Ramthun recounts playing scenarios where full nuclear exchanges between superpowers would produce what gamers called "the hand of God," a pattern of missile trails curving over the poles toward the United States. She explains that early simulations almost always ended in total annihilation until Cold War thinking was replaced by limited strike doctrine. The conversation covers modern threats including biological weapons, the nuclear posture review as a warning to Saddam Hussein, and the thermobaric bomb tested in Afghanistan as a tool for destroying biological facilities without dispersing their contents.
Art presses Ramthun about the facility's extreme security measures, and she speculates that the interlocking copper plates in the submarine doors may have been designed to block remote viewing rather than conventional electronic surveillance. She also reveals that the war gaming system was built to simulate scenarios involving non-human adversaries, though she was never granted access to those particular games.
Key Moments
Real Cheyenne Mountain rebuilt to look like the movie War Games: Ramthun says when NORAD redid Cheyenne Mountain after the film War Games came out, the original was just a small room and the producers thought the movie set looked better - so they essentially built the real facility to match Hollywood. Her own Schriver Air Force Base post had retina scanners that weighed her and submarine doors she'd spin closed.
The Hand of God: when every nuclear war ended the same way: Ramthun describes the in-house term for the moment massive nuclear games tipped over: missile-trail markers from China and the Soviet Union curling over the pole formed a giant tendrilled hand on the display. When you saw the Hand of God, she says, it was over - send the vice president to South America, nothing bigger than a cockroach left.
Brilliant pebbles, plutonium rain, and EMP-vulnerable satellites: Ramthun walks through space-based defense: 'brilliant pebbles' as kinetic-kill BBs that hit incoming missiles before they reach the U.S., the trade-off that plutonium will rain on the country where you intercept them, and the under-discussed vulnerability of unhardened civilian satellites - including the 1998 outage where doctors lost pagers and ATMs went dark.
9/11 was a decapitation attack we'd already gamed - with nukes: Ramthun says her teams ran the exact 9/11 scenario in war games but with nuclear weapons instead of airliners: hit Washington (White House, Capitol, Pentagon), the New York financial district, Atlanta, Colorado Springs, several other city centers. She argues 9/11 was a classic military decapitation maneuver, not a terrorist strike, that nearly succeeded.
Why Nevada wasn't a target, and the Marine in purple-faced rage: Ramthun explains decapitation theory - take out the king and queen, the pawns scatter - which is why Nevada and Area 51 weren't 9/11 targets. She then describes watching trained military officers in war games hit with truly unexpected scenarios: one Marine she remembers in 'purple-faced rage' trying to save the Earth as every command went wrong, suggesting that's what the real chain of command looked like on 9/11.