April 1, 2002: War Games - Bonnie Ramthun
Podcast: The Art Bell ArchivePublished On: Fri Mar 21 2025
Description: Art Bell welcomes former Department of Defense war gamer Bonnie Ramthun, who spent seven years running nuclear conflict simulations at a classified facility on Schriever Air Force Base. Ramthun describes entering the windowless war gaming center through a retinal scanner, being weighed in a sealed glass booth, and passing through submarine-style doors with interlocking copper plates before reaching her workstation.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.
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