Dan Snow's History Hit - When We Nearly Nuked the Moon

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Vince Houghton joins me on the podcast today to talk about some of the weirdest and craziest ideas put forward during the twentieth century. We're talking exploding bats, sonic cats, aircraft carriers made of icebergs and detonating a nuclear missile on the moon just to show that you could do it! This is a really fun episode and as you'll hear many of these ideas came closer to becoming reality than you might think. Vince Houghton is the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. He also is the host and creative director of the Museum's podcast, SpyCast, which reaches a national and international audience of over 2.5 million listeners each year.

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David

Baddiel. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I have got a brain. This is a great episode of the podcast. It's a great one. I've got to say, I loved recording this one. Nuking the moon. Nuking the moon.

We all thought shooting the moon was an expression. In what game do you shoot the moon? Can't remember. Is it Marjan? I don't know. Anyway, answers on Twitter, please. But the Americans during the Cold War, they didn't want to shoot the moon. No, they want to nuke the moon. This is true. I talked in this podcast to Vince

Houghton, absolute legend. He's a historian, he's the curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. And he has looked into some of the craziest, some of the weirdest ideas in the 20th century. Exploding pigeons, aircraft carriers made of icebergs, detonating a nuclear missile on the moon just to show that you could do it. I joke you not, you're going to love this podcast. Please feel free to share it with anyone who thinks they'll like history, but is going to absolutely love this kind of content. If you wish to go and listen to other podcasts, if you wish to go and watch history documentaries, please do so at historyhit.tv. We've got a lot of documentaries going up at the moment. We've got too many. I was out filming only this morning, creating more content for all of you. Can't wait to get that out there. And don't forget the live tour. Tickets are on sale now,

historyhit.com slash tour. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy the excellent Vince Houghton talking about some crazy schemes. Vince, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I was happy to be here, man. I mean, nuking the moon. First of all, let's deal with nuking the moon to start with. I mean, what's going on there? Yeah, I mean, this is one of many stories in the book, nuking the moon to start with. I mean, what's going on there?

Yeah, I mean, this is one of many stories in the book, but it's the one we pulled out for the title because it's such a ridiculous idea. It's such a ridiculous program. And this comes on the heels of Sputnik in 1957, where the Soviets beat us into space and it scares the living hell out of everybody. I mean, the idea of the Soviets beating us at something scientific was just unheard of. The United States or the West had been so prolific at developing all the important scientific discoveries. You know, we invented the car, the airplane, the chocolate chip cookie, microwave popcorn, everything that was important. And all of a sudden they beat us at our own game. And so very quickly it was decided that we need to do something big. We need to do something big and something that the whole world would know that we were the top dogs on the block once again.

And so the idea was, you know, maybe one day we can land on the moon, but what can we do now? Well, now we can detonate a high-yield thermonuclear weapon on the surface of the moon so that the whole world can watch in awe as the fireworks take place thousands of miles away. And this was a real plan set up by the U.S. Air Force. They gave it to real scientists. One of them was Carl Sagan, who a lot of people may know. He was a junior scientist at the time, but he was involved in this program. And the idea was, let's show the world what's up. And they got fully through the planning stages and they decided that they would actually do the full-fledged research into how this would work. And there are some problems. The Air Force was hoping for a wonderful mushroom

cloud-shaped explosion on the moon. Someone had to explain to them that the moon doesn't have the same atmosphere as Earth does. It barely has any atmosphere at all and the atmosphere of earth is what causes that mushroom cloud to form and that would not be what you would get on the moon so they were a little disturbed about that and then of course the scientists came back and said you know you're going to blow the living hell out of this pristine surface that maybe one day we want to land on. And at that point, the realization was maybe we should think twice about this. And that's a lot of the programs in this book are ones that got really far along to the point where they were ready to put it in a full production. And finally, someone said, hold on, there may be a better idea. There may be a better way of doing

this. But this was the top, top, top of the US government was thinking about this idea of how do we beat the Soviets at their own game? Well, let's blow the living hell out of the moon. The Cold War has plenty of these examples, right? Because I was reading the other day about the Kennedy administration had a big chat in the Oval Office about a first strike. This is just before Cuba around the West. But like, maybe we can take out all of their key intercontinental nuclear missiles. So let's do a first strike on the Soviets. That'll make sure that we don't have a nuclear Armageddon. I mean, jeepers creepers.

You must have come across some extraordinary ones. Yeah, that story itself almost made the book. I mean, it was one that the publisher said, you only can have a certain amount of pages. And so there are a bunch of stories that made the cutting room floor. And that's one of them, the JFK first strike, mainly because there are a lot of debates about how close they actually got there. But there's a wonderful quote from Kennedy as he walks out of the room

and all these generals are yelling at each other about like, this is the time to do it. And he stops and turn around and he says, and they call us the human race. And then walked out because of this just ridiculous argument about, I mean, it's basically what Dr. Strangelove is, right? You know, like, oh, 50 million, no big deal. I wouldn't say we'd get a hair must, but we would beat the Soviets at

their own game. And to me, there are certain stories in this book that are kind of make you stop and go, Jesus, like how in the world would people have that idea? And then it kind of focuses back to my introduction where I tried to lay this out and I said, it's very unfair for us to judge from 2021 what people were thinking back in 1955 or 1963 or during World War II and the lengths that they were willing to go to because of just this feeling of desperation. We really haven't felt the same thing. Maybe during COVID, we're now in a position where our lives are so first world problems. Most of the time we're thinking about, God, I need to get the new iPhone.

My biggest problem is how am I going to pay for school or whatever? I'm not saying those aren't big problems, but the biggest problem, we're not facing the loss of our national sovereignty, right? You know, I think about the UK during World War II truly had the fear of losing their national sovereignty to the Nazis. And the United States and the West during the Cold War, we had our fear of losing our entire existence to a nuclear war. And it's very hard for us in 2021 or when I was writing this back in 2018 and 2019 for us to put ourselves in the shoes of those people and how they were actually feeling and that's that's what i think historians should do first and foremost is to create a environment where we can be empathetic with those that we study that we can truly understand the people who are making these historic actions because they are the ones that understand what they're going

through at the time i couldn't agree agree more, especially in the Cold War, the nuclear stuff, it's new technology. But you looked at ideas that didn't get off the drawing board, as it were. I mean, some of the stuff that did get off the drawing board, like the Davy Crockett, this little tactical nuclear weapon that was virtually portable, did get off the drawing board. Let's go a little further back. You mentioned the Second World War. One of your examples is the famous iceberg aircraft carrier. I've come across that before, but I didn't know much about it. That's just fascinating. Yeah. And a lot of the stories in this are ones that kind of like I've heard of that and I want to take a deeper dive into some of these. And you

look at this as, yeah, I guess that makes sense, right? I mean, you've got these huge chunks of ice that you can shoot thousand torpedoes into and they're not going to sink and it's ice right ice is not going to sink anyway so why not use this and turn it into an aircraft carrier i mean this is a time period where we're not building like gerald ford class carriers that are impervious to attack these aircraft carriers are big floating targets in the pacific for japanese submarines and then the atlantic for german submarines and the problem you run into is the ground forces attacking Africa and attacking Europe. How do we provide the merit cover if we can't actually get aircraft carriers there? So the idea the British had was a man named Jeffrey Pike, who was this intrepid inventor.

He'd invented all sorts of different things. And somehow he got an audience with Lord Mountbatten. And if anyone's been watching the crown, they know Lord Mountbatten pretty well now. And he demonstrated this idea of this thing they called Pike Crete, where essentially it was a combination of ice and kind of newspapers that had been all mushed up together. And what it did is actually made a substance that was insanely durable, lighter than steel, but also it's just as strong and you could legitimately build an aircraft carrier out of it.

And they demonstrated this to the Admiralty and the Admiralty was like, oh my God, this is fantastic. And then they actually did some small scale experiments in Canada where they proved it worked. They also proved that it would cost like 10 times the GDP of the UK to make just one ship. So they said, oh, Jesus, this could help us win the war, but basically it would bankrupt us completely and we couldn't build anything else. And so they passed on this idea. And then it combined with the fact that they had started to be able to develop longer range

aircraft to help cover some of the Atlantic crossing. They had been able to develop longer range aircraft to help cover some of the Atlantic crossing. They had been able to develop beachheads in Northern Africa that they could use to bounce over to Europe. So they didn't necessarily need to be bringing stuff from Canada and the United States. What's cool about this is this prototype that they built in Canada, they just kind of left it there. They're like, all right, well, I'll just kind of leave it there and we keep doing our thing. And it took a year for it to melt. It was so well-made. It took a year for the prototype to melt on its own. So, I mean, you look at this and say, you know what? I think that probably could have worked if it wasn't for the cost, if it wasn't for the kind of resources that would

have to go into it. This is an idea that wasn't so ridiculous. And it actually made a lot of sense if you ignore the whole idea of having to use every single resource in the country in order to build a single aircraft carrier well there's a fine line between genius and insanity and he's i mean i think if that mulberry harbors at d-day towing base harbors across the uk one of them was destroyed in the storm if both of them had been destroyed immediately in the storm we'd be laughing at those guys now going this is the stupidest idea i've ever heard and so i admire pike there's some however, are slightly beyond the fine line. Project Seal, man.

Tell me about that. Yeah, you think about it. You know, we've been trying to control the weather since the beginning of time, whether it's a shaman or a witch doctor or someone doing a rain dance. That's been the kind of the fundamental belief of people is like, if we can control the weather, then we have immense power and the idea for project seal was we are now creating explosives powerful enough that we can potentially control a tsunami or we can create a tsunami this is pre-atomic bomb but we have strong conventional explosives what we would call chemical explosives versus nuclear atomic.

And we started to understand the physics of what we call hydrodynamics and kind of how tsunamis work. And so a lot of this work was done in New Zealand with both British teams, American teams, New Zealanders also involved in the science behind this. And the idea was, can we create a chain of explosions that would start very small waves and then chains of explosions that would make the waves bigger and then chains of explosion that would make the waves even bigger than that with the idea that we could use weather to wash the Japanese out of the war. And you kind of think of this as why not just use those explosives on the Japanese? Why not just do what you did and develop the atomic bomb? But think of this as why not just use those explosives on the Japanese? Why not just do what

you did and develop the atomic bomb? But think of what happened after the earthquake. Everyone was focused on the Fukushima disaster, but the realization that the same earthquake that caused that tsunami could have flattened all of Japan if Japan was in the 1940s during that time. Nowadays, Japanese buildings are specially designed to resist earthquakes and tsunamis and natural disasters. But during World War II, a lot of the buildings in Japan were made of paper, made of wood. And if you had a big enough tsunami, you could literally wash Japan off the face of the earth without having to invade, without having to lose any allied soldiers. And this could win the war almost instantly in this way. So I understand their idea. Their idea was a little bit ahead

of its time. Maybe today with atomic weapons, this is something that we could pull off. Maybe, maybe today, but certainly in the 1940s, it wasn't, but they said, you know what? It's worth a shot. It's worth seeing if this is a possibility. Now that completely ignores any kind of moral consequences of this, right? Because you would have killed millions of civilians, far more than what the atomic bombs did. You would wash entire cities away if you were able to create this actual weapon. But no one was really thinking that way during the Second World War. And that's another thing that I think is really important to put ourselves in the mindset of the people at the time. And, you know, they were hell bent on winning the war. No matter what it took, they were going

to win the war. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about nuking the moon. Literally. More after this. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast. What is the Ancients, I hear you say? Well, it's like Dan's show, except just ancient history. We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world, as far as we can tell, anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those great things pompey it's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction we've got the big topics the man destroys seven legions

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Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation

of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel. Thank you. I have always heard of project x-ray with the bats and I thought that's an urban myth now I couldn't believe it's true but it turns out to be true tell everyone about that and x-ray is actually the one if you ask me like which one in the book had the best chance of working, I would argue it was x-ray and x-ray the eye. Yo, if you think about it, I don't get to this. They did a full scale trial and it worked. And it's one of the crazy things about this. And so this story is even more ridiculous than some of the others, because it doesn't start with a great inventor. It doesn't start with an idea from a military leader. It was actually a dentist an idea from a military leader.

It was actually a dentist. A dentist who had just been on vacation in the western United States was driving back to Pennsylvania from New Mexico and heard on the radio on December 7th, 1941, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. And like everyone else in the United States, he wanted to do something to help the war effort. And he was a dentist, but he was also a tinkering inventor.

He had patented a couple inventions and done some stuff in the past. Well, he had this kind of light bulb moment where he's like, you know what? I just came from an area of the United States where there are bats everywhere, talking millions and millions and millions of bats. And he had heard somewhere or read somewhere that bats can carry a huge amount compared to their body size, kind of like ants, right? Ants can carry like a hundred times their body weight. Well, bats can carry a lot more than their body weight. He's like, well, what if we put an explosive on a bat or lots of bats and then drop them on Japan? Let's see what they would do. Maybe they could be a kind of a cruise missiles for us before there were cruise missiles.

And this was kind of a wacky idea. And a lot of people had wacky ideas after Pearl Harbor. And a lot of them were trying to get their wacky ideas to people who were important. And most of them were unsuccessful in doing so. But what this man, his name was Lytle Adams, had that others didn't is he had a way in. Earlier, one of his inventions was this quirky idea of creating a way to get mail from Europe to the United States faster. And essentially, mail from Europe was put on ships and sent across the Atlantic. And so it took days and days and days for it to get there.

Well, he was a pilot also. And he said, all right, what if halfway across we flew a plane out there with a hook? And basically, you could hook the mail onto the plane and then fly it back. And it would be several days earlier that the mail would get there and he patented this invention and it got a little bit of attention it got enough attention that the first lady of the united states eleanor roosevelt went out and watched him demonstrate his invention and and this would never happen today and it would be absolutely ridiculous to think of it happening and he's like hey first lady would you like a ride in the plane i can can show you how it works. So she jumps in his plane and he flies her around and shows her the

invention works. And they get to chatting and they get to know each other a little bit. So by the time a couple of years later happens, he writes a letter to her. He's like, if you remember me, I flew you around on the plane. I've got this really interesting idea. And she reads it and goes, oh, this is an interesting idea. And since she's the first lady of the United States, she goes, hey, Frank, Franklin Roosevelt hands it off to him. He reads it and goes, huh, hands it to Bill Donovan. Now, Bill Donovan was the head of the OSS and Donovan was like, this is a ridiculous idea. He was the first person to say this is dumb, but he had been handed it by Franklin Roosevelt. So he couldn't just throw it in the garbage. So he passed it along to his scientists and said, see if you can do something with this. And the scientists said, you know what? I think we might be able to,

because Lytle Adams was right. Bats can carry a lot more weight than you think they possibly could. And the idea was similar to what we just talked about with Project Seal. Japan was made up of wooden and paper houses and buildings and put that together with an incendiary device and you could create a huge conflagration as when we bombed tokyo we created this huge firestorm that basically burned tokyo to the ground well what do bats do well if you drop a bat in the middle of the daytime they're going to do everything they can to find a dark warm place where they can hang out until it becomes nighttime. Well, what is that in a city or what is that in a town? Well, that's an

attic. It's an easement. It's a nook and cranny inside somebody's house. Well, if you attach bomb to bat and bats naturally will go find the attic of somebody's house. And when the incendiary goes off, you can burn Japan to the ground. Now, why do I think this idea made sense? Because they actually tested it. They built a full scale Japanese mock city out in the middle of the Mojave Desert in California and said, okay, let's do the test. And they rounded up a bunch of bats. And what they had to do is actually they had to put them into hibernation. So they put them inside refrigerated trucks to bring their temperature down and make them go to sleep. And then from that, they packed them into these cylinders that kind of look like the cargo drop cylinders in World War II. If you've seen in the movies, they parachuted down the cylinders with weapons and other things inside of them.

So they put them inside that cylinder with the idea is they would drop them. The bats would wake up halfway down and they'd fly out of the cylinder and then they'd fly and do their actual mission. The first time they actually miscalculated how long it would take for the bats to wake up. So when they dropped the cylinder, the bats didn't leave the cylinder. And so the cylinder hit the ground at terminal velocity with all the bats inside of it. And I don't care if you're a bat or a human, if you hit the ground at terminal velocity, you're going to have a big cylinder full of dead bats. The second time they actually said, we want to avoid this from happening. So they waited a little bit longer for the bats to get a little more awake before they loaded in the cylinder. So they had them back in this truck. They warmed the truck up. They'd

already affixed the explosive to the bats and they went to open the doors to load them into the cylinder, but they had miscalculated the other direction. And at this point they'd waited too long. And so all the bats were wide awake. So when they opened the doors, instead of docile bats that were kind of half asleep, the bats just flew out in every single direction. Now, again, these are bats that have already been fitted with their explosive devices. Now, again, these are bats that have already been fitted with their explosive devices. The good news is half the bats flew straight to the mock-up Japanese city, went to the eaves and attics and nooks and crannies of that mock-up Japanese city, exploded, and burned the Japanese city to the ground. It worked perfectly. The problem is the other half of the bats flew to a working U.S. Army airfield,

and the hangars and the bunkers and the towers and everything else went up into the attics and nooks and crannies of the working U.S. Army airfield and burned that to the ground. So the Army was a little pissed off about this, that they had one of their top airfields in California, which is basically a smoking ruin. The Navy and the Marine Corps who had been running this operation were ecstatic. They're like, man, this thing works great. This is the perfect opportunity for us to win this war.

So finally, they went to the chief of naval operations and said, we have a fantastic plan. We've been working on this out in New Mexico. The scientists have been working hard on this, and we have it. And the CNO goes, oh, I know all about it, right? I know everything that's been going on in New Mexico. I've been read on this, but how do you guys know what's going on in New Mexico? And they go, what are you talking about? We've been working on the bat problem in New Mexico. Chief of Naval Operations goes, oh, that New Mexico scientific study. This was in the beginning of the summer of 1945, where the chief of naval operations had been thinking about a whole nother project that had been taking place

in New Mexico that was about to work very, very well. And so timing was the issue with Project X-Ray. If they had figured out how to do this six months earlier, it's altogether possible that we would have actually used this against the Japanese. But it just so happens that when the Navy went to get full funding to collect a million bats and to do this in an operational sense was exactly the time that we were testing the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. And so the U.S. government was like, well, we can win this war without your bat problem. We can end this war with a couple bombs and not having to round up a million bats. And so I say, in hindsight, this may have worked. And it may have been something that would have potentially caused less Japanese deaths than the atomic bombs did.

And so to me, it's an interesting idea. I love it. I thought it was a joke one, but it turns out that's the most serious run the whole book. We have a band in the UK called Atomic Kitten. And that really did remind me of the Acoustic Kitty when I saw that in your book. Let's finish up on that one. Yeah, so Acoustic Kitty is one that is legend at CIA. And every new recruit, every new operations officer, every new scientist who joins the directorate of science and technology at CIA hears about Acoustic Kitty and it's turned into a legend. And in this case, I think there's a true story about Acoustic Kitty and then there's kind

of an urban legend about Acoustic Kitty. The sad part is the urban legend is much more fun than the true story, but the true story is still crazy also. And the idea behind this was the CIA was trying to figure out a way to infiltrate listening devices inside of Soviet compounds. And they developed a bunch of really whiz-bang Bondian technologies where they would shoot a bullet and there'd be a listening device inside the bullet and it would embed itself into a tree and you could hear stuff or they would create laser microphones and all this stuff. We're talking going back to the 1950s and 60s where this technology just was not ready for prime time. Today, sure.

But at that time period, they really could not get a good listening device that would pick up just what they needed to pick up. And the problem they ran into is that bugs at the time picked up everything. They were not able to be filtered to where if you put a bug under a park bench, it wouldn't just pick up the conversation of the people sitting on top of the bench. It would pick up the wind blowing and dogs barking and birds chirping and everything else, all the ambient noise around the conversation. So the CIA actually found out that they thought they had really good recordings of nearby conversation that turned out all they had was white noise that would just junk. And they couldn't even hear the people talking. So like, how can we directionally record these

conversations and at the same time not be noticed doing it, right? You can't have a guy in a bushes with a directional microphone trying to listen to these conversations. Well, the idea for Acoustic Kitty actually came from a CIA officer in Istanbul, Turkey. And if you've ever been to Istanbul, there's stray cats everywhere. It's a cat lover's paradise. Even to this day, if you're sitting in an outdoor cafe, there's just cats all on your feet and you can reach down and scratch them.

And there's a CIA officer who was watching the Soviet compound, the Soviet embassy in Istanbul, and noticed that cats were going in and out nonstop all day long with impunity. No one paid attention to them. No one even noticed them. There's a courtyard in the middle where like the generals and the top people would speak and sit on benches and talk and cats would just jump up on their laps and cuddle with them and

they'd scratch them and not even stop their conversation. So someone at CIA said, man, if we could somehow get a listening device onto one of those cats, then we would have the Holy Grail of listening devices, right? And we get to be able to hear everything. And maybe it got lost in translation of the idea of a listening device on the cat was when it got back to the CIA, it became a listening device in the cat. And acoustic kitty was a program to take a normal house cat and surgically implant a listening device inside the cat where you would work the receiver, the microphone up into the ear canal of the cat. The power pack for the listening device would be in the abdomen, surgically implanted, and the tail would be the antenna so that the cat could basically be a robo kitty and pick up information no matter where it was.

And they did do this. We know for a fact there are CI documents that they brought a cat into a sterile operating environment. They opened it up. They implanted the listening device inside of it. They sewed the cat back up and then they did some training runs. They actually set up at work. And the amazing thing is we know for a fact that the listening device worked, that the cat was turned into a kitty listening device, which is actually a huge step. If you think about the inside of a body is not the most hospitable place for electronics. And it worked. The problem that the main story, the one that's probably true, and the reason the program was canceled is training cats.

As anyone who's ever had a cat knows that cats train you, you don't train them. And the CIA, as good as they were, just had a real difficulty trying to figure out a way to get the cat to do what we wanted it to. And so the program was canceled. That's the straightforward version of the story. The urban legend takes it to the next level. The urban legend says that's not really what happened, right? You've only been told that it was canceled.

Instead, the CIA actually figured out a way to train the cat. And they didn't just train it. They rewired its brain. Because what was happening at the same time as Acoustic Kitty was another CIA program called MKUltra. And MKUltra has become this big conspiracy theory thing because it was where the CIA used some very choice drugs, psychedelics, most famously lysergic acid diethylamide, which most of us know as LSD, to experiment on people's minds. Can we control minds, Venturion candidate stuff?

Can we create the perfect soldier against interrogation? And can we find ways to interrogate people and get all the information we have from them no matter how trained they are against it? Part of MKUltra was also using electromagnetism and electro stimulus to brains to see if we can't find ways to rewire the human brain. So the urban legend, the conspiracy side of the acoustic kitty story was they had figured this out with cats. They had figured this out with cats. And so they said, all right, we can't train the cat. Well, let's go back in surgically and see if we can't rewire the brain of the cat to do exactly what we want it to.

And the story says we did, right? We went in and we rewired the brain of the cat so that it would actually listen to commands. And at that point, you had a working listening device and you had a delivery system that would do exactly what you want it to. So they said, all right, let's do a field test of this because this thing can work. So the story goes, the CIA and their through acoustic kitty inside their top secret spy van. And you can imagine 1960s era technology kind of think bond with like the oscilloscopes doing oscilloscoping and all the knobs and all that thing and drove it to Northwest D.C.

where there are a lot of parks and there are a lot of embassies and there's a lot of places that you could test this cat out. And they put it down on the street and they typed inside their 1960s era computer like we want you to go over and just sit in front of these two guys sitting on a park bench and listen to their conversation. These weren't spies. These were just two random guys sitting on a bench, but it was a good test. These weren't spies. These were just two random guys sitting on a bench, but it was a good test. And to their absolute amazement, Acoustic Kitty made a straight beeline for the two men on the park bench. Did exactly what it was trained to do, exactly what it was designed to do. And they started celebrating like, oh my God, we've figured out the greatest intelligence

coup in history, right? We have a RoboKitty that will be completely the best intelligence collecting technology anyone's ever thought of. And they were celebrating, they were high-fiving, they were thinking about all the ways that they were going to spend their raises and all the different vacations they were going to go on with all the acclaim they were going to get. And what they weren't doing was paying attention to traffic. the acclaim they were going to get. And what they weren't doing was paying attention to traffic.

And the sad part of this story is Acoustic Kitty doing exactly what it was designed to do, was making a beeline straight for these two guys sitting on a park bench. Didn't quite make it across the street before a DC taxi cab ran our feline hero over in the middle of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. So one second they were celebrating, the next second they looked over and saw a smoking, sparking, splattered cat across the highway. And that was the end of the program. It was good luck, nice try, but you killed our cat, our multi-million dollar robo cat. And to add insult to injury, they had to go scrape the roadkill off the street before the Soviets found out about it, or God forbid the Washington Post

got wind of what the CIA was up to. And we know this program existed. We know it was canceled. The documents canceling the program are still sitting right there. They're not redacted. They're available to people to read. And so we have an idea of when it was canceled, we just don't necessarily know which story is true. I like to think it was the more fun one, certainly. I love it. Just out of interest, how did it work in the US with releasing these documents and things? How long are you gonna have to wait before you can write the craziest plans and ideas of this period that we call the war on terror? Yeah, so the trick with agencies in the United States is there are certain periods in which there's a mandatory review of classified documents, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a mandatory release of classified documents. Agencies can keep documents

secret forever if they really think that there's a need to. The protection of sources and methods is paramount. So even if something is like 100 years old, there are 100-year-old documents that are still classified because of the fear that you're going to give away a methodology. Hopefully, we're not using a lot of the same methods that we were using 100 years ago. But there's a possibility that something that we did, we don't want our adversaries to know about. Sources are also very important, particularly if you're operating in places in the world where they will punish your grandkids and great-grandkids if you were involved in helping them at some point. So we may have documents from the 40s and 50s,

particularly in places like the Middle East or in China and other places, where even though the person is long dead, their family may be targeted by security services if it comes out that they were involved in helping the United States in some way. And so we'll keep that stuff classified indefinitely. I'll tell you what, man, you better keep that stuff classified. If I find out who actually helped Washington escape from Brooklyn Heights over to Manhattan, I'm coming for their

descendants. I'll tell you what. Thank you so much, Vince. That was just outstanding. This book is brilliant and congratulations. Tell everyone what it's called. The book is called Nuking the Moon and other intelligence plots and military schemes left on the drawing board, although it might be a reversed military intelligence. One way or another, it's a collection of stories that I love telling that are all true, 100% true, and they're all throughout history, mainly the Cold War, the Second World War. Hopefully you'll have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. Well, I've had a lot of fun talking to you.

Thank you very much, Vince. It's been a pleasure. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the history of our country, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public

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