators position and they said, well, here is Senator so-and-so, he’s an anti-communist. And the Southern senator said: I don’t care what kind of communist he is. I believe that’s happening right now. I believe it’s happened over the last 70 years.
Benesch: It’s easy for Russian intelligence to do baseline anti-communism here, and then they can use that for whatever operation. And I think what they’re using it for, among other things, is they’re using it to keep people away from more advanced forms of anti-communism. Who might be working for the communists. It’s more advanced. And this is not what the Russians want. So I see I see quite a bit of very simplistic anti-communism around, but you’re not going to win much, you know, on that level. I mean, of course it’s it’s necessary to point out overt socialism, communism everywhere. But if you if you’re stuck on that level, you’re going to lose.
CUT
Yeah. Did you say you had to leave at a certain time? Yes. I am actually running out of time, unfortunately. But we can pick you. We can over the next week, we can pick the topic for next weekend. And also people can always leave, leave a comment or this video and and say what topic they would most.
They want to hear about the So because we have so many topics with so many interesting fascinating cases we can pick and choose from. So yeah, just right in the comments down below what topic you want to you want us to get into or a certain organization or a certain person or whatever, because of course I can always add a European European perspective.
I can always add some stuff that, you know, that is less well-known in America and whatnot, because a lot of the stuff that goes on over here has very bad effects on the United States. You know, some some of the problems over here, they become America’s problems. I mean, I’ve talked about this before. You know, for example, Britain’s intelligence failures always had the consequence that America was supposed to fix that.
The consequence is they have to fix the problem that Britain caused so it can. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. And I am Jeff Nyquist and with Alex Spanish. And we’ve been discussing Cold War, World War three and more. So hope you’ll join us next week. Oh, righty. Let’s stop the recording right here and confirm, start recording.
You know, I love it when people say I listen to I listen to this show during work. So I’m just hoping they’re not working in a nuclear reactor or. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, this is yeah, this will catch people’s attention, I think. Yeah. And this, this will catch their attention. So. All right, I think you have to go pick up your daughter.
That’s correct. All the driving through a forest here on a very windy road, apparently. And you don’t have snow yet? No, no. Luckily there’s not much snow yet. But how are you at altitude there or are you? Yeah, a bit of altitude. I mean, it’s just south, so we get a lot of snow, a lot of snow, and then we get a lot here too.
We got lake effect north. Yeah, I used to drive. I used to drive. I used to drive a Ford Ford Explorer. And I love this car and had this we I put on this these very, very, very rough tires. You know, they, they had a lot of of the winter tires. Yeah. Yeah. I bought Canada’s favorite winter tire.
What they called it. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. It’s called the Bridgestone Blizzard. Yeah. I love that car. And first opportunity I get, I’m going to buy myself another American SUV that’s really heavy and really good in the snow. I drive an Xterra four wheel drive. Yeah, I’m. I can many more, but that’s a fabulous car. It’s just amazing.
I need something with a third row. So it’s going to be something like. Like a Ford Expedition or something like that, you know? How many kids do you have? It’s two kids, but there’s always more people to drive around and the kids off hanging out to yeah, and stuff because the average by the average German car has four and a half seats.
So the rear is not three, four wide seats. It’s two and a half seats. Oh, oh. So yeah, the nice big American cars you can fit. I could fit three people in the back of my across the Xterra. Is that pretty nice car. Exactly. So it’s pretty nice but yeah, it’s a big it’s a wide car. But the American SUV, that’s how.
Have you ever seen that one. Yeah, some, some people some people drive a Tahoe in person but I would love to go for the Suburban. I would go like Olivia. It’s like a mobile living room. Yeah, it’s huge. But if you want the third row, it’s going to be the suburban, right? It’s going to be the bigger one.
Yeah, that’s. You know, that’s true. All right, I’ll keep an eye keep an eye on my Skype so you can just toss me any. Any idea about next week’s episode, or we can pick a part two, part two of this, whatever it is. Just. Yeah, anything. Anything is really interesting. Okay. And we’ll watch to see what pops up.
Okay? All right all right. Take care.
