America Built Towns Just to Nuke Them

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[00:00:45] Michael Shermer
Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Jon Else. He's a documentary filmmaker and professor emeritus at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He's a MacArthur Fellow. A Genius Award winner. Love that. Two-time Oscar nominee.

[00:01:09] Michael Shermer
Oh, this is going to be interesting. Five-time Emmy winner. All right. Love that. Produced and directed the first ever film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Day After Trinity, which I saw back in the day. And I just watched it again the other night, Jon.

[00:01:23] Jon Else
So you did.

[00:01:24] Michael Shermer
So good. So classic 1970s documentary, but I loved it. And he was a series producer. And cinematographer for Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize, the classic film series about the civil rights movement. His new book, here it is. Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs. Okay, Frenchman Flat, you're not going to be familiar with that term, but it's what, it's the, you've all seen the famous films of this where there's a bunch of buildings and cars and mannequins set up inside a house having dinner.

[00:01:56] Michael Shermer
And little animals running around. It looks like a town. And then all of a sudden, kaboom, and the whole thing gets flat. All that was fake. This is all fake, fake, fake, built in the Nevada desert by the U.S. Government to test the effects of atomic bombs. That's what this book is about. Although Frenchman Flat is the name of the place, the book itself is about the whole thing. So, Jon, nice to see you. What got you interested in this subject? Well, I guess Oppenheimer must have got you started.

[00:02:22] Jon Else
Yeah. Well, it's great to be, great to be here. I know you've been around this block a few times yourself. Uh, what got me interested in this? Well, uh, I grew up in the, during the Cold War, uh, at a time when atomic bombs and atomic testing, where they were just part of the air we breathed, uh, these things were on television. You could watch atomic tests in Nevada live on television.

[00:02:49] Jon Else
Uh, you know, my grandparents were born in the 19th century and they had, they knew men who had fought at Gettysburg, but they lived to be able to watch live atomic bombs on television, like over breakfast. Uh, I mean, this stuff was just all over. It was every day in the newspapers. Uh, when I was about 10, growing up in Sacramento, California, which is 400 miles north of the Nevada test site.

[00:03:19] Jon Else
Uh, my dad got me out of bed one morning. My dad had an acute sense of history. Uh, and he got me out of bed early one morning. We went out in the backyard, uh, and we looked to the south and the sky lit up this iridescent coral color, just like, like the sun rising in the wrong direction. Uh, and it was atomic bomb at the Nevada test site.

[00:03:43] Jon Else
Uh, because you could, you know, you could see these things all over the West. If you were willing to get up in the morning, you could see those nuclear tests from Northern Mexico up to Canada. Yeah. So I, that's, I mean, you know, you could not escape this if you were of my generation. Um, you know, we, as kids, we knew about fallout. As kids, we knew about intercontinental ballistic missiles.

[00:04:10] Jon Else
My beloved middle school civics teacher, uh, Mr. Gaynor in class, uh, you know, reminded us that, you know, the, the days of, of conventional warfare were over. And now it was all about some guy pushing a button to launch a missile, uh, to get the Russians, you know, in this, this great sort of battle royale between democratic capitalism and communism.

[00:04:37] Jon Else
So it was all over, you know, and then I, I, I got, um, you know, I went to film school. I became a filmmaker. Uh, I had heard about this guy Oppenheimer. Um, at the time there was no, there was no biography of Oppenheimer. There was no film about Oppenheimer. He had sort of fallen off the cultural radar. I mean, he's enormous on our cultural landscape now, thanks to Chris Nolan's film.

[00:05:04] Jon Else
But back then, there was nothing. And I decided, this guy sounds interesting. You know, maybe he would make a good film. And I thought, you know, I'll be able to interview him. I'll go have dinner with him. You know, we'll spend weeks with him, interviewing him, hanging out with him. And in those pre-internet days, I went to the Palo Alto Library and went through the card catalog under Oppenheimer. And the first thing I came to was an obituary.

[00:05:29] Jon Else
I thought, ah, you know, I can never make this film. I didn't even know he was dead, so I was not going to have supper with him. I doubt he would have had supper with a young filmmaker anyway. So, you know, we set out. It turned out a lot of people who knew him and worked on the first atomic bomb were still alive. So we made this movie. I mean, central to the movie is his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, who became a friend.

[00:05:56] Jon Else
And that was kind of the beginning of it. It was part of, I guess, a lifetime of making films about the unintended consequences of good ideas. And I think we can probably say that the development of nuclear weapons kind of falls into that trajectory of human undertakings.

[00:06:24] Jon Else
We set out to do things that That seem inevitable, that seem exactly the right thing to do at the time. You know, looking back, I was born before the Trinity test, so I mean, I was probably a year old. But if I had been of age, if I had been a young scientist... Or if I'd been a young draftee in the Army in 1943, and they said, why don't you get yourself up there to this mysterious place on top of this mountain, this Los Alamos secret laboratory, you know, to work on a bomb that's going to defeat Hitler.

[00:07:04] Jon Else
I mean, I would have been on the next train. I wouldn't have thought for a second about what is this going to mean. Eighty years later, you know, how is this going to evolve? The problem at hand was to stop fascism. You know, Japanese militarism and the Nazis. So, you know, the rest is history and here we are.

[00:07:29] Michael Shermer
Well, there's much to go on there. I mean, first of all, I did rewatch The Day After Trinity, and I remember thinking, how come he didn't interview Oppenheimer himself? And then I had to look up when the film was made, and when he died, I went, oh, oh, that's why. You had everybody else. I mean, you got everybody that's in that film. So that was, you know, kind of a, now a historical piece of what they were thinking at the time, just two decades after the event.

[00:07:53] Michael Shermer
Another comment you made, let me just make a rip on that. In the Civil War, If I recall, before that, when people launched cannonballs, the cannonballs would just go and hit something. They'd just land on the ground, or the soldiers would dodge, or they'd laugh at it, or whatever, or it would hit the ship and make a hole. But they didn't explode until somewhere in the middle of the Civil War, where somebody said, let's put an explosive device in the cannonball, and then when it goes, it explodes, and then we'd kill lots of people.

[00:08:21] Michael Shermer
So you go from that, your grandparents, to the ultimate explosive device that kills everybody, or almost kills everybody. That's in three generations, your grandparents, your parents, and you.

[00:08:34] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Alfred Nobel, who was credited with being the inventor of dynamite TNT, he felt that his weapon was so savage, his explosive was so savage that it would bring an end to war. A lot of people thought that about the atomic bomb after the war. Let me back up a minute to the Day After Trinity.

[00:08:59] Jon Else
You said we got all the people. Well, we didn't get all the people. I mean, obviously Oppenheimer had passed by then. General Groves's was gone by then. So the two principal players at Los Alamos were available only in archive footage. If you think about it, there are two critical people who were not in The Day After Trinity. One is Richard Feynman, who was very much alive and kicking and, you know, full of piss and vinegar.

[00:09:31] Jon Else
And the other is Edward Teller, who was also very much alive at the time. You know, documentary films are incredibly expensive to make, and we were doing The Day After Trinity on a shoestring, and I could afford to take the film crew either to New York to film all the guys at Columbia, Robert Serber and Bob Wilson, and then to Freeman Dyson at Princeton, or I could take the film crew to Los Angeles and do Feynman, and I couldn't do both.

[00:10:01] Jon Else
So Feynman slipped away. It was a huge mistake. I should have mortgaged my house. I have an incredible recorded phone call with Feynman from that time. And the guy just, he can riff on anything. Teller is absent for a different reason. When I was developing The Day After Trinity, I wrote a letter to Teller and said, you want to be in this movie about Oppenheimer?

[00:10:27] Jon Else
And he wrote back and said, you know, I'd be happy to. Between the time we corresponded about him being, between the time he agreed to be in the film, and when it came time to shoot him, I had done camera work on a BBC documentary about Edward Teller. So we spent a lot of time with him. We spent a couple weeks at his home, went out to Livermore with him. And that film was broadcast right before we were to film him for The Day After Trinity.

[00:10:58] Jon Else
And it was a hatchet job. I mean, the BBC... The film director hated Teller. He didn't tell Teller that. I mean, he would do things like we'd be filming Teller playing chess or playing the piano. He was an incredible pianist. And the director came over and whispered in my ear, he said, make him look like Dracula. Which raised all kinds of documentary ethics problems. Anyhow, long story short, that's why Edward Teller is not on the film.

[00:11:25] Jon Else
I got a letter the day before we were to film, two days before. He said, I will never again cooperate with public broadcasting. I couldn't blame him. He would have been a great addition. I mean, Teller was nothing if not fascinating.

[00:11:44] Michael Shermer
Super brilliant. My one claim to connection there is he came to Pepperdine University when I was an undergraduate in, I think, 1974, 75, and he gave a speech, and it was his Mutual Assured Destruction speech. Yeah, yeah. And I remember thinking, yeah, well, it doesn't work. I mean, it's great as long as it works, but when it doesn't work, it's the end of the world. Okay. Yeah. But, you know, people today still argue, well, it has worked.

[00:12:08] Michael Shermer
There have been no bombs dropped since 1945. And, you know, aggression. So, you know, I'll just throw that out to you. Does Mutual Assured Destruction work as a deterrent?

[00:12:20] Jon Else
Well, we don't know. You know, we don't know if deterrence works.

[00:12:23] Michael Shermer
So far so good, yeah.

[00:12:24] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, you know, there would be a good title of a new book, you know, until the day it doesn't. You know, I came into this whole project, this whole enterprise, the whole nuclear enterprise, you know, decades ago, convinced that the whole thing was at its root, just pure evil. I had no patience with deterrence. And I have since come to understand, as a lot of folks have, that deterrence may well have worked.

[00:12:54] Jon Else
I mean, it is true that after the use of the atomic bomb at World War II, which clearly hastened the end of the bloodiest war in history, we haven't had a nuclear war since then. In fact, you know, one of the ironies Is that, you know, the Second World War killed 80 million people, bloodiest century in history.

[00:13:20] Jon Else
And the 21st century, the latter half of the 20th century and the first half of the 21st century have been comparatively the least bloody in history. Now, can we... Credit that to the hard work of an awful lot of clear-thinking diplomats and leaders, rational leaders, you know, who spent numbing years, months at the You know, the diplomatic table in Geneva hammering out these arms control agreements and reducing the stockpiles, reducing the risk of nuclear war.

[00:13:55] Jon Else
Do we credit them or do we credit the deterrent umbrella that held the nuclear powers at bay while those negotiations were going on? I don't know. You know, I'm not a policy guy. I'm not a historian. But I won't let that stop me from having an opinion. I think it was probably both.

[00:14:15] Michael Shermer
Well, it's a combination of things there. We don't give ourselves enough credit. I mean, people like the Cuban Missile Crisis, whoa, we got lucky. Well, how about Kennedy and Khrushchev just playing really smart intellectual diplomacy games to prevent war?

[00:14:29] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the idea of luck in all this. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, there's some folk, Marty Sherwin argues that it was luck that that... Sub-Commander was on the sub. But, I mean, Kennedy and Khrushchev, they were both veterans of World War II. They respected each other as military men.

[00:14:54] Jon Else
And they made a deal. They made this secret, you know, backroom handshake during that crisis. You know, they'd take their missiles out of Cuba. We'd take our missiles out of Turkey and, you know, save The world.

[00:15:08] Michael Shermer
Another thing about nuclear weapons I like to play with is the idea that it's inevitable because the science is there. We can discover it. But, in fact, it takes quite an effort. So, I've been nudging up against the idea of no Hitler, no Holocaust. But no Hitler, no World War II. No Hitler, no necessary for a Manhattan Project. Who's going to develop a nuclear weapon without some huge motivation to start?

[00:15:32] Michael Shermer
Right? So, all of this is contingent. Upon one guy, Hitler. Hitler, you know, had this exterminationist policy and conquering the world and all that stuff. And then also the Japanese. So two things on that. Is it clear now to you, as far as you know, that the Germans were not going to get a nuclear weapon? At some point, by 44, maybe we knew that this probably wasn't going to happen?

[00:15:56] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, having spent some time in this, I'm always hesitant to judge those folks. Yeah, it is clear now, after the fact, it was clear that the Germans never got close to an atomic bomb, nor did the Japanese. And the Japanese had thought about it before the war, but they never even got a project really launched.

[00:16:21] Jon Else
You know, but nobody knew in 1942, 1943, that Hitler was not on his way. You know, an awful lot of the best nuclear scientists in the world Theoretical physics and experimental physics was done in Germany. You know, the first fissioning of uranium at a laboratory scale was done in Germany.

[00:16:47] Jon Else
Fortunately, I mean Hitler was such a demon that he drove most of the good minds out of German science. I mean, don't get me started on what's happening with American science now. But an awful lot of those people ended up at Los Alamos working on the first atomic bomb. So, as I said, you know, knowing what they knew then, I'm not at all surprised that folks flocked to Los Alamos.

[00:17:17] Jon Else
I mean, what a mission. You know, I mean, as Robert Wilson said in The Day After Trinity, you know, it was a great time to be American. It was a time when Americans were united in this cause. You know, I will say that there's no secret about atomic weapons, about the physics of atomic weapons, the theoretical physics.

[00:17:43] Jon Else
You know, you can split a uranium atom and it's going to release a lot of neutrons that are going to release a lot of other neutrons in the billions. What's secret... Is, you know, is the metallurgy, the mechanics, you know, the chemistry, the experimental physics, the engineering to actually get it done. So back in the 40s, I mean, you know, that knowledge had spread through universities all around the world.

[00:18:16] Michael Shermer
Yeah, but yeah, and then also producing the fissionable material. Let me read you a little excerpt here.

[00:18:22] Jon Else
At the time, in the 1940s, you did need a big Manhattan project. Yeah. And a lot of the You know, the problems we're having now is trying to stop in their tracks some of these big projects for uranium separation in Iran. And that's part of what the Nonproliferation Treaty is all about.

[00:18:45] Michael Shermer
Let me punch on this point. I'm going to read you an excerpt from George Harper's 1979 article in Analog titled, Build Your Own A-bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood. He reveals just how difficult it is to actually make a bomb. As a terrorist, one of the best methods for your purposes is the gaseous diffusion approach. This is the one used for the earliest A-bombs, and in many respects, it's the most reliable and requires the least sophisticated technology.

[00:19:11] Michael Shermer
It is, however, a bit expensive and does require certain chemicals apt to raise a few eyebrows. You have to start with something on the order of a dozen miles of special glass-lined steel tubing and about 60 tons of hydrofluoric acid, which can be employed to create the compound uranium hexafluoride. Once your uranium has been converted into hexafluoride, it can be blown up against a number of special low-porosity membranes.

[00:19:37] Michael Shermer
Molecules of uranium hexafluoride, which contain an atom. Of U-238, are somewhat heavier than those containing an atom of U-235. As the gas is blown across the membranes, more of the heavier molecules are trapped than the light ones. The area on the other side of the membrane is thus far further enriched with the U-235-containing material, possibly as much as one-half of 1% per pass.

[00:20:03] Michael Shermer
Repeat this often enough and you wind up with uranium hexafluoride containing virtually 100% core atoms of U-235. You then separate the fluorine from the uranium and arrive at a nice little pile of domesticated U-235. From there it's all downhill. Who's going to do this? Who's going to do this? Come on.

[00:20:23] Jon Else
It's a lot easier to steal it. You know, there was a lot of... Yeah, I mean, there was a tremendous concern when the Soviet Union collapsed that there was a lot of Soviet nuclear weaponry that was in the... Satellite states. I mean, Ukraine had plenty of nuclear weapons. I mean, think about that for a minute. And they were all under, with a lot of help from Los Alamos actually, that nuclear material and those weapons in the former Soviet Union was corralled and reprocessed for use in civilian reactors.

[00:21:02] Jon Else
You know, Ted Taylor, who's an interesting fellow, was a weapons designer at Los Alamos. He designed the famous levitated core, which made a little atomic core about the size of a baseball. The only man ever to light his cigarette with an atomic bomb out at Frenchman Flat, actually, with a little parabolic mirror, and he focused the heat from a blast 15 miles away onto his Pall Mall cigarette.

[00:21:31] Jon Else
Ted Taylor, later in his life, became incredibly concerned about a terrorist bomb. And, you know, he said, you know, if you could get together about 10 kilos of plutonium, somehow. You know, steal it from an unguarded or a poorly guarded reactor, you know, a civilian reactor, a power reactor, if you could steal it from, you know, a failed state.

[00:21:58] Jon Else
You know, you can get that in some high explosives and you could blow up the World Trade Center. You'd easily knock over one of those towers. As it turned out, it happened not with conventional explosives, but with aircraft. You know, I was with Freeman Dyson, a physicist, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Centers, and he said, thank God it wasn't plutonium this time.

[00:22:24] Michael Shermer
Wow.

[00:22:25] Jon Else
You know, so, I mean, though, you know, the Department of Energy is out there looking after us 24-7, you know, with all kinds of surveillance for exactly that eventuality. You know, for stolen plutonium.

[00:22:45] Michael Shermer
Yeah, well, I do wonder why Iran hasn't just bought one. I mean, they had the money, at least they did. Maybe Putin locked them all down. Maybe they're not on the black market anymore.

[00:22:55] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sure you and I are not the only people thinking about that. Yeah, I know. I hope. Yeah, I hope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:23:07] Michael Shermer
But now on the other side, let's talk about Japan, you know, did we need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I think we did, you know, but there are people who argue that they were on the verge of surrendering anyway, and then Russia invades, and they would have surrendered. We didn't need to do this. This is all a political thing. Your thoughts?

[00:23:27] Jon Else
Well, you know, the older I get, the more reluctant I am to re-litigate the decision to drop the bomb on Japan. I mean, I will stipulate that I think it certainly hastened to the end of the war. But what's important looking back at that is that the choices were appalling. If you put yourself in the position of, you know, Stimson and Conant and the people in Washington, Truman, who were making that.

[00:23:59] Jon Else
You know, we were in the fifth year of the by far the bloodiest war in history. There had already been 70 million people killed. We were on our way to killing 80 million people. You know, the city of Stalingrad had a million corpses in its streets. My father was in The United States Army at the time. Probably ready to go into the second wave in the invasion of Japan.

[00:24:31] Jon Else
So, you know, did it hasten the end? Was it better to destroy what Oppenheimer expected would be 20,000 civilian lives ended up to be well over 100,000 civilian lives? Was it better to do that and, you know, do the grim work quickly or to let this thing grind on? You know, I don't know. I mean, what interests me is that there was a lot of discussion about having a demonstration.

[00:25:00] Jon Else
And you've got to understand, you have to remember that this bomb was untested at the time. You know, It was even before the Trinity test that folks started thinking about this. So no one had any real visceral sense of what the bomb was. Let alone. Let alone any visceral sense of what it would do to men, women, and children in a city. A city which had some military installations, but it was certainly not, as Truman said, a major military installation.

[00:25:31] Michael Shermer
You know, Stimson was going to, Kyoto was originally on the list. Well, Kyoto

[00:25:36] Jon Else
was originally on the list and there's an unconfirmed story that it was taken off the list because I believe Stimson had spent his honeymoon. There.

[00:25:45] Michael Shermer
That's correct, It is confirmed. That's now confirmed, yes. It

[00:25:50] Jon Else
does now confirm. But at least someone in those meetings understood the cultural significance of Kyoto. But, you know, after the war in 1946, they exploded a bomb at the bikini tests. And it was a Hiroshima-sized bomb, Nagasaki-sized bomb, and it made this unbelievably spectacular display in the ocean.

[00:26:17] Jon Else
I mean, there was a mile-high column of water that went up. There were 100-foot, it was a 100-certain-foot base surge of waves. And had they done that in Tokyo Harbor in view of the emperor, you know, we'll never know. So, you know, I think there was a dud, then diplomatically that would not be good.

[00:26:44] Jon Else
I mean, both of those bombs, I mean, the Trinity bomb had been tested under very controlled circumstances at Trinity. It had never been dropped out of an airplane. I mean, think about that. Think about this untested, you know, it's half the world's supply, a third of the world's supply of plutonium being dropped out of an airplane, triggered to go off 1,900 feet above ground, And it worked.

[00:27:08] Jon Else
And then the Nagasaki bomb was a different design. It was a uranium bomb, not a plutonium bomb. I'm sorry, I've got it backwards. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb. Yeah, Never tested. Under combat conditions. I mean, it's interesting they call it combat. It's still referred in the business as the combat delivery of the bomb.

[00:27:38] Jon Else
And it raises some questions about what combat. That is, obviously, we were in combat with the Japanese armed forces. Were we in combat with the city of Hiroshima?

[00:27:51] Michael Shermer
Well, Yeah, let me riff on that for a minute. My father was in the U.S. Navy. He was on a destroyer, the USS Wren, surrounding the aircraft carrier with the Kamikaze pilots trying to get to the aircraft carrier. He was one of the ones shooting. He was an electrician. Let me put some numbers on this. During the invasion. Of uh Iwo Jima, there were approximately 26,000 American casualties, which included 6,821 dead in the 36 day battle.

[00:28:16] Michael Shermer
How fiercely did the Japanese defend that little volcanic rock 700 miles from Japan? Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers assigned to fight to the bitter end, only 216 remained at the end. Um Let's see, of the uh at the battle for Okinawa, only 340 miles from the Japanese mainland. It was even more ferocious, resulting in a staggering body count of 240,000 dead, including 77,000 Japanese soldiers, 14,000 American soldiers, plus an additional 150,000 Japanese civilians living on the island.

[00:28:52] Michael Shermer
Uh When an estimated 2.3 million Japanese soldiers and 28 million Japanese civilian militia prepared to defend their island nation to the end. It was clear to all what an invasion of a Japanese mainland would mean. Truman's advisors estimated that between 250,000 and a million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan. And Douglas MacArthur said it'd be a ratio of 22 to 1 Japanese to American, but that would still lead to several hundred thousand to a million American.

[00:29:24] Michael Shermer
Yeah. And so, you know, in a pure utilitarian calculus, I mean, the bomb is way less deadly than that. And uh And, you know, we know that the people controlling Japan, maybe the citizens didn't want any of this, but they weren't in control, right? It was the uh the, you know, the warriors who were running Japan and telling the emperor what they were going to do. And they didn't want to give up. We know all the way to the bitter end, they're like, we're going to fight to the last man on our own.

[00:29:52] Jon Else
And uh and that's what they intended until the emperor finally stepped in after the two bombs and said, all right, enough of that, right? I think it was necessary. I think Truman did the right thing. Uh

[00:30:02] Michael Shermer
It's an unfortunate thing. I mean, it would be better if we didn't have to fight the war at all, but that's not what happened, right? So, as a as an ugly calculus, I think you have to side with the bombs.

[00:30:12] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, it was, there's no question it was, you know, incredibly ugly calculus. I mean, the Japanese the Japanese killed about 10 million civilians in territory they occupied during the war. You know, I don't know what I would have done at the time. Yeah. And my, you know, I probably, you know, you and I might, neither one of us might be here with our fathers both being in the armed forces during that time.

[00:30:42] Jon Else
So I just hope.

[00:30:45] Michael Shermer
several There's several passages passages from from your your book book that that are are just just so so, there's dramatic of what we're talking about here. Like here you describe back in 1945 Los Alamos engineers had been preparing a third bomb that would have been dropped on Japan. Japan. As reports from Nagasaki arrived in August, Trinity veteran Harry Daghlian had worked alone with the plutonium core to be inserted into that third bomb.

[00:31:13] Michael Shermer
He dropped a neutron reflecting block. Plutonium went critical, and he pulled apart the core assembly with his hands. In an instant, a massive dose of radiation shot through him, about the same as a person standing in the open near Hiroshima ground zero. Daghlian fell to the floor with prompt acute radiation. Over the 24 agonizing days it took the young physicist to die, doctors fought in vain to save him while laboratory photographers compiled a visual record as his body became more and more grotesquely ravaged.

[00:31:45] Michael Shermer
His hands began to swell to bursting. The following month General Groves's, an otherwise realistic, well-informed, decent man, testified under oath to the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy. They say it is a very pleasant way to die. Oh, my God. I mean, so what is going on? There? The radiation just destroys the cells in your body and you just die from within?

[00:32:06] Jon Else
Well, yeah, it's like being boiled, burned to death from the inside. Yeah, I mean, the radiation wreaks havoc in the strands of DNA in the cell, and it does it within the first, like, you know, 10 trillionth of a second, whatever a femtosecond is. That's how quickly the damage gets done.

[00:32:31] Jon Else
And that damage, it may just kill the cells outright. It may set in motion cancers that manifest decades later. But the damage is set in motion. I mean, all the important business in a nuclear explosion happens in the first millionth of a second, including that damage to cells.

[00:32:58] Jon Else
I mean, General Groves's comment is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that there was no mention of radiation in the reports from Hiroshima, in the first reports, none whatsoever. It's probably because it was very poorly understood. The images and descriptions, pictures of what actually happened to people on the ground in Hiroshima were suppressed, frankly, when the occupation forces went in, American occupation forces.

[00:33:36] Jon Else
They had a couple thousand military censors who went in, and they seized every image of a person on the ground, including children's drawings, and those were sequestered by the military. The first image that I could find of an injured human on the ground, an injured or dead human on the ground in Hiroshima was not released until 1950.

[00:34:06] Jon Else
There was no film, there was plenty of film taken by Japanese film crews immediately afterwards in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lots of still photos. Those were not really released publicly until about 10 years later. Life magazine ran a big story on the five remaining films photographs of Hiroshima on the morning of the blast.

[00:34:34] Jon Else
And that was very deliberate. That was very, very deliberate. And then slowly, information about the...

[00:34:41] Michael Shermer
But why, Jon? Was that for national security reasons, military reasons?

[00:34:45] Jon Else
Well, you know, this was the beginning of an arms race that needed the support of the American public. I mean, within days of the end of the war, There was a discussion about whether we needed to ramp up production of nuclear weapons. Within literally weeks of Hiroshima, there were plans for nuclear war that were being put in place at the Pentagon.

[00:35:14] Jon Else
And those, you know, we live in a democracy and those things required public support. And I think it was understood that a real close understanding of what the nuclear weapons did to humans, was not going to be helpful to the public affairs necessary for congressional authorization of weapons.

[00:35:42] Jon Else
There was, of course, around that time, John Hersey's incredible book called Hiroshima. Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He managed to sneak his way into Hiroshima shortly after the bombing. He made it past the censors and interviewed about 80 people, including American prisoners of war who had been in the city.

[00:36:06] Jon Else
Wrote an incredibly measured account of what people in Hiroshima on the ground endured. It was published in The New Yorker. It was an entire, the first time in its history, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to one story. I still have a copy on the shelf here.

[00:36:25] Michael Shermer
You do? Oh, wow.

[00:36:27] Jon Else
A copy that I found in a family trunk. Somebody thought it was worth saving.

[00:36:31] Michael Shermer
That's probably worth a lot now.

[00:36:33] Jon Else
Yeah, it's worth $1,200 on eBay. I'm not selling it. Sold out in an hour on the newsstands. It was read in its entirety on CBS radio. No commercials. 50 years before the first podcast. So those things, you know, they made a difference in how members of Congress voted. They made less difference than you'd think, but they did affect appropriations for this coming massive spending on nuclear arms buildup.

[00:37:09] Jon Else
And pictures of children, burned children in Hiroshima was not going to help that campaign.

[00:37:18] Michael Shermer
There's something about nuclear weapons, or nuclear energy, radiation, Same thing with chemical weapons, that seems different intuitively than just being shot, or stabbed, or blown up by a cannon, or whatever. It feels demonic, or you can't smell it, see it, taste it, it's just there and it kills people. It doesn't feel like old warfare, right? There's something creepy about it.

[00:37:43] Jon Else
Yeah, and that's, Yeah, I agree, there's something magic and darkly mystical about it. I think it's partly because, I mean, I'm a smart guy, I can't understand relativity. I have tried many, many times, E equals MC squared, What do you mean that those little atoms of plutonium turn into this massive blast of energy? There's something, you know, beyond our ken, beyond our understanding.

[00:38:11] Jon Else
But it's an interesting question. I mean, after the war... I mean, some of the most outspoken concern about the bombing came from clergy. And Oppenheimer famously, after the war in 1946, talked about how the physicists had known sin. I mean, we'll get back to that in a minute. And the question is, well, wait a minute, Was it a sin because they killed 70,000, 80,000 people in a minute instead of in five years, in five minutes, in five months?

[00:38:50] Jon Else
Was it a sin because it was carried out by people whom we would like to think are exactly like us, you know, smart, caring human beings, you know, who played with their kids and read the Iliad and the Bible? And, you know, the Old Testament, You know, was it a sin because it was not carried out by someone with a rifle who could see the person he was killing?

[00:39:15] Jon Else
It was carried out by an air crew 30,000 feet in the air. I mean, it's an interesting question. Oppenheimer, much later in his life, in 1965, When asked about his sin quote, which he delivered at MIT, by the way, the Mother Church of American Science, you know, the physicists have known sin, and that is a knowledge they cannot lose.

[00:39:44] Jon Else
In 1965, in an interview, he said, what I meant was the sin of pride. Interesting. What I meant was that we felt that we knew what was good for mankind. Now, whether he was backtracking after 20 years of pushback from the scientific community about the idea of knowing sin, I mean, Ernest Lawrence said, I have no knowledge of sin that I have to feel guilty about, or whether it was that that's actually what he meant at the time.

[00:40:18] Jon Else
I mean, it's an interesting two different kinds of sin. The first was simply the sin of killing, I believe.

[00:40:27] Michael Shermer
Yeah. OK, so let's pick up your story where your book really picks up. That is, by 49, the Russians have a bomb. So by the early 50s, our government is saying, all right, we need to do something here. We need to ramp up our defense, deterrence, all that stuff. But we don't know exactly what's going to happen. So we're going to go to Nevada where there's nothing and set up these fake towns and explosive tests.

[00:40:52] Michael Shermer
How many were there? When did they decide to build this town? How did they do that? Tell us a little bit about that.

[00:40:57] Jon Else
Well, they did it after the crossroads test in the Pacific. You know, they took 42,000 sailors out to the Pacific and they set off two bombs out there, you know, and the cost was probably a quarter of what the Manhattan Project cost. And so they had a problem was that it was this fantastic expense. I mean, the whole nuclear enterprise for the last 50, 60, you know, years has been just preposterously expensive.

[00:41:25] Jon Else
The other problem was that by setting the bombs off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you gave the impression to the world and to Americans that these things could only be safely tested in the middle of the ocean. And there was a need to make this normal. I mean, just as atomic testing, in fact, became normalized during our childhoods, you know, these things became sort of an everyday occurrence.

[00:41:53] Jon Else
In the late 40s, they had to somehow bring them stateside so that Americans felt comfortable with atomic bombs in the backyard, basically. They also, I mean, in 1949, 1950, Stalin was on a tear. Were we going to lose all of... Western Europe to communism. I mean, the Chinese had now been taken over by the communists.

[00:42:19] Jon Else
So President Truman, who was bombarded on all sides by opinions from different folks, decided two things. He decided that we would pursue the hydrogen bomb a thousand times more powerful than a plain old fission bomb. And we would open a continental test site in the middle of Nowhere. So the middle of nowhere at the time was south central Nevada, a bombing range.

[00:42:49] Jon Else
And I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to central Nevada, but it is the middle of nowhere. I mean, it appears.

[00:42:54] Michael Shermer
Oh, I've been there. Yeah, I know.

[00:42:55] Jon Else
Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, and at the time, I think Nye County, which was the second largest county in all of America, was as big as, I don't know, it was as big as Vermont, I believe. I think it had 3,000 residents and the population was falling. So they carved out about 1,000 acres. It's now expanded. It's 13,000 acres now.

[00:43:20] Jon Else
And they... They took, in January of 1951, without telling anyone, they didn't alert the governor of Nevada until the week before, behind closed doors. They said, governor, you know, we're going to set off an atomic bomb in your state, you know, whether you like it or not. So they went out there and they set off the first bomb in January of 51, which was a little tiny, it was a dumbed-down version of a Hiroshima bomb, a one kiloton little thing called the Ranger test.

[00:43:57] Jon Else
And then within the next week, they set off increasingly powerful bombs. And by the end of that first Ranger series, they set off a bomb that was the size of the Nagasaki bomb, was 21 kilotons. And by then you couldn't hide this. You know, people were now lining the rooftops of casinos in Las Vegas to see the glow.

[00:44:21] Jon Else
You couldn't actually see... The ground zero detonation. But you could see the mushroom clouds. I mean, Las Vegas is 60 miles south of the test site, 65 miles. And in those days, you could see the mushroom clouds from the big bombs rise up. You could certainly see the sky glow. This, you know, this powerful, powerful flash of light. It became a tourist attraction.

[00:44:47] Jon Else
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce actually advertised it at one point. So they set off a hundred atmospheric explosions out there. The largest was, I think, 70 kilotons. Think about that for a minute. Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.

[00:45:12] Jon Else
And they built, I mean, the civil defense, part of deterrence is civil defense. It's letting your enemy know, bring it on. We've got enough shelters. To protect our population, you know, bring it on and then we will rain more destruction on you. But to do that, you need civil defense. I remember, and you probably remember, President Kennedy in 1960 decreed that there should be civil defense shelters all over America, and America went on a civil defense binge.

[00:45:45] Jon Else
We built just astonishing shelters. All in my hometown, Sacramento, there were the classic, iconic fallout shelter signs that went up on all of the office buildings down along K Street. And those were basements of office buildings, and they were stocked with, you know, water and drink and Geiger counters. So the civil defense people had a legitimate need to know what exactly would happen.

[00:46:11] Jon Else
To an American city. We had a lot of evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We knew that the flash would burn the shadows of humans into concrete. We knew that it would melt tiles on ceramic tiles, on roofs. It would blow away the whole center of the city. But those were uncontrolled tests. We knew that there would be radiation sickness ramping up.

[00:46:37] Jon Else
So they built You know, they went out to Nevada, and they basically built a little mid-century modern America out there. They built, you know, two-story houses, like the kind you'd find on a street in New England. And that's the famous house that you've seen a million times, a house being blown away. That's at Frenchman Flat.

[00:47:03] Jon Else
They built freeway overpasses. They built railroad overpasses. They built every manner of bunker. They built little houses, concrete houses, steel houses, wooden houses. They built a bank vault out at Frenchman Flat. This wreckage is all there still.

[00:47:29] Jon Else
The wreckage of all this stuff is still out there. It's like... You remember in Planet of the Apes, at the end of Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston comes around a corner and he sees the wreckage of the Statue of Liberty. And he's 2,000 years in the future looking back at what happened. And he says, you maniacs, you blew it up. God damn your souls. Well, you go out to Frenchman Flat. First time I ever went there, I thought, this is the planet of the apes.

[00:47:55] Jon Else
This is the wreckage of a future that has been held at bay. This is the flamboyant end of my civilization that never happened. So the centerpiece that's out there today, still there, is a bank vault. They built a bank vault for a test in 1957, the Priscilla test. And my military escort, the first time I went there, explained that they filled the vault with insurance policies, with cash, stocks and bonds, tax documents, facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence, mountains of cash, gold.

[00:48:38] Jon Else
And then they set off a bomb half a mile away, the Priscilla shot half a mile away. And the idea was that the United States, the American empire, a paper-based democratic capitalism could rise from the ashes afterward. As it turns out, what they did was they filled the vault with paper, which was a surrogate for all of the above, so that it could emerge.

[00:49:08] Jon Else
You know, there are underground shelters all around the bank vault, and you can imagine people after the nuclear endgame crawling out of the shelters trying to open the vault. As it turned out, when they did open the vault after the Priscilla shot, the lock hardware in the door had been blown away, but they got the door open, a seven-ton door, and inside was just peaceful and calm.

[00:49:38] Jon Else
Despite hundreds of thousands of degrees of heat outside, there were motion picture cameras inside the vault, and the film was entirely 100% fogged, which meant that no one, even if you had been a banker inside the vault protecting America's paper archive, you would have died.

[00:50:01] Michael Shermer
From the radiation.

[00:50:03] Jon Else
From the radiation, yeah. I'm sorry, yeah. It was neutrons and other kinds of radiation that just went right through the foot and a half thick concrete and steel of the vault.

[00:50:13] Michael Shermer
But Jon, one of my favorite stories from your book on this Frenchman flat explosive is that they took pigs out there to see what the effects would be on mammals, that were mammals, and then dressed them up in little outfits. This is crazy.

[00:50:25] Jon Else
Yeah, when I was doing, when I first got into this, I was doing the Day After Trinity back in 1980. There was this folklore, this folktale that kept popping up that they had taken a dozen pigs out to Nevada and they were young pigs. And they dressed them in military uniforms, sergeants and corporals, and they set them out.

[00:50:50] Jon Else
They were ready for a nuclear test, but the tests kept getting delayed. Tests were often delayed by weather, because if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, steadily and strongly they would postpone the test. We can come back to that. And so the test was postponed and postponed and the little pigs grew and they began to outgrow their uniforms. So the military sent out a call.

[00:51:15] Jon Else
To all its draftees, through its personnel departments, to find draftees who had been tailors in civilian life. And they got together, all these tailors, and they sent them to an undisclosed location in the desert. The tailors expected to be altering the general's pants for a big parade, and they get out there when they were altering the suits and uniforms on little piglets. So they redressed the piglets in the new altered...

[00:51:44] Jon Else
Uniforms and set off the bomb, and then the testing officials and the tailors had roast pork that night. Well, it turns out not to be true. The true story is just incredibly grisly. They got almost a thousand pigs, and pigs are very similar to young humans, actually, in their cross-section.

[00:52:11] Jon Else
And there, you know, there's been a lot of study done on pigs. They were going to use dogs first, but there was such public outcry against the use of dogs for the Crossroads test that they figured they would have a lot of public relations problems. So they got nearly a thousand pigs, I think 800 and something pigs, especially bred in Missouri, took them out to Nevada.

[00:52:36] Jon Else
They had a pretty good sized farm out there. And they set the pigs out for the Priscilla test in 1957. And they did, in fact, put protective clothing resembling what was called the Military Utility Summer Ensemble. You know, a t-shirt and, you know... Shirt and pants. They put some insignia on some of them.

[00:53:01] Jon Else
Most of them were just in their, you know, pig attire. And they put them behind machine gun emplacements. They put pigs in a tank. They put pigs in pens at stations out along lines leading out from ground zero. They set up a field hospital about 20 miles away, and the idea was to set off the bomb, see what sort of injuries the pigs would sustain.

[00:53:30] Jon Else
They set them in front of flying glass, plate glass windows from suburban mid-century homes. They set them in front of an array of all sorts of flying missiles that would get picked up, pieces of rock and bricks, croquet balls. And they set the bomb off. And then the veterinary corps went in immediately, removed the pigs from their restraints.

[00:54:01] Jon Else
Most of them had been disemboweled and killed. The few that had survived were taken to the field hospital. Which quickly became called the Autopsy Center. If you take the tour now, they call it the Autopsy Center. And those who would survive the blast really quickly succumbed to radiation sickness.

[00:54:26] Jon Else
So, yeah, it was... I mean, it was interesting that at the time they were studying how the American population could survive burns. And it was estimated that if there were a Soviet nuclear attack... On Detroit, there would be a million burn victims. And in the entire United States, there were only 1,200 burn beds at the time.

[00:54:53] Jon Else
So, I mean, it sounds to me like...

[00:54:56] Michael Shermer
Here's your description of this. Priscilla's flash was visible from Mexico to Idaho. Mm-hmm. Astonishing. A shrieking complex of shockwaves battled to overtake one another as they shot out through superheated air. Marine Lieutenant Thomas Saffer crouched in a trench two miles out when the bomb went off, wrote, Eyes tightly closed.

[00:55:21] Michael Shermer
I could see the bones in my forearm as though I were examining a red X-ray. The earth began to gyrate violently. I was thrown repeatedly from side to side and bounced helplessly off one trench wall and then off the other. Showered with dust, dirt, rocks, debris, the odor reminded me of that overheated electrical circuit. Air blasts stamped flat the aluminum shelters, twisted the freeway overpass beyond recognition, overturned railroad cars and tanks, swept away parked aircraft, blew helmets off troops eight miles away, and knocked a door off the control building 15 miles away.

[00:56:00] Michael Shermer
A vortex of incineration enveloped the desert, broiling the soil half a mile out as a wave of instant entropy thundered through the smartly crafted little civilization. In the two concrete shelters still standing, gamma rays and high-energy neutrons generated so much radioactivity in their stout internal webs of steel rebar that any human inside would have been killed.

[00:56:25] Michael Shermer
And then you have a parenthetical another. And Hiroshima gamma rays had exposed X-ray films stored in the basement of a concrete hospital nearly a mile from the blast. There's a picture of the Priscilla blast.

[00:56:39] Jon Else
Yeah, that's the Priscilla blast. And, you know, that was one of the blasts where they had lots of news photographers out there. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You know, today. Well, in our lifetimes, people making policy about nuclear weapons had actually experienced nuclear weapons. They had gone out to the South Pacific and they had seen the entire sky explode before them.

[00:57:09] Jon Else
They had been at Priscilla, and they had felt the shockwave. They had felt the heat on their face. Oh, yeah, here's Priscilla. Priscilla was that thing dangling from the bomb from the balloon is the Priscilla warhead. It was a warhead that was pulled out of the stockpile, suspended from a balloon 700 feet up to minimize fallout from...

[00:57:36] Jon Else
Dirt that would be sucked up. There's the Priscilla mushroom cloud. The ring of destruction around the bottom on the desert surface is several miles wide. Lieutenant Saffer, who's in the trench being thrown around, is out within the white circle. That's the observers.

[00:57:55] Michael Shermer
There are only people just standing up there looking. It's

[00:57:58] Jon Else
like a picnic. I'm sorry?

[00:58:02] Michael Shermer
It's looking like they're out there for a

[00:58:04] Jon Else
picnic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the dust blown up from the cloud. There's a guy sort of crouching behind the radar. These people are, this is part of the photographer corps. There's a live TV camera. And there's the mushroom cloud rising up. Now that thing is sucking millions of tons of gravel and dirt and the remains of...

[00:58:30] Jon Else
The balloon, and all the junk on the ground up into the air. And you can see here that the cloud is beginning to drift. It's beginning to drift toward the east. When they fired the shots, they never fired them when there was a whiff of wind toward Las Vegas or Los Alamos. We tend to think of nuclear testing as happening in Nevada and in the South Pacific, you know, because we've seen, you know, all these newsreels are a dime a dozen on YouTube now.

[00:58:59] Jon Else
Yeah. But that happened all over the world. I mean, the French shot tests in Algeria, the English shot tests in Australia.

[00:59:11] Michael Shermer
Here I'm just running it. There was Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. And now you'll just see them just starting to go off.

[00:59:18] Jon Else
And it really ramps up starting around 1950, yeah. And if you'll notice, the most prolific year for nuclear testing will be 1962 because we had signed the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, which was going to ban atmosphere. Tests in 1963. So there was an orgy in 1962.

[00:59:43] Jon Else
I mean, I've just been nuts all over the world setting off these things.

[00:59:48] Michael Shermer
Oh, there it is. Oh, my God. Look at that.

[00:59:50] Jon Else
It's the highest number of tests of any year. Now, all these things that are happening after 1963 are all underground tests.

[01:00:02] Michael Shermer
Oh, I see. Because of the test ban.

[01:00:04] Jon Else
Yeah, because of the test ban. He drove the tests underground.

[01:00:10] Michael Shermer
Wow, we're about to get to 1,000 bombs.

[01:00:14] Jon Else
Oh, yeah. No, it's going to keep climbing. I mean, we kept testing up until 1992.

[01:00:19] Michael Shermer
But all of them are in Nevada. Look at that.

[01:00:22] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. And Kazakhstan.

[01:00:25] Michael Shermer
Do we know the effects of downwind now from all

[01:00:28] Jon Else
those tests on people? I'm sorry?

[01:00:30] Michael Shermer
Do we know anything about the effects of downwinders?

[01:00:33] Jon Else
Oh, yeah. Let me finish up a point we started on a moment ago. Yeah. Yeah, we're up over, we're getting up to 1,000.

[01:00:43] Michael Shermer
Yeah, look at that.

[01:00:47] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, well, obviously, the total. Yeah, I mean, the total is going to be over 2,000. Let's see where this bottoms out, tops out, yeah.

[01:00:58] Michael Shermer
Well, I think this goes all the way up to present.

[01:01:03] Jon Else
Yeah, it probably is to the present, but the big cessation was in 92.

[01:01:09] Michael Shermer
Oh, yeah, Russia, China, 37. I mean, is Israel on here? Israel doesn't technically have...

[01:01:17] Jon Else
Well, they claim to have, yeah. I mean, there was an apparent Israeli test in the Indian Ocean some years ago. Yeah, okay, 2009. Yeah. Okay.

[01:01:36] Michael Shermer
Yeah, here we go.

[01:01:39] Jon Else
Yeah, go ahead. You know, well, back when, you know, when we were becoming, in our young adulthood, the people who were making nuclear policy had all experienced tests. They had been to Nevada. They had felt the heat of these things on their face. They had been to the South Pacific. They had seen the entire sky. Horizon to horizon light up, and they had in their gut a visceral feeling of what nuclear weapons do.

[01:02:07] Jon Else
I mean, there's a famous story of a general, a combat-hardened general wetting his pants at Eniwetok at the site of one of these things. And if you talk to anyone who's ever seen a nuclear explosion up close... They're all unanimous that this is insane, this is preposterous, this is something we must never do. Today, there's not a single person anywhere in the world making nuclear policy who has ever stood in the presence of a nuclear weapon.

[01:02:40] Jon Else
I mean, the leaders of NATO, most of the leaders of NATO were born after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I think, you know, that's the, that's the only argument in favor of nuclear testing. You know, the, the, um, Philip, Philip Agnew, one of the, uh, one of the directors of Los Alamos, um, said, you know, every 10 years we should take all the leaders who are dealing so cavalierly with this stuff.

[01:03:09] Jon Else
And we should take them out to the Pacific and, and, you know, set off one of these things and let them feel the heat, uh, And then let them go home and make the, the policy. Decision. In one version of the story, he said they should drop their pants, turn their backs to the bomb, Feel the heat on their ass, and then go home and make policy.

[01:03:34] Jon Else
Yeah. Okay. The, Yeah, you were going to, the downwinders?

[01:03:38] Michael Shermer
Oh, yeah. I was asking you about, what we know now about the effects of all those tests in Nevada on the downwinders.

[01:03:45] Jon Else
Yeah. Well. The current director of Los Alamos, a very sharp guy named Tom Mason, Thomas Mason, says that atmospheric testing was a mistake. And it is true that we gained enormous scientific, technical knowledge from the atmospheric testing, perhaps more than we ever needed, probably more than we ever needed.

[01:04:14] Jon Else
The unintended consequences were astonishing, and those have to do largely with the downwind fallout. They set the tests off never when the wind was blowing toward Las Vegas, toward Los Angeles, but always when the winds were either calm or blowing either predictably or unpredictably to the east, toward southern Utah.

[01:04:41] Jon Else
Where the civilians were heavily dusted with fallout. There were a number of service personnel, including Lieutenant Saffer, whom you quoted earlier, who actually had significant fallout on them at the test site. Saffer went on, by the way, to write a book and to become a leader of the atomic veterans movement that led to the Radiation Compensation Act in 1990.

[01:05:07] Jon Else
So, yeah, I mean, long story short, there was, you know, when they set off one of these bombs, it sucked up millions of tons of newly radioactive isotopes of contaminated garbage, dirt. Parts of the tower. And that stuff joined. There was an airborne pipeway, an aerial pipeline that went to the east, and it went almost directly over southern Utah, particularly over the town of St.

[01:05:39] Jon Else
George, Utah, and rural areas around Cedar City, around that area. And in the 1950s, several things happened. Monitors began realizing that there was a lot of radioactive fission products that were falling here. The science of radiation damage was maturing.

[01:06:06] Jon Else
The science of the pathways of fallout into... You know, the fallout falls on the grass, the cows eat the grass, the cows give milk, young children drink the milk. The incidence of childhood leukemia began to rise. This wasn't just fallout from Nevada. I mean, there's fallout from Trinity.

[01:06:30] Jon Else
I mean, you and I and everyone watching today, we have atoms from the Trinity shot in our bodies. Think about that, that this stuff. Now, they're harmless now, But it's the old Mozart's last breath paradigm where, minute amounts of these long-living atoms find their way into our bodies, particularly with Trinity it's strontium-90.

[01:06:59] Jon Else
So the downwinders... Began to become very concerned. They began to organize. In the late 50s. Unsuccessfully, they brought a number of lawsuits against the Atomic Energy Commission. And eventually, well, you know, over the years, they were dismissed. I mean, you know, they were dismissed as cranky farmers.

[01:07:25] Jon Else
I mean, it's ironic that the fall of the major... Domestic victims of fallout are really the descendants of Mormon settlers in southern Utah. You know, traditionally enormously patriotic, just want to be left alone, served in the armed forces. But they began circulating petitions. They began bringing lawsuits against the Atomic Energy Commission.

[01:07:54] Jon Else
It's a long, painful story. And eventually, in the late 1980s, the government began to actually look carefully into this. And there was a big retroactive study conducted of everyone at the test site who had been exposed to radiation, including Lieutenant Saffer, and thousands and thousands of other GIs, and then residents in southern Utah.

[01:08:18] Jon Else
And it led to the passage in 1990. Of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which awarded significant money, reparation really, to folks who could show that they had suffered from a specified list of cancers in a specified number of counties, first in southern Utah and then further afield, up into Idaho at least.

[01:08:46] Jon Else
In the initial legislation, downwinders from the Trinity site were excluded. They were just recently brought under the umbrella of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The Atomic Energy Commission by then had been roundly discredited for being disingenuous and at times just outright deceitful with American citizens about the danger of radiation, dangers of fallout, which they understood perfectly well, but which they downplayed.

[01:09:24] Jon Else
They went through a lot of effort, particularly with the press, to get the press to back off on stories about fallout. Back off. They repeatedly asked reporters and journalists not to compare shots in Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they would send AEC representatives to newspapers far afield.

[01:09:50] Jon Else
They sent representatives up to Quincy, California to talk to the little local paper. They would run articles about fallout. They were particularly rankled by the paper in the little Nevada town of Tonopah, Nevada, that had a crusading editor. And they hauled him on the carpet and said, you've got to knock this off, you can't be talking about fallout this way. When they knew perfectly well that fallout was directly related to the rise in childhood leukemia downwind.

[01:10:21] Michael Shermer
Amazing. The men in black showed up.

[01:10:25] Jon Else
Well, yeah. I mean, the men in black were... In the end, they wanted the same thing for their grandchildren as you and I. They wanted a world safe from aggression, safe from nuclear war. They felt the way to do it was by perfecting deterrence, by rehearsing all the ways to blow ourselves to bits.

[01:10:50] Jon Else
The wreckage of which is out at Frenchman Flat. On the other hand, during this time, there was an extraordinary cadre of arms control diplomats who were boiling up in Washington. I mean, these were folks who said, okay, if you're going to have deterrence, let's figure out a way to... While you deter the threat, the rest of us figure out a way to reduce the number of weapons, to limit the size of the weapons, to limit the size of the delivery vehicles.

[01:11:22] Jon Else
I mean, the arms race, the nuclear arms race, went hand in hand with the rocket race. You know, I grew up in Sacramento, and we had an aerojet general, which made Titan missiles, was just up the highway. And, you know, you could stand in our backyard and listen to the thunder of... Testing these Titan missile rocket engines on test stands up there.

[01:11:46] Jon Else
So the arms control folks understood that it was partly a matter of the weapons, of reducing the number of weapons, and hence reducing the risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war, but also to reduce the delivery vehicles, the B-52s, the rockets. And they succeeded. You know, the fact that you can stand at Frenchman Flat and, you know, see the birds flying overhead, or you can look around you today and see a lovely afternoon, that's due in large measure to incredible work by arms control diplomats who refuse to say, well, you know, we're stuck with these weapons, there's nothing we can do about it, let's make them bigger.

[01:12:32] Jon Else
And they said, no, you can still... You can improve your national security by reducing the size and number of weapons. It took one bomb to destroy the city of Hiroshima. That's about enough to destroy all of San Francisco, including the firestorm. In 1957, General James Gavin, who went on to be the commander of NATO, was testifying before Congress in a budget hearing.

[01:13:00] Jon Else
And the different services were proposing what kinds of nuclear weapons and how many they would need for the coming year. General Gavin said that the army, of which he at the time was the head of weapons research, the army, and remember the army is infantry and cannons and tanks, the army would need 152,000 nuclear weapons for its mission.

[01:13:25] Jon Else
152,000 nuclear weapons. The head of the Navy had just testified shortly before that the Navy needed, I think, 2,000. So that was the extreme to which this was taken.

[01:13:39] Michael Shermer
Does that include these smaller battlefield-sized bombs?

[01:13:43] Jon Else
Well, the Army, you know, it's interesting. There was an arms race not only between the United States and the Soviet Union, but within the services. I mean, very clearly, they were all vying for a chunk of the defense budget. They were all vying for a chunk of the usually shrouded nuclear budget. The only service that had no use for nuclear weapons was the Marine Corps, interestingly.

[01:14:13] Jon Else
The Marine Corps felt it was important to have your enemy come out and fight. The Army had a cannon, a nuclear cannon, that fired a shell which armed itself on the way out the muzzle at 13,000 miles an hour, 1,300 miles an hour, and it fired an explosive that was Hiroshima-sized.

[01:14:38] Jon Else
The Army also developed a little thing called the Davy Crockett, which looked like a little watermelon with fins. And it could be fired by a bazooka by a three-man crew on foot. And it had a little tiny levitated core designed by Ted Taylor. And it was wildly inaccurate.

[01:15:04] Jon Else
It had a range of about three miles. And they were deployed. There were several thousand of them deployed along the East German border during the Cold War along the front in Korea. And the problem with them was that with that inaccuracy, they had to be very near the front lines. So they were subject to capture in the chaos of war.

[01:15:33] Jon Else
You know, cooler heads prevail, and eventually the Pentagon withdrew them. Congress passed legislation saying you can't manufacture a nuclear weapon smaller than five kilotons, which is the lower threshold now. I don't think we have an upper threshold right now, although I believe our largest deployed weapon, thermonuclear weapon, is something like half a megaton now, 500 kilotons.

[01:15:59] Jon Else
I mean, it's plenty big.

[01:16:02] Michael Shermer
Yeah, I'll say. Well, the tactical nuclear weapons on a battlefield have the same problem as chemical weapons. What if the wind changes? And you become a downwinder.

[01:16:13] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. And that, you know, out at the test site, I mean, they were very diligent about weather. You know, test directors would sometimes delay tests, you know, a day and then two days and sometimes up to a couple of weeks because of the wind. But, you know, weather prediction, you know, was then at best an inexact science. And there were a number of shots where the wind just did not cooperate.

[01:16:39] Jon Else
The wind did not do what it was supposed to do. There was a shot called Harry, now known as Dirty Harry, that dumped an enormous load of fallout on St. George, Utah. The Atomic Energy Commission scrambled to get people to shelter in place. This was in 1953. They had to... Decontaminate buses that were traveling on highways at the time.

[01:17:05] Jon Else
The worst nuclear fallout disaster was in the equatorial Pacific with the Castle Bravo test. You know, when we made the ramp up, the jump up from fission weapons, atomic weapons, to fusion weapons, hydrogen bombs, that's an increase in yield of a thousand.

[01:17:36] Jon Else
And we've got to be careful because the damage doesn't ramp up by a thousand times. It ramps up by the cube root scaling. So it's, you know, it's about a hundred, a couple hundred times as much. But those bombs were way too large to test in Nevada. So they went back to Bikini and Eniwetok in the equatorial Pacific, and that's where they set off these monstrous bombs. I mean, they were, you know, I think our largest one was 15 megatons, which was, you know, a good fraction of the size of the Tsar Bomba one that you saw.

[01:18:11] Jon Else
And those, they just blasted their way through archipelagos out there. They just eliminated one island after another. And in 54, I believe, there was the Castle Bravo. It was the Bravo series of tests. And Castle Bravo was a 15 megaton shot. The wind blew unexpectedly.

[01:18:36] Jon Else
I think to the southeast when it was expected to go to the northeast. And it caught a Japanese trawler, the Lucky Dragon, the fortunate dragon, in the cloud of fallout. It also dusted a number of American ships, sailors on American ships. The Lucky Dragon limped into port. And the minute it arrived in Tokyo Harbor, this was a national news story.

[01:19:03] Jon Else
One of the crewmen died. All 23 of the crewmen became sick. And it was the biggest fallout disaster, both in terms of casualties and public relations for the United States.

[01:19:20] Michael Shermer
Jon, let me read your description from that in your book because it's so good. This was March 1st, 1954, Bravo's Million Degree Fireball. Snapped out to four miles across in the first half second. Scientists immediately saw that something had gone terribly wrong. Looking at the approaching monster from a ship 35 miles away, Colgate's first thought was, oh, those assholes.

[01:19:46] Michael Shermer
He wondered if the fire racing to fill the sky would ever stop. Surpassing Ivy Mike, Bravo was the largest man-made explosion in history so far. Then you continue down another paragraph. Bravo blasted 10 million tons of pulverized coral debris upward, with no precedent since the 1883 explosion of the 200 megaton Krakatoa volcano.

[01:20:11] Michael Shermer
Even higher than Mike's cloud, this one punched up out of the troposphere with incandescent rage, unexpectedly discharging huge quantities of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. Bravo's 25-mile-high mushroom ballooned out 66 miles wide. It turned an ugly brown and headed east to spread fallout far beyond the restricted zone, instantly laying to rest any notion that airborne debris would stay local.

[01:20:41] Michael Shermer
The irradiated coral fell like pinhead-sized white gritty snow on hundreds of sailors on the U.S. Navy Armada and civilian ships retreating to the south. Even a Navy fuel tanker, 580 miles downwind, was hit. Wow. I mean, that's just angry.

[01:21:01] Jon Else
Well, we have to also, you know, say that there was the population of the atolls was heavily...

[01:21:08] Michael Shermer
Because people lived there.

[01:21:09] Jon Else
Because people lived there, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, as Colgate points out, they miscalculated the yield. It was expected to be a 5 megaton shot, and it ended up being 15 megatons. You know, I mean, think about that in a combat use. It's now felt that even if it had been its expected yield, five megatons, there still would have been this problem because of the shift in the winds, the unpredicted shift in the winds.

[01:21:38] Jon Else
Yeah. Those islands are still on the

[01:21:40] Michael Shermer
map. They kind of dramatize some of that in that Nolan's film, Oppenheimer, whether the atmosphere would catch on fire and they placed a little bit on that.

[01:21:48] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, that, you know, I mean, it makes a great story. Hans Bethe and Emil Konopinski did the calculations over and over and over. Einstein had nothing to do with those calculations and there was not a shadow of a chance. What they were worried about was... The nitrogen in the atmosphere, and it turned out the neutron cross-section of nitrogen was not nearly enough.

[01:22:17] Jon Else
Yeah, you don't have to worry about that. I mean, there's plenty of other things to worry about, but don't worry about the atmosphere igniting the way it does in the last few seconds.

[01:22:25] Michael Shermer
But in general, how did you like the Oppenheimer film?

[01:22:28] Jon Else
Well, I mean, God bless Christopher Nolan for getting this back into the national and international conversation. I mean, nobody had particularly thought about nuclear weapons for the last 15 or 20 years because they kind of figure, well, we've got the arms control. The arms controllers have got it under control. We've got rational people in Washington and Moscow.

[01:22:53] Jon Else
They've got it covered. Let's worry about other stuff. Well, he may not have it covered. So, for Nolan to have taken his own risk to make this sort of popcorn gravitas movie, I mean, it's seen by millions and millions of people about this story. I say, great. That's the good news, the bad news. You know, there are things about it that I found, and there's a lot of historical inaccuracy.

[01:23:23] Jon Else
Okay, so, you know, it's a Hollywood movie. The big problem... For me, is that we never see what the bomb does. And it, you know, knowingly or unknowingly, I think Nolan has played into this erasure of pictures of what the bomb actually does to people. I mean, these weapons are meant to take out bunkers and they're meant to burn people to death.

[01:23:49] Jon Else
I mean, who are we kidding? And in his film, the only image we see of what happened to victims on the ground in Hiroshima, civilian or military, is in Oppenheimer's imagination at the big celebration at Los Alamos. And Oppenheimer imagines white Americans in the audience with their faces melting.

[01:24:13] Jon Else
Shortly thereafter in the film, there's a scene with a slideshow which a scientist, I think it's Robert Serber, is showing Oppenheimer's slides. From Hiroshima of victims and damage. And we never see the victims. We never see the damage. We only see Oppenheimer's face. And Nolan has argued that the viewers will fill that in themselves, but I don't think so.

[01:24:40] Jon Else
I mean, you know, most of the history of visualization of Hiroshima has been visualization of the effect on objects. It's shots of... You know, football fields of rubble stretching to the horizon with some pedestrians. It's shots of gnarled, charred trees. It's shots maybe of a bandaged child, but that's it. So, you know, I was not too crazy about that.

[01:25:09] Jon Else
You know, I'm a little troubled that every single woman in the film is dysfunctional. Now, there are plenty of dysfunctional women in that story. But I didn't quite know what to make of it.

[01:25:23] Michael Shermer
Well, and dysfunctional men, too.

[01:25:26] Jon Else
Well, dysfunctional men. The story is all of that. Yeah, but I think in the dysfunctionality race, the women win in that movie. I see. There's also a composite character. I mean, Nolan says there are no composite characters. But at Los Alamos, there was a fascinating guy named Robert Wilson, who was the head of, I think, head of experimental physics. And he's the guy who convened a seminar.

[01:25:51] Jon Else
To get his colleagues to talk about the future of the gadget and civilization. You know, which is a question we're still, I mean, we're discussing it today. It was very forward thinking. And in the movie, it's actually a woman physicist who convenes that seminar. To discuss among the scientists, what does this mean? Should we keep going? There were no women physicists in any kind of senior role at Los Alamos.

[01:26:21] Jon Else
I mean, part of what I write about is that the nuclear enterprise is a resolutely male undertaking. I mean, Los Alamos and the Trinity shot were virtually 100% men. So I was perplexed at the need to have it be a woman who raises the ethical considerations, who raises the questions about should we go on working on this thing or should we walk away?

[01:26:53] Jon Else
Yeah, exactly.

[01:26:55] Michael Shermer
All right, Jon, let me show you one last clip here, and then we'll kind of wrap up with a bigger picture. This is from the Planet of the Apes. No, this is from the Planet of the Apes here. I'll play this clip. So just to set it up for the audience, the few people that haven't seen this movie, does the original Planet of the Apes still better than all the other ones, I think, that have been produced? So at the end, he's let go by the apes under force.

[01:27:21] Michael Shermer
He's got a rifle. And he takes Nova, the... The female left human on this planet. And they're going to go start a new civilization, right? So he's going down the coast at the end of the movie. And here, I'll just play it for you.

[01:27:57] Michael Shermer
Of course, he thinks he's on a foreign planet. 2,000 years in the future. And this is all in the so-called forbidden zone, where the apes don't let anybody go out there.

[01:28:37] Michael Shermer
[Unclear commentary over film excerpt.]

[01:28:53] Film excerpt
[Dialogue not reliably resolved.]

[01:29:36] Michael Shermer
By the way, I should point out, Jon, that in the movie, this is the end of the day. So the sun is setting on the right. And so this was actually filmed in Malibu. Right. There's no Statue of Liberty in Malibu.

[01:29:51] Jon Else
No, no, no, no. Well, I'll see your planet of the apes and I'll raise you because Godzilla. Do you know when Godzilla's birthday is?

[01:30:00] Michael Shermer
Oh, right. There's a link to all this, right? I forget.

[01:30:04] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. Godzilla was born in November of 1952. November 2nd, to be exact. Which is exactly the day after the first hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific. Because it was that hydrogen bomb test that rumbled down through the earth and woke up the slumbering sea creature who then, like the hydrogen bomb, can go wreak havoc on humankind.

[01:30:31] Jon Else
Yeah, that's Godzilla's birthday. That's crazy. The director of the original Godzilla was actually marched through Hiroshima with his Japanese army unit a few days after the bombing of Hiroshima. And in the original Japanese Godzilla, they find strontium-90 in the footprints, but that was taken out for the American version.

[01:30:56] Michael Shermer
Oh, of course. Oh, my God, that's crazy. Yeah, okay, let's talk about how to get to nuclear zero. How do we prevent ourselves from blowing it all to hell? You know, that we can't seem to get there. We've reduced a lot, which is good. It'd be nice if it was under 1,000 rather than under 10,000 because by the Sagan's calculations for nuclear winter, you know, anything over 1,000 detonations could probably trigger a nuclear winter.

[01:31:23] Michael Shermer
So if we can get it below that. But, you know, there's there's something going on here. Like even Obama's Mr. Transparency wins the Nobel Prize, Peace Prize for his work on nuclear. You know, he says we're going to eliminate no first use and and, you know, no launch on warning. And none of that happens. OK, so why is that? Is that, you know, here's my I'll show you my one conspiracy theory. I think it's true. You're elected president.

[01:31:47] Michael Shermer
They take you in a back room and they tell you, all right, here's what's actually going on in the world. This is why you can't do all these things. Oh, no. You know, we got to have our bombs. We got to keep Gitmo open. We got to do this. We got to do that. And I'm like, oh, but I told everybody I was going to. I know. Don't worry about it.

[01:32:02] Jon Else
I know. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Well, apropos that, you know, when Trump was first elected, he, in that briefing, he asked why he couldn't have more bombs than other presidents. Right. Any other president. Right. I mean, George Bush, you know, Jr., when he had that briefing. He turned to Cheney, he said, just tell me how many more million people I'm going to have to kill.

[01:32:28] Jon Else
Obama, in that briefing, said, let's stipulate this is all absurd. So I don't know why we haven't been able to do it. I mean, there may be something, you know, just like the laws of physics, we can't erase neutron multiplication that allows for nuclear fission, which allows for explosions. Maybe somewhere... You know, in our tribal DNA, we can't erase that alpha male thing.

[01:32:56] Jon Else
But in practical terms, I just think we desperately need to reinvigorate the arms control regimes. I mean, we need to restart the arms control and disarmament agency administration. We need to depend on diplomacy. I mean, don't get me started on the Iran deal, which was working.

[01:33:21] Jon Else
And, you know, I have faith that the, you know, the folks who actually make these weapons and the military who actually control them, we don't have a whole lot of guardrails left. But I think that these folks can function as guardrails in the short run. It's interesting when Nixon was kind of sloshing around in the White House, half drunk, and his Russian counterpart was addled on tranquilizers, the senior military leaders...

[01:33:57] Jon Else
They basically got on the phone and said, look, you know, if the boss tries something crazy, we're going to stop him. And it's, you know, it's now a fellow fairly well-known that General Milley, at the end of the first Trump administration, he and some of his colleagues in the House of Representatives contacted their Chinese and Soviet counterparts and said, you know, if you think something's...

[01:34:23] Jon Else
Cookin, don't launch on warning. We'll make sure it doesn't happen. So I think diplomacy is the key. Humans are really good at devising weapons, and we're really good when the need comes at not using them.

[01:34:40] Michael Shermer
All right, let me give you a little discussion here. This is a... A course I took at Claremont Graduate University from the political scientist Jacek Kugler. I was writing The Moral Arc, my book.

[01:34:52] Jon Else
Okay, yeah, The Moral Arc.

[01:34:53] Michael Shermer
His course was Perspectives on War and Peace. So I asked him, why can't we get to nuclear zero? Here's his answer. One, deterrence among nations that trust each other is stable and predictable. Two, unstable or unpredictable states such as North Korea, which periodically rattle their nuclear swords inside their siloed sheath, require a threat of retaliation. Three, there still exist rogue states such as Iran that need the threat of retaliation because they threaten to join the nuclear club but are not so keen on joining the club of nations.

[01:35:24] Michael Shermer
Four, States waging conventional wars that might escalate to using weapons of mass destruction required the threat of retaliation to keep them in check. Five, non-state entities such as terrorist groups that we either do not trust or do not know enough about also require the threat of

[01:35:42] Jon Else
retaliation.

[01:35:43] Michael Shermer
Six, there may be a taboo against using that nuclear weapon, but there is as yet no taboo against owning them. And finally, seven, the nuclear genie of how to make an atomic bomb is out of the bottle. So there's always the chance that other nations or terrorists will attain nuclear weapons and thereby destabilize deterrence, as well as increase the probability of an accidental detonation. In short, it's the other guy problem.

[01:36:08] Michael Shermer
Like, I would give mine up, but the other guy might not, so I better not give up mine if he thinks the same thing.

[01:36:13] Jon Else
No, you know, I would agree with all of the above with a couple of exceptions. You know, sooner or later there may emerge on the world stage. A nuclear power that doesn't care about retaliation or a rogue actor. We don't care if you blow us off. What really matters is that a higher power has told us to eliminate your nation.

[01:36:37] Michael Shermer
They get to go to the afterlife.

[01:36:39] Jon Else
As for possession, if you drive out to Los Alamos now... Which I do. It's a fascinating trip. You still drive up this incredible Red Rock Mesa to like the throne room of the nuclear gods. You will pass at one of the reservations on the way, the San Ildefonso Reservation, there's a giant billboard which says, possession of nuclear weapons is a sin.

[01:37:05] Jon Else
And it's a quote from Pope Francis. Oh, wow. The current Pope, Leo, has echoed similar sentiments. The Archbishop of New Mexico, John Wester, is an interesting character who I think would question whether possession is a sin. He has a very interesting moral versus ethical set of arguments about this.

[01:37:33] Jon Else
Deterrence works until it doesn't. And then we're back. You know, you go out to Frenchman flat and there's the planet of the apes. I think the answer is to have every world leader stand at the very least at Frenchman flat and look what this does. This is what your country is going to look like.

[01:37:52] Michael Shermer
And we'll set off a 10 megaton bomb and they can turn their back to it. Then go back and make policy. That's great. All right, Jon Else, there it is. Frenchman Flat, The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs. It's thick. It's beautiful. For me, it takes its place right up there with Richard Rhodes' Nuclear Trilogy, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, and Arsenals of Folly, Eric Schlosser's Command and Control, Fred Kaplan's The Bomb, Martin Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon, Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, and Carl Sagan's A Path Where No Man Thought.

[01:38:24] Michael Shermer
And others. I've read all this stuff. It's great. Your book is right up there. It's just as good as important. By the way, it's Harvard University Press. So it's chock-a-block full of references and bibliography is nice and thick. So it's all detailed. It's professional. And it's well-written because you're a journalist and a professional writer, not just an academic. So well done, sir. Nicely done.

[01:38:47] Jon Else
Thank you. That's pretty heady company.

[01:38:49] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I also recommend, by the way, Annie Jacobson's book. Yeah. I mean, it's scary stuff. What can actually happen when you really look at it? You're right. When you really experience like, wow, OK, we should not do this.

[01:39:04] Jon Else
Well, you know, it is in the end of success story. You know, we rehearsed every conceivable way to blow ourselves to bits and to inflict just impossible pain on ourselves and others, and we haven't done it. We've done a lower level in a lot of tragic ways, but we have not unleashed nuclear war, which seemed an inevitability to a lot of people in the 1950s.

[01:39:33] Jon Else
So I think we should congratulate humans.

[01:39:36] Michael Shermer
Remember the Lehrer song about all the nations that were going to get the atomic bomb? Yep. And who's next?

[01:39:43] Jon Else
Who's next? Yeah, yeah. Great song about proliferation. By the way, Tom Lehrer songs, which I recommend to everyone, they're still popular up at Los Alamos.

[01:39:52] Michael Shermer
They are?

[01:39:53] Jon Else
People out at the test site listen to them. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's really funny. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, it's a scenario you don't even want to consider.

[01:40:05] Michael Shermer
All right, Jon, well, thanks for considering it. I mean, this subject, I just can't get enough of it. It's like watching a bad accident.

[01:40:12] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, you know, you obviously know this stuff well. And, you know, I should have called you when I was writing the book. I could have stolen some of your ideas.

[01:40:20] Michael Shermer
I don't know. These other guys that rattle off, they know a lot more. I mean, Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine. I mean, he's got conversations in there at the Rand Corporation, and they're like, let's see how many people we think will die. It's like tens of millions or only 100 million. And Dr. Strangelove or the George C. Scott character, you know, Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but, you know, just maybe 100 million or more. That's it.

[01:40:45] Michael Shermer
It's like, what? And that was real.

[01:40:48] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's, you know, before we sign off, let's talk for a minute about the RAND Corporation, the Herman Kahn, Strangelove. The last time I saw Dr. Strangelove, it was playing in the gift shop at the Nuclear Testing Museum in Las Vegas. Every American should see it. Every citizen of the world should see Dr. Strangelove. It's on YouTube. You can watch it for free. Yeah, it's on YouTube, yeah. And it's based on the premise that the United States is keeping fully armed...

[01:41:17] Jon Else
Bombers around the borders of the Soviet Union 24-7, just sort of feinting at the Ruskies. And there's a rogue commander who sends his bombers in to bomb the Soviet Union. Well, as it turns out, the United States actually was maintaining 24-7 fully loaded, fully armed nuclear bombers around the entire periphery of the Soviet Union 24-7 in the early 1960s.

[01:41:48] Jon Else
And it might have been possible for a rogue commander to send his guys on in. It was called Operation Chrome Dome. And it was finally, and that's the centerpiece of Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove is basically a story. It takes place all in two hours as one bomber crew heads for Moscow and the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States try to call him back.

[01:42:14] Jon Else
It's a, you know, wacko comedy. Chrome Dome was finally terminated after they had... 11 accidents that we know of in which live hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped from aircraft or the aircraft crashed. The final crash was up in Greenland at an air base.

[01:42:41] Jon Else
The aircraft, a seat cushion caught fire. The crew had to bail out, and the aircraft crashed into the Baffin Sea, and all four hydrogen bombs went to the bottom of the ocean where they are still sitting there. Next day, the Secretary of the Air Force said enough of this and canceled the program. But a lot of what's in Dr. Strangelove is based on the work of Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and philosopher at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica.

[01:43:09] Jon Else
Where the staff and faculty there actually occasionally took LSD, which was legal at the time. And Kahn is known for his book On Thermonuclear War, which draws in the classic text about war, just simply called On War. And what's interesting about it is it's completely divorced from visceral...

[01:43:33] Jon Else
It entirely quantifies everything having to do with nuclear war. Exactly how many citizens of Ohio would we trade for citizens of Ukraine? Exactly how many tons of radioactive food should we reserve for elderly people to eat because they're going to die anyway before they get radiation sickness?

[01:44:00] Jon Else
And it's this strangely game theory world of planning. Nuclear wars. Kahn assumed we were going to have a nuclear war. Kahn argued that we would, in fact, be able to survive a nuclear war. I mean, that whole business about the mineshaft gap is partly from Kahn.

[01:44:26] Jon Else
And the United States and the Soviet Union, in fact, did survey mineshafts, abandoned mineshafts as potential shelters. There's a lot of stuff in, there are a lot of documents on the table in the war room in Dr. Strangelove that are actually drawn directly from Kahn, the megadeath potential. You know, and I mean, what makes us fascinating is our contradictions.

[01:44:51] Jon Else
And Kahn was this jovial guy, you know, who loved playing with his kids, his grandkids on the rug. And then he would go into the office and he would calculate mega deaths you know are we willing to trade Chicago for Leningrad what are the what are the statistical odds of that

[01:45:09] Michael Shermer
yeah yeah oh yeah it's completely crazy I mean so many scenes in that movie were were good about that mineshaft gap but uh you know all the other stuff about you know a doomsday machine only works if yet if you make it public if everybody knows you have a doomsday machine It doesn't work if we keep it a secret.

[01:45:31] Jon Else
Well, in fact, I mean, do you know about the dead hand systems? You know, the Soviets.

[01:45:36] Michael Shermer
No, I forget. What is it?

[01:45:37] Jon Else
Well, the Soviets put in place.

[01:45:39] Michael Shermer
Oh, yeah. Yeah. They all died. It goes up anyway.

[01:45:42] Jon Else
The Soviets put in place a system which would, if it sensed five. Large nuclear explosions on Soviet territory, it would automatically launch a strike against the United States, even if all the Soviet leadership had been obliterated. It had recorded orders that would go to the missile sites. And it was called a dead hand system, so that if the hand of the person controlling it is dead, the system fires the rockets.

[01:46:13] Jon Else
The United States... Worked on a similar system. As far as we know, both systems are now deactivated. And that's the kind of thing that diplomats can do.

[01:46:25] Michael Shermer
That's a little bit like the terrorist that has his thumb on the explosive device trigger, and if you shoot him, then he releases it and it goes off. Crazy.

[01:46:34] Jon Else
If you care about life, the doomsday machine makes perfect sense that if you launch a nuclear war, the entire planet is going to be Incinerated. That's sort of the ultimate point.

[01:46:49] Michael Shermer
Let's see, a couple more points. I had Fred Kaplan on the show with his book, The Bomb.

[01:46:54] Jon Else
Yeah, he's great.

[01:46:54] Michael Shermer
He made some interesting points, like you made about the kind of arms race between our own military, and that they were competing for those dollars. Okay, but then he also made another point about, like, we've got to keep increasing our budget every year, so we have to find more and more targets in the Soviet Union. You do all the cities, and then you do, like, the military sites and so on. Finally, you end up with some site in Siberia that's closed nine months out of the year because it's cold, but it's a military base, so we got 27 bombs targeted just for that place.

[01:47:27] Michael Shermer
Why? You only need one, but because everybody needs to keep making more bombs. It's crazy.

[01:47:33] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, Kaplan wrote eloquently about that. It's because the target lists have been declassified. I think he also notes that... Not only did we, and all those bombs that were targeted in the Soviet Union were enormous. You know, they were megaton bombs, many, many, many times the size of Hiroshima. I think he also notes that, what does he say, you know, we would bomb the factory that makes the tanks, we would bomb the foundry that makes the iron, we would bomb the rail line that brings the iron to the factory, we would bomb the mine that makes...

[01:48:08] Jon Else
That extracts the iron. I think you said in one case we had plans to bomb vacant fields that might be used as alternative landing strips for bombers. I mean, yeah, I mean, go figure. We had... You know, we had an alternative landing strip for us. Well, it is rumored that we had an alternative landing strip for our Strategic Air Command bombers at Yucca Flat in Nevada in case they, you know, they got what they call the worst day ever, a tap on the shoulder, the pilots call.

[01:48:43] Jon Else
And when they finished their mission, there was no home to come home to. So with poetic justice—

[01:48:50] Michael Shermer
Well, what's that place near Washington, D.C., where everybody will go, all the leaders of our country will go?

[01:48:55] Jon Else
Well, Raven Rock. Raven Rock, that's right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a good book called Raven Rock about all the bunkers. Yeah, there's a place they built in—you know, the year of 1957, which is the year of Priscilla that I concentrate on in the book, is interesting for a number of reasons. I mean, there was no arms control. There were no discussions. That was the year that they began work at the Greenbrier Resort just outside of Washington, I think in the hills of Virginia.

[01:49:26] Jon Else
Which was a very, very fancy resort. It was the place you would go for your, you know, 20th anniversary. But they built a huge bunker complex underneath, which was to house the United States government in case of they had to evacuate Washington. It could hold 1,200 people. It could hold the president and all the cabinet and all the Supreme Court, all the Congress, all the staff, the Senate, all their staff.

[01:49:51] Jon Else
And it was like the vault at the Frenchman flat, except it was for people. Mosler Safe built the vault in Nevada and Mosler Safe built the extreme vault bunkers in the basement of the Greenbrier bunker. It's since been decommissioned and it's used for data storage by Fortune 500 companies now.

[01:50:16] Jon Else
So I guess the paradigm of the bank vault lives on.

[01:50:22] Michael Shermer
Another darkly humorous story I'd had. Marty Sherwin on for his book, Gambling with Armageddon.

[01:50:28] Jon Else
I watched that podcast. It was great.

[01:50:30] Michael Shermer
Oh, you watched it? Okay, yeah. He tells this crazy story. JFK now famously had his trysts. With multiple women fairly regularly, apparently, during his administration. And apparently he had one lined up for that week, like in the middle of that 13 days when, you know, the world could come to an end. And there's a little passage that He failed to perform. It's like, sorry, honey, but the world might end tomorrow, and it's on my shoulder, So I've got to think about other things.

[01:50:59] Michael Shermer
It's just crazy.

[01:51:00] Jon Else
Yeah, coitus interruptus, Yeah.

[01:51:03] Michael Shermer
Right. But even that, you know, I do think Marty makes a good point that it's not just luck. I mean, these guys really worked hard at diplomacy to make sure they didn't end up in war.

[01:51:12] Jon Else
And they were, by and large, rational leaders. I mean, these are people who really, they really were able to deal with evidence and reason. And that, you know, I mean, you know, don't get me started. That seems to be a bit of an issue now. Yes, I know,

[01:51:33] Michael Shermer
yeah. Oh, another film, The Man Who Saved the World, Stanislav Petrov, and, you know, how he didn't launch the counter-strike when it appeared there might be some incoming missiles from the United States to Russia. Well, But he himself said, well, if there's going to be a first strike by the United States, it's not going to be five little blips on the radar. Yeah, yeah. So that's not irrational or luck. That's just like, well, that's rational, of course. Yeah, yeah,

[01:51:58] Jon Else
yeah. I mean, you know, more recently. House of Dynamite. Have you seen House of Dynamite, Catherine Bigelow's

[01:52:04] Michael Shermer
film? No, what is it?

[01:52:05] Jon Else
Well, it's a feature film that came out last year. And it's an interesting story. It's a speculative fiction about the American nuclear defense array across... The Dakotas and Washington. And the story is that American intelligence picks up a missile that's headed for Chicago from somewhere in the Pacific.

[01:52:33] Jon Else
And they're very... Careful not to, the filmmakers never say who launched it. Was it North Korea? Was it China? You know, was it a rogue in Uzbekistan? And the missile is going to take half an hour to reach Chicago. What are we going to do? So it's Rashomon. It tells a story, the half hour story, from four different perspectives. From the perspective of Interceptor.

[01:52:59] Michael Shermer
What's it called again?

[01:53:00] Jon Else
It's called House of Dynamite. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who did The Hurt Locker.

[01:53:05] Michael Shermer
Oh, wow.

[01:53:06] Jon Else
First woman ever to win an Academy Award for directing.

[01:53:09] Michael Shermer
Yeah, that sounds a little bit like Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War. Yeah,

[01:53:13] Jon Else
it's similar. It's a scenario story. And, you know, you look at it from the perspective of an interceptor base up in the Arctic, American interceptor base, look at it from the perspective of the president in Washington who gets, you know, somebody, the guy with the briefcase is right next to him. From the perspective of a policy person in the Pentagon, a powerful woman. And then I think there's a bunch of school kids, I think.

[01:53:41] Jon Else
What's interesting is you watch this drama develop as they have to evacuate Washington and they send all the people out to Raven Rock, which is the new bunker. I believe it's the new bunker. And, spoiler, the film ends... About 20 seconds before the bomb is set to detonate, to land.

[01:54:06] Jon Else
Oh. So, did it land? Did we launch our massive retaliatory strike?

[01:54:13] Michael Shermer
Wait a minute. Did I see this? I remember that scene you just described. Okay, maybe I have seen this. Anyway, there's so many of these films. What did you think of, as a filmmaker, the day after? I mean, this is old now, but I watched it maybe a year ago, and it's pretty good.

[01:54:28] Jon Else
Well, The Day After is maybe the most important nuclear film ever made. It was a film in 1983 that dramatized for a television audience. It was a television drama, CBS. I believe it was CBS. And it dramatizes a nuclear strike on Lawrence, Kansas, of all places.

[01:54:53] Jon Else
Lawrence, Kansas was at the time surrounded by missile sites. And in the film, the filmmakers, as in with House of Dynamite, they refuse to say who launched the incoming attack. But it's clear that there's an incoming missile attack on the United States. And the film is really about the aftermath of that attack in the heartland.

[01:55:21] Jon Else
I mean, the bombs start landing around Lawrence, Kansas. And it's horrific. I mean, it was one of the most gruesome things ever on American television. They couldn't get any advertisers. They anticipated it would be traumatic for Americans, so there was a roundtable broadcast nationwide hosted by Ted Koppel with Henry Kissinger and Carl Sagan.

[01:55:53] Jon Else
I mean, it showed that there was no happy ending to this. It's about the day after deterrence fails. And what's fascinating about it is that President Reagan, who was a hawk if ever there was one, I mean, we thought the guy was going to get us all killed. President Reagan actually did a screening at Camp David. There's a screening room at Camp David. And President Reagan watched it there with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[01:56:22] Jon Else
And we know from his diary that he was horrified by it. And it was really the trigger that got him to go to Reykjavik to meet with President Gorbachev. I mean, that's every filmmaker's dream, you know, to know that the president watched your movie. One of the proudest days of my life was when I found out, like, someone sent me an invoice.

[01:56:49] Jon Else
And it was when the CIA bought a copy of The Day After Trinity. And I thought, well, fine with me. If they want to learn their nuclear history from The Day After Trinity, boy, you know, have at it. That's great.

[01:57:03] Michael Shermer
I wrote this story about this. Not everyone was on board with the Reagan vision of a nuclear-free world. Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz, recalled an incident which he got handbagged by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she found out that his boss suggested Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons. Here's Shultz. When we came back from the 1986 U.S.-Soviet summit in Reykjavik with an agreement that it was desirable to get rid of all nuclear weapons, she came over to Washington and I was summoned to the British Embassy.

[01:57:34] Michael Shermer
It was then that I discovered the meaning of the British expression to be handbagged. Bam. She said, George, how can you sit there and allow the president to agree to abolish nuclear weapons? Which I said, Margaret, he's the president. She replied, but you're supposed to be the one with the feet on the ground. My answer was, but Margaret, I agreed with it. So he got handbagged.

[01:57:56] Jon Else
Yeah, handbagged. I'm going to file that away, handbagged. Reagan was an interesting guy. His secretary of, I believe it was defense, Caspar Weinberger, do I have that right? Yeah. I mean, he was a firm believer in the apocalypse. And Reagan sort of danced around belief in the apocalypse. Yeah. And Reagan, I mean, the guy scared the daylights out of us with his SDI and with his enormous increase in nuclear weapons, you know, development and deployment.

[01:58:30] Jon Else
But in the end, you know, he kind of came out on the side of the angels when he became an abolitionist. You know, whether that's realistic or not is in a different conversation. But the point is that Ronald Reagan decided, That, you know, nuclear war was not a great thing to pursue and that there were ways around it. And went to Reykjavik. As it turned out, he and Gorbachev could not come to an agreement on a treaty at Reykjavik, but they issued an amazing statement.

[01:58:59] Jon Else
I mean, this is the president of the United States and the secretary of the Soviet Union issuing a statement saying a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

[01:59:11] Michael Shermer
That's it, right there. Yeah. That's the final line that absolutely should be everywhere. Here is Kugler's comment on the Islamic Republic of Iran doesn't play by the rules of the international. There is no formal diplomatic relations with the United States or Israel, thereby making communication in the event of emergency problematic. And it's so close to Israel that it lowers the warning time of a missile launch minutes, thereby limiting the effectiveness of countermeasures such as anti-ballistic missiles that make sneaking a dirty bomb into the country.

[01:59:44] Michael Shermer
More likely, that was a decade ago he told me that. Yeah, yeah I don't know, some iranians friends of mine, they're they were elated to get rid of this whole regime. But, you know, that was 16 weeks ago. Okay, so maybe this is not so easy.

[02:00:00] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah, I've had Iranian students. Yeah, yeah, yeah, not so easy. And I believe since the quote that you read, I mean, we obviously did talk to the Iranians with the Obama deal with the Iranians. And I believe we're talking with them now. I mean, it all depends on being able to talk to your opponent.

[02:00:26] Jon Else
I mean, you know, Through a series of coincidences, a family friend of ours was Ambassador George Bunn, who was the original guy in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. And he spent a lot of time in Geneva negotiating with the Soviets for the Non-Proliferation Treaty. He was involved in the original Test Ban Treaty.

[02:00:52] Jon Else
And I'll never forget him telling me that sometimes you really do need secrecy. And the reason is that you want to be able to go take a walk in the woods with your counterpart that no one knows you're talking to. You need to be able to, and he in fact did this on numerous occasions. There's a little picturesque cog railway outside Geneva where all the arms control talks happened.

[02:01:20] Jon Else
Some of the current talks are happening there. And he and his Russian counterparts would occasionally go on a Sunday afternoon. And they would go hop on the Cog Railway and they'd go up to the Spruce Forest up at the top and they'd wander in the woods and they would agree to agree. And then they would sometimes say, well, listen, what we have to do is, this is my proposal, but you have to tell your president that it's your proposal, or vice versa.

[02:01:48] Jon Else
And he said that would not have been possible, you know, without... You know, secrecy without being able to know that we were talking honestly and clandestinely. So whether that's happening with Iran under the current administration, I don't know.

[02:02:05] Michael Shermer
I don't know. I hope so. All right, Jon, I have an idea for your next film project.

[02:02:09] Jon Else
Ooh, tell me what it is.

[02:02:11] Michael Shermer
That. Make a film out of your book. I mean, it's just a compelling story. You can take your film, crew to Nevada.

[02:02:20] Jon Else
No, no. I mean, I've been out to the Nevada Test Site a million times. 20 years ago, I tried to make a film. I tried to make this book as a film. Couldn't get any funding for it. No, I'll tell you, I would love for someone to make a film out of this book. But, you know, filmmaking is... Documentary filmmaking, especially idiosyncratic documentary filmmaking, especially sort of documentary in the public interest, which I think this is, it's impossibly difficult to fund now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dismantled, the National Endowment for the Humanities is disarmed, National Endowment for the Arts.

[02:03:02] Jon Else
A film of this book would cost a million dollars. You know, I can write another book.

[02:03:09] Michael Shermer
Really a million? Even if you ran a tight budget and you had all the cheap equipment now? Maybe you could do it for $100,000.

[02:03:18] Jon Else
I'll take your $100,000. But I still need to raise $900,000. No, no, if you turn on public television tonight and you see, I don't know what, a Ken Burns documentary, it's an

[02:03:31] Michael Shermer
hour. Yeah, those are expected.

[02:03:33] Jon Else
You know, those things are a million bucks an hour. And the reason is that, you know, the cheap equipment is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. I mean, it does exist, It's not used on high-end stuff. At The cost of people. You know, it takes a genius to edit one of these films, Geniuses are [unclear]. Somebody has to direct it. Somebody has to buy the insurance. We've got to fly the crew to Las Vegas. We've got to go through all the clearance stuff.

[02:04:01] Jon Else
We have to pay for the archive footage. Well, in this case, the archive footage would be... Cheap because it's government, It would be free because it's government. So I write, it's much easier to write books. It's interesting.

[02:04:16] Michael Shermer
Yes, it is.

[02:04:17] Jon Else
I miss the camaraderie. I miss the physicality of making documentary films, but I can write a book.

[02:04:24] Michael Shermer
Maybe we need to get to Elon to fund this. He cares about the future of civilization. Elon, we don't need to go to Mars. We just need to prevent nuclear war.

[02:04:34] Jon Else
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, don't get me started. I mean, don't get me started on Elon. I mean, he's an eccentric enough guy. Maybe he'll send me a billion dollars. Yeah,

[02:04:42] Michael Shermer
that's it. That'll do it.

[02:04:43] Jon Else
But, you know, I mean, you know, you can, I'm sure you've done it. You can work on your book in a cafe in Bali. You can work on your book after, you know, your cross-country skiing in the Sierras. You can hole up. In your little office, as I am. And you can write a book, you know. It It takes a little bit of money to do it, but it doesn't take... A film is five years.

[02:05:08] Jon Else
It takes four years to raise the funding, and it takes a year to make the movie. A book can take that long, but it's leisurely. Also, if you write a book, you don't have... Well, you've worked in television. You've worked in television a lot. You have executives. And some of them are in the business of making your television work better.

[02:05:34] Jon Else
A lot of them are not in that business. They're in the business of maximizing viewership, maximizing profit, maximizing their own careers. You don't really have that problem with books. Well, you know, I'm just sort of cursed by having...

[02:05:47] Michael Shermer
Your story.

[02:05:49] Jon Else
Yeah, I mean, I've cursed from having had resources to make really high-end stuff. But now it's time for me to try to make one just to get it made.

[02:06:02] Michael Shermer
Just to get it made. It's an important story. We're not there yet. We could still nuke ourselves.

[02:06:07] Jon Else
Yeah, we're still on our way.