Could World War II Have Ended Without the Atomic Bomb?

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[00:00:00] James M. Scott
110 minutes at Pearl Harbor changed everything. And that's no exaggeration. That's one of the most consequential 110 minutes in American history is that attack on Pearl Harbor. 96 cents of every federal dollar spent was going to war. 96 cents. I mean, it's either the war or the debt service. It's an astonishing mobilization of American money and industry to fight a war. One of the big fears for the Americans was that, you know, the Japanese don't really understand surrender.

[00:00:25] James M. Scott
They've never done it. Like, we knew the Germans understood surrender. They had already surrendered in World War I. Like, we knew they, as a society, they knew how to lay down their arms. Japanese didn't, we didn't have a track record with them. And throughout the Pacific War, you don't really see any organized mass surrender anywhere. They just fight to the death. You know, you look at islands like Tarawa, it's 99.7% kill rates.

[00:00:43] James M. Scott
And so we were really worried that Japan still had 5 million men under arms. Like, all right, what if they don't surrender? Life in Japan at that point was really awful for the public. Japan had lost all of its ability to import food for the most part. It was facing a disastrous rice harvest in 1945, 1946. The average person was surviving off about 1600 calories a day.

[00:01:04] James M. Scott
It had a rampant black market. People, I mean, new mothers were so malnourished that they couldn't produce breast milk. So they were having to experiment with like using radish juice for newborns, turnip juices and things like that. So typically a person was spending about five hours a day just figuring out where their next meal was coming from. I mean, it's just daily life is insufferable.

[00:01:23] James M. Scott
How are you gonna revolt when you're just trying to figure out how to get fed?

[00:01:27] Michael Shermer
Up until December 7th, 1941, Japan was pretty successful at militarizing and colonizing and so forth. What made them decide we need to attack America?

[00:01:37] James M. Scott
They were looking to make their big expansionist push at that point. And the Japanese effectively wanted us out of the way so they could capture the territories they wanted. And then they banked that the American public, they really felt that our democracy would work against us in a war. And that the American public would never get on board with a very costly war in terms of blood and lives as well as money on the opposite side of the Pacific.

[00:02:00] James M. Scott
And so that eventually the Americans would get sick of this. They would allow the Japanese to settle. The Japanese would get to keep the territories that they wanted.

INTERVIEW

[00:02:11] Michael Shermer
Hey, everyone. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. We have today James M. Scott. He's a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of a number of World War II in the Pacific books, including Black Snow, Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, Rampage, MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila, Target Tokyo, Jimmy Doolittle and the raid that avenged Pearl Harbor.

[00:02:42] Michael Shermer
I just started that this morning because you're such a good writer, James. But let me finish my proper introduction here. The War Below, the story of three submarines that battled Japan. The Attack on the Liberty, the untold story of Israel's deadly 1967 assault on a US spy ship. And co-author with Jack Carr. Of the book, Targeted Beirut. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

[00:03:06] Michael Shermer
His new book just came out. It's called Empire of Ashes. Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War. It's a great read. I listen to the whole thing on audio. Yeah, it's great. You have a good reader there, James. So interesting. I love your work. I love your writing. I just started the Jimmy Doolittle book. I want to read the Curtis LeMay one because he's such an interesting character.

[00:03:31] Michael Shermer
To get more details about that. But before we dive into the new book, what's your story? How'd you get interested in the Pacific War?

[00:03:38] James M. Scott
Yeah, actually it's funny. I never would have guessed I would end up doing this for a living. I was a public school teacher in Japan back in the 1990s. Many, many years ago. I graduated college here in the U.S. and Japan has long had a program where they bring Americans over to teach public school. And so I thought, well, I don't have anything to do.

[00:03:58] James M. Scott
You know, my first year out of college, I wanted to kind of travel and have some adventure. Why not go to Japan? And so I did. And as I mentioned, this was in the late 1990s. There were still a lot of folks around at that time who had lived through World War II, fought in World War II, been civilians during that time period.

[00:04:14] James M. Scott
And so I volunteered to teach a class at my local community center. It was like an evening conversational English class, and it was about eight or 10 people. And I lived in this little tiny village on the main island of Honshu. And so we'd get together once a week, and invariably the conversations always went back to the war. And I'll never forget my students talking about being in Osaka during the fire raids.

[00:04:35] James M. Scott
And I remember thinking, what fire raids? I don't remember anything about that. And I'd studied history in college, but like so much else, it's sort of overshadowed by the atomic bombings. And so just for me, it really kind of sparked this huge interest. While I was there, I went down and visited Hiroshima for the first time. It was back in 1998. Museum was very different then than it is today.

[00:04:53] James M. Scott
They've redone it a couple of times since then. And then literally about two weeks after I'd been in Hiroshima, I flew to Pearl Harbor to meet my parents for my spring break. And I toured the Pearl Harbor. And yes, so really within the span of just a couple of weeks, I kind of saw the bookends of America's experience in the Pacific and World War II, really.

[00:05:11] James M. Scott
It just sparked a huge interest and started reading everything. I could get my hands on it. I spent a number of years as a journalist before I eventually sort of segued into writing books, but always in the back of my mind was my interest in the Pacific War. I've been very fortunate for the last 20 years. This is what I've been able to focus on.

[00:05:28] Michael Shermer
Amazing. Yes. Well, you've gotten so many details. It's incredible. There's so much on this. If you just scan through Amazon Prime or on YouTube, there's just millions of videos on World War II. You just can't get enough of it. And that goes back to like the History Channel, which used to be all Hitler all the time. Yeah, exactly. There's something about the war that Americans find interesting.

[00:05:52] Michael Shermer
My wife's from Germany. She's from Cologne. And so when she came here to marry me, she's like, All you Americans, all you talk about is Hitler. I mean, we got over this guy a long time ago. I mean, come on. There's something fascinating to

[00:06:05] James M. Scott
Us. He is a fascinating figure. There really is, you know, and we always joke, all my Pacific War nerds, you know, we're always joking about how the European theater tends to overshadow us. I'm always like, it's because we don't have Nazis, man. I mean, people love the Nazis in Hitler, you know? We don't have that, so.

[00:06:21] Michael Shermer
It's those Hugo Boss uniforms that were so cool with the leather jackets and all that. Yeah, it's crazy. But the American theater, I mean, the Pacific theater was really quite striking. I was just rewatching the film Midway, the remake of the old one. And it's so good, just kind of revisiting all that. And so, but just back to your Japan experience was By the 90s, had the Japanese public largely come to grips with their own moral culpability in the war, or is there still debates going on?

[00:06:53] James M. Scott
You know, I mean, I would love to say that as a 23-year-old, I kind of had a grasp of that, but I really, I didn't appreciate it at that age. You know, here I was in a town of about 19,000 people, you know, just kind of, you know, even for me, even though with my interest in it, it just wasn't, you know.

[00:07:09] James M. Scott
I was still teaching. Yeah, everything was going on in the world at that point. So I wasn't paying exclusive attention for those larger debates. One thing I will say is, you know, I do spend a lot of time, I take tourists back to Japan every year. We go visit a lot of these sites. And there is still very much a robust debate inside Japan today that I very much appreciate and see over Japan's role in World War II.

[00:07:32] James M. Scott
And I would compare it kind of just to sort of how the Americans view, depending on where you are, our Civil War. Which is, you know, was it a war about slavery or states' rights? I mean, even though we feel like those things have long been settled, that argument still is debated here, and there's this tug of war in certain circles over that.

[00:07:52] James M. Scott
And you see that, quite frankly, in Japan. And I'll give you an example. If you go to the Yushukan Museum at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, when you first walk into that museum, you'll be stunned to find the locomotive that first crossed over the Thai-Burma Railway. And you're thinking, oh my God, this is a this is an artifact of atrocities, you know?

[00:08:13] James M. Scott
And yet that whole museum is built around this sort of Japan as a victim of the Americans and sort of whitewashing the horror, all the atrocities, the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, all of that just sort of glossed over. And you're like, wow, this is a really warped view of it. But then if you go down to Kyoto, there's another museum, the Kyoto Museum of World Peace, and I always take our guests down there.

[00:08:35] James M. Scott
It tells a completely opposite view of World War II, which it talks about the co-prosperity sphere. It talks about Japan's brutality to its neighbors. It owns up to a lot of that. And so I think depending on where you look in Japan, you'll find history and the way it's told can be a conflict with itself. But I would kind of compare that to where we are.

[00:08:54] James M. Scott
You know, how people debate the Civil War here. At the end of the day, however, you know, so much of Japan these days is focused not so much on World War II as it is looking at what else is going on in the Pacific, specifically with China and the remilitarization of the Pacific and whatnot as well. But that's, for me personally, I mean, I really enjoy going back over there and taking our guests and showing them kind of how history is sort of this tug of war is still playing out over it.

[00:09:21] Michael Shermer
It is, yes. I mean, you have all the facts, but in the case of history, you have the interpretation of those facts, which is really huge, very influential.

[00:09:31] James M. Scott
And I'm emboldened. I'll say I'm emboldened. I mean, all my books have been bought for translation. And I mean, like Black Snow, which came out in 2022 here, came out this past year, it's done very well in Japan. Empire of Ashes will come out next summer in Japan. So I mean, there is a robust market for wanting to read. You know, perspectives from Americans on the war.

[00:09:51] James M. Scott
So, you know, I take that as a positive, too.

[00:09:55] Michael Shermer
That's super positive, yeah. Well... I mean, taking the perspective of the other side is always good, particularly when it comes to war, because it's so easy to moralize about it. That, you know, everybody has a perspective. Hitler had a perspective, even though it seems crazy to even ask, what was his perspective? And Japan had a perspective, right? So let's steelman their argument at the time, let's say early 30s, you know, they've already Beaten Russia in the 1905 war.

[00:10:23] Michael Shermer
They're expanding their empire. Why can't we have an empire? America has an empire. The British have an empire. All these colonies. We want to get in on that. What's wrong with that? And then it just starts to grow from there. So what is their perspective of why they invaded China and then the United States attack on Pearl Harbor and so on? What were they thinking?

[00:10:43] Michael Shermer
Well,

[00:10:44] James M. Scott
You know, at that time period, I mean, it's exactly as you noted. I mean, Japan in the 1920s and 1930s is undergoing a huge fundamental transition as a society. And that it's becoming, even though it's sort of a democracy in name, it's really increasingly those Democratic guardrails are falling away at that point. And a lot of that's being driven by the militarists who are going to spend much of the 20s and 30s consolidating power.

[00:11:10] James M. Scott
And how they're going to go about doing that is sort of, it's a playbook right out of any autocrats, sort of a hand guide, or a guidebook there, which is, you know, you go after the media. You force the consolidation of your newspapers. You create a propaganda arm. In this case, it was Domei, which was their wire service, so that you have a way to sort of put out the government's spin on things.

[00:11:31] James M. Scott
You go after universities and intellectuals. You rewrite the curriculum for your your grade school kids. You start putting military officers in schools. You go after, Japan was really, I mean, they even went after the toy industry, for example, and trying to get rid of Western influences all the way into toys and literature. Film, arts, all of it. And so you really see the reshaping of Japanese society around this nationalistic viewpoint of, you know, we're sort of the, you know, this superior nation, you know, we're better than our neighbors and our rivals and whatnot.

[00:12:07] James M. Scott
And of course, a big component of that is political violence, which is, you know, you go after, you know, you use violence as a tool to silence dissidents and say they created a thought police and assassinations were big. I mean, the prime minister at the end of the war, Kantaro Suzuki, literally barely survived an assassination in the 1930s. He still carries a bullet inside him from that attempt.

[00:12:29] James M. Scott
Hirohito lived under the threat of assassination. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, one of Japan's greatest admirals and really thinkers in naval warfare. His top aides all slept armed because they were convinced somebody was going to come kill him too. So it really was just kind of this, you know, it's a very difficult time in Japanese history. And it really sets the road, sets Japan on the path to eventual war.

[00:12:54] James M. Scott
Because what happens is, you know, as it's sort of this nationalistic sort of tide is rising, you do start hearing this. Well, the Americans have the Philippines and the British have Singapore and Japan very much needed Raw materials from its neighbors. People forget it's a materially bankrupt nation. I mean, Japan is only self-sufficient in a handful of industries. And let's be honest, there are industries that nobody really needs.

[00:13:17] James M. Scott
I mean, sulfur, fish oil, silk. I mean, you know, what you want to be self-sufficient in is oil, food, fuel. They have none of that. Rubber. And so what Japan, as it's building out its military and its population's growing, it's realizing they've got to look elsewhere for these needs. And so rather than buy them, they're going to go take them. And when you have a rising military that wants to sort of sow its oats, test out its mettle, go after it, all of that sort of builds into the recipe that's going to lead to the outbreak of the war.

[00:13:51] James M. Scott
Now, people often forget, you know, World War II in Asia starts much earlier than 1941. It goes all the way back to 1931. We tend to look at when we started it, you know, we started in it in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese had been at war for a decade already at that point.

[00:14:07] Michael Shermer
At that decision point, we're going to take it rather than trade for it and just buy it. Was that the decision of militarists? They just thought a different way rather than a capitalist economy?

[00:14:20] James M. Scott
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the idea was, you know, they really, what they really needed, in addition to food stuff, was they really needed oil. They needed the raw materials for their military. And the dominant of that, of course, was oil. And that's why they needed the Dutch East Indies. And so, for the Japanese, and again, they're looking, you know, they're seeing, you know, everybody else around them has colonies, and they're like, well, you know what?

[00:14:42] James M. Scott
We're going to go do the exact same thing. And this is sort of set against the backdrop of the rise of Germany in Europe and quite frankly, Japanese leaders saw opportunity in that.

[00:14:52] Michael Shermer
In other words, is somebody doing a cost benefit analysis like, yeah, we could buy it and this is what we'll spend to get all the oil and rubber and whatnot that we need. Or we could just... Go take it by colonizing this area, which we're going to need the military for. And that'll cost us some lives and machinery or whatever, but it's better to do it that way then.

[00:15:12] Michael Shermer
Or is it less sort of a risk-benefit calculation than that, you know, we're militarists and this is what we do?

[00:15:21] James M. Scott
Probably the latter, I would say. You know, it's more like, you know what, we want these territories, we need these resources, we will be, you know, and then Japan was not a really good manager of the possessions that it took. If you look at how they mismanaged the Philippines and other places, I mean, they kind of came in and sort of pillaged everything they want, and then sort of set up puppet governments in ways to kind of run things, which often ended up with disastrous consequences.

[00:15:47] James M. Scott
I mean, the Philippines, by the end of the war, literally facing mass starvation, which is pretty difficult to understand when you think that Pretty much everything will grow in the Philippines. I mean, it's hot. It's sunny. They get plenty of rainfall. You know, things will grow, and yet they so mismanaged the economy there that they nearly created a humanitarian catastrophe. And you see that elsewhere in areas that Japan controls.

[00:16:09] James M. Scott
They just simply weren't interested in managing the territories that they seized. They wanted the resources, and that was it.

[00:16:18] Michael Shermer
Right. And then who are these militarists that threaten Hirohito and Yamamoto and so on? Do we know them?

[00:16:25] James M. Scott
Yeah, it's largely coming from the army. It's Hideki Tojo and a lot of his senior aides surrounding him at that point. Of course, Tojo is going to be sort of the initial architect of a lot of this, the war minister, the prime minister. I mean, he's going to be the dominant force really leading during that time period. But it's largely going to be more the army.

[00:16:44] James M. Scott
Japan is a Pretty big reputation or pretty big, so we look back on historically as having sort of this infighting between the Navy and the Army or whatnot. But it was very much the Army that had much more of the imperialistic designs on things. But that's who's driving a lot of

[00:17:01] Michael Shermer
This foreign policy. Yeah. And so they just basically threatened Hirohito or whoever and said, this is what we want. And if you don't go along with it...

[00:17:11] James M. Scott
Yeah, he's a weak figure. He's come into power as a monarch in the 1920s. His reign has been set alongside his consolidation of power by the military. Of course, he's seen the violence that has happened there. The emperor really has a weird role in Japanese society in that he's a figurehead Uh, in a lot of ways, he's sort of, even though he's at the center of cultural, political, and spiritual life in Japan, he sort of governs by his presence.

[00:17:44] James M. Scott
And by that, I mean a lot of times, you know, he will go in and sit on a meeting and he'll be briefed on everything and then he just simply leaves. He's not, and that is sort of considered his, his blessing. And, you know, he doesn't have this active role like you would see like a general or an admiral would have. Uh, but he does, the outbreak of the war, he is required to actually give his blessing to the outbreak of the war.

[00:18:05] James M. Scott
And he's very alarmed in 1941 when they're preparing for the attack in the United States about how successful this is going to be. And he's assured, yeah, that basically he doesn't need to worry about it, but he's going to delay any real decision making on this for the better part of about a month. And of course, at that point, he's getting a lot of pressure from the militarist about, you need to kind of hurry up and, you know, we got to get this thing going or whatnot.

[00:18:28] James M. Scott
So he eventually is going to cave. And I think that's what you're going to see for Hirohito is he kind of waffles a lot throughout. And it's not until 1945 when, you know, Japan is really, by that point, the war has very much turned against it. Its cities are burning. You know, the submarine blockade has effectively starved it of its natural resources.

[00:18:49] James M. Scott
And of course, then the Americans are building up to the atomic bomb that he's going to have to sort of rise to the occasion and intervene in the political process there to push Japan on the path to surrender.

[00:19:02] Michael Shermer
Yeah, but there's that, I mean, it took him a long time, right? So much of the moral debate about, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done this or that or whatever. It turns on the fact that he just kind of didn't stand up to the militarists for the longest time. I mean, things are pretty catastrophic by 44. It was pretty clear they were going to lose.

[00:19:22] Michael Shermer
I mean, anybody could say that. And is the militarists are just like, oh, fuck it. We're just going to Go down in flames with everybody else and that's the way, like Hitler, right? You know, Hitler generals are like, you know, we're losing. We got to just stop and make peace. He's like, no, we're going to take it down.

[00:19:38] James M. Scott
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, really the big turning point is the fall of the Mariana Islands in the summer of 44. I think at that point, it really, because the Mariana Islands were, and that's Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. Of course, Guam had been an American Possession from the Spanish-American War, but the Japanese had had Saipan and Tinian after the end of World War I.

[00:19:58] James M. Scott
And these were used extensively for Japanese sugarcane production. And so they were very commonly known throughout Japanese society as Japanese possessions. And so the loss of those islands in the summer of 44 really kind of breaks through, not just for Japanese military leaders, you know, but it really breaks through from the Japanese citizenry at that point that like, oh, wow, the allies are getting close.

[00:20:23] James M. Scott
And the Japanese leaders really understood that the fall of the Mariana Islands put the Japanese homeland at great risk to American bombing. All you had to do was look at Europe and see what happened in Hamburg in July of 1943, look at what happened at Dresden in early 45, and look at the whole campaign, really, against Berlin, and to understand where this was headed.

[00:20:43] James M. Scott
And the Japanese military leaders very much understood it. In fact, one of Hirohito's top aides, literally after the fall of Saipan, said, look, told the [emperor/empress unclear], he said, hell is upon us. And he was right. And of course, but at that point, you know, 44 is really when you see its shift. Americans then are going to sort of move in for building up the bases in the Mariana Islands.

[00:21:04] James M. Scott
They're going to start bombing the Japanese homeland in late 44. Not going to be until March of 45 when the fire raids are really going to move into overdrive and start burning Japanese cities. Remember, what doesn't get enough attention either is just how effective America's submarine blockade was with the Japanese home islands. And that by cutting off all those raw materials that they had really robbed the Japanese of food, medicine, basic supplies, raw materials that they needed.

[00:21:35] James M. Scott
So, I mean, we tend to look at the atomic bombs and the firebombing sort of without appreciating as much how successful the Navy's Uh, undersea war was, and also the mining campaign. So you're really just seeing Japan just getting, you know, the one-two punch coming from the Air Force and the Navy. Uh, and that begins in 44. By early 45, Hirohito begins to start to assert himself, but he's really living under the fear of the military.

[00:22:01] James M. Scott
At that point, so what he does though, is he begins sort of polling former senior political figures, former prime ministers. It's a body called the Jushin, which is, it's basically like an ex officio former cabinet that he can seek out. And in early 1945, he starts asking them, what do you think we should do about the war? What's your take on it?

[00:22:21] James M. Scott
And basically everybody comes back and says, keep fighting, keep fighting. Except one guy, Prince Konoe, he's like, we're doomed. But in general, He's getting urged to continue to fight, even though his instincts are telling him, this is bad, this is real bad. And of course, that's only going to build up more and more. But again, he's not a strong figure. And so pushing back against the military is going to come with potentially dangerous consequences.

[00:22:45] James M. Scott
So he's very cagey in how he operates. And it's not really until June of 45 when the military effectively tries to force Japan down the path of a of a ground battle with the Americans that he's going to really step up at that point.

[00:23:01] Michael Shermer
And remind us, what did the Japanese citizens think of Hirohito? There's something about he was a deity or a godlike figure, not just a politician.

[00:23:11] James M. Scott
Yeah. Unlike when you look at Prince Harry and Prince William, who are always in the tabloids and everybody knows him. The Emperor, I remember, this was the era when most people had never heard his voice. You know, he was sort of an enigma. He was considered a deity, but he was Other than maybe seeing him on horseback in a newspaper photograph, they would have had no contact with him whatsoever.

[00:23:37] James M. Scott
Yet people would bow down in the direction of the Imperial Palace. He didn't do public events like a lot of monarchies do today. There were no ribbon cuttings at your new grocery store, things like that. I mean, he largely lived behind the palace walls. It kind of functioned in private like that. So he was an enigma to a lot of people. But his role center of Japanese life is what made him very valuable, particularly to the Americans at the end of the war, because he was this one central unifying figure that if the Americans could somehow co-opt him into helping us, could prevent this from ending up in a worse situation than it otherwise might

[00:24:19] James M. Scott
Have. So, the fate of the emperor becomes a very big debate inside Washington in 1945.

[00:24:24] Michael Shermer
In terms of the concept of unconditional surrender?

[00:24:29] James M. Scott
Exactly. Because, you know, at the Americans, there were people inside the American State Department, for example, that felt Hirohito was equally as guilty as the military, and that he should suffer the same fate as His military war crimes trials, et cetera, his monarchy should be overthrown. But there were others inside there, particularly Joseph Grew, the America's longtime ambassador to Japan, who recognized that the role of the emperor could be harnessed.

[00:24:53] James M. Scott
And one of the big fears for the Americans was that, you know, the Japanese don't really understand surrender. They've never done it. Like, we knew the Germans understood surrender. They had already surrendered it in World War I. Like, we knew as a society, they knew how to lay down their arms. Japanese didn't, we didn't have a track record with them. And throughout the Pacific War, you don't really see any organized mass surrender anywhere.

[00:25:12] James M. Scott
They just fight to the death. You know, you look at islands like Tarawa, it's 99.7% kill rates. And so we were really worried that Japan still had five million men under arms. Like, all right, what if they don't surrender? Like, what if even though we demand it, what if they end up in a guerrilla war situation? This could go on through the 1940s and the 1950s.

[00:25:31] James M. Scott
But Hirohito could unlock the potential to force the Japanese people to lay down their arms because his role at the center of Japanese life meant people had to follow his orders. And it also gave him power over the militarists, which he didn't realize until very late. But at the same time, the militarists who'd been out there claiming they were fighting all along for the emperor, how could they disobey his orders as well?

[00:25:55] James M. Scott
So he kind of realizes his own power in 1945 there. But the Americans are having a debate over how we can harness his power as well.

[00:26:04] Michael Shermer
Interesting. Yeah, I'm always interested in like a game theory analysis of why citizens don't stand up to their corrupt governments. And, you know, there's a concept called belling the cat, where the mice all get together one day and decide it would be good if we had a bell around the cat so we could hear him coming. But the problem is, is who's going to bell the cat?

[00:26:26] Michael Shermer
Right? Because whoever's going to do it is probably going to be eaten. So, you know, why don't the Russian citizens today stand up to Putin because of Ukraine? Well, we can see what happens to people that stand up to Putin. They get killed. So the average citizen is like, I'm just going to keep my head down and my mouth shut because this is not good.

[00:26:44] Michael Shermer
Right. So we're mass bombing German cities, you know, and part of the justification, I guess, was, you know, well, maybe the German citizens will rise up against Hitler. How are they going to do that? Right? They're going to be sent off to the concentration camps or whatever. And so I assume something like that with Japan, the average Japanese citizen, what are they going to do to stop the militarists?

[00:27:06] Michael Shermer
And

[00:27:06] James M. Scott
It's important to note too that life in Japan at that point was really awful for the public. You know, the combination of the fire raids, even backing up even before the fire raids, the submarine blockade had so starved Japan of natural resources. And Japan being an industrial bankrupt nation as far as resources, it already basically forced everybody to turn over every piece of metal that you had, whether it was a gold tooth or even family diamonds that could be used for radio.

[00:27:39] James M. Scott
So, I mean, everybody had surrendered everything of value that could go to the war. Japan had lost all of its ability to import food, for the most part. It was facing a disastrous rice harvest in 1945, 1946. The average person was surviving off about 1,600 calories a day. It had a rampant black market. New mothers were so malnourished that they couldn't produce breast milk, so they were having to experiment with using radish juice for newborns.

[00:28:10] James M. Scott
Turnip juices and things like that. Typically, a person was spending about five hours a day just figuring out where their next meal was coming from. Then when the city started burning down, you saw a mass exodus of about 10 million Japanese people leaving cities and moving to the countryside, which further burdens the rural populations. There's a great diary I found from one of the Philippine diplomats that was in Tokyo.

[00:28:34] James M. Scott
He said, basically, the average Japanese person Has their head down, figuring out where their next meal is coming from, while this tidal wave of war is about to wash right over them. And I think that's really probably one of the most accurate analysis of what was going on there is like, you can't stand up to your government when you're hungry and you're trying to figure out where you're going to eat or how are you going to feed your newborn?

[00:28:56] James M. Scott
Or if you don't have enough firewood, in Tokyo, had a notoriously awfully cold winter and 45. You know, there are people chopping out wood in parks. They're burning their furniture. I mean, it's just daily life is insufferable. How are you gonna revolt when you're just trying to figure out how to get fed? And so I think that's a big part of it as well.

[00:29:16] James M. Scott
Where

[00:29:16] Michael Shermer
There are no people in the military, leaders who could look around and go, this is horrible what we're doing to our citizens. We need to turn this thing around.

[00:29:26] James M. Scott
There was some of that, but not publicly. And what you see is in some of the diaries, some of the senior leaders are like, yeah, it's getting pretty bad in here. And you did begin, and there were beginnings to be grumblings that people might turn against the government and or the monarchy because of this. The reality is Japanese people in general aren't Americans, we're a very diverse bunch.

[00:29:47] James M. Scott
We love to take to the streets, protest. We're a feisty bunch of people. The Japanese had come out of feudalism only 80 years before that. Japan was a relatively new democracy. Literally, for hundreds and hundreds of years, life and death was controlled by warlords. And so if culturally they weren't at a point where they were comfortable sort of doing the types of protests and things like that, that you might otherwise think of.

[00:30:15] James M. Scott
I mean, it just wasn't ingrained in who they were at that point as a society, because you still have people who'd grown up in feudal era that were still alive at that point, you know? And so they just... It wasn't in them to do it at that point. You had societal issues, cultural issues, hunger issues, all these things at work here. I've spent a lot of time going through the diaries and doing interviews with people who had survived during that time period.

[00:30:40] James M. Scott
One of the things that really comes across is just how difficult life was. One of the best quotes I had, I interviewed this guy, he was 12 years old at the time of the war, and he and his family's house burned down in Tokyo. They lived in the ashes with 300,000 other people in the ruins in Tokyo. He said, so we lived like stray dogs, trying to, hunting through ashes for food, for canned goods that had been left behind.

[00:31:02] James M. Scott
I mean, that image of living like stray dogs. And that's how tough life had gotten in Japan.

[00:31:09] Michael Shermer
Okay, so up until December 7th, 1941, Japan was pretty successful at militarizing and colonizing and so forth. What made them decide we need to attack America?

[00:31:22] James M. Scott
Well, they were looking to make the big expansionist push at that point. And so the Japanese were really, their big goal all along was the Dutch East Indies, which today we know that was Indonesia. That's where all the oil is. And so they knew that the Americans, that we had the Asiatic fleet, which was parked in the Philippines. And we basically kept it over there to help out with American commercial interest for our colony there.

[00:31:47] James M. Scott
And of course, we'd already begun to put the Philippines on a path to independence. You know, they were going to get their independence in July of 1946. We were helping to build up their military at that point. But we, even though our forces there weren't tremendous, they were obstacle. And the Japanese effectively wanted us out of the way so that they could Capture the territories they wanted.

[00:32:07] James M. Scott
And then they banked that the American public, they really felt that our democracy would work against us in a war. And that the American public would never get on board with a very costly war in terms of blood and lives as well as money on the opposite side of the Pacific. And so that eventually the Americans would get sick of this. They would allow the Japanese to settle and the Japanese would get to keep the territories that they wanted and needed.

[00:32:32] James M. Scott
And of course, all that goes out the window in early 1943 when Roosevelt is at Casablanca and he announces the world that America will accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. And of course, he makes the play back to Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. But at that point, Japan's whole plan effectively was not really to win the war, but to just Capture what it wanted and then hope America would let them keep it.

[00:32:56] James M. Scott
That's effectively what their military strategy came down to, which is a terribly dumb idea. The challenge of the Japanese is they had a fully mobilized economy at the outbreak of the war. They had no spare. Everybody that was working age was working.

[00:33:17] James M. Scott
They'd stockpiled in some cases about 18 months worth of supplies they needed. They had no real pipeline once all that would get shut off to be able to bring in these kinds of supplies. They really had no excess capacity in their economy and their labor force to make up for moving into a wartime economy. Where that's going to become really, really vital is when you start losing troops overseas.

[00:33:43] James M. Scott
You've got to replace those troops. Just build those warships and those planes and whatnot. Well, if you don't have any extra human bodies, it's really hard to replace them. If you don't have any raw materials coming in, you can't build the things you need. The Japanese economy, it wasn't built for war at that time. It was already too taut. The American economy had a lot of flexibility to it.

[00:34:05] James M. Scott
We would ultimately end up enlisting 16 million men and women. We would have bond drives. You cannot imagine that would raise more money. We would switch our automotive industries into building planes. We had the industrial capacity to do that in part, too, because we were also the world's largest oil supplier at that point. So we had unlimited fuel. And so, you know, we just, it's a, I mean, at the end of the day, wars inherently turn on money.

[00:34:31] James M. Scott
And this one's no different.

[00:34:33] Michael Shermer
I love those analysis of the American Civil War where, you know, by I don't know, the second year or so, it was clear that the northern industrial power was so much greater than that of the south, they were going to lose, inevitably. Just by raw materials, by men, by everything. Yeah, exactly. All right, so at the end of the day, on December 7th, there's that famous quote from Yamamoto where he's congratulated and he says, I fear we've woken a sleeping giant.

[00:35:01] Michael Shermer
So he kind of knew, because he went to Harvard, right? I mean, he toured America. He knew what our capacity was. So he was just hoping for a draw. And like you said, we would just, you know, like cave at some point and not bother with him. So let's go to the American front. What changed in the American psyche to go from, you know, just an isolationism, America first, to what ended up doing?

[00:35:24] James M. Scott
Well, I'll tell you, it's 110 minutes at Pearl Harbor changed everything. And that's no exaggeration. That's one of the most consequential 110 minutes in American history, is that attack on Pearl Harbor. Most Americans at that time could not have found Pearl Harbor on a map. A lot of them probably couldn't find it today.

[00:35:43] James M. Scott
But that attack in the carnage that followed, in those images broadcast around the world of capsized battleships, when I just awakened the American public. And of course, remember Pearl Harbor would come one of these driving slogans throughout the war. And he saw immediately after that. I mean, there was real fear in some circles in the United States that, you know, America was really far behind the eight ball at this point.

[00:36:06] James M. Scott
I mean, our military ranked 19th in the world. We were sandwiched between Bulgaria and Portugal. I mean, we had a big learning curve, or not even a learning curve, just a money curve that we were going to have to overcome. And we would spend much of 1942 doing that. You had to enlist and train troops. You had to switch your economy over and all that.

[00:36:27] James M. Scott
And so the American public was very quickly on board after the attack on Pearl Harbor. I mean, you immediately saw massive lines outside of a Recruitment centers and whatnot. You saw the bond drives really beginning to go in earnest. One of my favorite anecdotes of this really is Jimmy Doolittle. You're reading that book right now. Jimmy Doolittle flies this amazing mission against Tokyo in April of 1942.

[00:36:50] James M. Scott
It's literally just four months after the war breaks out. When he comes back, they start trying to use the Doolittle raid to make money. Doolittle signed a war bond poster. And that war bond poster with his signature went for like $4 million.

[00:37:04] Michael Shermer
Wow.

[00:37:04] James M. Scott
And that's in 1942. I mean, that's like $50 million today for a signed poster.

[00:37:10] Michael Shermer
For a signature.

[00:37:11] James M. Scott
Yes. I mean, like, God, I mean, but that shows you the fervor. I mean, a town out in like Missouri renamed itself Doolittle in his honor. I mean, like, you can go today to Doolittle, Missouri. I think it's Missouri. I'm pretty sure it is, yeah. But it's like that just kind of shows you where the American public was. And it's true. I mean, you know, we did have the industrial output here.

[00:37:33] James M. Scott
We were about half the size. We already had 150 million Americans. But we had the raw materials. We had the fuel that we needed. We had the human power that we needed. And literally the mobilization of this country. It's unlike anything else. One of the stats I always talk about in a lot of is Roosevelt in 1944, when he does the State of the Union, he talks about how 96 cents of every federal dollar spent was going to war.

[00:37:59] James M. Scott
96 cents, and it's either the war or the debt service. It's an astonishing mobilization of American money and industry to fight a war.

[00:38:11] Michael Shermer
Yeah, some of those numbers you see, like how many B-17s were built or how many tanks were built. I mean, it's like tens of thousands of B-17s. Like, what?

[00:38:19] James M. Scott
Yeah, I think we built, I think we like the B-25, we built like 10,000 of them. I mean, the B-29, which I think is one of the most, I wrote about that in one of my other books, you know, we built 4,000 of them and the latter days of the war. I mean, that was the most expensive weapon system of the war.

[00:38:34] James M. Scott
Figure out how to build that plane. It was a landmark plane.

[00:38:37] Michael Shermer
Right. Didn't it cost more than the Manhattan Project?

[00:38:40] James M. Scott
Yeah, $3.7 billion. I mean, you know, the atomic bomb project was only $2 billion, you know, but it was the first hemispheric bomber. It was the first pressurized military plane. You know, it could bridge the great distances of the Pacific because people won't realize the Pacific. It's huge. I mean, it's such a big body of water. You can fit every continent on the planet just in the Pacific Ocean.

[00:38:59] James M. Scott
And so when you're fighting a war across those kind of expanses, you need a plane that can cover them and we take it for granted today. I mean like just last week I flew to Scotland for three days for a quick work assignment. You know back then you didn't do that. There was like jump on a jet and go [unclear] you know everything had a propeller I mean it was just the distances are so tremendous.

[00:39:19] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Okay, so on the home front, I love that you opened your prologue with, I never believed he'd die until he did. Right. I mean, for Americans, I guess Roosevelt seemed almost like our Hirohito, almost a deified type leader we've always known, and he'll just always be here, and then he's not.

[00:39:35] James M. Scott
Yeah. Now, you know, the thing about Roosevelt too, he served 4,400 days in office. Like, if you were in the seventh grade, like, you would have never known life without FDR, your leader. I mean, think of how astonishing that is. This guy's been around for that long. And, you know, he had taken America from 1933, during the bank crisis, when banks are collapsing, through the Great Depression, through the Dust Bowl, through the isolationist stuff.

[00:40:02] James M. Scott
I mean, all the way, you know, through all this whole period, the outbreak of the war, the fighting of the war.

[00:40:11] James M. Scott
Almost to the end of the war, before he dies. It's like an astonishing amount of work and time and everything else that had gone into that for him, and then he dies. But you know, and I feel like I've spent 20 years writing about World War II, and I really feel like I know him. Because I've spent so much time reading about him, going through his papers, going through the files and whatnot, that you kind of get a sense of, and then so when writing that scene in Empire of Ashes, it was a it's kind of a tearful moment because I felt like I had been with FDR for decades now as a historian and as

[00:40:41] James M. Scott
A writer, and then here we were writing the scene when he goes.

[00:40:46] Michael Shermer
Well, but even by, say, late 43 or so, I mean, he's looking pretty ill, right? I guess that's the cardiovascular circulation through his skin, so his skin is sort of hanging off his face. I mean, surely his doctors must have said, okay, this is not looking good. We got to turn this guy around. There he is still smoking. But, you know, it's a different, I guess it's a different world, right?

[00:41:07] Michael Shermer
They just, I don't know.

[00:41:09] James M. Scott
He looked terrible. You go back and look at those photos and he looks like a ghost. I mean, the deep circles under his eyes, I mean, his coloring, even in black and white photos, you can see how bad his coloring is. And, you know, everybody, you read the diaries of the men who served with him and the women who served with him, and they could tell he was in bad shape.

[00:41:26] James M. Scott
And the whole reason, he'd basically gone and spent time recovering here in South Carolina up at Baruch Plantation in 44. He was back down in Georgia at Warm Springs in 45. I mean, polio, he had done a number on him. He had heart disease. I mean, you name it. He was just, all his systems were crashing. And essentially when you look at him and Truman together, because they were very comparable in age, and Truman just looks like a puppy.

[00:41:54] James M. Scott
I mean, just fit, smiling, good color, you know full energy. And then, you know Truman just looks like an old hound dog who's just about to be you know put out the pasture.

[00:42:05] Michael Shermer
So for Roosevelt was Truman just a token vice president. He's not going to do anything, and I'm going to make it to the end of the war. And so I don't need to inform him of much of what we're doing.

[00:42:15] James M. Scott
Yeah, I think, you know, there was no great relationship between these two guys at all. I mean, Truman was nobody's first choice to be his vice president. He was a politically expedient solution to a democratic problem in the 1944 election. And that everybody knew FDR likely was going to die in his next term. That he was, he just looked so bad. I mean, he couldn't even campaign on the campaign trail in 1944.

[00:42:38] James M. Scott
But FDR refused to kind of admit that personally. And so, but he and, you know, FDR supported Truman's opponent in his previous Senate race. He originally, you know, Henry Wallace had been as an initial vice president. Nobody liked Wallace. He was considered too liberal and too out there. I mean, he dabbled in mysticism. He played with boomerangs. And he just, they thought he's, the American public's not going to get behind this guy anymore.

[00:43:05] James M. Scott
Roosevelt really liked Jimmy Byrnes, who was a close aide of his. Byrnes was a very experienced Washington hand, very political animal, but also had a lot of baggage. He was a segregationist. He was from South Carolina. He was just not going to be able to win over minorities. They're kind of going down the list, and somebody's like, well, what about Harry Truman?

[00:43:24] James M. Scott
He's this farmer from Missouri. He's a veteran from World War I. He ticks all these boxes that you need for different constituencies, and they're like, that'll work. And so they basically called him the Missouri Compromise. So he comes on board. He has to do all the campaigning by himself, because FDR-

[00:43:42] Michael Shermer
He was a haberdasher, right?

[00:43:44] James M. Scott
Yeah, he was a failed haberdasher. I'm not because of his own instincts. The market conditions did, but yeah. And I love Truman, because when you see him, he's always so dapper. He loved two-toned shoes and bow ties. I mean, he was just, you know, always just a sharp individual, smartly dressed, [unclear]. But he, you know, there was no love between these two guys.

[00:44:02] James M. Scott
You know, FDR, and it wasn't just Truman. FDR kept everybody out. of the loop. I mean, he never engaged the State Department. He did everything himself from the White House. And of course, he'd never bothered to bring Truman up to speed during the 82 days he was Vice President. And of course, all that comes home to haunt Truman when FDR dies in April of 45.

[00:44:22] James M. Scott
Because he basically comes in completely blind to what's been going on. Doesn't even know the Manhattan Project exists, other than there's some secret project out there. So he's got to get caught up on everything.

[00:44:32] Michael Shermer
This is one of my favorite conspiracy theories. When you're elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on. And you're like, oh no, I said I was going to pull the troops out of here and I was going to stop this war. Yeah, yeah, they all say that. But you can't do it because of this, right?

[00:44:47] Michael Shermer
So I'm picturing Truman, they take him in the back room and they go, okay, here's this Manhattan project and here's what's happening in Japan. And he's like, oh.

[00:44:56] James M. Scott
That's exactly what they did, basically, yeah. About 12 days later, Stimson comes to see him and brings Leslie Groves, and he's like, so we got this thing going on. And literally in an hour, they kind of lay it out for him, like, we're about to have this amazing new weapon, and here's everything you need to know on it, and not just what the bomb will do, but how it's going to potentially up in post-war society, and we're going to need to have an agency that controls this internationally.

[00:45:22] James M. Scott
And it's a lot to swallow for anybody, particularly when Germany's about to collapse. You've got the war in Japan, potentially going on. His aides were telling him up to 18 more months. You've got the Iron Curtain coming down in Europe. He's never met Stalin. He's never met Churchill.

[00:45:39] James M. Scott
He's got a lot to get caught up on.

[00:45:42] Michael Shermer
But Truman did have a backbone, a real spine. He was a feisty character once he had the power.

[00:45:52] Michael Shermer
Truman

[00:45:52] James M. Scott
Was kind of, I think, marginalized in a lot of circles. People didn't give him the credit he was due. He was a small town rural guy from Missouri, never went to college. Not because he wasn't bright, but because his parents didn't have the money. He spent his first decade after high school working on his family's farm. And I'll tell you, that education was probably more valuable than four years at any school that there was.

[00:46:11] James M. Scott
He got up before dawn every day, he milked cows, he had to learn how to castrate hogs, he had barnyard animals fall on him, he had to re-shingle. You know, Barnes, I mean, he walked behind a plow. I mean, it was like it's hard, difficult work, but it allowed him to think, and it got him in tune with what, you know, the rural population of America, which was much larger back then than it is today, Really was understanding and felt their needs.

[00:46:34] James M. Scott
And I think that work ethic to maintain a small farm is what the work ethic he then applied. in order to getting caught up to speed on everything in 1945. He was the first one in the office when he was in the Senate. He was one of the first people in every day at the White House. He had no problem staying late.

[00:46:50] James M. Scott
He literally carried briefing books home with him every night. He had dinners with people to educate him, like his senior aides. He met with people. I mean, he was a tenacious, tireless worker, and that's what it took.

[00:47:02] Michael Shermer
But the decision to use the bomb was he really was his, ultimately, right?

[00:47:07] James M. Scott
Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when people try to argue, well, the bomb already, you know, it was going to be used regardless of whether Truman wanted to or not. I mean, that's just a failure to understand how the governance in this country works. I mean, he's the commander in chief, he's the president. If he did not want to use the bomb, he could have said no.

[00:47:21] James M. Scott
In fact, after the second bomb's dropped, he's put out orders and he said no more bombs without my express approval. So, he was very much in control of that. The bigger question is, why would he have not used it? The Japanese were having, despite having burned 64 of their cities, were still hell-bent on fighting. The bomb was very much a political weapon.

[00:47:41] James M. Scott
We were trying to shock the Japanese into surrendering before we had to invade. Truman had already greenlit the invasion of Kyushu for that fall. I mean, the atomic bomb in a lot of ways was a political Hail Mary. With way to kind of rattle the Japanese and hopefully bring them to their senses. So the idea that all this money, time, and energy would have gone into it and it would not be used is just kind of a failure to appreciate the reality of the situation in 1945.

[00:48:08] Michael Shermer
Did the administration understand how, you know, I don't know, suicidally tenacious the Japanese militarists were and that they were not going to be shocked into this?

[00:48:20] James M. Scott
Yeah, there was real fear. I mean, George Marshall really worried that, in fact, he said at the time, he said, you know, we burned Tokyo in March 1945. We killed 100,000 people. They didn't surrender. How is one bomb going to be any different than that? You know, the first bombs dropped on Hiroshima and August 6th rolls on August 7th, August 7th rolls on August 8th.

[00:48:38] James M. Scott
You know, we don't see any white flags coming up across the Pacific. It was real fear that, hey, you know what? Maybe this thing didn't work. Maybe our hopes were misplaced in this atomic bomb. Maybe we are headed for an invasion. And so, you know, it's not until after Nagasaki, really, quite frankly, that the Japanese do, in fact, come to their senses.

[00:48:54] James M. Scott
In fact, I wrote a piece recently for Time Magazine all about the importance of the Nagasaki bomb and how it's often overlooked. You know, people, when they go to visit Japan, they don't go to Nagasaki. They ultimately go down to Hiroshima, you know. But the Nagasaki bomb is far more important at convincing the Japanese that, hey, if the Americans are dropping these things every 75 hours.

[00:49:16] James M. Scott
The jig is really up. We've got to find a way out of this war.

[00:49:20] Michael Shermer
And when you say they, you mean these militarists that are still holding sway over Hirohito.

[00:49:25] James M. Scott
Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, you had, basically, Japan had a war council. You had three, six members, and you had three members basically committed to fighting the death, and you had three that wanted peace. And so it's after the Nagasaki bomb, finally when Prime Minister Suzuki says to Hirohito, he says, look, we're split. What do we do? And normally what should have happened at that point is the Japanese government should have broken down and had to reform, but that would have taken too much time.

[00:49:52] James M. Scott
And at that point Hirohito intervenes and he says, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, it's time for us to bear the unbearable and we have to surrender. At that point, he really cast the tie-breaking vote. I mean, how are the militarists who argued for years that they fought in the name of the emperor, how are they going to do opposite what the emperor wants?

[00:50:10] James M. Scott
And so at that point, you know, he really intervenes the political process to put Japan on that path to surrender. Next few days, are going to be very tumultuous, very tenuous, perilous even. But it's an important path that Hirohito then puts Japan on to bring it into the war.

[00:50:27] Michael Shermer
So you often hear the argument against that, that in between the two bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the declaration of war by the Russians against Japan. And maybe that was enough to Do it, and we didn't need Nagasaki. How do you respond to that?

[00:50:43] James M. Scott
Not true. Not true. Yeah, no, and that's one of those red herrings that's been out there. I mean, the reality is the Japanese knew the Russians were coming into the war. The Russians in the Japanese had a neutrality agreement that they signed in April of 1941. And in April of 1945, the Russians told the Japanese, we're not going to re-opt this thing.

[00:51:03] James M. Scott
So basically, we're communicating to them that, hey, we're coming into the war. And they had a there was a clause in that agreement that said if either side pulls out, you agree not to invade for a year. But then that then requires the Japanese to be thinking that Stalin's going to live up to that, which is not necessarily something you want to trust 100%.

[00:51:22] James M. Scott
After that, not only that, the Japanese then when Hirohito starts pushing for Japan to start looking for a diplomatic solution out. One of the instincts is let's go to the Russians, get the Russians to help us out. Stalin has no interest. He rebuffs Japanese efforts to even send an envoy over there. Japan's ambassador to Russia is cabling back that the Russians don't want to help us out.

[00:51:44] James M. Scott
They're likely in bed with the allies at this. And, of course, soon thereafter, all you had to do was pick up a newspaper and you would see Stalin, Churchill, and Truman all together at Potsdam. So, talking about the end of the war.

[00:51:59] James M. Scott
Everything was pointing to the Russians coming into the war. I mean, you would have had to be blind not to have understood that's where the things were headed. And of course, on top of that, we were supplying the Russians through ships, tuna fish, underwear, everything, ships after ship after ship. The Japanese saw all that. I mean, they knew what was going on.

[00:52:18] James M. Scott
So does the Russian entry in the war add pressure to the Japanese? Certainly. It absolutely does. I mean, anytime you have an army invading you, you're suddenly fighting it. You know, the Russians were fighting the Japanese on mainland China. Americans were bombing cities in Japan. The Americans were a far greater threat by any stretch of it.

[00:52:39] Michael Shermer
But your point is that, and they still didn't surrender.

[00:52:43] James M. Scott
Yeah. So what happens is the Russians come in, Hirohito realizes after August 6th, we got to surrender. Now, because of the atomic bomb, and it's astonishing, about how the Japanese system works, they basically couldn't get together until August 8th, or really even August 9th, to get together to have a meeting in the Big Six. And so at that point, they have a better understanding of what has happened in Hiroshima.

[00:53:06] James M. Scott
They know it's an atomic bomb. They know how bad the damage is. They're meeting on the 9th when they get word that the Russians have invaded, and then they get word too about Nagasaki. And of course, it's really, Nagasaki is the dominant threat. Because one of the things that the militarists have been holding out for is they've been saying, you know, Everybody knew about atomic energy at that point.

[00:53:26] James M. Scott
Atomic energy was much like AI is today. I mean, you had scientists in every country were pushing for it. Everybody was desperate to unlock the power at the heart of the atom. There was talk about how we could power warships with these cities one day as well as creating a bomb. Everybody knew about it. The Russians also knew, the Japanese also knew how expensive and difficult it was.

[00:53:45] James M. Scott
And so you had the military saying, well, look, the Americans dropped one of these on Hiroshima. Yes, they destroyed one city. In all reality, what we know about this, there's no way they have more than one of these bombs. Too expensive, too difficult to build, and we've survived it. The regime's still intact. The fact that the Americans dropped that second bomb so soon after basically destroyed that argument.

[00:54:04] James M. Scott
The Americans could drop these things every 75 hours, and they may have 20 of them or 200 of them, or more importantly, they may never invade. They may just sit offshore and drop one after the other every three days until there's nothing left of Japan. And so this idea that the militarists were going to hold out for this battle against the Americans really kind of goes away at that point because there may never be a battle against the Americans.

[00:54:26] James M. Scott
They may never land. They may just use this new weapon until there's nothing left. And so that's why Nagasaki is so much more important. It's because it breaks that sort of hope that the Japanese militarists had that they would get an opportunity to fight the Americans in a land battle and have a greater say in how the surrender would go down.

[00:54:46] Michael Shermer
And if I recall, we had a third one by September to drop?

[00:54:51] James M. Scott
Yeah, a third one would have been ready about August 24th, and the Air Force was pushing for that one for Tokyo, and then the next one would be online in September. We would probably have about half a dozen by the end of the year, but we would not have had any kind of real inventory of these things. So, I mean, that one-two punch with Hiroshima and Nagasaki was really the only time we were going to get any kind of back-to-back use of those weapons.

[00:55:13] Michael Shermer
And what about the argument people make that the administration had considered dropping an atomic bomb, like in a, I don't know, a Bay Area or some place in Japan where no one lives, so civilians wouldn't die, just to show them how powerful it is? And

[00:55:29] James M. Scott
That was debated. You know, people don't realize, I mean, these were, these were possibilities that were debated in 1945 by senior members of our government. And these things, for different reasons, were shot down. I mean, one of the arguments, like you said, was what if we tell the Japanese we've got this great new weapon and we drop it? And then the big fear was, well, what if it doesn't go off?

[00:55:45] James M. Scott
Like, what if the first one's a dud? And then we told the Japanese we got this great bomb and it didn't go off. Like, they're never going to believe us again. Or if we tell them we're going to do it on this beach somewhere, what if they show up and they have all the Allied prisoners of war and they just stick them all there?

[00:55:57] James M. Scott
And we end up annihilating 30,000 Allied prisoners of war. And also, it really kept coming back, too, to the power of the bomb wasn't the destruction. I mean, yes, it's a destructive weapon, but it's not as necessarily as destructive, any more destructive than a fire raid. I mean, 16 square miles of Tokyo were burned out on one raid in March of 1945.

[00:56:16] James M. Scott
105,000 people killed. Hiroshima, a little under five miles, destroyed Nagasaki, two. And the deaths are going to be higher, but not initially, only after the radiation is factored, in, which we didn't know as much about that. So the idea was that the power of the atomic bomb was in the shock and the surprise of it. If you tell the Japanese, we've got it, and then it doesn't work, or it's not as big as you think it's going to be, or whatever, You've lost that value, and then you're still headed for this nasty ground invasion that's going to ultimately cost, you know, potentially millions of lives.

[00:56:50] James M. Scott
That's important to remember. The Pentagon estimate in July 1945, so the ground invasion was going to cost America between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, and the Japanese between 5 and 10 million. I mean, we were looking at some really rough numbers and projections if we had to go to any ground war.

[00:57:08] Michael Shermer
Yeah, people forget that the U.S. government had to notify each family of their dead sons that had been fighting. And had they found out that we had this weapon, we didn't use it for these now post-war moral issues, they would have had to face these rather angry citizens.

[00:57:29] James M. Scott
Usually, yeah. I mean, if your kid died on Kyushu, you wouldn't forgive him. I mean, it would have been, you know, and the war. I mean, it could have potentially gone on for months and months and months. And it's people forget, too, that, like, it's not just American and Japanese casualties. I mean, people are dying every month all across Asia. I mean, 20 million people are going to die in China alone from a war.

[00:57:50] James M. Scott
You know, there's a famine and disease. I mean, so literally, you know, and I've talked with, like, Rich Frank and Jon Parshall, who are two Pacific War historians and good friends of mine. You know, and those numbers are, in some cases, estimates as high as half a million people every month. So every month that the war goes on, another half a million people in Asia die.

[00:58:06] James M. Scott
It's like how long can the world afford for this war to keep going? You have to pull the lens further back than just even American and Japanese casualties.

[00:58:17] Michael Shermer
Yeah, I always make this distinction for moral equivalent. Arguments like David Irving used to make this argument that we bombed Hamburg and Dresden and they had Auschwitz. They're both bad. No. One is done in order to stop the killing. And at the moment the war ends, that's it. We're going to stop killing you. Whereas in the other case, they're just going to go until everybody's dead.

[00:58:45] James M. Scott
Yeah, you can't make any kind of comparison to just gassing and killing millions of people based on their ethnicity or religion as any comparison to fighting a war. You're absolutely right. Those are not valid comparisons that are being made. That's why he's been discredited and pretty much a pariah.

[00:59:06] Michael Shermer
Yeah, well, right. So here's some statistics. During the invasion of Iwo Jima, there were approximately 26,000 American casualties that included 6821 dead in the 36-day battle. How fiercely did the Japanese defend that little volcanic rock 700 miles from Japan? Of the 22,060 Japanese soldiers assigned to fight to the bitter end, only 216 remained. I mean, that's astonishing. Now, do we know who those soldiers were?

[00:59:34] Michael Shermer
I mean, how many, again, back to the belling the cat problem, how many of them were like, we don't want to be here, but we have to, or else they're going to ship us off and kill us? Yeah,

[00:59:45] James M. Scott
Most of the ones that were survivors were people that were badly injured, that were left on the battlefield thinking they would die. Japan would try to often kill their people before letting them be captured. And what happened a lot of times is, Guys were considered so bad off they weren't worth wasting a bullet, and so they just left them. And so then the Americans got them and patched them back up.

[01:00:04] James M. Scott
Same thing happened after the Battle of Manila. I think we got 400 out of 17,000 Japanese troops. And we interviewed them all afterwards, and most of them by that, they were so bad off. Their memories and what we got out of them were pretty worthless. I'll say I've been to Iwo Jima, and I've walked up to the top of Mount Suribachi, and when you stand at the top of that mountain and you look out over the battlefield, you get a sense of just how tiny that island really is.

[01:00:26] James M. Scott
You can walk from the airfield to the top of Suribachi in about an hour and a half. That entire battlefield is tiny, and yet it took 32 days and 50,000 dead and wounded to take an island that has no fresh water and stinks like sulfur. I mean, it's just like fighting for a wasteland, and yet that's what it was. It did have a huge strategic value for the Americans, and then it allowed B-29s that were wounded over Japan to have a place to put down if they weren't going to make it back.

[01:00:53] James M. Scott
So it did save a lot of American lives, airmen's lives, but it is, and I use Iwo Jima as a perfect example of just how ugly of a fight it would have been with the Japanese. If you take Iwo Jima and you magnify it out over Kyushu or whatnot, you just get a sense of just how awful this thing would have been.

[01:01:12] James M. Scott
Oh,

[01:01:13] Michael Shermer
Terrible. Yeah, Okinawa was 240,931 dead, including 77,000 Japanese soldiers, 14,000 American soldiers, additional 150,000 Japanese civilians living on Okinawa.

[01:01:29] James M. Scott
I've been to Okinawa as well. You go to Okinawa, and the actual battlefield is about 20 square miles. You go to the top of Hacksaw Ridge or Kakazu Ridge, and you get a sense of just, you go through the caves and the tunnels, and you see what it was like fighting them. That battle and just how hellacious that was. It was three times as long to take 80 some days to get Okinawa.

[01:01:50] James M. Scott
And you know, literally one out of every three people that lived on the island died. And that's how bad the casualties were for the civilians.

[01:01:58] Michael Shermer
And you see these films of these Japanese soldiers or even civilians jumping off cliffs rather than letting themselves be captured by Americans. Is that propaganda against Americans by the Japanese government?

[01:02:09] James M. Scott
Yeah, no, and I've been to those cliffs. I mean, they've got the suicide cliffs and the banzai cliffs on Saipan. You've got the similar banzai cliffs on Tinian. I've been in a cave in Okinawa where mass civilians committed suicide. All that was Japanese propaganda because the Japanese were telling the civilians, if you're captured by the Americans, they're going to rape you, they're going to brutalize you, you're better off to commit suicide.

[01:02:30] James M. Scott
And in a lot of cases, they forced families to do it. They sort of prod them off these cliffs and whatnot. But when you go and you visit these cliffs today, they're Like on Saipan, it's one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I mean, you're on this cliff, you know, it's covered with greenery, and you're looking out over this just beautiful blue water, and you're 100 feet up, and you just rocks all on the bottom, and you think, this is where it all took place.

[01:02:52] James M. Scott
And then you have cliffs behind you that are even higher that drop down onto land, and so people were jumping off both sets. It's horrible to go there and see just the astonishing beauty and know what happened there.

[01:03:05] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Yeah, my father was on the USS Wren. It was a destroyer in the Pacific. He was there in Tokyo Bay. I have photos that he took.

[01:03:13] James M. Scott
Oh, wow. That's awesome.

[01:03:14] Michael Shermer
Yeah, and he was one of the destroyers that were surrounding the aircraft carriers to try to shoot down the Kamikaze pilots before they got to the aircraft carriers, right? But that's an astonishing thing. You would think, If the pilots were being forced to do this, but they didn't really want to, they'd just fly out there and just go land in shallow water and run off and hide or something like that.

[01:03:35] Michael Shermer
But they didn't, right? So they really believed, you know, I'm doing this for the empire, the emperor, for my country or whatever. I mean, they were true believers.

[01:03:44] James M. Scott
Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, there's the power of peer pressure too. And I'll tell you the sad thing is you look at the letters of these kamikazes. There's a wonderful museum, the Chiran Kamikaze Museum that does a really terrific job in Japan of telling that story. And I've read the last letters of some of these guys. And yeah, they would often get drunk and write letters home.

[01:04:06] James M. Scott
And they're anguishing letters to read. I mean, they were kids. You know, they're 19, 20 years old. I mean, they're writing letters to their mother, you know, and they're crying. And it's awful. And that's the reality of the war. But you face tremendous societal peer pressure. To go and do this. Because if you don't, you're going to. – you can never go back to your village.

[01:04:31] James M. Scott
You'll always be shamed. And so it's really – People forget that role in society that it played to kind of pressure these young men. And. Because particularly by summer of 44, it was a lost cause. I mean, that summer of 45, it was all a lost cause. And that's when you see all the big kamikaze attacks off of Okinawa. I mean, they did a real number on American forces there.

[01:04:52] James M. Scott
It was very, very brutal. But that's the tragedy of it.

[01:04:57] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Okay. What about the argument, we also dropped the bombs as a signal to the Russians. We have this power going forward in terms of post-war negotiations.

[01:05:07] James M. Scott
That's all a post-war myth. yeah what you have is after the after World War Ii, you have some diplomatic historians who are trying to sort of edge in on the the territory and sort of a scholarship of it all try to make that argument. There's nothing in the historical record that I found. I spent a lot of time going through the archives where there's any real tangible evidence that you could point to that says Truman did this to send a message to the Russians.

[01:05:33] James M. Scott
He was just desperate to end the war. He was not thinking long-term about this. He wanted to hurry up and end the war. And that's kind of been one of those post-war myths that I think is it's pretty much been destroyed at this point. You know, Truman also was not in his character to go kill 200,000 people, but send a message to the Soviets.

[01:05:51] James M. Scott
I mean, Truman was, when he goes off to Potsdam to meet Stalin, he goes there with his number one goal, get them into the war to help the Americans. You know, I mean, he's, that time the Americans were facing an invasion, Japanese, I mean, Had, you know, almost a million men in Manchuria. We needed the Russians up there to tie down the Japanese.

[01:06:12] James M. Scott
They couldn't use those troops to reinforce the Kyushu, where we were going to invade. So, I mean, Truman was anxious to get the Russians into the war. We were accommodating the Russians by sending them ships and food and everything. And then suddenly, you know, 10 days later, he decides he's going to just use this atomic bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese people just to send some message to Stalin.

[01:06:33] James M. Scott
I mean, just nonsense. So

[01:06:36] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Okay. Well, so what about the argument amongst the scientists at Los Alamos about the moral use of the bomb and so forth? Was there voices just largely at this point meaningless because there was so much momentum in the project?

[01:06:57] James M. Scott
No, I mean, much of this was driven by a guy by the name of Dr. Leo Szilard. And Szilard was a, in a lot of ways, he's the father of the atomic bomb. And I find him to be an immensely fascinating character, in that, you know, he is this Hungarian immigrant who saw, I mean, he almost had like a crystal ball. He saw the rise of the Nazis before anybody else did.

[01:07:17] James M. Scott
He bails out of Hungary after World War I, basically gets out of Germany in 33, tells his family the Nazis are bad news, we got to go. So, he's always kind of one step ahead of where everybody else is. And so he sees the writing on the wall really early on about what atomic energy could produce, and he's terrified of it. He's terrified of it because he sees it falling into the hands of the Germans.

[01:07:42] James M. Scott
And so what he does is he recruits his buddy, Albert Einstein, and the two of them decide they're going to sell the American President on how to like Build an atomic energy program to kind of counter what they fear the Germans are going to do. And so they're ultimately successful. And they ultimately begin the Manhattan Project with a $6,000-based governmental grant is how it all starts.

[01:08:04] James M. Scott
And then, you know, Szilard plays a role throughout. But as the bomb is developing, he starts having real second thoughts. And his second thoughts, and they're very notable, are you know, Hey, once you unleash this thing, you know, you're going to it's like letting a genie out the bottle. I mean, every small country is going to want one of these things. You know, you're going to create arms races.

[01:08:24] James M. Scott
You're going to have the potential for a small rogue nation to knock out a more powerful nation. I mean, you know, this is, you know, he gets really scared of the creation, the monster he's done. I compare it to like, he's a lot like Dr. Frankenstein after he's built his monster. And he's like, ah. So he starts kind of. Pushing back on it all and trying to counter that.

[01:08:42] James M. Scott
Well, Leslie Groves ultimately despises him. And Leslie Groves, of course, is really, in a lot of ways, the actual guy that builds the atomic bomb. Even though Oppenheimer got the movie, Leslie Groves is the one that did all the work. He's the one that had to build the atomic cities. He's the one that had to hire Oppenheimer. Leslie Groves is a real badass.

[01:09:00] James M. Scott
But he hated Szilard because he saw Szilard as a thorn in his side. But Szilard ultimately it feels like the scientists are in a better position to make the decision about whether a bomb should be used in combat than are the civilian leaders, I.e. Truman and his interim committee, which is a group of civilians that are appointed to help guide policies for the atomic bomb.

[01:09:20] James M. Scott
One of the leaders of the interim committee is Jimmy Byrnes. We talked about earlier, but Jimmy Byrnes is going to be appointed Secretary of State. He's a close Truman confidant who's going to have, by July of 45, a very powerful role in government as Secretary of State. So Szilard eventually gets a sit down with Jimmy Byrnes at his house in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

[01:09:42] James M. Scott
And he basically goes over all his concerns with Byrnes and he basically makes a very bad impression on Byrnes. One of the things about Szilard is he rubbed people the wrong way. He lacked that social diplomacy and grace that he, quite frankly, would have benefited his cause more. Because what he came across is haughty and condescending to non-scientists. And so what he failed to recognize is that, yes, Byrnes may not have had a PhD in physics, but Byrnes was a very smart dude himself.

[01:10:13] James M. Scott
He'd been a Supreme Court justice. He'd been a U.S. House of Representatives. He'd been FDR's top confidant. He'd been around the block. He also understood how government structured. And at the end of the day, it is the Commander-in-Chief and his top lieutenants who are going to be the ones making these decisions, not the scientists.

[01:10:32] James M. Scott
And Sillard's argument in his efforts to stop the atomic bomb got the hearing amongst the civilian leaders that he wanted to have. Sillard's concern was that they just didn't listen to him. And so the argument that he couldn't make the argument, well, you know, nobody heard what I had to say. They heard it. I've seen all the memos. I've seen all the Byrnes writes about his memoir.

[01:10:53] James M. Scott
They just didn't follow his advice. And Szilard was right. Look, there was a Cold War and an arms race after this. His other fears that there would be nuclear weapons used frequently and toppling the other nations, that never materialized. But some of his fears did. But that's kind of the story there. They ultimately, in the end, what they did is they got Oppenheimer involved.

[01:11:15] James M. Scott
And they said, Oppenheimer, we need you to take this to the other senior scientific minds and hear all the arguments that Szilard and them are putting out there. Drop it on a beach somewhere. Should we tell the Japanese? Should we do this or whatnot? Evaluate it all and put together a report. And that's what the top scientists did. And their report ultimately came back and effectively backed what Truman and them wanted to do anyway, which was to surprise the Japanese with a bomb.

[01:11:38] Michael Shermer
Amazing. Is there anything to that story that Kyoto was the original city to be bombed and that Stimson and his wife had visited there a decade ago or 20 years before and they loved it and they didn't...

[01:11:52] James M. Scott
All right, we got to tackle one of the biggest errors of the film Oppenheimer. And this thing comes up all the time now. In fact, I was in Kyoto last year, and I met someone, I guess, we went to the samurai museum. And even the guy at the samurai museum was like, well, Kyoto was spared because Henry Stimson honeymooned here. And I'm thinking, he never honeymooned here.

[01:12:18] James M. Scott
He didn't know.

[01:12:19] Michael Shermer
Really?

[01:12:19] James M. Scott
No. And so I finally dug into it to figure out where this error has come up. And the error has been out there. It predates the Oppenheimer movie. The reality is, okay, Leslie Groves absolutely wanted to hit Kyoto. No doubt about it. He was hell bent. That was his number one target, not Hiroshima, because he felt like Kyoto, if anybody's, folks who've never been there, it's a magical Japanese city.

[01:12:43] James M. Scott
It's my favorite city in Japan. It has lower architecture. It's been spared. It has 2,000 temples. I mean, it is the cultural Heart of Japan. I love going to visit Kyoto. And for that reason, Leslie Groves wanted to destroy it. Because he thought, if you destroy this, you will send such a shock to the Japanese. It'll stun them. Yeah, this is what we need.

[01:13:06] James M. Scott
If we're after shock value, destroy Kyoto. Also, he's convinced that a lot of smart people live there, which is true. It had a lot of university presidents and academics. They're the type of people who can appreciate this new weapon. So for all the reasons [unclear], we should hit it. Now Stimson said no, absolutely not. Now Stimson had gone to Kyoto. Yes, he had gone in his capacity as governor general of the Philippines, which he had done in the 1920s, I believe.

[01:13:31] James M. Scott
He was, by the time the World War II was going on, he's almost 80. His honeymoon was back in the 1800s, and he was like canoeing in New Hampshire. And so what it was is I looked it up. I think the actor that played him in the movie Oppenheimer had read it on Wikipedia, apparently. And ad-libbed it in the movie, and Nolan was like, right, awesome, let's go with it.

[01:13:55] James M. Scott
Then like literally probably when the movie came out, whoever it was realized the air like changed Wikipedia's page. I read some scholarly article like kind of the tracing the origins of it. It was really funny, but as a result of that, it is always, everybody's like, it's all because of a honeymoon and it saved him. I'm like, no, it's not a honeymoon.

[01:14:12] James M. Scott
He was just there on a government trip. I mean, yes, he loved Kyoto. He understood the importance of Kyoto. And also, more importantly, Stimson was a really smart dude. He understood that in the post-war era, and it reflects Stimson and Groves had two different goals. Groves' goal as Manhattan Project is to drop the bomb in the war. Stimson is war secretary in the war, but also figure out the peace.

[01:14:35] James M. Scott
And he knew that if we destroyed Kyoto, we would create such animosity with the Japanese that we would forever drive them into the Russian sphere of influence after the war. And we were already thinking, we want the Japanese in the American sphere of influence. We want to be able to rebuild Japan. We want to be able to create them as a bulkhead against [unclear].

[01:14:53] James M. Scott
So we need to end the war in such a way that we can continue to have influence on the Japanese. So that was Stimson's view. And that is a far, far-sighted view and a very smart view, and he was absolutely right in that.

[01:15:06] Michael Shermer
So that's why Kyoto was spared? That's why it was spared. And he had power over Groves to make that decision. Oh,

[01:15:14] James M. Scott
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Henry Stimson is basically the chairman of the board of the Manhattan Project. And Leslie Groves is the CEO. The two of them effectively run it. But it was funny, because literally all the way up until the very end, though, Groves got to be like, let's go after Kyoto, let's go after Kyoto. And Stimson is all the way over in Potsdam, and his aide, George Harrison, is cabling him and saying, and he kept calling it your pet city.

[01:15:42] James M. Scott
Groves is once again wanting to go after your pet city. Stimson's so mad about it. He goes to Truman. He says to Truman, I want on the record that you're opposed to this. Truman's like, absolutely. Then he goes to Hap Arnold, who's head of the Air Force, and these guys are going to take this mission. I need your guarantee as well. He goes to make sure that there's no shenanigans by Leslie Groves at the end.

[01:16:04] James M. Scott
Of course, Groves wouldn't have done that. That's not the kind of soldier he was. But I do think that that story of Kyoto is one of my favorites.

[01:16:12] Michael Shermer
It is, yes. But it predates the movie by a lot. I had a guest on Brian Klaas. He's a political scientist. His book is called Fluke. And it's about the role of luck in history, which is super interesting. And there's lots of good examples of this. But he opens with that story and says, you know, the sparing of Kyoto was a fluke.

[01:16:30] Michael Shermer
It was just a piece of luck just because Stimson happened to have a honeymoon there. So I need to let him know about that. Oh,

[01:16:36] James M. Scott
Yeah, he's wrong. There's been a lot done since the movie came out. I was like, I was like, I need to get up there and correct all this in front of my guests.

[01:16:45] Michael Shermer
Did you like the movie?

[01:16:47] James M. Scott
I love the movie. I've seen it three times. I think, you know, I think Cillian Murphy just does a fantastic job as Oppenheimer. You know, I love Matt Damon, and I think Matt Damon does a really good job as Groves, although they physically don't resemble one another at all. But I think he does a good job of kind of capturing the sternness and sort of directness of Leslie Groves.

[01:17:08] James M. Scott
So yeah, I very much enjoyed the movie.

[01:17:11] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Yeah, it was a great flick, my God. I mean, it kind of saved the movies, because I hadn't been to movies since COVID. And it's like, finally, here's one worth seeing.

[01:17:22] James M. Scott
Yeah, and I went and saw the Odyssey. The last time I saw a movie in a theater, it was probably Oppenheimer.

[01:17:26] Michael Shermer
And then the Odyssey. I haven't seen it yet

[01:17:28] James M. Scott
In a three-year window.

[01:17:30] Michael Shermer
Did you see it in an IMAX?

[01:17:32] James M. Scott
No, we don't have one in South Carolina. So, you know, there are only like 27 theaters in the country that show it that way. But yeah, I'm a huge Christopher Nolan fan and I love all his movies. And so it was a miserably hot summer day here. And I was like, you know what, let's get movies. And so we went.

[01:17:48] Michael Shermer
That's great. That's great. Yeah. All right, James, thank you for your time. Last question about the atomic bomb in general. I mean, there was an arms race that happened. That's not good, but it's never. Been used in conflict since Nagasaki. So, what do you think? Is a game theory deterrence? Does it work? It's worked so

[01:18:12] James M. Scott
Far. And that's one of the things that's been disturbing about watching what's going on with Ukraine and everything is how glibly Putin is threatening to use one. Because these are, and one of the things I've hoped in writing this book, is that it illuminates the decision-making process. Because this is not an easy decision. And Truman faced the most consequential decision probably of any world leader in whether or not to use this weapon.

[01:18:33] James M. Scott
And he went through all the proper protocols and the research and talking to everybody from Churchill to the military. And now you have Putin who's very glibly just threatening it and trying to hold the world hostage to these threats. And it doesn't reflect the seriousness of what these weapons are.

[01:18:54] Michael Shermer
But he hasn't yet so far, so that's good. Knock on wood he hasn't, but I've been fascinated by the rise of, I guess, AI-powered drones in the use of warfare now. Yeah. I mean, it's the opposite of a Manhattan Project thing. It's very bottom-up, simple mechanical. Radio shack war. Radio shack level, yeah. I mean, I guess the Ukrainians have made millions of these things.

[01:19:20] Michael Shermer
It's astonishing. Out of plastic or whatever they have around. They're phenomenal.

[01:19:23] James M. Scott
Now, this is probably the most revolutionary change to the battlefield since nuclear war. I mean, since the atomic bomb or the airplane. I mean, it's really, you know, you don't need expensive aircraft carriers anymore. I mean, look, Ukraine has managed to sink, what, 16 Japanese warships or more? And Ukrainians don't even have a Navy. I mean, they're doing it with, you know, with these Radio Shack-type drones.

[01:19:45] James M. Scott
And it's astonishing.

[01:19:48] Michael Shermer
All right, James, what are you working on next?

[01:19:51] James M. Scott
Got a book coming out with my buddy Jack Carr next April on the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

[01:19:58] Michael Shermer
This is the person who made the bomb?

[01:20:01] James M. Scott
Yes, it's a guy by the name of Masud and so he was a Libyan bomb maker. He confessed to making the bomb that blew up the La Belle disco in 1986 in West Berlin. Just killed a couple American service members and led to our attacks on Libya in '86. And then he's also confessed to the building of the bomb for Pan Am 103.

[01:20:24] James M. Scott
Now, he's recanted those confessions, and that's the whole point of the trial. But I'm excited to go up and see this, because I think it's almost four decades now. I've met many, many family members who lost loved ones on that horrible, horrible attack. And I think there's a real excitement that some answers will hopefully be coming out of this trial. Oh,

[01:20:43] Michael Shermer
That would be good. Yeah. Oh, that'll make a gripping story. Oh, my God. They should make movies out of all these.

[01:20:50] James M. Scott
I agree, they should.

[01:20:53] Michael Shermer
Is there a good Doolittle raid movie? I mean, there's the scene in the Midway movie where they have, you know, the segment on that.

[01:20:59] James M. Scott
No, you know, Michael, I've been trying for years to get one going, and you know, I actually had worked with some guys, some great guys, you know, we had several of the screen we were going to do as a miniseries, had several of the scripts written, and then our director got sick and sadly passed away, and the project kind of got orphaned.

[01:21:15] James M. Scott
And it's been kind of like since then, no, there hadn't been. And I think it's one of those stories. It's just such a great American story that it's ripe for like a miniseries telling of it. It's got great characters. It's great, you know, great heroism. But Hollywood has not yet figured out the need to tell that one.

[01:21:36] Michael Shermer
Astonishing. Yeah. Because it was a pretty high risk enterprise.

[01:21:40] James M. Scott
Huge risk. Yeah, we sent two aircraft carriers right off the shore of Japan four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We sent 80 young airmen on a suicide mission to bomb Japan. It's a horrific and amazing story that could have gone horrifically for these poor guys, and yet they were successful. And, um, so yeah, we knock on wood. At some point, somebody will do it.

[01:22:05] James M. Scott
You know, I wrote a book on it. I'm very partial to these guys. I spent four years researching and writing about the Doolittle Raid. So it's a story very near and dear to my heart. So.

[01:22:13] Michael Shermer
Amazing. All right.