Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty-six books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; and two further volumes of nuclear history. His latest book, “Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature” was published on November 9th, 2021 by Doubleday.
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hi i’m stanley goldberg host of the inquiry mind podcast i hope you enjoyed
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thank you for your support and now to today’s guest richard rhodes welcome to the inquirer
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mind podcast thank you my pleasure oh the the pleasure is all mine uh it’s
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been a hell of a journey to get you on the podcast it’s uh so so i’m happy we could finally get to
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do this before the year is over so uh before
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we get into you know you’ve written 26 books as we uh discussed before
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uh hopping onto this podcast there’s a lot to discuss different topics and and all that but
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i wanted to start with a little bit of an unusual uh book that you wrote a book
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that maybe you’re not best known for um and that book is called a hole in the
Childhood Trauma and “A Hole in the World”
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world um i i bought a used copy somewhere on the
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internet because when we were on talking on the phone you mentioned that uh your brother’s name was stanley as
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well and and you you had a quote that
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stayed in my mind for the next week because i kept thinking about it and he said uh
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you know i like that name because it was my brother’s name because he saved my life
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and that’s a that’s a big statement and i thought i thought for a second
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that it might have been hyperbole or or whatever it might have been but then i looked it up and i was blown away and then i had to
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get a copy of your book and read the book and it’s astonishing so
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what would you say a difficult early life
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taught you and how you kind of overcame that to become the successful writer that you
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are now well it gave me an intense drive to want
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to live a very different way and a very different life than the one
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that had blighted part of my childhood but inevitably it
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made me an early expert on violence and terrorism if you will
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my stepmother in beating us starving us putting us out
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to work sending us out into the cold on weekend days with a
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hard-boiled egg in our pockets uh told us don’t come home till dinner
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um prepared me to understand how violence is perpetrated upon people in
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the world and it’s a very primitive system and it’s not different really from one
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level of violence to another i mean her ultimate goal was simply to
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enslave us she wanted to put money together to open a store
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and she used us as laborers in various ways
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and saved for us as she put it the money that we made
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working on weekends shoveling snow working people’s gardens whatever kind
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of work we could find so people well let me
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let me phrase this differently one of the things i’ve discovered in writing about scientists
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is that they all typically had some
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formative experience early in their life that led them to the work they did
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just to take one example leo zillard a great hungarian scientist
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who was the co-inventor of the nuclear reactor along with enrico fermi among many other
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things read a famous hungarian epic in hungary
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as a child there was about the the time in the future when the sun
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would begin to burn out and it really impressed him as an
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eight-year-old and it was kind of a national epic in hungary
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and he formed a desire to save the world
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and learned as he went along still a boy that that there would not be enough
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energy and chemical rocketry to move people and large amounts of matter from
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one place to another so he became interested in nuclear physics
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which just then in the 1912s and 20s was
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at its richest early period of development and then he became the one who in 1933
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almost discovered nuclear fission but fortunately for the world since
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the united states hadn’t come close to being involved in it yet but germany was
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was had just come under the leadership if we may call it that of adolf hitler
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he started looking at elements at the wrong end of the periodic table he started with hydrogen he started with
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uranium he would have found nuclear fission and lord knows what the world would have
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been presumably a fascist world run by the nazis with nuclear energy nuclear
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weapons that’s their controlling force so he was someone who was shaped by this
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early powerful formative experience and over and over again one finds that my latest
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book scientist about the biologist edward wilson elio wilson and
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as a boy was kind of a huck fan going out barefoot into the woods down in alabama where he was living
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and was formed in part by the fact that he lost an eye to a fishing accident
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and and then was congenitally hard of hearing he really had to choose some
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natural object that was small enough and he could find on the ground nearby
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to be his research subject and became ants later on he was the one who figured out
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how ants talk to each other no one had worked out before so
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again and again usually before one is 12 years old you find formative experiences that were
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better for worse mine was personal experience with violence and domination
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and that’s basically what i’ve written about in every book i’ve written right and but for those people you just
What drove you to become a writer?
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described uh it seemed like they their formative experience was that of
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uh reading something or finding a bit of information and going into a field that they sort of read about um e.o wilson
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was very fascinated by you know the outdoors and obviously with the eye he he had to focus on ants and kind of made
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a whole career out of it obviously um what what what was your
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moment i guess that you decided that i want to be a writer
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you know it kind of evolved because as a teenager i was living in independence missouri in a
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boys home semi-orphanage where my brother was courageous going to the
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police when he was being beaten one day by our stepmother with a fungal bat
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and grabbed the bat out of her hands and seriously considered beating her
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but instead because he was imbued with already reading philosophy and things
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like that at the age of 13 and also because we actually just happenstance had been to the local
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police station a few weeks earlier to get a license for our bicycles put all this together and went to the
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police rather than using violence himself which would have been a totally different course for him and therefore
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for me so he went to the police and they recognized his need he was bruised and
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he was obviously starved years later when i met the social worker
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who handled our case when i was 18 and was being disconnected from being awarded the court
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she said we didn’t know what to do with you boys after all you had two parents which was which was the standard for
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child abuse in those days she said but you were so obviously starved
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so stanley’s saved my life i think quite literally in the sense that i was already half
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crazy i mean i was drawing rock cuts in a big chief tablet all day in school
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obsessed with the conviction that if i made the drawing perfectly somehow
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then i could i was drawing a little cockpit in the rocket this was long before real rockets
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and i would draw a little tiny person in the cockpit that was me as a four-year-old i’d rather a
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fourth-grade child obsessed with the belief that if i got the drawing perfectly i would literally
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be able to go to another place in that rocket well who knows where that
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would have led maybe it would have led to a lee harvey oswald i don’t know i think it would have led to violence
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and i think it would have led to serious violence my using it
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having written about violent the development of violence and individuals since then i now understand how people
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become violent and one and you start by being dominated by a violent dominator so i think
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stanley really did save my life either literally in the sense that i didn’t die as a result of this situation we were in
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or more metaphorically in the sense that i was turned toward a really healing
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place the drum institute for boys now the drum farm for children in independence missouri
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left in the endowment of a local wealthy cattle man and banker
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uh empowered us every day i mean one of the features of of
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abu’s children is that they feel helpless don’t know how they can get out of the
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situation they’re in but but drum in so many ways we worked
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our we grew our own food we processed our own food
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we did 4-h and ffa and church and scouting
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both stanley and i became eagle scouts in the course of time and every time every day was an
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achievement of some kind even as simple as that we all had chores to do and my
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chores for the first two years there was scraping the chicken [ __ ] off the chicken
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uh roost that was left there after the sleeping there at night but it was work
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and it was good work and you could be proud of it and later on you progressed to feeding cattle and feeding sheep
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and and plowing and harvesting putting up grain putting up hay all the
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work on a farm that was still in many ways a general farm not like the specialized
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farms today so by the time i was a senior in high school i had come to believe that i should
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become a methodist minister and i thought about it later why did i go that route well i was trying to be a
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good boy that was part of it uh but more than that i had gotten into
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meeting albert schweitzer who was in those days well-known kind of
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saintly figure a man who had been one of the great organists of europe
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as a younger man and had had his own transition
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into trying wanting to become someone who helped people changed over his entire career went to
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medical school became a doctor at a mission in africa that he founded so
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that was the only context of of
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philosophic thinking if you will about life in the world and how things are put together and how life works
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that i had encountered within the context of methodism so i saw that as therefore the logical
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way to go and by the time i was a senior in high school i had qualified as what’s called a local preacher’s license in the
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methodist church i had delivered a few sermons was qualified to baptize
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didn’t actually do any of that but was also really conflicted because it
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didn’t quite feel entire but the writing kind of began then i
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mean writing sermons i also was dating a girl as i thought who lived 75 miles
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away and therefore was totally inaccessible there was i couldn’t access her by phone i could
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have no way to get to see i wrote her 400 letters in one year
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meaning i wrote her more than one letter a day so i really must have had to work pretty
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hard to come up with something to say in all those letters unfortunately they’re lost i would love
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to see them today and see what they said but in these ways
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and then i had the great good luck to be living in a community kansas city missouri where there was a locally
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funded and locally supported scholarship to yale
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available for men in those days boys
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you didn’t have to qualify on the national level competition wasn’t national the way some of the
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famous scholarships are it was simply you had to be a resident of kansas city and we used my one of my aunts it’s my
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mailing address and you had to get in well it’s a lot easier to get in than it
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is to beat internet everyone else international competition i got in i remember later the the chairman of the
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yale schools committee said well we knew you were bright but when you weren’t sure you were illiterate
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which was which is ironic considering what i do for a living now in any case
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i won and i won at an extraordinary lucky level
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the scholarship originally had been set up for people who could not afford to go to college
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they actually had to break the will many years before ike arrived on the scene in order to extend it to people who could
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afford to go to some college they just couldn’t afford to go to yale i was evidently the only one who was
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literally someone who couldn’t afford to go to college at all i left drama 200 in my pocket for
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raising a couple hundred chickens that i sold for to my school teachers
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for for friars so four years of all expenses paid in one
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of the great universities of america it was a totally transformative experience
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and one of the things i picked up very quickly was that i wasn’t really sincerely and deeply
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religious and i didn’t have what’s called a calling that philosophy which i had as a
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freshman at yale would give me the same
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arena for writing and thinking as theology would
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as preaching would and i kind of jettisoned all the religious superstructure at that point
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and just simply went to learn how to read and write and think
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how there’s just so much to unpack in that in that uh story but
Advice to a person going through a difficult time in life
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for someone in a difficult situation at the moment whether it be
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um in their work environment home life whatever it might be at different ages
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you know people go through trials and tribulations in their life
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one if they knew your story i think it’s it’s it’s very inspirational to see
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somebody um i i you know i don’t want to say racks to riches uh but it’s it it
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almost strikes me as a story like that yeah what advice would you give to a
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person that’s going through something a difficult time in their life well
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let me just say first of all there’s enormously more resources available
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to children or young people who are in these situations than there were the first
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medical paper on child abuse was published in a journal of radiology
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in 1946 1946 before that
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it was a paper about an infant that had come to the hospital with strange twisting fractures of his legs
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because someone had twisted its legs until the bones broke and the physician who wrote the paper i
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looked it up really had to be very careful in the way he described it he didn’t want to say this is child abuse
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so he simply described the injury and said as if someone
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so by 1949 when my brother went to the police there really wasn’t much around
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the drum institute as a place to be able to go was just
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absolutely wonderfully fortuitous for us again the sheer luck of being in the
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right place at the right time but since then you know when i published
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a hole in the world we got we my wife and i who helped me with the books she’s a psychologist
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i received probably two to three hundred letters from people with stories
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many of them much worse than mine and we ginger and i decided that we would as we
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traveled around the country doing magazine work and she would help me with that she had been trained in radio journalism and she
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handled the mic and so forth we would stop off long enough to
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interview anyone in that city whose letters had been particularly interesting so we collected 20 extensive interviews
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with the among the people who wrote and did a book which was titled trying to get some
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dignity uh a phrase that one of the people we interviewed had used about how he’d spent his whole life trying to get some
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dignity one thing that everyone had in common who had survived was they had help
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they had some kind of model they had someone who had intervened in their lives sometimes really
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peripherally there was a really beautiful woman whose
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mother had been really a sadistic torturer and but walking down the street one day as a
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little girl someone had passed it by and stopped and said what a beautiful little
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girl and she clung to that through all this terrible time in her
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childhood as something that was different from what she was learning every day from her
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mother there was another woman who a policeman had come to school to give
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one of those police talks and had been involved in art in some way in school and helped her with learning to
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to paint or draw and that had been enough for her so
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and of course there were much more elaborate interventions like the ones stanley and i experienced
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that there was really more salvation if you will these were often
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people who had not achieved what they’d hoped to in their life so
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i think the important point and especially when one hears when here’s the the financially
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successful bragging about how they did it all themselves the fact is nobody does it all himself
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and especially when you’re in those circumstances someone intervenes someone helps
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later on i got to know and correspond with the
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psychoanalyst who wrote the book soul murder which is an extraordinary book about
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people who go through lives like this he calls the experience of this kind of mistreatment soul murder
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as if someone had murdered your soul and he had treated people who
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had not successfully moved on and again and again it was because
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they’d had no intervention they’d had no help they’d had to shoulder the whole burden
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themselves so i mean the credit goes to those decent
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human beings who step in and
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and act when they see something that needs attention and it may not be easy you can’t just
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walk up to some bully and say stop hitting your child but there are ways and unfortunately
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more and more there are institutionalized ways the drum institute had a real problem in
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the 1980s and 90s because the prevailing training of social
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workers in the social welfare system was that any institution like the drama which where
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people lived collectively if you will we were four to a room in an old
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wonderful farm building that had been around since it just after the civil war and we were we were all
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living collectively that had been spurned as something that was bad
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in place in in preference uh
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um i’m sorry what am i blocking on the name for the kind of
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the the homes the children are taken into these days
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no not orphans but individual children there are people couples who take in children and
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and raise them as they foster foster care yeah foster homes thank you um in
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favor of foster homes it turns out that foster homes have really bad psychological profiles for children not
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because the homes are necessarily benefited but because the children inevitably are moved around all over the
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place all the time and drama well by then i was on the board we had the problem that they
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wouldn’t let us take these children where we could provide a continuity over
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i mean i was a drum six years other children since then have been there as long as 12 have arrived as six-year-olds
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and stayed all the way through high school really become a part of that that life
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and that family and well anyway to make the long story short the solution was the drum
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reorganized itself as a collection of group homes which could benefit from the endowment
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of the institution and from its greater gathering power if you will for
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resources while still living in what was essentially a collection of foster homes
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all on one campus but times change and
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my point is this place this kind of institution and even foster homes when they’re not
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the children are constantly moved around are a wonderful solution to a problem
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that still exists which is that the family is the one
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political unit left which is still if you will private it’s
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very hard to get inside a family legally you really have to have serious evidence of serious abuse and
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even then the custom now and the belief now i don’t know that it’s particularly supported scientifically
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is that the best place for children is with their family well it wouldn’t have been the best place for
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my brother and me that’s for sure and i think it would not be the best place for many children
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so it’s still a problem and it hasn’t really found a solution we don’t want the state intervening in our private
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family lives but there’s some way to fix all that and i
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have quite a few ideas about it that we don’t need to go into but there is an evolution in the direction
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of better care all around uh what i found interesting in this um
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and i i do intend on uh pivoting towards some of the books you’ve written over the years this is just incredible uh one
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of those like incredible stories that you hear about and uh want to highlight because
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um you know a lot of people know your book you know the making of the atomic bomb
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books about nuclear energy and um one of my favorites is masters of
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death which i do want to ask a few questions about which is a superb book
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did you see how much you’re seeing how my subject matter focuses on violence yeah
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i’m an expert yes non-violence
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but um you mentioned earlier on that uh when
How books can change your life?
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uh your stepmother was beating stanley with a with a bat correct he he took it
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away from her and thought about maybe brutality retaliating
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and he was reading philosophy you you said that he at the time he was reading
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philosophy he was what 13 years old
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13 years old um my my question is
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where did he start why did he start reading philosophy where did he get it where did
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he get uh his hand on hand on these books and then the second kind of part
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to that question is um when did you first fall in love with books
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because i think as a person that’s written 26 books uh you must
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you must find incredible utility in books so where where did that initial love come come from
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well to answer the second question first very early age partly because stanley
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was reading stanley is a year and a half was a year and a half he’s deceased now and sadly
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stanley was reading and shared his comic books which in those
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days were considered to cause you to become violent or insane
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that’s another story that i find amusing anyway and we were living in a boarding house
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my mother committed suicide when i was a baby i mean the reason my father married this
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my stepmother is because he had raised us by himself in boarding houses
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for about what seven or eight years living in one room with two boys never
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having a private life except when he went off mysteriously on saturday afternoons
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dropped us off at the movies and i suppose went off to get laid presumably
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but anyway uh we were living in a boarding house that was operated by a german couple
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and mrs bernhardt who was just a wonderful classic german patron who did all the
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cooking and made great food and took care of everything taught me to read when i was four i mean
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i had a high iq i was a bright child and i picked it up when i was four and
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as soon as i got going i was here was a whole universe the answer to where did i get it
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the wonderful public library system in the united states in those days it’s not quite what it was but
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even little kids could go to the library and check out books fill them i once tried at the age of seven or eight to
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check out an adult science book and was told by the librarian it was it was too old for
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me and i was just incensed i knew dan well it wasn’t too old for me i could read that book
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or at least muddle around with it so but anyway i
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i learned to read early and it really opened up a whole universe for me
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and i got the kind of training that writers traditionally got in the past
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which was reading where else would you learn to write except by reading other people’s writing
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that’s exactly what i did all through childhood with curious bent towards science that i think had much to do with
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with the fact that i was really dazzled by the atomic bomb not surprisingly i was eight years old
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in 1945 most of my childhood had been the second world war one of my earliest memories is
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pearl harbor going from door to door in our neighborhood in kansas city knocking on
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the door and when people came to the door saying the japs bombed pearl harbor and then
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everybody would scramble and run around and turn on radios it was the most powerful kind of experience for a little
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kid so when i learned that the bomb as was
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supposed then ended the war forced the japanese to surrender
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i was suddenly struck in a deep way again thinking of zillard’s story
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by how powerful science must be if you could build something that could end a war that could consume my
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childhood in good ways but also in dark ways and on every block someone had a
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had a morning flag in the window with a gold star and a black felt background
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which indicated someone in their family had been killed in the war as well as the fact that the streets
30:59
were basically empty of cars that we could play in them because nobody could get tires and nobody could get gasoline
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they were all rationed uh we couldn’t get bubble gum either which was a great tragedy for us
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so that’s when i began to be interested in science i began to read the superb
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science reporting that was in life magazine in those days they would give experiments and talk
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about it and all and i used to clip the articles stick them in a big cornflex box take them to school and bore my
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classmates and show and tell time by explaining what an atom was and what the
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nucleus was and what nuclear fission was and so forth
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so it was a logical progression up through childhood with books and stanley
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was a great reader too but as i say one of the ways i learned to read from him once mrs gernard got me
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with going with the basics was that we read comic books which were just marvelous you know they in those
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days they were bloody and wonderful and they got emasculated by some psychiatrist in the 50s who
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made all these claims about they caused children to be violent and so forth and
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the comic book industry just took out all the violence all of a sudden and they got to be really boring
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so kids like bloody stuff you know yeah
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so that’s the way it progressed so you won uh your pulitzer prize uh for
Utility in writing a popular nonfiction book vs becoming a scientist
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that book the making the making of the atomic bomb um i made my i’m still making my way
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through it it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a thicker it’s a thicker book um
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i’m enjoying it i’m taking it slowly i’m taking notes uh there are a lot of
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uh characters that i want to remember and do the same kind of version of what you
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did at show-and-tell and come come up to people and be like well did you know um so
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but it doesn’t again still strike me as a natural progression to be you know
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love reading and and you you know uh grew up on on books
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but then you’re so fascinated by nuclear energy wouldn’t the natural transition then be to become a scientist or to go
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into uh you know to become a new a nuclear physicist or or whatever it might be
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but instead you wrote a a very popular and accessible book about
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nuclear energy to the general public what why did you go
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the book route rather than the um i guess the science route yeah no
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because i really my education didn’t prepare me i didn’t have any math and that’s one of
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the fundamentals of doing science uh i mean in high school at the boys
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home we went to school half days and took what were called solids history in
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english and so forth and then we went back to the drum institute and took vocational
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agriculture which was studying agriculture in various ways and also working on the
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farm which in many ways was a marvelous
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education for a writer i think i got more out of vocational agriculture than i ever would have out of
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out of a more academically oriented high school program i mean after all i was reading like
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crazy i was consuming seven novels a week i shouldn’t say novels i was consuming
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seven works of science fiction a week and then when i discovered
34:51
the popular historical fiction that it had sex scenes in it at about the age of 14.
34:57
i switched to media to historical fiction but i mean that’s
35:03
getting pretty close to how what i ended up writing but i really was not prepared
35:09
certainly not when i got to yale to study science in a serious way especially because i had no math so
35:17
i found another slot which let me be close to science and learn about
35:22
science but not actually do it and sometimes i’ve been disappointed that i wasn’t
35:28
capable or able or prepared to go into being a physicist i think it would have been great fun i know it would have been
35:35
great fun i’ve met a lot of wonderful physicists who’ve told me about their work
35:41
and how very special it is to find something that no one’s ever found before
35:46
to get another little piece out of the puzzle about the natural world
35:51
but i love what i do and i love the work i do and it took me a long time to get over feeling like a fraud
35:58
because i’ve discovered that if you learn the language of the professional field
36:04
people in the field will assume you know the field when all you actually know is the language
36:11
in other words it’s about an inch deep i think i’ve gone deeper than that when i was writing to making the atomic bomb
36:18
again kansas city happens to have one of the great science libraries in america
36:24
the linda hall library of science and i went there this was pre-pre-internet of course
36:30
these days it’s much simpler to do research because you can find almost everything online
36:36
serious documentation for most kinds of researchers there waiting for you
36:42
i went to the linda hall library and they had because of the way their collection been
36:47
assembled they had all the original papers the nuclear physics all the way back to the discovery of the nucleus
36:53
and i was able to read through those papers luckily nuclear physics is primarily
36:59
experimental there’s very little mathematical work in it at least that you need to to
37:06
to comprehend you can you can read a description of a laboratory experiment
37:11
this piece of this metal box was evacuated and set on a table
37:17
and a piece of cotton went into one end and a little piece of radioactive material and then at the other end blah blah blah
37:24
they’ll detect you know so you could follow physically and grasp therefore
37:30
and experiment that way and also as a writer describing what happened i could
37:36
describe the experiment in a way that the reader could follow whether they knew physics or not with a
37:42
certain amount of minimal minimal jargon and understanding of what was going on so
37:49
i don’t think i could i’ve been told i could not have managed that had i dealt with particle
37:54
physics and ironically i’m right now working on a book about the large hadron collider
38:01
the largest machine in the world in switzerland and france
38:07
and also the history of particle physics but i think i’ve reached a point where with it with
38:13
enough coaching by some friends i can probably describe that much as i did nuclear physics
38:20
that’s the goal anyway we’ll see yeah uh so when you were
Are nuclear weapons still important?
38:25
younger and growing up obviously you know you just mentioned that one of your
38:30
you know kind of original memories was of pearl harbor and then the war ending because of nuclear weapons and then
38:37
uh we went through the cold war period where nuclear weapons were very prominent you know kids had to
38:44
uh you know had had drills just you know go under their desks and you know
38:50
do all that stuff as if that was going to work and
38:56
now you kind of don’t hear as much about nuclear weapons i think we’ve entered a new kind of war of uh cyber wars and
39:05
um and all that so do you think that nuclear weapons still play a major role
39:11
in foreign affairs or or or they’re not they’re not that
39:17
important absolutely in fact it’s appalling that they have fallen off
39:23
the table i remember looking up what were the main concerns americans had what fears they
39:30
had back in the middle of the cold war nuclear weapons were number one now they’re number 25.
39:37
number one is like street violence or
39:42
something to do with personal personal violence and way way down the list
39:48
our nuclear weapons which is they’re still there the missiles are still waiting in their silos the bonds are
39:55
still loaded on planes and like all machinery
40:00
the risk is there of accident or malfeasance
40:06
we have not escaped the dangers of the cold war just because we don’t have a cold war going anymore
40:15
and more to the point perhaps they profoundly affect international relations
40:21
they do so because countries that have them are basically safe
40:26
from attack by other non-nuclear powers and probably by
40:32
nuclear powers as well the the so-called deterrence i don’t think is as sophisticated as
40:39
as the mandarins who invented the theory in order to build more bombs have said over the years but on a
40:46
fundamental existential gut level we all understand that certainly our
40:52
governments understand maybe donald trump didn’t understand but he was eventually enlightened
40:58
uh that you can’t use the damn things and if you can’t use the weapons then you can’t really have large-scale wars
41:05
anymore one of the things that i looked up and analyzed about 1949 five
41:11
was the rapid decline of man-made death man-made death meaning death from
41:17
violence of various levels slowly increased from the 18th century
41:25
on the world scale up to 1943 when about 15 million human beings died
41:33
combining both world war ii and the holocaust then it began to drop off and in 1945
41:39
it reached a low of about a million people a year in small regional conflicts
41:45
and it stayed around there one to two million ever since that’s a really paradoxical fact it was
41:52
increasing almost uh exponentially prior to that
41:58
where did it go what led to it i mean did human beings all become angelic suddenly no
42:04
the nations of the world were scared pardon me jealous by the by the the fact that nuclear weapons
42:11
could exist in the world and that as countries acquired them they would basically be protected
42:17
against assault by the potential for mutual annihilation so that’s i think why after all these
42:24
years of what one should write they call a long piece i mean of course
42:30
a million deaths a year is terrible and and we should work to reduce them but
42:36
it’s considerably fewer than die of smoking so in some sense at a public health
42:42
level we found a cure or at least a restraint a vaccination
42:49
against large-scale wars everyone after the second world war all the scientists
42:55
einstein and others were all terrified there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons it never happened
43:02
and it never happened because of what i was just describing i think there are those who disagree but i
43:09
haven’t seen an argument that’s as as convincing as as the nuclear weapons
43:14
arguments so so what niels bohr the great danish physicist
43:21
drew out of his understanding of where these bonds would take us
43:27
this curious paradox of a more peaceful world but one constantly hovering on the
43:34
brink of annihilation as we do today even though we reduced our arsenals by
43:39
enormous numbers the united states has now about 8 000 nuclear weapons the soviet union about
43:46i mean russia about 12 we at the height of the cold war russia had 75 000
43:54
i mean they were doing their old factory thing of crank them out as fast as you could crank them out
43:59
best exceed your quota every year comrade was was the rule and and basically so were we we had to
44:07
find new targets all the time because we were making more so
44:13
that’s an interesting history but we don’t need to go into it but we’re in this interesting place where we
44:19
haven’t we’ve found a cure for war but the cure for war if it ever had to be
44:24
executed would be far worse would be the equivalent of the extinction of the dinosaurs
44:31
i think that’s clear now it’s an interesting place to be and it either says the human beings are very
44:37
clever or it says they really have to be brutally controlled in order not to knock themselves off
44:44
in the meantime of course the environmental changes have been sneaking in on the side and bringing us
44:50
another similar perhaps dilemma it’s not quite clear yet but
44:55
maybe it is yeah uh but can you ever put the genie back in the bottle can can
Can we ever have a world without nuclear weapons?
45:02
we ever have a world with no nuclear weapons sure you don’t put the genie back in the
45:08
bottle exactly what you do is have a world of of uh
45:13
that has deterrence on the level of knowledge
45:19
let’s say i mean right now how would you reduce the threat of instant war when we
45:26
have missiles with 30 minute delivery times on hair trigger alert as do the
45:31
russians as do other countries how do we think about that we think about making it a little slower before
45:39
you can send them off you we think about taking the warhead off the missile and putting it in
45:46
another building down the road so it would take 30 minutes to go get it and
45:51
bring it to the silo and screw it onto the onto the rocket
45:56
then we talk about maybe moving it a day away
46:01
so we walk back the delivery time and make it longer and longer
46:07
it’s conceivable then to have a world if it’s perfectly transparent which is to
46:13
say if you have open inspection of every country that’s been the hang-up really
46:19
conceivable to have missiles that are basically parts in a silo some are in a warehouse
46:26
somewhere that would take three or four or five months to assemble
46:31
or even in the ultimate scenario the plans for these machines
46:37
carefully stored in a vault so that it would mean you’d have to go mine the uranium and build the rockets
46:44
and do all of that then maybe it’s the two-year delivery time on that level
46:50
if it were certain that somebody who tried to cheat would be
46:55
found out early on before they were able to actually build some missiles
47:02
then there would be all sorts of possibilities for intervention short of nuclear war
47:08
you could start by diplomacy if that didn’t work you could start by
47:13
you could move to sanctions if that didn’t work you could move if you had to to conventional war
47:20
but as robert oppenheimer described it in 1946
47:25
this is the plan that was proposed by the famous actress lillian paul commissioned in 1946
47:35
and it’s still the best clear idea of all oppenheimer was asked by the guy who was going to deliver the planet at the
47:41
united nations well what where’s your army what do you do if someone tries to cheat
47:47
and he said well if someone tried to cheat that would be an act of war wouldn’t it if you set up a world where
47:53
no one may own nuclear weapons where it’s outlawed to have nuclear weapons and inspection and
48:00
those controls are all in place then if someone starts to move toward a nuclear arsenal that’s an act of war and you
48:06
respond as you would do any act of war ultimately at its worst
48:12
we would end up back with the world that we have today with a bunch of missiles and their silos ready to go in 30
48:18
minutes that to me is the only plan that’s ever made sense and i know there are lots of
48:25
things people could ask about it but it’s doable it was doable in 1946 except we were the
48:32
only nuclear power in the soviet union was not about to allow us to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons yeah we
48:38
would not have allowed that if they had been the only power so there is a solution
48:45
but detoxifying nuclear weapons right would it be that uh for example
Solutions for achieving a world without nuclear weapons
48:52
just to pick a country if uh china would have their uh
48:58
investigators in in the united states for example and the americans would be in china checking up on
49:05
we do now russia has inspectors at some of our places out in nevada and so forth and we
49:12
have inspectors in their places we’ve had that for 20 or 30 years
49:17
i know that this sounds very simplistic but is there any fear of them hiding facilities or
49:23
yes that’s a concern but the inspection the level of inspection
49:30
that has been devised over the years at many different levels in terms of the
49:36
materials look you cannot have a nuclear weapon without uranium or plutonium
49:41
it just there’s no other way to build a nuclear weapon those are the only two materials that work then you can expand in hydrogen bombs
49:48
and so forth but the heart of it is those metals and they’re fairly rare and it’s possible to keep track of all
49:55
that stuff in fact we do so it’s not
50:00
beyond the range of human intelligence and gifts and skill to make such a world
50:06
what’s lacking is the desire and the will on the part of nation states that still
50:13
believe somehow their power is invested in the ownership of these weapons when india got
50:21
its nuclear arsenal started in 1998 after having tested its first bomb in
50:27
1974 and then leaving it kind of in a bomb in the
50:32
basement level until pakistan tested weapons in 1998 and then india jumped in
50:38
as well the two states being linked by their animosities
50:48
i forgot what i was going to say what was i talking about when india got its bombs oh yes
50:55
when india got its bombs in 1998 and built the first arsenal
51:01
its defense minister said well now the big boys will have to let us sit at the table with them
51:07
and he was talking about the other aspect of nuclear weapons that’s more insidious and that is they represent a
51:13
source of national prestige and the way we tried to combat that was
51:20
to develop the nuclear non-proliferation treaty back in the 60s after the terror of the of the
51:27
cuban missile crisis as close as we’ve ever come to a nuclear war which would have been an absolute disaster all over
51:34
the world the soviet union in the united states decided that they better get a treaty
51:41
going they will prevent what kennedy i remember was talking about as the possibility of 30 or 40 nuclear powers
51:48
in the world if everyone had been allowed just to take off and build nuclear weapons it
51:54
might have come to that but by offering a treaty that everyone signed pretty much
52:00
a couple outlaws but that said basically we will give you the knowledge and skills and financial
52:07
support to develop the peaceful uses of nuclear energy meaning nuclear power basically
52:13
uh if you will forego developing a nuclear arsenal then
52:20
that would be the deal and that was the deal and it’s limited the number of nuclear powers after all these years to
52:26
nine it’s not simply a matter of when you have the technology you you build a
52:32
nuclear arsenal it’s a political decision and it’s a very fraught political decision
52:37
israel has made a point of never mentioning that it has a considerable nuclear arsenal the numbers i’ve seen
52:44
estimated vary from 100 to 300 warheads and they’re on cruise missiles on
52:49
submarines right off the coast of iran that’s a very potent deterrent for a
52:55
very small country that’s surrounded by people that would rather it weren’t there
53:00
and it’s guaranteed for israel its existence all these years well those are the kind of
53:06
political issues that would have to be resolved in order to move beyond using deterrence
53:12
at some level but deterrence won’t go away so it’s going to be deterrence as i
53:17
said at the level of mothballed weapons if you will kind of like the cannons and the forts between
53:24
canada and the united states and the northern northern regions of the country none of those old cannonballs are still
53:32
stacked up there in the cannon or there they’re just not nobody even thinks about them anymore
53:37
they’re just decorative that would be a lovely place to arrive how about how about the power of these
What is the real power of nuclear weapons today?
53:43
nuclear weapons so for a long time i would i would read something like it’s 50 you know the current atomic bomb is
53:50
like 50 times what it was in nagasaki no and i it’s it’s one thing to hear it yeah but
53:58
i can’t wrap my head around what 50 times okinawa uh not okinawa sorry nagasaki is
54:06
like i i can’t you know it’s it’s really difficult to is that are we talking about mainland japan just being blown up
54:13
or is it what what if you blow up an atomic weapon right now where you drop it in the middle what
54:19
is it how far does it go when we got to hydrogen weapons we moved from bombs
54:24
that could destroy cities to bombs that could destroy states
54:30
the largest weapon ever conceived was one that edward keller came up with
54:37
that would be a thousand megatons that bomb if it had ever been built it
54:44
never was that bomb would have had a fireball 10 miles in
54:50
diameter what teller then realized or someone with better sense realized was
54:56
that the atmosphere is only about 10 miles deep so if you had a 10 mile fireball most of
55:02
the explosive force would just blast out into space so there was no there was a
55:08
limit to the use utility of of this of scaling up weapons the largest weapon
55:14
actually tested was a soviet bomb the so-called zarbon which they built basically as they said
55:21
later just to show you what we could do it was uh its design yield was 150 megatons 150
55:30
million tons of tnt equivalent they actually built one or more
55:35
and they dropped one by plane over siberia and it was kind of like the
55:40
tungusta meteorite that swept through siberia back in 1908 it knocked down an
55:46
enormous a lot of trees and burned out a lot of an area
55:52
but again the scale was just crazy
55:58
when oppenheimer was robert oppenheimer was had his security clearance withdrawn
56:04
in a really nasty policy piece of political attack that took place in the
56:09
early 50s one of the questions he was asked at the security hearing was
56:15
well because the claim was that he would have prevented the development or delayed the development
56:21
of the hydrogen bomb he was asked well dr oppenheimer if you
56:26
had had a hydrogen bomb at the end of the second world war wouldn’t you have dropped it on hiroshima
56:32
and oppenheimer said no no i would not have well why not because the target was too small he said
56:40
because the target was too small and and that’s kind of the case with these weapons why did we build all those
56:47
nuclear weapons did we really need them would not one submarine or two
56:53
submarines with with warheads untraceable under the oceans of the
56:58
world been more than enough yes no question that it would have one
57:03
submarine could have taken out all of the soviet union or all of europe or all of north america they had 16
57:11
300 kiloton warheads 300 kilotons is at least
57:16
let’s see it’s 10 times the yield of the of somewhat more than the nagasaki
57:22
plutonium bomb so why did we why did we build all these
57:27
and i i think the answer is fairly clear in the record by
57:33
the air force took control of the nuclear arsenal early on curtis lemay realized that that
57:40
whoever controls the nuclear arsenal is going to have most of the defense budget
57:47
and he worked out a kind of a bootstrapping process target
57:53
targets number of targets determine number of bombs
57:58
number of bombs determined in those days only planes number of planes to deliver those bombs
58:04
and number of planes in term determines the budget so he got control of the targeting
58:12
and by 1954 the defense budget 47 percent of the defense budget was
58:19
going to the air force and the navy in the army realized that if they didn’t jump on the nuclear
58:25
bandwagon they were going to fade away because lemay was asking for bigger
58:31
bombs so these planes could carry more yield and he had a plan to sweep all his
58:37
aircraft across eastern europe bombing it as he went
58:42
even though those were supposedly the people held hostage by the soviet union but there were bombs there and so forth
58:49
and then bombing all of the soviet union and then just as a kind of a soup song
58:54
afterwards go ahead and bomb china as well that was his vision for how he would
59:00
bring peace to the world truly insane but there it was
59:05
but the army started discovering that it needed nuclear weapons too it built
59:11
cannons with nuclear shells the smallest nuclear weapon ever built
59:16
weighed 51 pounds and it was the warhead for artillery shell it was an elegant little
59:22
little bomb but but you really ran the risk that your
59:28
cat your cannon crew your gun crew would be destroyed when it exploded
59:35
so the army found uses for nuclear weapons the navy obviously found uses for
59:41
nuclear weapons and developed the whole submarine fleet so it was i think inner service rivalry
59:48
more than anything else that led to the enlargement of the nuclear arsenal with
59:55
the soviets maybe a little bit more their horror at what happened to them in the second world war they lost 25 of
Soviet Reason for Nuclear Proliferation
1:00:02
their national industrial plant they lost 20 million people 20 million
1:00:08
people died in the soviet union in the second world war they were reduced to just bankruptcy
1:00:15
after the war for a while and they had every reason to think that we would attack them in a stealthy way
1:00:21
just as the nazi germany had attacked them in 1941.
1:00:26
so their goal was basically to build as many weapons as they could
1:00:32
build as fast as they could they were slow at first and the cuban missile crisis
1:00:37
when kennedy called their bluff about not have daily had about four missiles
1:00:42
they they pretended they had more but the whole point of slipping missiles into cuba as indeed they did
1:00:49
was to give them the same kind of advantage as we had with with warheads
1:00:54
in turkey right on the edge of the soviet union with very short delivery times
1:01:00
so khrushchev thought well screw them they want to have missiles right in our borders we’ll have missiles on their
1:01:05
borders and kennedy could not accept that that would be politically annihilating for him
1:01:11
and so they had this very close call of a standoff i remember vividly we were all
1:01:17
staring at our television sets all weekend wondering if we were going to live to see the next week
1:01:22
as was kennedy as were people in washington fortunately
1:01:29
they found their way through but khrushchev had to back down and he lost his position as premier of the
1:01:36
soviet union within a few years largely because he did that but he saved the world perhaps so
1:01:44
wow um
1:01:54
um but obviously you know i mentioned the fact that uh i was introduced to your work uh
Lonnie Athens and the True Nature of Violence
1:02:02
through a book again you’re known through your for the most part the books about nuclear energy but
1:02:08
i i was introduced by this book i have right here masters of death yeah um
1:02:13
i i only read a chapter in college before a paper i was writing about uh about bobby
1:02:19
uh which is you know a pit in in by kiev in ukraine
1:02:26
where the single i think it’s the single largest uh massacre during world war ii
1:02:33
took place at bobby r and i had to read a chapter and i was so enthralled by that chapter even though it’s it’s
1:02:39
fairly short um that i i decided to read the whole book
1:02:44
and so um that’s a great experience it
1:02:49
yeah uh i had my my my family is from the soviet union
1:02:55
my my parents uh emigrated in 1996 but they um
1:03:01
they grew up in the soviet union and uh i grew up with these kind of stories
1:03:07
about the difference between the soviets and how the soviets viewed the americans and what what they were told about
1:03:14
um america but this book is so well written and i cannot begin to
1:03:22
express how well written it is because i read it and i felt like i was reading a novel and i thought it wasn’t fair
1:03:29
that i was reading a non-fiction book because i was learning but it was just like you know how this ends
1:03:35
but you keep reading because it’s a story the sheer horror of of these of these
1:03:43
battalions um um but how did you why did you decide to write this book
1:03:51
two reasons i had just written a book called why they kill which was about an american
1:03:57
criminologist named lonnie athens who had i believe
1:04:02
developed the first definitive causal model
1:04:09
of how people are taught and conditioned to become violent
1:04:16
socialized to become violent he had received a great deal of criticism for the book it had been
1:04:22
rejected by his fellow sociologists over and over again but it made intuitive sense to anyone
1:04:30
who had experienced violence himself as i had and i’ve noticed that by the way since i
1:04:35
wrote the book that the people who get it instantly are people who work with criminals criminals themselves
1:04:43
anyone who’s been around violence almost always says ah you got it he got it
1:04:50
that’s right that’s how it happens whereas people who have not had personal experience with violence
1:04:56
uh vividly in one experience i had with a group of psychiatrists don’t get it at all
1:05:02
i gave a talk to the bookstore once where there was a psychiatrist in the audience and after i finished he stood
1:05:08
up and announced who he was and said now let me tell you how people really become violent
1:05:14
as if everything i had just said had made had blown past and hadn’t even
1:05:19
registered in his mind and then he went through the usual explanations of this and then the other
1:05:25
but i think athens and athens did it by interviewing about 100 violent criminals
1:05:32
in prison all over the united states interviewing each one to
1:05:38
the extent of about eight to ten hours of interview each taking those transcriptions and and the
1:05:45
question was always the same so what was he would start with the case of
1:05:51
record they wanted to put them in prison that was the way of testing their their honesty if they lied about that then he
1:05:57
would throw out the whole thing later on when my book was reviewed in the new york times book review by joyce
1:06:03
carol oates she said these are a bunch of [ __ ] stories these people made up
1:06:08
she obviously hadn’t read the book very carefully because i explained exactly his procedure for isolating the people
1:06:15
who were lying to him he would start with their case of record
1:06:20
and then he’d walk them back so what happened what was the one what was the one behind that what happened to you
1:06:26
before that did you did you attack someone before that were you attacked before that with the younger men at
1:06:32
least he could walk them all the way back to their first experience with violent domination typically by a parent or a gang member
1:06:39
in the streets or a sibling you know
1:06:45
the context would vary maybe in the military the military is one of the places that people are actually taught
1:06:51
to be violent but limited to defensive violence so that they won’t walk around
1:06:56
shooting people vietnam was a classic example of situation where where it got to the point where the
1:07:02
soldiers could no longer distinguish violent enemies from normal villagers in black black pajamas
1:07:10
and therefore started committing atrocities because they basically leaped over into i’ll
1:07:15
kill anyone who walks past me if they’re wearing black pajamas and look like they’re vietnamese
1:07:21
so athens interviewed all these people took the transcripts of the interviews as he
1:07:26
had laid them out put them side by side and compared them what do people who have this problem
1:07:34
have in common it’s the classic way that diseases are are discovered you take people who have the
1:07:41
disease and you look at their symptoms and signs and you try to understand
1:07:46
what’s different from people who don’t have the disease
1:07:52
so the whole superstructure of of uh
1:07:58
normal sociological research which relies on correlations between people not causes between people
1:08:06
and which therefore requires large numbers of subjects in order to
1:08:13
tease out the rather limited behavior that
1:08:18
shows up in correlations nobody in the sociological world seems
1:08:24
to understand the difference anymore athens has had to struggle with this over and over again
1:08:29
he was looking at people who had the condition they had been proven to be seriously
1:08:34
violent what in their past in the way of social experience with violence did they
1:08:40
all have in common because if he identified that and tested it against some other people
1:08:46
who were often exposed to similar situations but weren’t violent such as abused women
1:08:53
which he did do later this would be for at least this set of
1:08:59
people the cause of their violent behavior every time you encountered a new violent
1:09:04
person you would have to test the model again because the model was only as good causally
1:09:11
speaking as the people who had the disease so so athens
1:09:17
went about preparing this model and i won’t go through the whole model it’s quite complicated fortunately or we’d
1:09:23
all be violent because we all have some experience of being pushed around and so forth bullies and schools and all that
1:09:32
so he tested it with criminals in prison i wanted to test it i realized after i
1:09:37
published this book about him and his work i wanted to test it in an entirely different context
1:09:43
one that would not in any way resemble you know bicycle gangs and street gangs
1:09:49
and and people in prison because they’d killed their parents or whatever and and i came across i don’t remember
The Einsatzgruppen, Nazi Death Squads, and Violence
1:09:56
how i came across the the story of the einstein script but i do remember that i read a book
1:10:02
called ordinary men oh fantastic book i had christopher browning on the podcast to discuss ah
1:10:09
so browning’s theory is that anybody can be made violent just by being told to be violent
1:10:15
that’s basically what he proposes in his book ah no that’s simply not true
1:10:21
what happens when people who are non-violent are forced to use violence is they break down
1:10:27
what’s interesting about the einsatzgruppen is that these were men who were already
1:10:33
conditioned to defensive violence as policemen right as ss recruits who’ve
1:10:39
been trained for combat and to some degree as locals who were
1:10:45
personally violent anyway there was a great deal of personal violence in central europe there still is
1:10:51
there’s a lot of beating of children and so forth so and germany too has had very high rates
1:10:57
of children being abused over the years they had a plague of suicides in their schools back in the 1910s and 20s
1:11:05
because the children were being abused so badly so there’s
1:11:10
plenty of evidence that that these people were already violently socialized to a certain level
1:11:18
and in that context they were then sent out ahead of behind the advancing
1:11:24
armies of nazi germany when they invaded the soviet union in june of 1941
1:11:32
ostensibly to pacify the cities and towns as the army moved
1:11:37
on but part of their assignment was to kill jews and they started out by
1:11:44
basically recruiting the local thugs to do their killing for them some horrible
1:11:50
stories along those lines but pretty soon they realized they were going to have to do it themselves
1:11:56
because there was so much reaction against all this public slaughter that was going on people being beaten to
1:12:01
death with iron rods in the public square so they developed a system where they would take some local prisoners of war
1:12:08
and take them out to the edge of town and either find a tank trench or a trench or a gully of some kind thus
1:12:16
bubba yar or they would dig a trench and they would gather together the local
1:12:22
jews men but specifically men of military age
1:12:28
men between the age of about 15 and 50 who could be construed by these
1:12:34
these einstein’s grip and the special forces that’s what the phrase means
1:12:39
as enemy as dangerous because they had the potential to be
1:12:44
guerrilla forces they had the potential to become soldiers to fight the german army
1:12:50
and so you could justify the killing as defensive you were protecting yourself and the people
1:12:57
you value meaning the people in the homeland from these potentially dangerous people
1:13:03
under those circumstances although it wasn’t easy they would line them up on the edge of a trench and shoot them in
1:13:09
the head and they’d be spattered with blood and brains and they’d see people die and
1:13:14
everything else but they got along reasonably well with that challenge
1:13:20
until july when hitler decided that the soviet union was going to be knocked off
1:13:26
by christmas and and passed the word through heinrich
1:13:32
himmler the head of the ss to start killing the women and children as well
1:13:38
now we had a circumstance where these einsatzgruppen could no longer
1:13:44
construe the killing they were doing as defensive it’s one thing to say i shot that man
1:13:51
because he was going to be a soldier but it’s hard to say that about a young woman or a child or a baby
1:13:58
these were suddenly the people who were in that lineup on the edge of the trench that they were killing
1:14:05
and they began to break down my point i made earlier about you can’t just get anybody to walk out and start killing
1:14:11
people unless the threat of their own death and not always even then there are people who won’t use violence
1:14:18
even if they’re told they’ll be killed if they don’t um
1:14:23
at that point these guys started to have problems they didn’t they weren’t comfortable
1:14:29
doing this kind of killing anymore uh one solution that himmler came up with and his people was to have
1:14:36
nightly feasts in the local uh
1:14:42
you know and bring them in together and sing cheerful patriotic songs and they would
1:14:48
be told that what they were doing was important to to the fuhrer they would be told that this interesting
1:14:56
logic if you don’t look you’re killing the parents of these babies right right
1:15:01
if you don’t kill the babies they will grow up to want revenge on you and they will take revenge on your children so
1:15:07
you must kill them now and get clean sweep it didn’t really work there were two kinds of pillars that
1:15:13
evolved very quickly across the next few months one the more common people who had
1:15:20
nervous breakdowns of one kind or another volunteered to go to the eastern front for christ’s sake
1:15:26
which is like committing suicide in those days the the ss actually opened a hospital
1:15:32
north of berlin as a place where these people could do some r r and recover from these
1:15:39
traumatic experiences they were having himmler was okay with that because he
1:15:45
perceived them to be merely weak but there was another kind of person who evolved
1:15:51
and that was someone who became fully violent who went through all the stages of athens
1:15:57
model and came out the other side as a fully violent individual who would volunteer
1:16:04
to go find jews to kill who would take off after hours on their own and find jews to go
1:16:09
himmler was horrified himmler was not himself a fully violentized individual
1:16:15
he managed to become a desk murderer you get all the aggrandizement of being violent and there is
1:16:21
prestige in being violent of a sort without having to actually go around killing people
1:16:27
so he was able to order any number of people killed as was hitler just because
1:16:33
it was necessary the viewer wants it so himmler was horrified by these guys
1:16:39
who became voluntary killers fully malefic individuals
1:16:45
he said at one point look when he observed one of these killings and was sickened by it was really literally made
1:16:52
sick by it it was so horrible to him from his perspective he said
1:16:58
we kill out of a duty to kill out of pleasure is is barbaric is savage
1:17:05
and and we don’t want that at that point and this is what’s so important about this story that i think
1:17:12
has not really been been explained fully yet in the literature
1:17:18
at that point he and his his crew decided they had to find some other
1:17:24
way of killing jews that would be less traumatic to the perpetrators
1:17:30
people have always said the einstein group and the so-called bullet holocaust was less efficient than the gas chambers
1:17:38
that the death camps were invented because they were more efficient they were an industrialized technology
1:17:44
they weren’t more efficient at the height of the killing such as at babiyar these guys with their guns and
1:17:50
their bullets were killing 10 to 15 000 people a day so they were perfectly and and and the
1:17:58
death camps at the height of their power never got to the point of knocking out
1:18:03
more than a hundred than 10 000 people a day bobby yar was what 44
1:18:10
700 in two days using just local police and ss
1:18:16
and rifles stacking people and what they called sardine packing
1:18:22
laying them down and shooting the back of the head and having the next group lie down crosswise and shooting them in the head
1:18:29
and building up your sardine can i mean it’s it’s horrible to talk about
1:18:34
it’s horrible to write about i had nightmares when i was writing that book but i did want to see
1:18:41
what happened what and and i discovered that the transition to the death camps
1:18:47
was done not because of any so you know one of the things that historians have said was modernity
1:18:55
caused the death camps others have said science was responsible
1:19:01
no they invented the death camps because they wanted to reduce the trauma to the
1:19:06
perpetrators so at the height of some of these camps where they were the the ones that were
1:19:13
totally devoted to killing not not the camp the concentration camps where people were brought together
1:19:20
to use them for slave labor which is another mix-up that people make
1:19:25
auschwitz was both it had a death camp where people were went straight from the trains to the gas
1:19:31
chambers and it had another camp where people were held healthy young men
1:19:36
mostly to work in the factories group and the other industrialists who were
1:19:42
feeding the war it’s the death camps i’m talking about typically they would be run by about 75
1:19:48
ss men and staffed with polish prisoners russian prisoners
1:19:55
anyone they could find who could do the dirty work for them the actual moving people in and the actual dragging
1:20:02
dead bodies out and they used the jews themselves to deal with the dead bodies they weren’t
1:20:08
special crews for that so the holocaust
1:20:15
like any large industrial enterprise any large war enterprise was organized
1:20:22
around technologies of killing and it was organized for the benefit of the killers of course who else
1:20:30
and out of that came the whole business of these of this industrialized killing process
1:20:36
not science not modernity whatever that means
1:20:42
just let’s make sure our guys don’t break down or worse at all become killers all the time
1:20:50
and that by the way then became a just to finish a testimonial a test of athens model
1:20:57
athens model beautifully described the process whereby these people were moved
1:21:02
from ordinary training for combat or police duty
1:21:08
into a more brutal kind of killing and then approached and were were
1:21:17
complicated by by the the slaughter that they were being asked to do that was beyond the
1:21:23
range of their social experience and therefore led to breakdown of one kind
1:21:28
or another wow um this is a a pretty heavy conversation uh
Hope for the Future
1:21:35
we’ve had i i wanna end on a more positive note i i have uh two two questions i ask of all
1:21:42
my guests at the end of every podcast i’ll put them together and then you can answer in whatever order you please
1:21:48
one is uh if you have any i hope you do what gives you hope for the future and
1:21:54
uh the second question is what are five books fiction nonfiction that you would recommend to someone
1:22:01
well the second one’s a harder one but for the first yes hope for the future of course
1:22:08
not only do i have children and grandchildren and i think they’re just as helpful as
1:22:13
one could possibly help your grandchildren could be but
1:22:19
you either i think toward the end of life and i’m toward the end of life i’m 84. i’ve got maybe 10 to 15 more years
1:22:26
if i’m lucky and i hope i’m lucky i haven’t another brother that didn’t grow up with us
1:22:32
who’s 94 10 years older than i am and he’s still kicking so maybe i’ll make it to there
1:22:39
and ed wilson whose biography i just wrote leo wilson is at 92 i think now
1:22:46
working on what will be his most important book a book about the whole structure of
1:22:51
ecology and how that works in the world so there’s help that i can write some more books which i want to
1:22:58
but generally hope i mean ed is helpful at 92 having seen all these years of
1:23:05
everything we’ve seen in the world and he’s helpful because he’s seen the species
1:23:12
manage its problems maybe clumsily maybe not only always
1:23:18
very well but but get by until something better comes along
1:23:23
and pushed by hope and intelligence and and political forces of various kinds
1:23:30
pushed by the fundamental needs of human beings to live and to thrive so
1:23:35
if ed can take that perspective it seems to me i don’t want to be one of those old guys and i’m not one of those old
1:23:41
guys who says we’re all going to hell in a handbasket i don’t believe that and all you have to
1:23:47
do is look around you to see it we may end up wearing wearing silver suits
1:23:53
underground in an air-conditioned habitat and coming up to the surface of
1:23:58
the earth boiling temperatures and taking taking little trips around to look at
1:24:04
the life that’s evolved with with air conditioned suits itself you know
1:24:10
but but i think we’ll keep going and find a way past that and poses the interesting question what happens when
1:24:18
we solve all these problems and we find that in fact we have no more
1:24:23
long-term purpose in life than all the other species of creatures that will be
1:24:28
a spiritual that i mean they talked about the death of god back in the postwar accidental
1:24:35
days uh this i don’t know what that one will be but i know i won’t be around to see it so i’m not worried about it
1:24:41
so i do have hope and i think we should have hope if you don’t have hope where are you
1:24:47
yeah i mean again to go back to the question of abuse in childhood the children who
1:24:53
didn’t have help and something that gave them hope and maybe physical help as well
Book Recommendations
1:25:01
are the ones who didn’t make it they’re the ones who became criminals they’re the ones who became
1:25:06
mentally ill they’re the ones who developed diseases that were the product of their adverse
1:25:12
childhood experiences a whole new field and a whole new rich knowledge of how humans developed
1:25:19
that i was hoping to write a book about because i knew the man who developed the
1:25:24
idea but never was able to find a publisher in new york who was interested
1:25:30
sadly anyway the movement has gone on and where that’s another rich aspect of hope
1:25:35
as well now books well i you know as a as an author who
1:25:40
answered the question how do you get up in the morning and get to your desk and start writing
1:25:46
who always says i have a mortgage uh i would love to mention my
1:25:53
five of my books any five choose your order i think there’s plenty there of variety and interest for anyone who
1:25:59
wants to read them but i mean my touchstone book in fiction for a long time has been moby dick
1:26:06
i’m working on a novel right now which is not going to be moby dick but it’s certainly in that vein
1:26:13
after 40 years of wanting to write some fiction again i’m actually doing it on the side while i start work on another
1:26:19
book of non-fiction but god knows mummy dick
1:26:26
leaves of grass one of the great works of american literature this little
1:26:32
tiny collection of poems that whitman published in 19 1855
1:26:38
sent a copy to thoreau i’m sorry to emerson who said great american poet has come forth among
1:26:45
us it still is the most amazing book to read because it sounds like conversation
1:26:51
but it’s just powerful poetry and beyond that i don’t know i’ll be
1:26:57
hard put just to grab something up i mean i’ve read all my life how about
1:27:02
something how about something you’ve read recently that you would that just pops to mind that that that maybe
1:27:09
you would recommend it doesn’t have to be your all-time favorites uh it’s like picking your favorite child uh i would
1:27:15
imagine uh but but but but something that
1:27:20
you recently read and thoroughly enjoyed
1:27:26
i’ve had trouble finding anything to read lately really yes
1:27:32
i have trouble reading fiction because i know how it’s assembled so i i just noticed the gears and wheels
1:27:39
rather than jump into the story so it’s more fun to write fiction for me
1:27:45
than to read it actually because it’s such play after writing non-fiction which is i like to call
1:27:51
non-fiction the task of trying to build the sistine chapel in a mosaic tile
1:27:58
all these little facts that you have that you want to assemble into this beautiful portrait whereas fiction just more like throwing
1:28:05
clay you can shape it any way you want right you make an option go flying but
1:28:10
but it’s much more more uh i amenable to touch and control
1:28:17
i’m not very good at coming up instantly with the names of books i mean dr doodle was a formative book of my childhood
1:28:23
in a way writing of ed wilson’s biography is going back to that because
1:28:28
ed learned how to talk to ants he really did he he found that he dissected ants until he
1:28:36
found the source of the the pheromone that they produced that they used to communicate with each other
1:28:43
and then he’d take a little pheromone and make a trail with it the ants would all come running up his trail and there
1:28:49
wouldn’t be any food at the end and they’d all stand around puzzled and bewildered
1:28:55
why’d you lay that trail if you have any food but
1:29:00
and you know i’ll tell you one book that i reread with great fascination and that’s the
1:29:06
origin of species anyone who has or even better maybe the voyage of the beagle darwin’s book about
1:29:12
his voyages down to patagonia when he really first kind of caught a glimpse of the ideas that led to his book on
1:29:19
evolution but as science books go evolution the origin of species is
1:29:26
is easily accessible it’s all written by a good english country gentleman in
1:29:31
the best possible english prose and step by step he goes through the
1:29:36
whole argument and when at the end if you’re not convinced then you must be a fundamentalist
1:29:42
is all i can say um yeah i i do want to say before we wrap
1:29:49
up uh it’s it’s thank you for giving me and the listeners so much of your time
1:29:56
um your books have brought me immense joy um
1:30:01
i’m sure they brought a lot of other people immense joy and thank you very much for coming on
1:30:07
and speaking with me ah my pleasure i’m glad we made it happen yeah definitely
1:30:12
thank you thank you okay