Angry Planet - America Once Planned to Nuke the Moon

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

The Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space in 1957. By 1958, thanks in part to the work of famed scientist Carl Sagan, the Pentagon had a plan to show the commies what for by nuking the moon. Thankfully, it was just a plan. One that the U.S. never acted on. But it’s far from the only military scheme the US and others cooked up over the years. From bat bombs to an aircraft carrier built from an iceberg, military history is full of outlandish and ridiculous schemes best left abandoned at the planning stages.Here to help us untangle these James Bond sounding plots is Vince Houghton. Houghton is a U.S. Army vet who served in the Balkans. Now, he is the historian and curator at the international Spy Museum in Washington D.C. He collected the wild schemes from America’s past in the new book Nuking the Moon and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The problem with that is electronics will freeze, and it's no good having these nuclear landmines if they're not going to go off. And so the solution had to be, how do we figure out a way to heat these up? There are probably much simpler ways to do it. You know, the original idea called for using fiberglass pillows to make a really kind of comfy space inside the nuclear landmines. But the ultimate idea was it called Blue Peacock.

And it was used live chickens. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. Derek Gannon is almost done with his finals, and we'll be back soon. The Soviet Union sent Sputnik into space in 1957. By 1958, thanks in part of the work of famed scientist Carl Sagan, the Pentagon had a plan to show the commies what for by nuking the moon. Thankfully, it was just a plan. One that the U.S. never acted on. But it's far from the only military scheme that the U.S. and others cooked up over the years. From bat bombs to an aircraft carrier built from an iceberg, military history is full of outlandish and ridiculous schemes, best left abandoned, the planning stages. Here to help us untangle these James Bond-sounding plots is Vince Houghton.

Houghton is a U.S. Army vet who served in the Balkans. Now, he is the historian and curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. He collected the wild schemes from America's past in the new book, Nuking the Moon and other intelligence schemes and military plots left on the drawing board. Vince, thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. Okay, so nuking the moon is obviously on the cover of the book. So I have to ask, why and how did America plan to nuke the moon? Sure. I mean, you set it up pretty well. I mean, the idea is Sputnik scared the believing hell out of everybody. And it looked as though the Soviets had passed us

in being the premier nation in the world for science and technology. I mean, we had always been number one. Well, certainly within the 20th century, we'd been number one. And all of a sudden, it looked as though the Soviets were moving ahead of us. And this is problematic for a lot of reasons. One of it was problematic because what Sputnik was launched in the space on could easily be transformed with a nuclear weapon on top of it. but it's problematic for diplomatic reasons also.

And the concept behind this is the fact that the rest of the world, particularly the developing world, was trying to figure out who to back. This is a zero-sum game of the Cold War where if one country backed the United States, it was a loss for the Soviets and vice versa. And so the Soviets had kind of thrown down the gauntlet saying, look, forget the United States. They're behind now. We are now the country that you guys should follow. Our economic system, our political system is better. And Sputnik is the proof. So we needed to figure out something very, very quickly to change that dynamic,

to change that narrative. And the idea was, you know what, let's detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon where everyone on Earth can watch it and we'll see who actually is the most powerful nation on Earth, who actually is the nation that has the best scientific and technological programs, and that would be us. And why did they decide to not go forward with nuking the moon? Well, that's a wonderful question. I think that what's great about intelligence history is we don't always have the answers.

No one is writing these documents for me. Most of these documents are written, assuming no one is ever going to see them except for the recipient. In many cases, these documents are written kind of like a cover your ass situation where they're not really as realistic as we'd like them to be. And, of course, most of them are heavily redacted. This is a great case where we have, at least to my satisfaction, we have no idea why this program didn't happen. There's a lot of after-the-fact hand-wringing about it where people say it was canceled because, you know, we didn't want to mess up the pristine surface of the moon. There's a lot of people saying, well, the budget didn't really matter. There's people saying that, you know, the Apollo program started to be envisioned about this time, and we didn't want to interfere with that.

But all the documents and all the people don't have any definitive answers. There's a lot of the reason was seemingly because of or it appears as though it was or we think it was. or we think it was. And this is one of the chapters in the book where there really isn't a great end point to this story. Most of the other ones are relatively straightforward. The war ended.

A new technology was developed. The technology cost too much money. This is one where there's still a lot of uncertainty about why it was finally canceled. It's funny you talk about the process of writing this. I have a lot of questions about that. And I think there's one of the stories early on in the book, the one you opened the book with,

that I think really speaks to the complicated nature of talking about this stuff. And that's Acoustic Kitty, which is one of my favorite CIA stories. And I think I'd poked around the edges of for a long time and only really been able to find the Marchetti version. As he's talked to a couple people about it. Can you tell the audience, what is acoustic kitty and why are there different versions of the story?

So there's stuff we know and then there's stuff we don't know. The stuff we know is that in the 1960s, the CIA got fed up with trying to create a artificial listening device, a bug, that would effectively listen in the conversations in the wild, meaning in the public, right? It's one thing, if you bug a lamp inside a quiet office where people are sitting and you can listen to the conversations, it's another thing to try to eavesdrop on a crowded park in a bench where there's dogs walking by and the wind is blowing and bird are chirping and people are talking and there's a lot of ambient noise behind it. The problem they ran into was that early bugs of the 1960s picked up everything.

That might sound good, but everything means everything. And the difficulty they had is to separate out what they actually wanted to hear, the collected intelligence, from all the other crap. And they basically gave up because 60s technology was just not capable of pulling this off. Then someone had a bright idea of instead of trying to create an artificial bug that was going to do this, let's take an animal that can go just about anywhere, and in case is a cat. And let's turn that into a covert listening device.

That way, Acoustic Kitty, our four-legged hero, can go anywhere and anywhere and listen to conversations inside embassy compounds on the street where people think no one's listening, places where you wouldn't look twice if a stray cat kind of wandered up and sat down next to you. And so we know the basics behind that. We know the CI tried to do this. There's documentary evidence that this happened.

We don't know much beyond that. that. There's one version of the story, which is probably the true one, but I'd like to think it's not. With the CIA made an attempt at this. They cut open the cat in a surgical suite with a veterinarian. They placed a power pack inside its abdomen. They wired up its ears with the listening device, actual the antenna and the microphone. And then they tested it. And as anyone knows who has cats, doing a cat, having a cat do what you want it to is near impossible. And so the CI finally gave up and decided this wasn't cost effective. This wasn't going to work.

That's one side of the story. That's probably the true, but certainly the more boring side of the story. The Marchetti one is the one that is a little bit more sexy, and that they actually did get the cat to do exactly what they wanted to, and part of this was because of project like MK Ultra, which was looking at the ability to wire animals' brains to get them to listen and to obey when we gave them specific electronic commands. and the cat was ready to go.

It was ready for a field test. And then they brought it out to do a field test, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do until it came to an untimely end. Right. It was hit. Marchetti claims it was hit by a truck, right? A taxi, yeah, which anyone living in Washington, D.C.

can certainly understand this as a possibility. But at the same time, this is such a fascinating story of, what can we prove? What can we not prove? and how do we go about writing history when there's two competing narratives of people who have very good insight, right? Marchetti was very high up at the CIA. The other story comes predominantly from Bob Wallace, who is the director of the Office of Technical Services at CIA.

So CISQ. Now, Wallace comes after all of this happens, but certainly he talked to everybody who was involved in it. And this is something he was cleared for at CIA. And he swears, it's the first one. He swears they never did the test. You swear it never got beyond the laboratory stage. But Marchetti is pretty explicit about how this actually happened. So the story's gotten out there.

And I kind of tackle it in both ways in the book. And really, more than anything else, this shows how difficult intelligence history can be. Yeah, that's one of the really things that I think is really fascinating about the book is how much you have to. I mean, there's flat out just wacky stories in here. But also the process of uncovering those wacky stories, you have to, dig and ask weird questions, and sometimes you get multiple versions of whatever the past was. How often do you have to make a decision about which record to go with? Or do you, do you typically tell both stories or multiple stories?

Well, in this book, I had the luxury to be able to kind of do whatever I wanted to. So I tried to tell multiple stories if there were multiple stories. I mean, if you're writing serious pure-reviewed academic history, which I've done also, you have to make somewhat of an editorial real choice. You have to let the reader know that there's controversy. You have to let the reader know that there's possible different aspects to it. But really part of being a historian is kind of looking at the evidence and figuring out which one makes more sense. As long as you're honest about it, I mean, again, another book that I've written focuses on things where there's a lot of oral history involved in. Oral history can be a landmind-filled nightmare. There's in many cases, people are making their stories sound more important than they actually were. In some cases, they're misremembering. In some cases, you have direct contradiction between what two people are saying. And so tackling that is incredibly difficult. And you just kind of say, all right, look, as long as I'm honest with the reader in the way that I did this, and as long as you lay out your process, I think you're okay.

And I don't think that it really matters how you do it. I think everyone kind of has a different perspective about how do they differentiate between what we know and what we think we know. But as long as you lay that out for the reader and let them decide for themselves, I think we've done what we need to do as historians. One of my other kind of favorite running themes in the book is the lengths that some in the intelligence community will go to to avoid conflict, to avoid massive loss of life. To that end, can you tell us about Project Fantasia and why it didn't take off? Well, in many cases, the intelligence community is trying to win wars without fighting them. You know, that's ultimately, you go back to Sun Tsu, right?

That's the ultimate way to win a battle. Or a war is to convince the other guy not to fight. You know, you don't even need to commit your troops. If the guy goes away without a battle, then you have the ultimate victory. And Fantasia was kind of within this vein. And Fantasia falls into the broader umbrella of psychological operations or sciops. And these have been around forever. Sometimes, you know, you talk about propaganda information operations within

SIEOPs. You look at deception within psychological operations. Fantasia was a, I would argue, a pretty brilliant idea if they were able to pull it off. This really looks at the Pacific theater in World War II where, yeah, we were winning and we were moving very steadily across the Pacific, certainly after Midway, when Midway turned the tide of the Pacific War. At that point, we were hopping our way all the way to Mainland. island, Japan. The problem was it was insanely bloody. The casualties were very, very high. We were

losing some of our best and brightest. Marines, army, sailors, airmen, and some people would argue this is a Pyrrhic victory, where, sure, we're taking these islands, but so many men are dying to do so. And so the OSS was tasked with trying to figure out a way to make the Japanese less willing to fight. And that was the real problem, right? The Japanese would just dig in and fight to the last man. A lot of them did not surrender. And so a lot of Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen were dying because the Japanese refused to go away. So could we make it to where the Japanese would go away on their own? So we would have to sacrifice so many lives. And Fantasia was a concept that tapped into, depending on the way you look at it, the worst of the worst in American

stereotypes and racism toward the Japanese people. But at the same time, it really tapped into some of the fundamental traditions of psychological operations. Find something that they're more afraid of than dying and use it against them. In this case, Shintoism, which is the predominant religion of the Japanese, has a special place in it for the fox. The fox is a particularly unique animal within Shintoism. In some cases, it brings positive.

omens and positive vibes, but other cases that can actually be a mischievous simo within Shintoism. The idea was, to make a long story short, to take live foxes and paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint, with luminescent phosphorescent paint,

and then have them sent in as essentially a vanguard for American forces with the idea that the Japanese soldiers would see these glowing foxes and say, I'm not afraid of the American Marine, but these foxes are terrifying, and they'd run, They'd drop their weapons.

They would surrender because somehow the Americans had weaponized spirit foxes from, you know, the Shinto religion. The problem, of course, is that, well, there's a lot of problems. One of them is this is about as obnoxious as it gets because you're assuming that every single Japanese person is going to be so superstitious that they're going to look at a glow in the dark fox and think there's a problem with this. But the bigger problem is, in a logistical perspective, these are islands. and unless we're going to parachute the glow-in-the-dark foxes onto the islands, which, granted, would be really cool, really cool. They're going to go in in the water, and they're going to do what the Marines are doing.

It's basically they're going to make an amphibious assault on these Japanese islands. Well, the paint's going to come off when they're in the water, and anything that doesn't come off when they're in the water, maybe licked off once they get to shore. So they're just going to be average everyday foxes instead of glow-in-the-dark foxes when they finally hit the beaches. None other than General MacArthur pointed this out. He was like, hey, guys, so when the water hits the paint, that could make things somewhat problematic.

But that didn't really stop the OSS guys who did a full-scale test of this concept in Central Park in New York City. And apparently it worked really well. There's one New York newspaper article afterwards that reported on these strange apparitions boxes running through Central Park and scaring the living hell out of the New Yorkers. I think they use the phrase, the screaming jimies. I don't know what the hell that is, but apparently it was enough to make the OSS guys think they had something on their hands. I really like the way that the different projects highlight kind of the different mentalities of the errors that they're from. One of the ones that comes to mind in that vein is Blue Peacock, which is not American, but does reveal a lot about Cold War thinking. Can you tell us about that one?

Sure. And, you know, kind of to take a broader step back of what you just brought up, the whole concept of this book, it started out as me writing a bunch of fun stories. And then I realized that there was a vein going through all these. And that's during the Second World War and the Cold War, the Allies were desperate.

And desperation really led to doing some things we wouldn't do in normal times. And that's really where all these stories come from. And Blue Peacock's a great example of this, where the British are trying to develop a, nuclear landmine, and that's not all that unique and interesting. We had what we're called atomic demolition mines or ADMs for most of the Cold War, and the United States deployed them all the way up until the Berlin Wall fell. But this ADM was using 1940s and 50s era electronics and technology. It used the design for the first ever British atomic bomb called the Blue Danube.

And so it was somewhat low tech. And the problem with low tech was that the idea behind this would be to emplace it in Eastern Europe. The cold, you know, tundra of some of these Eastern European countries where it gets, you know, minus 20 in the winter. The problem with that is electronics will freeze. And it's no good having these nuclear landmines if they're not going to go off. And so the solution had to be, how do we figure out a way to heat these up? They're probably much simpler ways to do it.

You know, the original idea called for using fiberglass pillows to make a really kind of kind of comfy space inside the nuclear landmines. But the ultimate idea was it called Blue Peacock. And it was used live chickens as the means to heat up the electronics in this nuclear landmine. The mine itself was big enough. And then there's a cavity to allow chickens to kind of walk around inside it. And you throw enough chicken feed in there and the chickens will live for about a week. And their body heat will keep the electronics from freezing.

And the idea, if I recall correctly, was to kind of place these. in kind of a strategic location in Germany. So to kind of taint the land in case there was ever a land invasion, right? Right. You're sure you have to preposition these. These would be things that you'd put in your dams or bridges or within rivers. You could also put them in places to create choke points. So if you wanted to detonate a couple of these to essentially funnel Soviet motor rifle divisions into an ambush,

to find ways to deny them. speak key strategic areas to help them get all the way to the English channel as quickly as they wanted to. So these would be put out in places that were important in the civilian world, right? These are like power plants and dams and bridges. So another interesting kind of theme that runs through the book that I thought was interesting is, or even another danger, I think, of doing this kind of reporting and talking about these stories is that they sound like X-Files plots, some of them. how do you avoid falling into conspiracy theory and to that end what was Project Northwoods? Yeah, and that's the one that worried me a lot. I almost didn't, and I even say this in the book, I almost didn't include it because I grew up in Miami.

Northwoods is about Cuba. And Northwood is always something that kind of flew around down there when I was growing up because it more than anything else kind of exemplifies the conspiracy nutcase mentality. of some people that take these things too far, like the X-Files ideas, right? And Northwoods was a false flag operation, or it was going to be a false flag operation, essentially to pick a fight with the Cubans.

After the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. military with the United States argued we would never invade Cuba to try to overthrow Castro. But before this, that was on the table, as we know from Bay of Pigs and from that operation, that fails pretty miserably. The idea was, can we cause the Cubans or make it look like the Cubans started the war?

For a multitude of reasons, right? That's the way to get international support behind any kind of military operation in Cuba. That's a way to make the American people get behind any kind of military operation in Cuba. The problem was that Castro wasn't an idiot. He wasn't going to pick a fight with the United States military. He knew he would lose that. And so he wasn't going to fall for the United States. debate. So how could we possibly come up with ways to make it look like the Cubans pick

the fight? And that's where an Operation Northwoods comes in play. It would be, there's a lot of different ideas within it, but one of the main ones was to dress up Cuban exiles as though they were Cuban regular army soldiers and have them attack Guantanamo Bay. This would coincide with a sinking of an American ship in Havana Harbor, remember the main incident from the Spanish-American War, and even could include some attacks here in the United States. One part of the plan called for a terrorist-like attack on American airliners flying from Washington to Miami, or even using pipe bombs or incendiary devices in Miami itself within the Cuban exile community to try to stir up trouble.

These are all ideas that were presented by the CIA and by the U.S. military to John Kennedy. So these were ideas that got all the way as far as the president of the United States. What was the most recent kind of weird plot that you'd uncovered? I mean, you know, most of the stuff we've talked about is like World War II to Cold War era. Is there anything beyond that? Well, I purposely kept it within World War II in the Cold War because of the broader theme of desperation in the book. But yes, I uncovered plenty of things that were post-Cold War. And I'd rather not talk about them because they may end up in the second book.

But there were things that really kind of did shock me. Periods like in the 1990s where you wouldn't think we would be so desperate because there's no existential threat anymore, right? The Soviet Union no longer exists. We're actually getting along pretty well with the Russians in the mid-1990s. But for a lot of foreign policy and military planners, the existential threat to them was unknown, the unknown, like the fact that we now live in a world where it's not bipolar anymore, where there is not one other big bad guy

where we're looking at threats from around everywhere else. We've cut the head off the dragon, a bunch of snakes came out, as it's famously been described as. And so there is a sense of desperation there that didn't exist before because everyone is trying to figure out, what is our role?

What is the role of intelligence in a post-Cold War world? What is the role of the U.S. military? I mean, in the 1990s, we're not fighting other than Desert Storm. We're not fighting straight up wars. We're doing operations other than war. We're doing peacekeeping operations, you know, special operation missions like in Somalia in 93. Obviously, counterterrorism becomes a key component to American foreign policy strategy in the 1990s.

So the desperation there comes from the unknown. And so there are some stories that weren't included in the book that come from that time period. But they just didn't fit into the broader theme that I was trying to make of the Cold War and World War II. being these moments where we truly looked at the world and said, there's a threat out there that could actually end the existence of the United States or Great Britain in some cases. That kind of, you kind of, you finish out the book with nukes. And a lot of the nuke stuff, I thought was very interesting because so much of it is about four uses other than killing a lot of people. Can you talk about some of those projects? Yeah.

I mean, this is the Plowshare project, which a lot of the scientists who developed nuclear weapons weren't out to kill millions of people. In fact, they were pretty upstanding scientists who realized they had created the world's most effective and efficient killing machine. But at the same time, wanted to try to find ways to make it to where this could benefit the world and could benefit the United States and could be used for less than just murdering, you know, hundreds of millions of people. And so the Plowshare program really focused on this. And this was something that was actually went all the way from the 1950s all the way into the 1970s. And this was trying to find ways to use nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. I know that sounds like a wonderful paradox. And it is.

But we're talking about can we construct artificial lakes? Can we make passages through mountains using nuclear weapons? Can we do mining? And can we essentially drill for natural gas and oil using nuclear weapons? using nuclear weapons. So there's a lot of different ideas that were abandoned about trying to find ways of using this new nuclear weapons technology that we can't put the genie back in the bottle. So maybe we can find a way to make it work for us.

And there are a couple of stories that were candidates for this book because Project CloudShare has some pretty extraordinary ideas. But the one that I chose, it's really the one that's most over the top. And in this case, it's one that people still today are arguing could be. be a potential solution to, unfortunately, an all too familiar problem. Did any of these projects lead to anything positive? I would argue, and it depends on how direct you want to make that argument. I mean, I'd say just about all of them did in one way or another.

It's very difficult to have scientific and technological research and development that doesn't eventually find its way into something good. I mean, Project Acoustic Kitty, if you look at some of the MK Ultra programs, if you look at some of the audio technology that goes in that program, I think even something as horrible as the CIA's mind control program where it was tested on unwitting subjects and it looked at brain chemistry and all these other things led to a better understanding of the human mind. So you can look at kind of the brighter side of some of these things. It doesn't make them justifiable.

A lot of it is turning, you know, somewhat lemons into lemonade because, you know, these are programs that in many cases were horrific. but when you're doing high-level science, when you're doing research, it's rare that you discover something new that actually sets us backwards. And so even the programs that fail miserably, and I'm not sure even any of these programs really fail, even the programs that are not pursued beyond the laboratory phase or canceled long before they go into production,

gave us insights in many respects about what doesn't work, gave us insights in many respects about how to even do things like budgets and logistics. some of them just kind of fell on their face because they were unaffordable. And we found new and innovative ways to make them affordable later on. In some cases, they're beneficial because in trying to figure out a way to do things, people were so disgusted and so blown away by the ideas that were coming out, that it spurred on better development. It spurred on better thinking about the way to solve some of these problems.

Give me an example of a time that people were disgusted. Well, a lot of these, it depends on who you ask. I mean, Operation Northwood is a great example of this. I mean, there's a report that President Kennedy heard this plan to create this false flag operation. And in the minutes of the conversation, he brings up Berlin and he brings up other things. But from those that were in the room, the look on his face, but the United States could actually be suggesting using human exiles to attack.

American targets that potentially carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. He just wanted nothing to do with it. And to me, it does bring a little bit of hope to the soul that the system worked, the way that it was supposed to, that the civilian leadership stood up and said, no, you're not going to do this. This is not going to happen. And there aren't a lot of those in the book, unfortunately. There's not a lot of times we feel, I feel better about things. Most of the time you're like, good boy. I feel pretty crappy about what we were willing to do at some point.

You know, thinking about biological weapons or nuclear weapons or other things that only get canceled because the war ends or war changes or new technologies developed. It has nothing to do with somebody saying, maybe we shouldn't do something like this. Maybe this is wrong. You don't hear that very often in this book. So it's not a feel-good book. In many cases, you're going to kind of, you're probably going to, I mean, you're going to read it and be, I'm not too happy about some of the decisions that we made in past. But Northwood really does stand out as one where you do have a civilian leader who stands up to the military and says, no, we're not going to do this because it's wrong.

What was the hardest topic to research? And did you ever get any pushback? I think anything more recent when it dealt with agency topics that they're a little bit embarrassed about. I mean, Acousticitty has become so public now. They kind of have fun with it. But there were other policies and programs. I'm trying to, I don't want to dime them out about specific pushback, but there are things that didn't make certain agencies look all that good. And they weren't necessarily in the mood to talk about them, which is understandable.

I mean, this is part of their history. But at the same time, this is part of the history that they don't necessarily want publicized. I mean, the hardest thing the research was the nuclear weapons stuff because that classification of those. goes higher than just about anything else. And even the things that were public or heavily redacted, even the things that were well known and had been written about before, we're still missing key pieces at which I try to lay out, like, hey, look, we still don't know certain things about this.

But this is not a book full of things that make these agencies look good. I didn't set out to make them look bad. These programs themselves just kind of made them look bad on their own. So I didn't get a lot of people with open arms to try to help me do this. Even friends like Bob Wallace, who is an advisory board member here at the museum, I know him very well. He just doesn't want to talk about this stuff. I mean, he did because he's a great guy. But he'd rather talk about all the amazing accomplishments that OTS did over the years,

whether it was creating really cool covert listening devices or covert communication devices or cameras or anything else. or being heavily involved in creating some of the programs that led to the U2 of the SR 71 and some of these amazing technologies, they would much rather talk about those and for obvious reasons than talking about their robotic kitties that almost become a punchline for many people. Last question. Do you think desperation is a good mother of invention? It can be. But I'm not going to also really lead us to make some really stupid.

stupid decisions. I think that's what we see in this book more than anything else. I mean, we're going to be in desperate situations a lot of times. I mean, we're in a position where every so often we're going to get slapped across the face and not see it coming. 9-11 is a great example of this, right? We have a moment where we have to reassess our lives. We have to reassess our future. And in some cases, that desperation can lead to some very good and innovative changes. It can lead to technologies that we just never imagined before. It can lead to new and innovative ways of doing espionage or fighting wars.

But as this book, I think, shows it can lead us down some pretty dark pass, and it can lead us to make some decisions that we never would have under normal circumstances. Vince, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book is Nuking the Moon and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields.

If you liked the episode, we've got four years of archives online. We're on iTunes and everywhere else. Find pods are casted. Follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. We'll be back next week to talk to Kevin about some robots he recently saw. We're also working on something about the UFOs that everyone's been seeing. We're going to tackle that issue. Until then, stay safe.