S1 E12: Nuclear Weapons, Russian Geckos & Thailand: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

what [Music] welcome to Last Week Tonight I'm John Oliver thanks for being with us uh just time for a quick recap of the week spoiler alert it's been depressing again uh it's been a very difficult time for diplomacy in Gaza the crisis continued uh over a thousand people have now been killed there were multiple ceasefires all week none of which have held one ceasefire was so short it was technically only a ceas f because fighting resumed before they could even finish the word it's it has all been enough to make you wish for some happier diplomatic news here at home and luckily I have some for you because on Thursday there was a house hearing about us India relations and freshman Republican Kurt Clawson took a chance to reach out to The house's guests Nisha biswal and Arun Kumar I went to school with nagaj Juna I know jagapati and these are my friends I love Hyderabad I love shanai and I'm very familiar with your country very nice I mean borderline offensive over pronunciation but very nice just one problem there the two people he's talking to are not from the Indian government they are Americans from the state department and the Commerce Department claron claron seems to have been LED astray by their misleadingly Brown faces however he does not know this yet so let's all sit back and enjoy a slow moving car crash so just as your capital is welcome here to produce good paying jobs in the US I'd like our Capital be to be welcomed there and there to be freedom of capital so that both sides are on the same territory and I ask cooperation and commitment and priority from your government in so doing can I have that I I I think you're question is to the Indian government and we certainly share your sentiments and we we certainly will Advocate that on behalf of the US of course okay let's see some progress whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa you do not get to pretend that that did not just happen because that was incredible and and my favorite part of it other than absolutely everything is Mr Kumar who is absolutely loving the whole thing he's leaning back in his chair going oh this guy is awesome pleas please nobody tell him I've got 10 bucks which says he's about to compliment me for my role in Slum Dog Millionaire amazing we needed that uh in other news there was potentially horrifying news about the behavior of Isis in Northern Iraq the UN is attempting to verify claims that Isis has ordered all women in one Iraqi City to undergo genital mutilation that is truly horrific or or it would be if it were definitely true thankfully other reports suggest it could be fake although I will say this to Isis the fact that that seems like something you would do still does not reflect particularly well on you as an organization it's like if someone told you that Bravo created a spin-off that's just dogs of Housewives or that Shila birth defecated on a homeless man neither of those things happened but they sound like they could have done and that's still a problem for all concerned and before everyone gets too relieved that female genital mutilation is not being practiced by ISIS in Iraq it is worth remembering it is still happening in a shocking number of places including as I learned for the first time this week Egypt where it happens at a 91% rate among married women aged 15 to 49 that is appalling for Egypt and absolutely amazing for whoever it is who does The Branding for Egypt because in light of that statistic how are pyramids the first thing we think of failing to mention genital mutilation first when you talk about Egypt it's like calling Rob Ford that Canadian guy who famously fought Toronto's Fair wage policy or referring to 9/11 as Harry conic Junior's birthday and and finally tonight Thailand you may remember a few weeks ago we talked a little about Thailand's buffoonish clown Prince and his miniature poodle called Fufu two things that I would argue are objectively funny however it turned out this week that Thailand's aggressive military government may not agree with me John Oliver is upsetting one uh one government officials in Thailand are worried about Oliver's activities and think he may be a threat to its monarchy oh okay okay okay I will say I will say this if I can bring down your monarchy you have at best a wobbly monarchy amazingly this story might actually be true a confidential Tha military document focused on overseas activities that are undermining the Royal Institution was leaked and you'll notice three English words in the middle of that page and unfortunately those words are John William Oliver uh and yeah I think deep down I always knew that everyone would find out my middle name thanks to an angry time military government clearly there are some big lessons to be taken away from this one it seems my Thailand vacation is going to have to be postponed very much indefinitely and two this is all happening because Thailand has a Les majeste law which can jail people for insulting the monarchy which is stupid other countries have this kind of law too and they're stupid as well and and if I'm not going to Thailand anytime soon and apparently I'm not let's burn some more bridges so working from a list working from a list of countries that have these Lords uh Hey Netherlands uh how's uh Queen Beatrix doing by the way the Dowager Countess of Grantham would like her face back uh hey hey Kuwait uh what's up with your current Amir he looks like a police sketch of an evil warut he looks like what you get if Freddy Mercury a sea turtle okay and and and finally Denmark now I I would offer not to make fun of your prince Henrik were it not for the fact that there is a video of him getting into a panda costume and molesting people while they're trying to eat their dinner you are the clown Prince of Denmark you are already an endangered meaningless mascot who exists mainly for people to take photos with putting on a panda costume is gilding the Lily somewhat you're mve down Mark I await my Danish prison sentence please take me to your impeccably furnished Birchwood cell I await my dinner of adorably tiny little cheeses and now this and now newscasters questioning whether they should be covering the stories they are at that very moment covering I'm going to file this next story under stories my producer is making me do that I don't agree with but okay I know we're tired of covering Miley Cyrus but we had to include this final headline I didn't believe our producers when we first started covering the Rodman story I wish that he becomes irrelevant as soon as possible there is breaking news now on Fox News channel it's not really that breaking I mean everybody knew this was going to happen even I knew this was going to happen we saw the obligatory Chopper Aerials of the beibs he's pushing important news off the front page it shouldn't even be a story we shouldn't even be covering it but that's not the world we live in why are we still talking about Monica why are we talking about 2016 what aspect of this is newsworthy should we even give that the crats of covering it um I just read it so I would say yeah moving on moving on uh our main story tonight is the threat of nuclear Annihilation uh it's probably been a while since you thought about it but there was a time when people lived in almost constant fear children used to be shown this in schools Sundays holidays vacation time we must be ready every every day all the time to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes Duck and Cover I'll say this for the 1950s they had the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism the death blast is coming but we'll survive it if we all get under this picnic blanket now by the 1980s attitudes had changed uh the TV movie The Day After had a slightly different tone see if you can spot it [Music] Danny the worst thing is Danny would have been fine if he just had a picnic blanket with him what were you thinking you Little Fool the strange thing is all of that seems so dated nowadays we spend less time worrying about nuclear Annihilation than we do worrying about whether we accidentally hit reply on an office email oh did I send that to Dave I said his face looks like a feret but may maybe we should be worrying about nuclear warheads a bit more and not the ones in North Korea Iran or Russia but the ones we have here at home America has around 4,800 nuclear warheads which is more than enough not just to destroy Earth but to provide Fourth of July fireworks for martians some of our most powerful weapons are intercontinental ballistic missiles icbms which is both an acronym and what you would say if you saw one coming at you that's a little joke for all you gastroenterologists out there they they are currently in silos in Wyoming Montana and North Dakota and let's start with Wyoming how well are we taking care of these things take this enormous outer door designed to protect the corridor leading to the capsule they can't close it because of a broken part so it's propped open with a crowbar and marked with a danger tag okay to be honest repairs like that are less appropriate in a nuclear Silo than they are in a divorc dad's condo why does the fridge open with string daddy uh and and for the record for the record it's not just their Hardware that needs updating it's their software too the equipment is this for example is one of the computers that would receive a launch order from the president it uses floppy discs the really old big ones holy those things barely look powerful enough to run Oregon Trail much less Earth ending Weaponry people who work there must watch war games and go one day one day we'll get to play with that stuff look fingers crossed things are a little better in North Dakota 17 Air Force officers are being relieved of their duties controlling nuclear missiles an inspection in March tested the group's missile launch proficiency they were rated as marginal the equivalent of earning a d-grade barely passing that's not great I do really think when it comes to safeguarding the deadliest objects ever known to mankind we should really insist on something more in a solid B+ C minus range uh okay finally let's look at Montana uh the good news their officers have not had degrades the bad news is why 34 US Air Force nuclear launch officers have been stripped of their certification four months ago a launch officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana allegedly texted the answers to a monthly proficiency test to other officers at the base they texted the answers those answers should not be textable you should not be able to answer how do you prevent the launch of a Minute Man 3 with Emojis it has to be more complicated than that but okay okay look Let's Not O Let's Not overreact you know not everyone is good at tests how are the people in North Dakota and Montana working in the field picture this four Air Force officers who hold the launch keys to nuclear missiles leaving open the blast door door that's supposed to prevent terrorists from entering the capsule this while another slept inside which is allowed only if the door is closed and who discovered this in one case it was a maintenance team in another case it was discovered by someone delivering food and once again America is saved from destruction by the heroes in meal Team Six and in case you think it's just low-level unmotivated officers who are dropping the ball here let's meet two of the top people who've been in charge of our most powerful missiles first up Major General Michael KY he was relieved of command last October for spectacular reasons according to an Air Force inspector General's report on a recent trip to Russia Air Force General Michael kery was often intoxicated rude and spent a lot of time with foreign women he often interrupted presentations he often interrupted translators with annoying comments when he gave toasts that really irritated the Russians just just just think about that the man overseeing our icbms was too drunk for the Russians for the Russians and CNN barely skimmed the surface of this story the inspector General's report reads like Ron Burgundy goes to Russia apparently General kery at one point tried to fist bump a confused Russian tour guide then dragged his staff to a restaurant called lacantina because because he and I quote really wanted to see this Beatles cover band prompting one staffer to observe I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go in Russia but all right if that's where he wants to go we'll go there and even once he was there it wasn't over cuz he again I quote was really intent on singing with the band and he said go ask them if I can play guitar which led to the immortal sentence I told the general that basically um you know that he can't he can't play the guitars take a moment to consider the Run of poor decisions that are required before you're being told you can't play guitar with a Beatles cover band when you're drunk at a Mexican restaurant in Russia just add all that up together and then consider this man had access to our deadliest nuclear warheads and in case that doesn't scare you enough until recently one of the men overseeing all the people we've met so far was vice admiral Tim jordina the president relieved him of his command last year for an even weirder reason Admiral Timothy gardina's undoing began with a local criminal investigation in Iowa where he was spotted on surveillance cameras using counterfeit poker chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs okay I'm sorry but a vice admiral has to have the mental fortitude to fool an Iowa Pit Boss you have to you have to and also this means let's recap that within the last 12 months we were in a situation where in the event of us launching a nuclear strike the president's command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips who would have then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison who would have then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP sized floppy disc and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it just and if you're thinking well it looks like we were lucky nothing terrible has happened we're actually even luckier than you think over the years America has had some pretty terrifying almost gons the goldboro incident of 1961 that's when a US B52 bomber jet broke in half during a flight and lost its load two nuclear bombs where was it flying at the time over the city of Goldsboro North Carolina both bombs plummeted to the ground one was nearly armed set to explode but miraculously neither did yep you dropped an armed nuclear bomb on your own country and it is frankly amazing that you don't talk about that more often there is genuinely a weirdly restrained sign marking the event calling it a nuclear mishap when it clearly should really say holy you have no idea what nearly happen here and I know I know you you're you're probably thinking okay all right we nearly blew up one of the Carolinas but that's basically why we have two but but in that case how about that one time we risk blowing up Arkansas someone dropped a socket in The Silo and and the socket fell about 70 ft pierced the missile caused a fuel leak and then there was a huge explosion just think about the system we have designed in the rock paper scissors logic socket beats nuclear missile and if that feels too much like ancient history to you here is something from as recently as 2007 six nuclear tipped cruise missiles were loaded onto a B-52 by mistake blown across the country and left guarded on the tarmac no one noticed for 36 hours and that must have been a hell of a moment when they realized hey guys um those things that have been out there for a day and a half there is no way that those are nuclear it seems clear at this point we have too many nuclear weapons to take care of them properly so why aren't we reducing them well we were to be fair since 1988 we got rid of more than 18,000 Warheads but recently things have slowed down a lot President Obama has reduced our Arsenal by just 309 which is crazy at a time of budgetary cutbacks we are spending $355 billion over the next decade on something we don't need and don't take that from me take it from someone who actually knows something about this the one thing I convinced myself of after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless yeah nuclear weapons are basically like Americans T-Rex arms they're essenti they're essentially useless and you are plenty scary enough without them when you have when you have 4800 of something you don't need you are a hoarder at that point it's like it's like having 4,800 cats sure each one might have made sense when you got it but but it all happened so gradually you didn't really notice that things had gotten out of hand and now you have too many of these agents of chaos and destruction and one of these days one of them might kill you the problem is there are two key things stopping us from reducing our nuclear weapons the first is politics because there are lawmakers from both parties who have missile silos in their states and they will fight any attempt to close them no matter how much sense that makes and they'll fight it with iron class logic like this we know that maintaining our current silos is the best interest and in the best interest of taxpayers because rebuilding them would be very expensive okay let me get that straight you are spending money on something you don't need in the hopes that you'll be saving money on the off chance one day you eventually do what exactly are you saying there that's desperate that's like saying I have to hold on to my storage facility full of Aquaman action figures on the off chance that my future wife really likes them she will not she will not she will not want those things you don't need them that the the man there that's that's Steve Danes and the house was discussing a bill that guaranteed that silos would be kept open until at least 2021 he was trying to attach an amendment removing the end date Al together essentially meaning no matter what the Pentagon wanted the silos would have to be kept open forever it was clearly a ridiculous Amendment let's now watch it pass on this both the Yer 222 the ner 196 the amendment is adopted that is some weapons grade now now the Senate could still make big changes to that bill but for that to happen people would need to care and that brings us to the main reason why so little is being done to reduce our number of nuclear warheads deep down people just don't give enough of a anymore in the 1980s hundreds of thousands of people pushed for disarmament in Central Park but in May of this year this is what a house hearing on nuclear security looked like we should point out probably one of the few hearings in which actually the attendance of the subcommittee Compares very favorably with the attendance in the audience because uh the public has not tuned into these issues as I should that's right a hearing on the most dangerous things on on Earth had attendance rivaling that of a weekday Open Mic poetry slam and the problem is no one honestly believes that we're going to destroy ourselves despite the fact that that has nearly happened multiple times but shouldn't we at the very least be reducing our stockpile down to a number where we can look after them properly with enough qualified people none of whom are going to cheat on a test leave a door open or vomit a half-eaten chimanga onto a Slavic Ringo or all I'm saying is if humanity is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon let's make sure that it's at least intentional let's have it be a US president riding a missile with a middle finger held to the sky screaming Humanity's Last Words you world America is shutting this down please let's just not have our last words be oops oh and now this and now politicians using increasingly dated pop culture references get ready for a lot ofate R ring on it and ring on it yeah who's got your camera who let the dogs out who who I deserve to be paid more and I'm only a freshman and I'm already complaining show me the money show me the money as as George castanza would say when they're applauding stop right that takes me back to another modern day Poet by the name of Jay-Z and one of his songs he wrote it's funny what seven days can change it was all good just a week ago I've been a original co-sponsor of this bill ever since I got here to Congress if I can quote LL Cool J the rapper don't call it a comeback I've been here for years it's B go back to A Few Good Men the movie Jack Nicholson you can't handle the truth but struggling Nevada families are asking where's the beef I was thinking about Davy Crockett remember the song born in a Mountaintop in Tennessee green EST state in the land of the free raised in the woods so he knew every tree and he killed himself a bear when he was only three Davey Davy cracker finally that guy has his finger on the pulse uh finally tonight look I I know that in the in the last few weeks we've been covering a lot of depressing stories but I'm afraid I have one more terrible tale to tell you Russia has lost contact with a satellite full of possibly mating geckos Russia launched the geckos into space about a week ago they were trying to observe their mating activities in zero gravity but after just a few orbits their pod stopped responding to Mission Control don't you dare laugh at that don't don't you dare laugh at the fact that Russia has lost a satellite full of sexually active space geckos there is nothing funny about that this is like Apollo 13 all over again only in cilic and with a quintet of Russian lizards instead of Tom Hanks and and and frankly Russia has not been treating this story with the urgency it deserves Russia is hoping to restore Communications before the geckos run out of food hoping that is not good enough Russia you can't just watch videos of them and then toss them aside they're not Kardashians and look look they're geckos and look you might be saying John why are you making such a big deal out of this aren't there more important things going on in the world well yes obviously almost everything is more important than this Ukraine is sliding into Anarchy the Gaza ceas far in tenuous and uh we're mostly powerless to do anything about any of them them but maybe just maybe if we could come together and accomplish one thing as a civilization we could then build on that progress and I think rescuing these space sex geckos might just be that thing and that is why I'm issuing a challenge to humanity go get those geckos now I know what you're thinking I know what you're thinking John how is a hashtag going to rescue those geckos the hashtag is to raise awareness you idiots be positive and look you can and should do more you could go onto the kremlin's contact page which inexplicably has a form allowing you to actually write Vladimir Putin a letter which you can do at this address and look look take take this seriously don't be idiots about this the Kremlin insists this is true that your suggestions be and I quote specific and I do not know of a more specific suggestion than go get those geckos how are we going to do it what's that how are we going to get them I don't know I don't know I'm not a space pornographer may maybe a net of some sort or a magnet I don't know may maybe you've got some better ideas and if you do don't tell me Tell Vladimir Putin at this address we can do this people and sure Russia's going to push back like they did yesterday saying they've reestablished contact with the satellite but they're clearly lying the just buying Putin enough time to run to a pet store get five geckos and parade them in front of us well we don't want those geckos we want the space geckos come on Humanity let us stand together as one and let us utter the most powerful words in the English language Mr Putin go get those geckos that's our show thanks so much for watching we'll be back next week and God willing so will the geckos good night go get those geckos go get those geckos go get those geckos go get those geckos go get those geckos go get those geckos we'll get those geckos we will get those geckos for you get the geckos get the geckos go get the geckos get the deos get them get the deos get the get them listen work look at the [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] getos e

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Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024