Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how everyone might die in nuclear hellfire.

This is part four of our series on The Bastards Who Built the Doomsday Device that we all currently live under the looming sword of Damocles above all of our heads, the several thousand nuclear weapons, ready

at a moment's notice to destroy everything any of us have ever loved or cared about.

Back with me to really get into some shit, because I did not expect it to take this long to get

to the mid-50s, but there's a lot to talk about. Margaret Kiljoy, how are you doing?

I'm good. I've come up with a strategy.

And the strategy is I've decided I believe you are telling me Warhammer 40K lore.

That would make this a lot more comforting.

Uh-huh. This is just something that some space orcs have decided to do.

There are orcs in space in Warhammer. That's a very important part of the setting.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

So I'm going to start this episode with something that happened concurrent to the last

couple of years that we've talked about in part three, right?

As, you know, the kind of fallout from the Korean War is going on and the U.S. and the Soviet

nuclear stockpiles are ballooning from the hundreds to the thousands.

Curtis LeMay had, as I noted, become obsessed with the idea of being able to land a

first strike that would compromise or cripple the Soviet ability to strike back. In public,

President Eisenhower was very careful to only discuss a U.S. nuclear response in defensive terms.

But in 1954, the Eisenhower-Dulles Declaration announced that the U.S. would respond to Soviet provocation

anywhere, even using conventional weapons, quote, at places and with means of our own choosing.

The term massive retaliation came to symbolize the Eisenhower administration's promise to the

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