Transcript – America This Week, November 22, 2024: “Gambling With Nukes”

Listen to Episode 113

Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America this week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, you look suspiciously close. Are you in New York?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’m in New York, I’m sealed in a skyscraper, and I’m going to name the hotel chain because it sucks so badly that it deserves to be named. It’s the Tempo by Hilton. Whenever there’s a hotel and it says by Hilton, as though they’re slightly distancing themselves from it, it means you are in for a hamster-like experience inside-

Matt Taibbi: Discomfort by Amtrak.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly. No, this is like test tube by Hilton. Okay?

Matt Taibbi: Nice. Nice.

Walter Kirn: It’s one of those hotels in New York City, it’s in Times Square, and so to insulate you from the funk of Times Square, you have to take an elevator to the lobby of the hotel. So, you have to first pass a checkpoint, then you get in an elevator, go 11 floors to the lobby, which is one of those Nouvelle lobbies that doesn’t really have a desk, it’s just some guys sitting around checking you in, sort of.

Matt Taibbi: Oh God, I hate that.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Just have a lobby.

Walter Kirn: They have mini desks. Then you get to the elevator that goes to your rooms and it’s some complicated affair because these are those horrible elevators that don’t have buttons inside them, they are programmed to go only to the floor that you ask for. You know what I mean?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Yep, yep. This is going to become relevant to the story we talk about later, but yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, right, exactly. So, you get into your passive box that has been programmed outside to deliver you to the 41st floor in my case, nobody else is in it because nobody else has to go to that particular floor out, of 800.

Matt Taibbi: Elevator by Kafka.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, elevator by elevator by Jean Paul Sartre. No exit.

Matt Taibbi: No exit. Yeah. Exactly.

Walter Kirn: “Hell is other people,” Sartre said. But there’s another kind of hell, which is no other people, and you alone in an elevator, that you don’t control. The thing could shoot off into space, it’s too bad for you. Anyway,

Matt Taibbi: That could have been a Sartre novel, but anyway, yeah, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: You’re delivered to your 41st floor, hoping the whole time it doesn’t malfunction and leave you in some terrible limbo. Sort of like where the extra socks go, we put them into the elevator, we programmed it for 41, and we haven’t seen them since. It happens every once in a while.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Just mark box X nine in your checklist.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It’s the price of efficiency. Every once in a while, one just goes off. Of course, you wake up as I did this morning, disoriented after your long flight from Montana, a two-hour time change, after daylight savings time, is enough to disorient you a little bit, and you turn on your phone because you’ve got to do a podcast, and oh, the first intercontinental ballistic missile ever to be used in warfare has just flown out of Russia back into Ukraine, but there are also plenty of new songs to listen to, right?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Nobody is making any noise about this online, which is par for the course for this crazy week. I guess we should start with this ICBM story, and then work our way back to the insanity of this thing. But should we just look at the video first? This is a report that came from the Ukrainian… Is it the Armed services or the Air Force? Probably the Air Force, right? And we saw a video of what is apparently the first intercontinental ballistic missile ever launched by Russia against Ukraine.

All right, well, there’s no noise.

Walter Kirn: Did you expect noise from that?

Matt Taibbi: No.

Walter Kirn: It’s taken from far away, I hope.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it is.

Walter Kirn: And the reason for our audience that doesn’t keep up on World War III technology, that you see multiple flashes, is that it’s not only a long range missile, it is MIRVed, multiple independent something vehicles, which means that out of this one missile come many, many missiles, that’s why there’s flash after flash.

Matt Taibbi: Ah, I see. Okay. All right. So, just so that people know that this is in Dnipro, which is the fourth-largest city in Ukraine. It’s outside of it anyway. And it’s in South Eastern Ukraine. And it’s the latest escalation in a week of escalations, that’s been kind of extraordinary. Now, this is what the, there is a tweet about this that says that this marks the first use in history of an ICBM during a conflict, but American and Western officials have refuted these claims, stating that the missile used against Dnipro was not an ICBM, but instead a medium or intermediate range ballistic missile. Okay, 6 of one half dozen of the other, the point is somebody wants us to think it’s the first ICBM launched, and why that’s significant is because Russia changed its nuclear doctrine this week to, among other things, include non-nuclear states that are engaged in a conflict against the territorial whole of Russia, so that would make it possible for them to drop a nuke on Ukraine.