American History Tellers - The Cold War - The Nature of Risk | 4

Episode Date: January 10, 2018

Americans were desperate to find hope in the shadow of the bomb.Miracle cures, cheap energy, and even brand new atomic gardens: the wonders of the atom were ours to discover! Right? Eager to explore nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, Americans instead found the resulting radioactive fallout too dangerous.In Episode 4, we’ll talk about swim wear, baby teeth, and how America just couldn’t get friendly with the atom.Scott Kauffman’s “Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War Alaska” was inspired by Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech and essential reading for anyone interested in nuclear history.Finally, Audra Wolfe’s book, “Competing with the Soviets,” was crucial to our overall understanding of the Cold War.Support us by supporting our sponsors!ZipRecruiter - To post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, just go to ZipRecruiter.com/AHTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine that it's late January 1951. You work for Kodak at the company's headquarters in Rochester, New York. The fine snow's been falling for days, and the drive to work this morning was a little slippery. The new snow squeaks beneath your feet as you walk from the parking lot to the factory. But once you're inside, no one wants to talk about the weather. Instead, everyone's talking about something else that seems to be falling from the sky. Radiation. You work for one of

Kodak's research arms, the physics division. You and your colleagues spend most of your time exploring new opportunities for your company at the margins of science. But your group also helps with quality control. Radiation damages film, and right now, the factory has a radiation problem. Your co-worker leads a group of you over to a Geiger counter, positioned by the air filters. It started going off Sunday, and it hasn't really stopped since. Wow, that's a lot. I've never heard anything like it.

The levels are just off the charts, at least 25 times higher than normal. Where's it coming from? It's got to be an atomic test. Nothing natural could create radiation levels this high. But nothing's been announced. Let's go ask Webb. Julian Webb, your boss, is the Kodak resident expert on unknown radiation. The last time Kodak had a radiation problem was 1945. In the fall of that year, several runs of x-ray film developed spots. Webb eventually traced the problem to the strawboard separating the layers of film.

He discovered that the strawboard somehow contained a radioactive element not found anywhere in nature. Last year, Webb published an article linking Kodak's fogged film with the first Manhattan Project test in 1945. So if anyone could make sense of the Geiger counter chirping away today, it was Webb. But when you bring Webb into it, he doesn't know what to do. You've got to understand what happened last time. The radiation was in the packaging, not the film. And it all came from a factory in Vincennes, Indiana, on the banks of a river. The fallout came down with the rain, and the river concentrated it. This is different.

A fallout here in Rochester could wipe out our entire production line. Within two weeks, Webb's fears started to come true. You hold up a sheet of x-ray film to the light. Look at that, worthless. The film is covered in tiny white spots, each no bigger than a pinprick. You learn the U.S. government has opened up a new testing facility in Nevada, and the fallout just keeps coming. The atomic age was threatening Kodak's business model. In March, Kodak threatens to sue the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, over its nuclear testing program. The threat of a lawsuit gets results.

The AEC agrees to start warning Kodak before conducting nuclear tests. But in return, Kodak agrees to keep quiet about the scale of the fallout problem. You are now the keeper of an unwanted secret. Atomic testing isn't just something that produces effects far away in the Pacific Ocean or in the Nevada desert. You can'tcers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments,

and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate, available now wherever you get your books. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. So, before we get into today's episode, I wanted to thank the hundreds of people that have left us so many thoughtful reviews. From teachers of history, to history fans, to people who are just interested in our country, thank you so much. Now, let's begin episode four of the Cold War. On the previous episode of American History Tellers, we talked about how the prospect of nuclear warfare changed American life. Military

strategists devised means for command and control, and universities committed themselves to designing weapons. Suburbanites built private bomb shelters, and the government built bunkers. Throughout all of this, citizens and politicians alike recognized that nuclear weapons presented a unique threat to civilization. But at least through most of the 1950s, the fear centered on all-out nuclear warfare. In the early years of the Cold War, Americans desperately wanted to find ways to live with the bomb. They dreamed of electricity too cheap to meter and hoped to harness the power of atoms for peace. In today's episode, we're looking at how Americans tried to get friendly with the atom

and how that friendship ultimately fell apart. By the late 1950s, a grassroots movement had grown up in opposition to radioactive fallout. Some historians even say the modern environmental movement has its roots in opposition to nuclear testing. The nuclear arsenal continued to grow throughout the 1960s, but Americans had soured on atomic salvation. Nuclear fear makes sense to us now, but let's start with the optimism. Imagine that it's 1961 and you're an avid gardener. There's nothing you look forward to more than breathing in the loamy smell of soil in the springtime. Except maybe for selecting your seeds for the year ahead. A seed catalog is one of life's greatest pleasures,

bringing a pop of color into an otherwise dull winter existence. You throw another log on the fire and settle in for an afternoon of garden planning. Maybe you're joined by a dog or a cat who enjoys the fire almost as much as you do. Your eyes pass quickly over the peas and lettuces, but tomatoes? What gardener can resist the allure of a new kind of tomato? And that's when you see the full page notice for something called atom-blasted seeds. You call your husband over to check it out. Have you heard about this? Listen, be one of the first to actually grow unpredictable atomic flowers and vegetables. You might just originate a totally new variety. Are they bigger,

hardier, resistant to wilt? What do you get in a pack of atomic seeds? That's the point. They don't know what the seeds can do. Apparently, they've been exposed to radiation. The ad says the radiation can create giants or dwarfs with unexpected colors or shapes. It's an experiment. So mutations like Godzilla, You want to grow killer tomatoes? No, the ads say it's perfectly safe. It's just a fun way to create new plants. They're offering prizes for the best new varieties. If our hypothetical gardener actually purchased these atomic seeds, she would have had lots of company. In her book Evolution Made to Order, historian Ellen Curry describes the widespread enthusiasm for atomic gardens in the early 1960s.

Private seed companies made arrangements with atomic researchers to use radiation to generate new kinds of plants. In 1961, if you visited a home and garden show in Los Angeles or Cleveland, you could check out new petunias, gladiolas, marigolds, and snapdragons created through the wonders of atomic radiation. The seed companies were actually a little bit late to the game. Savvy marketers began embracing the atom in their advertising campaigns as early as 1946, just one year after two atomic bombs killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians.

You could buy an atomic bomb decoder ring for your child or a mushroom cloud-shaped brooch for your wife. Life magazine described a Hollywood starlet as an anatomic bomb. If you've ever worn a bikini personally or admired someone who has, you've participated in atomic culture. In 1946, the U.S. Navy staged a public test of the atomic bomb in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. More than 40,000 people attended Operation Crossroads, as it was called. The Navy invited reporters, congressmen, international officials, even Soviet observers to witness the test.

A few days after that first test, the French fashion designer Louis Rayard debuted a new two-piece skimpy swimsuit and called it the Bikini. Americans were scandalized by the skimpiness, but not the name. Americans in the 1950s embraced what historian Alex Wellerstein has called atomic kitsch, flooding movie theaters to see bad sci-fi flicks based on mutations snacking on atomic fireball candies. It's hard to overstate the public's desire to find something good, some sort of salvation, in atom research in the late 1940s. In the spring of 1947, the popular magazine Colliers published an article titled Man and the Atom that touted the possibilities for personal

transformation through atomic research. It included an astonishing illustration of a man in a robe and pajamas standing in front of a mushroom cloud. His abandoned wheelchair glints in the background. He looks to the heavens, smiling, his hands outstretched to receive the redemption of the atomic age. But how exactly would the atom cure the sick? Medical researchers pin their hopes on radioisotopes, which are unstable byproducts of radioactive decay. These radioisotopes, in turn, give off types of radiation that can be used as cancer treatments or medical tracers. The growth of nuclear weapons research meant that the AEC was suddenly producing a lot of radioisotopes. The U.S. government needed to find an outlet for these materials, but it also hoped to encourage the idea of peaceful atomic research. According to historian Angela Krager, the AEC

distributed almost 64,000 shipments of radioisotopes in the first decade of the atomic age. The AEC sent these materials to laboratories, hospitals, and private companies. Doctors used radioiodine to diagnose thyroid cancer and radiophosphorus to identify tumors. In 1951, the AEC even built a 50-bed hospital in Argonne, Illinois, dedicated to exploring the possibilities of radioisotopes in cancer treatments. But these hopes proved misplaced. It turned out that radioisotopes could not cure cancer, and doctors soon wised up to the AEC. Imagine that it's the early 1950s, and you've just received disturbing news, a cancer diagnosis. With the help of your family doctor and some business connections, you've scored a coveted

appointment at Memorial Hospital in New York. You fly out tomorrow. It's your first time in New York. The hustle and bustle of the city is like nothing you've seen before. Cacophony of car horns, newspaper boys, and street hustle. The smell of diesel exhaust and hot dogs fills the air. But it's not all terrifying. The store windows on Fifth Avenue offer you a glimpse into a world you've only imagined, full of Italian shoes, English suits, and buttery leather briefcases from Hummel's brand. The people of New York have a

different kind of polish than the folks back home. It's an exciting place to be, if a bit overwhelming, and you're glad you came. Your cab drops you off in front of an imposing brick building on the Upper East Side. The hospital has a long history as a center for cancer treatment, but that's not why you pulled in every favor you had to get here. Next door to the hospital is a gleaming new 13-story research facility, the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. It's the largest private cancer research center in the world, and you're hoping to benefit from its findings,

especially its atomic findings. You bring this up immediately in your appointment with a specialist. What about isotopes? I keep reading about isotopes in the papers. Iodine, phosphorus, gold. Does Memorial use isotopes? The doctor pauses longer than you'd like. Don't believe everything you read in the papers.

Yes, we use radioisotopes, but primarily for diagnosis. We've been searching for five years and haven't really seen any breakthroughs in treatment. We still recommend external radiation. I didn't come all the way to New York for that. My hospital at home's been using radiation since the 30s. What are your researchers doing over there in the new facility? Ah, well, we do have some new treatments with a different kind of external radiation. Our experimental treatments use total body irradiation. It comes from cobalt-60

on an x-ray machine, but I'm not sure you're a good candidate for that. Why not? Let's just say you're not there yet. Let's focus on actually treating the cancer you have. As a patient in this scenario, you wouldn't have known about the medical community's deep skepticism towards medical radiation. At Sloan Kettering, researchers were experimenting with total body irradiation, but mainly on patients who are already near death. And here's what we found out later. These tests were experiments, not treatments. The Army wanted to know how soldiers' bodies would react to the radiation from an atomic bomb. So it asked cancer centers to find out.

Forty years later, a congressional investigation found out that most of the patients who received total body irradiation were not expected to recover. And most were so poor they had little to say in their treatment. The AEC's public support for atomic cancer treatments put prominent medical researchers in a bind. The public got excited about treatments that either didn't exist, didn't work, or were being used for something other than their stated purpose. If atomic seed catalogs are any indication, people still wanted to believe in the healing, hopeful powers of atomic radiation at least as late as 1961. But at some point in the mid-50s, it started to look like wishful thinking. On March 1, 1954, the United States began another

series of nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll. This time, there would be no audience of reporters. The 15-megaton hydrogen bomb used in the Castle Bravo test was the largest weapon the United States had ever detonated, and the fifth largest in human history. The fireball was visible from 250 miles away. Radioactive fallout fell over a 3,000-square-mile area, well beyond what the test designers anticipated. Hundreds of sailors, weather researchers, and Marshall Islanders were exposed to radiation. A Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru, was operating about 80 miles east when the blast went off.

The boat was well outside of the test exclusion area. Fine, flaky white dust started falling on the boat and fell for three hours. Everything and everyone on board was soon coated in a thin layer of pulverized coral, spiked with radioisotopes. By the time they arrived back in Yaizu, the entire crew was sick. They suffered burns, nausea, and headaches, and their hair fell out. The tuna on their boat was radioactive. Their exposure ignited an international scandal.

Was radioactive fallout more dangerous than the AEC was letting on? The AEC's commissioner, former Rear Admiral Louis Strauss, tried to downplay the damage. In a statement to the press, he claimed, I can state that any increase in background radiation would be far below the levels which would be harmful in any way to human beings, animals, or crops. Then, the fishing boat's radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died of radiation poisoning. Kodak's researchers knew that fallout was everywhere, but they didn't think it was particularly dangerous. Kuboyama's death made fallout visible to everyone, everywhere. Kuboyama died because he was exposed to the byproducts of nuclear explosions, the same

kind of byproducts that the AEC was suggesting might cure cancer. Americans desperately wanted to believe that good things could come from the atomic bomb, that new plants and new cures could emerge from the same research that brought death and destruction. But in the mid-1950s, it was beginning to dawn upon Americans that the government had been less than truthful with the American public. There would be no atomic salvation. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts.

But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambees and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one

series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will

bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition,

wherever you get your books. Imagine that it's 1960, and you're living in the suburbs of St. Louis. You're the parent of a six-year-old with all that entails. Birthday parties, visits to the zoo, howdy-doody on TV. Your son, Wurz, passed you on his bicycle. It's been a year of milestones, and another is just around the corner. How's that tooth coming? Almost there, I can wiggle it. You've got mixed feelings about the prospect of this lost tooth, and not just because it means your son is growing up. For months now, you've been volunteering with a new organization, the Committee on Nuclear Information. You've spent countless hours addressing newsletters and tabulating responses to questionnaires. The taste of envelope glue lingers on Nuclear Information. You spent countless hours addressing newsletters and tabulating responses to questionnaires.

The taste of envelope glue lingers on your tongue. So far, you've been gathering information from other people, but when your son finally loses that tooth, your role will change. A week later, the day finally comes. I got it, Mom, I got it. Look at that grin. Congratulations.

Now remember what we talked about. No tooth fairy. I need that tooth for science. I know mom, just like all my friends. That's right. Now can I have it please? You take your son's tooth and place it in an envelope. You take a survey from the stack in the dining room and sit down to fill it out. You record your son's date of birth, how long he was breastfed, and what kind of milk you used in his formula. Two. You record your son's date of birth, how long he was breastfed, and what kind of milk you used in his formula. Two weeks later, your son gets his prize. Open it. It's for you. Wow, a button. Yes, it says, I gave my tooth to science. I'm going to wear it everywhere. So you're not mad at the tooth fairy? No, this is better. You wish you could share your son's pure

delight at this experiment, but you're too worried about the results. What you know, and he doesn't, is that the minerals in his tooth will almost certainly show that he's been exposed to fallout from nuclear weapons testing. The question is, how much, and is it safe? This was the baby tooth survey. To understand why housewives in Missouri were handing over their children's teeth, we need to back up a moment. So bear with me for a bit of science. One of the main components of fallout is a radioactive element called strontium-90. That number 90 refers to atomic weight, or the combined number of protons and neutrons in the atom's core. Strontium always has 38 protons, but in nature, strontium has 46, 48, 49, or 50 neutrons.

Add these two numbers together and you get the atomic weights of naturally occurring strontium, 84, 86, 87, and 88. Strontium-90 is not a naturally occurring isotope. Instead, it's a major byproduct of nuclear fission. Many byproducts of fission in uranium have short half lives, decaying in a matter of days, but strontium-90 sticks around. If you started out with two pounds of strontium-90, 30 years later, you'd still have nearly a pound. But what makes strontium-90 really dangerous is its similarity to calcium. Strontium sits just below calcium on

the periodic table, which means it acts like calcium in chemical reactions. When radioactive strontium lands on the soil, plants incorporate it into their cells. From there, it enters the food chain. Let's say that this soil happens to be in a pasture. When cows eat the contaminated grass, the strontium enters their milk. And when kids drink this milk, their bodies can't distinguish radioactive strontium from the calcium they need to grow. Strontium-90 ends up in bones, bone marrow, and teeth. By the late 1950s, the AEC and American scientists were involved in a heated debate about the nature of fallout. AEC officials like Strauss consistently argued that fallout wasn't dangerous.

On the other side, an increasing number of scientists and doctors argued that radioactive isotopes associated with fallout could cause mutations, cancers, and especially childhood leukemias. Once incorporated into the body, isotopes like strontium become internal emitters, radiating the body from the inside. Both the AEC and the scientists accused each other of lying. Each side said that the other was politicizing facts about fallout. Because, you see, this debate wasn't taking place in a vacuum. Starting in 1954, after the Bravo

test debacle, a number of third world leaders began calling for a nuclear test ban. By 1955, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was calling for a moratorium. Washington and Moscow spent most of the rest of the decade bickering over test bans. By 1958, the debate about the dangers of fallout had become a proxy for debating a nuclear test ban. People who endorsed a nuclear test ban described fallout as terribly dangerous. People who wanted to continue testing nuclear weapons described fallout as harmless. The U.S. government framed the debate over fallout and nuclear testing as one of risk. Yes, fallout from nuclear testing might produce a slight increase in the number of cancer diagnoses and birth defects,

but the risks of not testing nuclear weapons were even higher. What if the Soviet Union had better weapons than the United States? Risk implied choices, and to make choices, the public needed information. Enter the St. Louis Base Committee for Nuclear Information I mentioned before. As historian Michael Egan explains, the Committee for Nuclear Information was part of a broader consumer movement that prioritized information over interpretation. When it first announced plans for a baby-tooth survey in December of 1958, the organizers declared that they had no position on test bands. The point of the study, they said, was simply to collect and

share information with the public so that the public could then make informed decisions about risk. Baby teeth, according to the press release announcing the study, were an irreplaceable source of scientific information about the absorption of strontium-90 in the human body. And because strontium-90 only comes from nuclear explosions, the activists hoped to use it as an index to Americans' exposure to fallout. Baby teeth were readily available. The AEC didn't control access to them the way they control access to the test grounds in Nevada or the Pacific, and the AEC didn't control the purse strings for the experiment either. Within months, the Baby Tooth Survey had collected thousands of teeth and questionnaires from St. Louis and beyond.

By the time the study ended in 1968, it had examined well over 200,000 teeth. The results were striking. An early study published in November 1961 showed that the levels of strontium-90 in baby teeth tripled between 51 and 55 Children fed formula diets had higher levels of strontium than children who were breastfed which tied the levels directly to fallout ingested through dairy milk The baby tooth study was groundbreaking

For the first time, the public had successfully broken through the AEC's monopoly as the most reasonable voice on nuclear information. This wasn't a study headed by radicals or eggheads. It was a study run by housewives and pediatricians. The Baby Tooth survey mainstreamed the suspicion of the AEC. As Egan puts it, the Committee on Nuclear Information gambled on political neutrality, and it won. But elsewhere, anti-nuclear activists dropped all pretense to neutrality. Grassroots movements to ban the bomb were popping

up everywhere, from Accra to Zurich. In January 1958, Caltech chemist Linus Pauling delivered a test ban petition to the United Nations. It bore the names of more than 11,000 scientists demanding a nuclear test ban in the name of public health. That same spring, Khrushchev scored a global propaganda victory when he declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests.

All evidence suggests that Khrushchev sincerely believed that a nuclear test ban could increase global security without damaging the Soviet Union's military position. But the halt also made the Soviet Union look like the real champion of peace. That fall, Eisenhower agreed to join the Soviet Union in temporarily suspending nuclear tests. With a temporary moratorium in place, negotiations for a permanent test ban could begin. But negotiating a permanent test ban was tricky business. At the beginning of 1960, the Nuclear Club had only three members, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom. But several others were already knocking on the door.

France was nearly there already. France tested its first atomic bomb in February of 1960 in Algeria over its allies' objections, and China was thought to be close behind. The test ban negotiations strained relationships within NATO and between the Soviet Union and China. A total test ban would shut the door on the nuclear club, but the toughest sticking point involved verification. If one could figure out how to elude detection, it could gain an advantage over its enemies. The superpowers came closest to reaching an agreement in the spring of 1960. But two weeks before a scheduled Paris Peace Summit, Soviet surface-to-air missiles forced down a high-altitude American plane from Soviet airspace. At first, NASA claimed responsibility.

According to the space agency, the flight was an errant weather mission. But when Khrushchev produced the plane, the pilot, and some of its photographs of Soviet territory, Eisenhower was forced to admit that the United States had been conducting high-altitude surveillance flights over Soviet airspace. Khrushchev accused the United States of spying. Eisenhower refused to apologize, and the peace summit was canceled. Still, by some miracle, the moratorium held. President Kennedy had no such luck. In September 1961, the Soviet Union resumed its test program.

The United States quickly followed suit. In October 1961, the Soviet Union exploded the largest weapon ever seen. Tsar Bomba produced a yield of at least 50 megatons, 1,500 times the size of the bomb used in Hiroshima. The United States never detonated anything this large, but it conducted other equally disturbing tests in 1962. One of these, codenamed Starfish Prime, took place in outer space. The blast disabled communication satellites and briefly knocked out the power grid in Hawaii. We can only speculate

where this game of nuclear one-upsmanship might have led had the Cuban Missile Crisis not spooked Kennedy and Khrushchev back to their senses. In July 1963, Khrushchev signaled that he would accept a more limited test ban treaty. Instead of banning nuclear weapon tests outright, the treaty would prohibit explosions in water, air, and outer space. This time, negotiations proceeded quickly. On August 5th, 1963, representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The wording of the Limited Test Ban Treaty centered on the dangers of fallout. On top of banning tests in water, air, and outer space, the treaty prohibited tests, and I quote, in any other environment if such explosion caused radioactive debris to be present

outside the territorial limits of the state under whose jurisdiction or control such explosion is conducted. The treaty, in other words, solved the problem of fallout. Kodak's film and the children's teeth would be safe. But the treaty did not quite solve the problem of nuclear weapons, because it only applied to the countries that signed it. It didn't prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. The existing nuclear powers could keep the weapons they had. They could even develop new and more powerful ones. All they had to do was figure out how to test them on the ground. For years, American Scandal has taken you deep inside the biggest controversies and shocking events in U.S. history.

And now you can listen to exclusive seasons on Wondery+. Go beyond the headlines with jaw-dropping stories and immersive reporting that unveils the complex truth behind these scandals. In our exclusive season, The Hare Krishna Murders, dive into the twisted world of a rogue sect of Hare Krishnas. When devotees mysteriously disappear, the trail leads to a dark web of deceit, greed, and even murder. Or explore the sordid tale of Enron as we reveal the shocking depths of corporate fraud that led to one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history.

From political conspiracies to corporate corruption, these in-depth investigations will keep you on the edge of your seat. Experience American scandal like never before, with exclusive seasons that you won't find anywhere else. And on Wondery Plus, you can binge entire new seasons before they're publicly available. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify to start listening today and uncover the real story behind America's most notorious scandals. audience like the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts, Gwyneth Houcho, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, Christian Siriano. These panelists are looking for entrepreneurs whose ideas best fit the criteria of the four P's, pitch, product, popularity, and problem-solving ability. I'm going to give you a yes. I want to see it. If our panelists like the product, it goes into the Amazon Buy It Now store.

You are the embodiment of what an American entrepreneur is. Oh, my God. Are we excited for this moment? Ah! I cannot believe it. Whoo! Buy It Now. Stream free on FreeVie and Prime Video. Imagine that it's 1965 in Texas.

You're an engineer with the El Paso Natural Gas Company. It's still boom time for oil and gas workers here in West Texas. Oil rigs and gas flares dot the arid landscape. Last year, your company raked in a record-setting $540 million in natural gas sales. Your truck bounces along the gravel road on your way to work. You slow down when a roadrunner dashes out ahead of you. You don't mind, since it gives you a chance to take in the early morning sun glowing on the Franklin Mountains to the west. Your geologists are convinced there's much more gas to be had underneath those mountains. Under all the Rockies, actually. By some estimates, there's $35 billion worth of gas there. They just can't figure out how to extract it for

any reasonable sum of money. So when you get a call with a possible solution, you're all ears. Yeah, hello. This is Frank Mermitt with the U.S. Bureau of Mines. We've got an idea for extracting gas reserves, and we're looking for an industrial partner. What do you have in mind? Atomic exploration. A peaceful nuclear explosion. I'm sorry, what? I must not be understanding you correctly. You want us to use an atomic bomb to recover natural gas? You heard me right. That's exactly what I have in mind.

My contacts at the AEC think we could free up 5, 10, maybe 15 times more gas than you can get with conventional techniques. I can sense your hesitation, but the AEC is on board for this and your company owns the perfect site up in New Mexico. It'd be good for national security and great for business. Well, sure, if we can sell the gas, but we can't sell it if it's radioactive. It's a risk, but a small one. We'll start with a small explosion just to make sure. We'll shoulder the risk. We're eager to show this thing can be done. What about the water table? We only have mineral rights to the land we own, not the surrounding water. Is there any chance it could be contaminated? Look, you want answers.

We want answers too. That's why we want to do this. If this project works, it'll transform the oil and gas industry. It'd be a windfall for El Paso. Despite the reservations, you and your company can't argue with Mamet's logic. In 1965, the real-life El Paso Natural Gas Company entered into a partnership with the Bureau of Mines, the AEC, and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory to explore a nuclear gas extraction project. They called it Project Gas Buggy. This sounds ludicrous, right? But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Project Gas Buggy, other than its name,

is that it was only one of a series of planned civil engineering projects based on atomic explosions. Weapons scientist Ed Teller first hatched the idea for Project Plowshare in 57. The project took its name from a biblical verse. The first half of Isaiah 2-4 reads, They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. In other words, atoms for peace. Project Plowshare took the idea of Atoms for Peace to its logical conclusion. Instead of using the byproducts of nuclear explosions like radioisotopes to create public goods, it would build new things from bombs themselves. Teller referred to this concept as Peaceful Nuclear Explosions, or PNEs.

Now, Teller remains a controversial figure among both scientists and historians. His anti-communism and his passion for nuclear weapons was legendary. But even his fiercest enemies had to acknowledge Teller's genius as a scientific salesman. He sold President Truman on the hydrogen bomb. And in the late 1950s, he sold President Eisenhower on peaceful nuclear explosions. And once the project was approved, it was hard to shut down. Between 1957 and 1975, the U.S. government spent hundreds of millions of dollars

devising ever more outlandish uses for nuclear weapons. As you might expect, most of these projects involve excavation of one kind or another. Teller referred to this as nuclear earth-moving. The ambitions of Project Plowshare knew no bounds. Its champions proposed using nuclear weapons to build a new harbor in Alaska, speed up construction of I-40 in California, and even build a new Panama Canal. From today's perspective, it's hard to take any of

this seriously. Project Plowshare has become a synonym for a particular kind of technological hubris associated with the Cold War. According to historian Scott Kaufman, who's written a book on the topic, by 1963, Project Plowshare accounted for about a third of the AEC's spending on weapons programs. We're talking extraordinary sums of money, as much as $1 million a month on plans for nuclear earthmoving. And, as you might have guessed by now, none of these projects came to fruition. El Paso Natural Gas did not gain a competitive advantage through nuclear explosions.

The AEC did conduct an explosion as part of Operation Gas Buggy, but as our hypothetical engineer feared, the natural gas released was hopelessly radioactive. The next Panama Canal would not be built with nuclear explosives either. Especially after the results of the Baby Tooth survey were published, plowshare proposals met public resistance. In Alaska, local Inuits feared that fallout would contaminate caribou feeding grounds, endangering their hunt and their health.

In Pennsylvania, public health authorities refused to issue a permit when plowshare authorities proposed using nuclear weapons to create an underground natural gas storage facility in the middle of a state forest. So why then did the AEC keep at it when any sort of careful analysis showed nuclear earth moving to be a really bad idea? There are two answers to that, one more cynical than the other. The first has to do with the difference between a nuclear experiment and a nuclear test. If Americans were to stay within the law of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, they had to find ways to test them underground. But with popular opposition to nuclear testing mounting, no one wanted to call these explosions tests. So, underground nuclear tests became experiments. Ways to test out ideas for more politically palatable uses of nuclear weapons.

The second answer is more philosophical, almost existential. Ever since the first atomic explosion lit up the New Mexico desert sky in 1945, Americans wanted to find something hopeful in the bomb. Maybe radioisotopes could cure cancer or generate cheap energy. Or maybe, at the very least, they might create new kinds of petunias to delight hobby gardeners. When the engineers at Kodak held up their ruined film, they saw an alternative future, one in which the bomb produced silent, invisible threats. Housewives in St. Louis used their children's teeth to make those threats visible to all Americans.

Now imagine, maybe against your best intentions, that you spent your entire scientific career working on weapons. The temptation to find something useful in this work, to find a way to turn swords into plowshares, must have been overwhelming. The weapons scientists were technological optimists. The first half of the Cold War was an optimistic time, when scientists, engineers, and doctors embraced the idea that science and technology could get us out of any crisis. Science had won World War II. So far, despite a few close calls, it had held off the communists too. Anything seemed possible.

Yet, by the early 1960s, this technological optimism was increasingly out of step with the American public. Concerns about fallout had sparked a new environmental movement. In 1962, Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring. Civil rights leaders asked hard questions about whether the country's investment in weapons research was distracting it from solving problems at home. Yet the U.S. government had one last scientific and technological trick up its sleeve. On July 20th, 1969,

NASA would put a man on the moon. From Wondery, this is episode four of The Cold War from American History Tellers. On the next episode, the United States didn't quite destroy itself in 1968, but it came awfully close. The calculus of the Cold War changed in the 1960s, and with it, Lyndon Johnson's vision of a great society,

the emergence of the conservative movement, and how left and right found surprising areas of agreement when it came to the Cold War. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode is written by Audra Wolfe, Ph.D. Executive producers are Ben Adair and Hernán López for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn,

and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of them. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it,

people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.