99% Invisible - 337- Atomic Tattoos

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations. There, fingers were pricked, blood was tested and the teenagers were sent on to the library, where they waited to get a specialized tattoo. Each one was in the same place on the torso, just under the left arm, and spelled out the blood type of the student. This experimental program was called Operation Tat-Type. It was administered by the county and the idea was simple: to make it easier to transfuse blood after an atomic bomb. At the age of 16, producer Liza Yeager's grandmother, who went to school in Lake County, was permanently marked in anticipation of a nuclear catastrophe. Atomic Tattoos

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Producer Liza Yeager recently did something that will become pretty common with the next generation of kids. She asked her grandma to show her her tattoo. Can you just describe what the tattoo looks like? That's Liza. Oh, the tattoo. And that's my grandma, Carol Fischler, showing me her tattoo. It's very tiny. I think it's maybe five eighths of an inch,

and it looks like a little hand mirror. Although, it's definitely not a hand mirror. It's a little circle, and then a line going off to the side of it, and then there's a cross over that line, because my blood type is O+. It's a tiny tattoo of her blood type, right on her ribcage and just under her left arm. Okay, so do you think that you can just walk me through

step-by-step the whole process of getting the tattoo? Oh, well, um... It was pretty straightforward. All of the kids whose parents had signed the little slip were taken, marched out of our classroom and down the hall. And yeah, this was in school. This happened in Lake County, Indiana. It was 1952 and my grandma was 16. And at the first station that you came to, they pricked your finger, and squeezed a little drop of blood onto a little card,

and determined what your blood type was. And then you proceeded inside the library. Inside the library, Carol discovered a few makeshift privacy booths set up, and inside each booth and administrator, waiting with a tattoo gun, ready to draw a tiny O plus or A B or A minus on row upon row of waiting students, and always in the same place, on the torso, just under the left arm.

It was sort of like an inkjet printer. It took seconds and it went, and that was it. My grandmother and the other students that day were part of an experimental program called Operation Tat Type. It was administered by the county, and the idea was simple, but also kind of terrifying. The goal of this was to make it easy to transfuse people who had been injured and who needed a blood transfusion in case of an atom bomb. At the age of 16, Liza's grandmother's body was permanently marked in anticipation of a nuclear catastrophe.

In 1952, the Cold War was in full swing, and the government was busy developing civil defense strategies. Things ordinary citizens could do to help protect the home front. And in this case, the thinking was that in the event of a Russian attack, the tattoos would make for quicker transfusions if children were incapacitated or did another blood type. But they would also have what they were calling a walking blood bank. So instead of having to extract blood from people, store it and keep it cool, you just have a cohort of potential donors walking around with their blood types written on their sides. And if you needed some A plus or AB minus or something, you would just check all these people and then when you found what you needed,

you'd plug them into the person that needed the blood and do an immediate transfusion. You would just sort of like lift up somebody's arm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I've got one here. This is what we need. You can maybe hear this from how she's talking, but for my grandma, getting this tattoo was not a big deal. Not at the time, not now. The way she tells it, it was a totally normal day, at least for a hoosier.

This was Indiana, nobody gets all that excited. You know, about every little thing. You're studying line, you took your turn, you went back to class and finished your mathematics or whatever else you were doing at the time. But as trivial as it may have seemed at the time, Carol's tattoo was more than a weird little Cold War oddity. It was one of the smallest and most personal manifestations of a much larger idea that deeply influenced how the United States fought the Cold War, the concept of survivability. The idea that with enough canned food, shelters, fearlessness, and sometimes tattoos, the American

people would be able to survive an atomic attack, and that it was only logical to prepare for it. There was a trail by the name of birth, and birth of Turtle was very alert. Today, if we remember anything about the idea of survivability, it's probably this. It's the Duck and Coverage Angle. The song that goes along with this grainy black and white film that was distributed by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. It shows a little hand-drawn turtle ducking under his shell. He's teaching kids to hide under their desks during a bomb.

People make fun of duck and cover a lot. It's considered the number one example of the kind of Cold War era propaganda that seems totally ridiculous now. Kitchie and absurd and sort of unimaginably naive. There are a lot of jokes made and I think ridicule of duck and cover. And even today, people joke about it and say you wouldn't be protected at all, it wouldn't make any difference. Susan Lindy is a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the Cold War. And she says that when we make fun of the usefulness of a tactic like decking cover,

thinking it couldn't ever work, we're actually just wrong. Those films were, in fact, based on the individual experiences of persons who had been exposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In September of 1945, just one month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military sent a team of American doctors and geneticists to Japan to interview people who'd survived the attacks. They were looking to understand both the short and long-term effects of radiation.

That program would eventually be named the Atomic Bomb Casualdee Commission, or the A-B-C-C. It would also prove to be highly controversial, because the researchers weren't there to treat the survivors. They were there to study them, and only to study them. And the reason to study the survivors was because they were surrogates for future American populations that would be subjected to exactly this kind of urban attack in a future nuclear war. It was American lives, not Japanese they were hoping to save, to understand who would survive and who would not when an American city was hit with an atomic bomb.

So when the American scientists and physicians arrived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what they wanted to do first was to track down how many survivors there were. They were looking at lots of things, cancer rates, irregular pregnancies, heart disease, but also critically, they asked every survivor they interviewed. Where were you at the moment of the detonation? How close had they been? Because before the ABCC researchers arrived, the physicists who had developed the bomb had assumed

that they wouldn't be finding survivors anywhere close to ground zero, what they called the hypocenter. But what became clear is that some people could be very close but weren't exposed to significant levels of radiation because they were shielded. And within about three blocks of the hypocenter at researchers discovered that people who had taken cover, even momentarily, didn't just survive the immediate blast, they seemed to be healthy. So there's a very famous story about Nagasaki, which involved young boys who were swimming, and they were diving off a cliff into a lake.

And at the moment of detonation, five of them were upstanding up on the cliff and one of them had just hit the water and went underwater. And all five who were on that cliff were dead of leukemia by 1952. And the one who'd been underwater did not get sick. Anyone who had been behind even a tree was more likely to be alive five years later than someone who had been out in the open. And the logic of this is that the key exposure to radiation, the most important moment,

lasts less than a second. It's not that there weren't other sources of radiation to be avoided, but what mattered most was being shielded at the moment of the blast. And during the blast wave that followed, it was the people who were standing up, who were most likely to be killed by shattering windows or falling debris. People who had been lying down when the blast wave hit, much more often survived. The lesson seemed clear. In the event of an atomic bomb, if you could stay low and stay shielded, in other words, if you ducked and covered, you might just be okay.

An American civil defense planter's head already began to wonder, if Duck and Cover could help the population of a city survive a nuclear attack, what else might work? They were studying things like psychology and group dynamics and infrastructure to see how society as a whole might hold up under a nuclear attack. And the civil defense policies that emerged from this research, all stressed that America could survive but only if everyone, not just the authorities but everyday citizens, did their part. With the knowledge of the first atomic explosions to guide us, our chances for survival

will be far better than those of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we act on our knowledge and are prepared. Like practicing proper home maintenance. I am going to show you how protective measures can help guard your home against the heat effects of an atomic explosion. And air raid drills. Warning is flashed along the civil defense network, and an air raid target city preparedness gets as concrete a test as possible short of actual bombing. Even learning how to deal with irradiated soil.

For detailed information, get your free copy of Your Livestock Can Survive Fallout. And in Lake County, Indiana, they opted into a little pilot program to indicate their blood type with a tattoo. All predicated on the belief that, in the face of an atomic attack, a person and a society might just survive. And my grandma, she says she was pretty much on board. You don't have any particular memories of your first impressions of the program. Yeah, they were all positive. I thought this was a really good idea. She says, for one thing, it was a time when more people still trusted the government. Well, you were just coming off this big

war, which is impossibly complicated in all parts of the world. And yet somehow it had all come out all right. And so you felt that somebody was in charge that knew what he was doing. Plus, the place she lived in Northern Indiana was a huge railroad hub. And it was a possible target. She didn't know for sure whether the tattoos would help her survive an attack. But she also genuinely believed that they might.

They were worth getting. Because if people were injured and would not be able to be assisted because you didn't know their blood type is, well, that's a no-brainer. Just go ahead and write it, write it on them. Remember, this was a voluntary program. My grandmother signed up for it and so did most of her grade. She wanted to do her part to be prepared. Because who knows?

Who knows? You know, in all of the Japanese cities that were bombed, there had to be a next day. What do you do the next day? What do you do to save as many people as possible? The unthinkable thing, when it happens, you'll have to somehow react to it. When I really listened to my grandmother, this made sense to me. It made sense that people believe that the risk of an attack was real. and believe there was a way to be at least somewhat prepared. The problem is that not long after she got that tattoo, the premise behind it, survivability, stopped making sense.

Even as children were learning to duck and cover and farmers were learning how to protect livestock from fallout, the very idea of what a nuclear war might look like was changing, and with it, our chances of survival. In 1950, just two years before Operation Tat-type, the Soviet Union had a grand total of five nuclear warheads. Five.

By 1960, they would have over 1600. Many of them thermonuclear weapons. Hydrogen bombs exponentially more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By then, Susan Lindy thinks that civil defense tactics like the school tattoo program, they might still have been valuable in the event of a limited engagement, in which perhaps only a small number of cities were hit. So it's not that blood transfusion wouldn't have mattered at all. But in the event of a global thermonuclear war,

where it's not just your city that's destroyed, but the entire infrastructure of the United States, you're not imagining a still functioning society outside of that city. You're imagining that there are no doctors to be rushed to the scene. Nobody can come from a neighboring city. And in that case, like, what are these children gonna do? Yeah, what are they gonna do? Still, government agencies like the Civil Defense

Administration continued to promote the idea that the country could survive a full-throated nuclear attack in part because the gospel of survivability, however imaginary, still served other functions. Sure, imaginary things matter a lot, especially in propaganda. Because a lot of military and civil defense planners, they didn't just worry there would be a war. They were convinced war was coming. Department of Defense, the president, Congress, reached the conclusion that developing and stockpiling ever larger, ever more powerful nuclear weapons was absolutely crucial to the

security and the future survival of the United States. Which is why, by 1960, the same year the Soviet nuclear arsenal topped 1,600 warheads, the United States had more than 18,000. And those weapons were controversial, almost from the beginning. In one week in June, demonstrations took place in more than a dozen countries and at 50 locations throughout the United States. There were always protests. Within 24 hours of the dropping of the bomb, there were critics all over the world

saying that the United States should not have used it. If this keeps up, then where does it stop? Do we live under this sort of domicile forever? And there were the allotions who said this is an immoral form of warfare. That what's happening here is immoral and that we, in faith, must resist it. And that made the logic of survivability doubly useful. Things like lessons in school, and evacuation we, in faith, must resist it. And that made the logic of survivability doubly useful.

Things like lessons in school, and evacuation drills, and tattoos. The advice is increasing the acceptability of nuclear weapons, and increasing public belief in the idea that even if a nuclear war came, there would be strategies that would permit those who were properly prepared to survive. And did it work? Like, did people feel less scared? I think that some people did, maybe most people, because when you look at surveys of people in the 50s about nuclear weapons, people believe that they're necessary.

And if you believe it's necessary, then you have to believe that it's also practical, that it's not insane. You have to believe it's not insane. The year that my grandma got her tattoo, 15,000 other late county residents also got their blood type checked through the tattoo- Tat typing program.

Finger-priced, drop a blood on the card. Two-thirds of those people opted for a tattoo. But Operation Tat Type didn't go far outside Lake County. Despite all the survivability fervor, it never made it beyond the pilot program. When I touched on my grandma though, I can kind of hear it. The thing Lindy talks about, about the psychological impact of programs like this. Did getting a tattoo make you feel safer? Yes, I guess so. I thought that I had done the thing that was available to do

to help in case of a total disaster. I thought I had done the right thing. But maybe more importantly, it was just doing something that made her feel better. a total disaster. I thought I had done the right thing. But maybe more importantly, it was just doing something that made her feel better. It was hard to imagine the bigger picture. No, no, I didn't dwell on all of that. I didn't envision myself lying there and doctors coming up and throwing up my arm and saying, aha, oh plus, transfuse this child with a plus blood, you know, I never played that all out in my mind. She says she was way too busy.

She was talking with her friends about boys or what they were going to do over the weekend. Daily life, the life she was living was much more attractive. Otherwise, we'd go crazy if we had to deal intensively with all of these terrible threats. It's a certain amount of stuff. I can't think about that. You just gotta keep going and do other things. I think that's one of the great capacities we have. Today, the legacy of survivability is hidden behind a new series of titles, acronyms, and other

obfuscating symbols. The Atomic Bomb Caterlary Commission, which studied the effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eventually became the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. A joint American Japanese venture that has continued to study the long-term effects on the survivors of the bomb and their children nearly 75 years later. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, after several name changes, was combined with various other agencies to form FEMA in 1978.

Its strategies have been adapted to deal with hurricanes, earthquakes, and, yes, possible nuclear attacks. And then there's the tiny legacy of survivability inked on the torso of Carol Fischler, just under her left arm. A faded tattoo that says, oh, positive, but looks like a picture of a little hand mirror. Special thanks to professors Tracy Davis and Ann Laman at Northwestern University whose voices we did not get to include but who provided us with invaluable information during our research for this story.

Up next, Joe Rosenberg and I play global thermonuclear war. Stay with us. Okay, so Roman, do you remember the movie War Games? I absolutely remember the movie War Games. It's a big deal when I was kid. Oh yeah, and it's aged. I should just side note, it's aged incredibly well. Yeah, I don't doubt it. For those who don't know it or don't remember,

it's kind of one of those classic movies from the 80s, where a teenager somehow single-handedly takes on the military industrial complex. Exactly. There's an entire subgenre and obviously, uh, stranger things owes a lot to it. Totally. Anyways, in this case, the teenager is played by a young Matthew Broderick, a pre-fair spieler, by the way, who hacks into this quasi-senshin computer mainframe that runs NORAD. And once he's in, this computer starts talking to him.

And it says, you know, Cree Danes, would you like to play a game? And this list of simulated games the computer likes to play pops up. And one of them is called Global Thermonuclear War. Right. And Broderick's character is, you know, teenager. He's teenager he's like hell yes I want to play the only option right yeah I want to play global thermo nuclear war but the computer tries to talk him out of it and is like wouldn't you prefer maybe I'll just say I'm not gonna try do it okay okay wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess love it and broader is like no no way global thermo nuclear war and eventuallyoric is like, uh, no. No way. Global thermonuclear war.

And eventually the computer is like, fine. And suddenly, the Brotoric is presented with this game where the map of the world is laid out before him. And he can start dropping bombs on cities and see what happens. And of course, things go awry from there, you know, hilarity and soons. I won't spoil the movie for anyone. But when I first saw Wargames when I was all of, I don't know, 10 years old, I kept thinking, man, why can't I play a game called Global Thermonucleure War? You know, to my 10 year old brain, that sounded wonderful.

Absolutely. Well, here's the thing. In doing some of the research for this story 26 years later I kind of sort of found it nice. It's this online simulator It's called NukeMap in which you can simulate the detonation of the nuclear weapon of your choice at any spot on the globe And you get to see what happens. Okay, so let's try it out. What's the address I need to go to? Just Google and NukeMap and it's usually the first thing that comes up. NukeMap by Alex Willarsene. Is that right? Yeah, correct.

Oh, here we go. Oh yeah. Drag the marker wherever you want it, like to hit the target, or you can like try a preset. Right, so you first get to choose which city it is, you'd like to destroy. Okay. You can place the marker anywhere, but there's, you'll see there's like a handy drop-down menu. Do you have a crapper? Oh, go right to San Francisco. Okay. You can place the marker anywhere, but you'll see there's like a handy drop down menu. Do you have a crapper?

We'll go right to San Francisco. Okay. So you want to nuke yourself. Well, you know, I think it's only fair. I mean, I actually did the exact same thing. As far as I can tell, everyone I've showed this to you, like they always immediately either nuke themselves or New York. Right.

We'll do Oakland next. Okay. Okay. So, enter the yield. There's a preset of the type of kiloton bomb you can try. A lot of different weapons, real weapons from history. You can choose from the actual US and Russian arsenals. You can choose really tiny, you know, 20 ton vision weapons that can be shot from a cannon to like the largest ever detonated, which is this 50 megaton hydrogen monster that the

Russians detonated this one time. So, like, which do you want to choose? Well, let's, you know, let's go for the big one. So this is the Sarbama, largest USSR bomb tested at 50 megatons. Okay, we'll select that. Okay, basic options, height of burst, air burst or surface. So air burst is, you know, like it explodes above the city at some point. Yeah.

Something. Okay. And so you've chosen air burst, you've chosen 50 megatons. It's about to be dropped pretty much right on Market Street. It's on 21st between Guerrero and Dolores. Right. Not that any of this is going to matter because it's a huge wall. So now there's a big beautiful red button that says detonate.

Let's do it. All right. Oh. Right now, it's totally not the estimated fatalities at 1.5 million people. It has this inner blast radius that's all red. Right. And then an outer blast radius that reaches all the way to anyach. And then a, I guess this is like a radioactive cloud that reaches well past Sacramento.

Yeah. It's crazy. And actually with these big bombs like this, I mean, actually you can see that outer red ring is, I believe, like, is, you know, third degree burns. Yeah. Shockwave is pretty much going to take out the entire Bay area. Yeah. It's kind of like what you expected, right?

Totally. This is what we think of nuclear war as looking like. It's just total devastation. Like you don't even need to be close. People in the central valley might be okay, but we hear in Oakland right across the bay from SF, we're definitely dead. Right.

But where this gets interesting and actually valuable is if you shift things up just a bit. So I want you to run the exact same simulation. But this time I want you to choose the bomb called Fat Man. This was the bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki Okay fat man. This is 20 kilotons. Here we go detonate

All right, okay San Francisco is in trouble still, but you're talking about 70,000 estimated fatalities and the talking about 70,000 estimated fatalities and the air blast radius, it really reaches only to 19th Avenue to the sunset. That's what I first use, that's what kind of shock me. These original bombs that we think of as these devastating weapons, they are devastating, but compared to the hydrogen weapons,

they're kind of shockingly small. And even if you calculate the shock wave that would break windows, that shockwave doesn't even reach Oakland. It doesn't even reach us. It's interesting because what you start to realize is that these smaller, older weapons, like the Hiroshima bomb, like the Nagasaki bomb, they take out this big chunk from the center of a city. But it's just this chunk.

Everything outside the chunk is kind of intact. And we need to put this in context and point out that in terms of lives lost. This is still an incredible catastrophe. Oh, totally, yeah. This simulation shouldn't minimize the idea that those bombs are horrible, and they killed a lot of people. But when you see what some of the largest nuclear weapons,

the potential of them, and these smaller ones, you realize that this logic of survivability really is intact. Right. Right. So yeah, I think it's really helps demonstrate this thing that I'd always heard, just like we say in the story, that hydrogen nuclear weapons are exponentially more powerful than conventional nuclear weapons. But that didn't really mean anything to me. I was like hydrogen, conventional, whatever. They're all bad. But in reality, no, there is an almost existential difference in the amount of destruction. And as Liza's grandmother puts it, whether there's going to be a next day or not. And it turns out that this actually has really profound consequences for how we think

about nuclear threats in the present day. Because people get real fatalistic about the bomb. They say things like, well, what could you do? There's nothing to do. It's not something I can deal with. It's not something I can do. So this is the Sized Creator, Alex Wellerstein. He's a professor of nuclear history at the Stevens Institute of Technology and also part

of a project called reinventing civil defense. And he says that one reason he built the Nuke map site is that we're still basically holding on to this late Cold War model of seeing nuclear war as this global existential threat. You know, why bother thinking about it? Because if it happens, we're all dead. It's like getting a rare disease. So, you know, like, why worry? And that becomes the excuse to totally check out.

And it's not just checking out if there's something happened to them, but it's checking out for it being like a national policy issue. It's checking out on treaties, checking out on, you know, what the president's allowed to do, that kind of thing. And I'd really like people not to check out. And I think the best way to do it is to get them to think about this more realistically. And so what is realistic in this case?

What's not particularly likely, what's not realistic in the current geopolitical climate is Russia or even China obliterating the United States and half the world with thousands of gigantic warheads, even though that's the scenario that most people like to gravitate towards. They have a hard time shifting into, no, no, no, we're talking about two or three detonations from North Korea. Nation is not going to be dead. And then if you do that, it is a little stressful, then maybe it should be, right?

Because you suddenly see it like, oh, we should have a plan. And this is where NukeMap comes in, because it really helps convey the proper size of the threat, because if you select for, you know, a North Korean size warhead, and that is one of the options, you'll see it is larger than the Hiroshima bomb, but still much, much closer Hiroshima in terms of the kind of damage it does compared to these large hydrogen weapons. Okay. So we're still in the, there will be a next day territory,

hence the need for a plan. That totally makes sense. So given this, what is the plan? Well, the big thing in Alex's mind is that now that we are once again presented with the possibility of these limited nuclear scenarios, we, as a culture, need to relearn civil defense. And in fact, there are civil defense tactics

you can find on the FEMA website, like right now, in case of a nuclear attack, but Alex's work with the re-inventing civil defense project is in part about how we could maybe actively disseminate this information in a way that everyday people won't look at scant-atty, there's like kind of panic inducing or as big brother propaganda that's normalizing nuclear weapons because he thinks that these

civil defense tactics could save lives. And so one of the big things he'd like to see come back, and I'm with him on this by the way, is ducking cover. You can think of it in a very crude way this way. If you're really too close to the weapon, then nothing you do is going to matter. And it's going to be over very fast. If you're really far away from the weapon, then nothing you do is going to matter, and it's going to be over very fast. If you're really far away from the weapon, you're going to say, what was that? And it's not going to matter what you do because you're outside the range.

And then there's sort of an in-between range where ducking and covering in some situations is exactly the right thing to do. And this is for all the reasons that were laid out in the main story, which is avoiding direct exposure to radiation and heat protecting yourself from structural damage and shattering windows, which you can see on these nuke map simulations of what a North Korean-sized weapon would do. Even if you're relatively close to the epicenter, you're much more likely to be in the zone of the shockwave, or at least the blast, you're most likely not going to be in the all-consuming

fireball. But maybe the biggest takeaway from the nukeMap simulator is what it can teach you about dealing with fallout. Because in this scenario where we survive from over here in our, you know, the cushy confines of Oakland, actually we're not out of the woods. The prevailing winds come this way, so we definitely have to deal with fallout. And in fact, that's what presents the most danger to the most people in these scenarios with these smaller weapons. And so Alex just a few weeks ago he added this feature which is kind of like Google Street view. You can drop this little marker anywhere on the map and tell it whether you're indoors or outdoors or in a basement and it will basically tell you how okay you'll be.

Because you can see very starkly, oh, if I'm stuck on the freeway, I'm going to absorb this much radiation in this case. However, if I had just stayed at home, then that cuts it down to this much. And if I go into a basement or someplace bigger, wow, it's like basically nothing at all. So it's cool. So it's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's

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when it comes to advice for fallout safety. Some of our researchers in that this communication has not gone that well. And in fact, my colleagues asked people, they actually told them what the right thing to do is, and then asked them what they would do, and a lot of them were like, I could get my kids. Yeah, if there was a bomb went off or a fire happened, where it's like so much better for kids to just stay in school where they are, and my impulse would be to run right to them. It's totally true. So you just ignore this and... I don't know if I would've told you.

What if, yeah, what if that meant they didn't have a father the next day? Well, I mean, I'd rather them live than me, that's for sure. But it would be really hard to fight the impulse to not run to them no matter what I knew in terms of common sense approach. I guess I can't be one to judge,

because I'd like to believe that I would overcome that paternal instinct, but maybe once I have children. That's all the children are going to go right out the way. You never know. But anyway, so let this be a lesson for everyone. The next time a computer program, like NukeMap, asks you if you want to play Global Thermonuclear War, you should say yes. Do it, absolutely. Nuke You should say yes. Do it. Absolutely.

Newt yourself. It's how it goes. And it's actually the reason for a thing to do. Play out the simulation. You might learn something. All right. Thanks, Joe. Thank you. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Liza Yeager and edited by Joe Rosenberg.

Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusef, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kirk Cole-Stat is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffman, and Mip Fitzgerald Vivian Lee, Teran Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, in Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a collection of fiercely independent and fascinating podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

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