Americans were desperate to find hope in the shadow of the bomb. Miracle cures, cheap energy, and even brand new atomic gardens: the wonders of the atom were ours to discover! Right? Eager to explore nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, Americans instead found the resulting radioactive fallout too dangerous.
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Foreign 1951. you worked for Kodak at the company’s headquarters in Rochester New York fine snow’s been falling for days and the drive to work this morning was a little slippery the new snow squeaks Beneath Your Feet as you walk from the parking lot to the factory but once
You’re inside no one wants to talk about the weather instead everyone’s talking about something else that seems to be falling from the sky radiation you work for one of kodak’s research arms the physics division you and your colleagues spend most of your time exploring new opportunities for your
Company at the margins of science but your group also helps with quality control radiation damages film and right now the factory has a radiation problem your co-worker leads a group of you over to a geiger counter positioned by the air filters started going off Sunday and hasn’t
Really stopped since wow that’s a lot never heard anything like it the levels are just off the charts at least 25 times higher than normal where’s it coming from it’s got to be an atomic test nothing natural could create radiation levels this time but nothing’s been announced Let’s go ask Webb Julian
Webb your boss is the Kodak resident expert on unknown radiation last time Kodak had a radiation problem was 1945. in the fall of that year several runs of X-ray film developed spots Webb eventually traced the problem to the strawboard separating the layers of film discovered that the straw board somehow
Contained a radioactive element not found anywhere in nature last year Webb published an article linking kodak’s fogged film with the first Manhattan Project test in 1945 so if anyone could make sense of the geiger counter chirping away today it was Webb but when you bring Webb into it he doesn’t know
What to do you’ve got to understand what happened last time the radiation was in the packaging not the film and it all came from a factory in Vincennes Indiana on the banks of a river The Fallout came down with the rain and the river concentrated it this is different
Fallout here in Rochester could wipe out her entire production line within two weeks Webb’s fears started to come true you hold up a sheet of X-ray film to the light look at that worthless the film is covered in tiny white spots each no bigger than a pinprick you learn
The U.S government has opened up a new testing facility in Nevada and the Fallout just keeps coming the atomic age was threatening kodak’s business model in March Kodak threatens to sue the U.S atomic energy commission or aec over its nuclear testing program the threat of a lawsuit gets results the
Aec agrees to start warning Kodak before conducting nuclear tests but in return Kodak agrees to keep quiet about the scale of the Fallout problem you are now the keeper of an unwanted secret Atomic Testing isn’t just something that produces effects far away in the Pacific Ocean or in the Nevada desert
Can’t see smell or taste radioactive fallout which hear it if you know what to listen for from wondery this is American history tellers our history your story I’m Lindsey Graham so before we get into today’s episode I wanted to thank the hundreds of people that have left us so many thoughtful reviews
From teachers of History to history fans to people who are just interested in our country thank you so much now let’s begin episode four of the Cold War on the previous episode of American History tellers we talked about how the prospect of nuclear warfare changed American Life military strategist
Devised means for command and control and universities committed themselves to designing weapons suburbanites built private bomb shelters and the government built bunkers throughout all of this citizens and politicians alike recognize that nuclear weapons presented a unique threat to civilization but at least through most of the 1950s the fear
Centered on all-out nuclear warfare in the early years of the Cold War Americans desperately wanted to find ways to live with the bomb they dreamed of electricity too cheap to meter and hoped to harness the power of Atoms for Peace in today’s episode we’re looking at how Americans tried to get friendly
With the Adam and how that friendship ultimately fell apart by the late 1950s a Grassroots movement had grown up in opposition to radioactive fallout some historians even say the modern environmental movement has its roots in opposition to nuclear testing the nuclear Arsenal continued to grow throughout the 1960s but Americans
Had soured on Atomic salvation nuclear fear makes sense to us now but let’s start with the optimism imagine that it’s 1961 and you’re an avid Gardener there’s nothing you look forward to more than breathing in the loamy smell of soil in the springtime except maybe for selecting your seeds
For the year ahead a Seed Catalog is one of life’s greatest Pleasures bringing a pop of color into an otherwise dull winter existence you throw Another Log on the Fire and settle in for an afternoon of garden planting maybe you’re joined by a dog or a cat who
Enjoys the fire almost as much as you do your eyes pass quickly over the peas and lettuces but Tomatoes what Gardener can resist the Allure of a new kind of tomato and that’s when you see the full page notice for something called atom blasted seeds you call your husband over
To check it out you heard about this listen be one of the first to actually grow unpredictable Atomic flowers and vegetables you might just originate a totally new variety are they bigger hardier resistant to will what what do you get in a pack of atomic seeds that’s the point they don’t
Know what the seeds can do apparently they’ve been exposed to radiation the ad sets the radiation can create Giants or Dwarfs with unexpected colors or shapes it’s an experiment so mutations like like Godzilla you want to grow Killer Tomatoes no the ads say it’s perfectly
Safe it’s just a fun way to create new plants they’re offering prizes for the best new varieties if our hypothetical Gardener actually purchased these Atomic seeds she would have had lots of company in her book Evolution made to order historian Ellen Curry describes the widespread enthusiasm for Atomic Gardens in the
Early 1960s private seed companies made arrangements with atomic researchers to use radiation to generate new kinds of plants in 1961 if you visited a home and garden show in Los Angeles or Cleveland you could check out new petunias gladiolas marigolds and snapdragons created through the wonders of atomic radiation the seed companies were
Actually a little bit late to the game Savvy marketers began embracing the atom in their advertising campaigns as early as 1946 just one year after two atomic bombs killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians you could buy an atomic bomb decoder ring for your child or a mushroom cloud-shaped brooch for
Your wife Life Magazine described a Hollywood Starlet as an anatomic bomb if you’ve ever worn a bikini personally or admired someone who has you’ve participated in atomic culture in 1946 the U.S Navy staged a public test of the atomic bomb in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific more
Than 40 000 people attended operation Crossroads as it was called the Navy invited reporters congressmen International officials even Soviet observers to witness the test a few days after that first test the French fashion designer Louis Raya debuted a new two-piece skimpy swimsuit and called it the bikini Americans were scandalized by
The skimpiness but not the name Americans in the 1950s Embrace what historian Alex weatherstein has called Atomic Kitsch flooding movie theaters to see bad sci-fi flicks based on mutations snacking on atomic fireball candies it’s hard to overstate the Public’s desire to find something good some sort of
Salvation and Adam research in the late 1940s in the spring of 1947 the popular magazine Colliers published an article titled man and the atom that touted the possibilities for personal transformation through Atomic research it included an astonishing illustration of a man in a robe in pajamas standing
In front of a mushroom cloud his abandoned wheelchair glints in the background he looks to the heavens smiling his hands outstretched to receive the Redemption of the atomic age but how exactly would the atom cure the sick medical researchers pinned their hopes on radioisotopes which are unstable byproducts of radioactive decay these
Radioisotopes in turn give off types of radiation that can be used as Cancer Treatments or or medical tracers the growth of nuclear weapons research meant that the aec was suddenly producing a lot of radioisotopes U.S government needed to find an outlet for these materials but it also hoped to encourage
The idea of peaceful Atomic research according to historian Angela Cragar the aec distributed almost 64 000 shipments of radioisotopes in the first decade of the atomic age the AAC sent these materials to Laboratories hospitals and private companies doctors use radioiodine to diagnose thyroid cancer and radio phosphorus to identify tumors
In 1951 the aec even built a 50-bed hospital in Argonne Illinois dedicated to exploring the possibilities of radioisotopes in Cancer Treatments but these hopes proved misplaced turned out that radioisotopes could not cure cancer and doctors soon wised up to the AUC imagine that it’s the early 1950s and
You’ve just received disturbing news the cancer diagnosis with the help of your family doctor and some business connections you’ve scored a coveted appointment at Memorial Hospital in New York fly out tomorrow It’s your first time in New York the hustle and bustle of the city is like nothing you’ve seen before cacophony of car horns newspaper boys and Street Hustle the smell of diesel exhaust and hot dogs fills the air but it’s not all terrifying the store windows on Fifth
Avenue offer you a glimpse into a world you’ve only imagined full of Italian shoes and English suits and buttery leather briefcases from who knows better the people of New York have a different kind of Polish than the folks back home it’s an exciting place to be if a bit
Overwhelming and you’re glad you came your cab drops you off in front of an imposing brick building on the Upper East Side the hospital has a long history as a Center for Cancer Treatment but that’s not why you pulled in every favor you had to get here next door to
The hospital is a gleaming new 13-story research facility the Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer research it’s the largest private Cancer Research Center in the world and you’re hoping to benefit from its findings especially its Atomic findings you bring this up immediately in your appointment with a specialist what about Isotopes I keep
Reading about Isotopes in the papers iodine phosphorus gold does does memorial use isotopes the doctor pauses longer than you’d like don’t believe everything you read in the papers yes we use radioisotopes but primarily for diagnosis we’ve been searching for five years and haven’t really seen any breakthroughs in treatment we still
Recommend external radiation I didn’t come all the way to New York for that my hospital at home has been using radiation since the 30s what are your researchers doing over there in the new facility uh well we do have some new treatments with a different kind of external radiation our experimental
Treatments use total body irradiation it comes from Cobalt 60 not an x-ray machine but I’m not sure you’re a good candidate for that why not let’s just say you’re not there yet let’s focus on actually treating the cancer you have as a patient in this scenario you wouldn’t have known about the medical
Community’s deep skepticism towards medical radiation at Sloan Kettering researchers were experimenting with total body irradiation but mainly on patients who are already near death and here’s what we found out later these tests were experiments not treatments the Army wanted to know how soldiers bodies would react to the radiation from
An atomic bomb so it asks Cancer Centers to find out 40 years later a congressional investigation found out that most of the patients who received total body irradiation were not expected to recover and most were so poor they had little to say in their treatment the aec’s public support for Atomic
Cancer Treatments put prominent medical researchers in a bind the public got excited about treatments that either didn’t exist didn’t work or were being used for something other than their stated purpose if Atomic seed catalogs are any indication people still wanted to believe in the healing hopeful powers of
Atomic radiation at least as late as 1961 but at some point in the mid 50s it started to look like wishful thinking on March 1 1954 the United States began another series of nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll this time there would be no audience of reporters the 15 Megaton
Hydrogen bomb used in The Castle Bravo test was the largest weapon the United States had ever detonated and the fifth largest in human history the fireball was visible from 250 miles away radioactive fallout fell over a 3 000 square mile area well beyond what the test designers anticipated hundreds of
Sailors weather researchers and Marshall Islanders were exposed to radiation a Japanese fishing boat the fukuru morrow was operating about 80 miles east when the blast went off the boat was well outside of the test exclusion area fine flaky white dust started falling on the boat and fell for three hours
Everything and everyone on board was soon coated in a thin layer of pulverized Coral spiked with radioisotopes by the time they arrived back in yaitsu the entire crew was sick they suffered Burns nausea and headaches and their hair fell out the tuna on their boat was Radioactive their exposure ignited an international scandal
Was radioactive fallout more dangerous than the aec was letting on The aec’s commissioner former rear Admiral Louis straws tried to downplay the damage in a statement to the Press he claimed I can state that any increase in background radiation would be far below the levels which would be harmful in any way to human beings animals or crops then the fishing boats radio operator
Akichi kuboyama died of radiation poisoning kodak’s researchers knew that Fallout was everywhere but they didn’t think it was particularly dangerous kuboyama’s death made Fallout visible to everyone everywhere hubayama died because he was exposed to the byproducts of nuclear explosions the same kind of byproducts that the aec was suggesting might cure cancer
Americans desperately wanted to believe that good things could come from the atomic bomb that new plants and new cures could emerge from the same research that brought death and destruction but in the mid-1950s it was beginning to Dawn upon Americans that the government had been less than truthful with the American public
There would be no Atomic salvation foreign that it’s 1960 and you’re living in the suburbs of St Louis you’re the parent of a six-year-old with all that entails birthday parties visits to the zoo Howdy Doody on TV your son worries past you on his bicycle it’s been a year of
Milestones and another is just around the corner how’s that tooth coming almost there I can wiggle it you’ve got mixed feelings about the prospect of this lost tooth not just because it means your son is growing up for months now you’ve been volunteering with a new organization the committee on
Nuclear information you spent countless hours addressing newsletters and tabulating responses to questionnaires the taste of envelope glue lingers on your tongue so far you’ve been gathering information from other people but when your son finally loses that tooth Your Role will change a week later the day finally comes
I got it Mom I got it look at that grand congratulations now remember what we talked about no tooth fairy I need that tooth for science I know Mom just like all my friends that’s right now can I have it please you take your son’s tooth and place it
In an envelope you take a survey from the stack in the dining room and sit down to fill it down you record your son’s date of birth how long he was breastfed and what kind of milk you used in his formula two weeks later your son
Gets his prize open it it’s for you wow a button is it says I gave my tooth to science I’m going to wear it everywhere so you’re not mad at the Tooth Fairy no this is better you wish you could share your son’s pure delight at this experiment but you’re
Too worried about the results what you know and he doesn’t is that the minerals in his tooth will almost certainly show that he’s been exposed to Fallout from nuclear weapons testing the question is how much and is it safe this was the baby tooth survey to understand why housewives in Missouri
Were handing over their children’s teeth we need to back up a moment so bear with me for a bit of science one of the main components of Fallout is a radioactive element called strontium 90. at number 90 refers to atomic weight or the combined number of protons and
Neutrons in the atom’s core strontium always has 38 protons but in nature strontium has 46 48 49 or 50 neutrons add these two numbers together and you get the Atomic weights of naturally occurring strontium 84 86 87 and 88 strontium 90 is not a naturally occurring isotope instead it’s a major
Byproduct of nuclear fission many byproducts of fission and uranium have short half-lives decaying in a matter of days but strontium-90 sticks around if you started out with two pounds of strontium 90 30 years later you’d still have nearly a pound but what makes strontium 90 really dangerous is its similarity to calcium
Strontium sits just below calcium on the periodic table which means it acts like calcium in chemical reactions when radioactive strontium lands on the soil plants incorporate it into their cells from there it enters the food chain let’s say that this soil happens to be in a pasture when cows eat the
Contaminated grass the strontium enters their milk and when kids drink this milk their bodies can’t distinguish radioactive strontium from the calcium they need to grow strontium-90 ends up in Bones bone marrow and teeth by the late 1950s the aec in American scientists were involved in a heated
Debate about the nature of Fallout aec officials like straws consistently argued that Fallout wasn’t dangerous on the other side an increasing number of scientists and doctors argued that radioactive isotopes associated with Fallout could cause mutations Cancers and especially childhood leukemias once incorporated into the body Isotopes like strontium become internal emitters
Radiating the body from the inside both the aec and the scientists accused each other of lying each side said that the other was politicizing facts about Fallout because you see this debate wasn’t taking place in a vacuum starting in 1954 after the Bravo test debacle the number of third world leaders began
Calling for a nuclear test ban by 1955 the leader of the Soviet Union the Kita Khrushchev was calling for a moratorium Washington and Moscow spent most of the rest of the decade bickering over test bans by 1958 the debate about the dangers of Fallout had become a proxy
For debating a nuclear test ban people who endorsed a nuclear test ban describe Fallout as terribly dangerous people who wanted to continue testing nuclear weapons describe Fallout as harmless the US government framed the debate over Fallout and nuclear testing as one of risk yes Fallout from nuclear testing might produce a slight increase
In the number of cancer diagnoses and birth defects but the risks of not testing nuclear weapons were even higher what if the Soviet Union had better weapons than the United States risk implied choices and to make choices the public needed information enter the St Louis base committee for nuclear information I mentioned before
As historian Michael Egan explains the committee for nuclear information was part of a broader consumer movement that prioritized information over interpretation when it first announced plans for a baby tooth survey in December of 1958 the organizers declared that they had no position on test spans the point of the study they said was
Simply to collect and share information with the public so that the public could then make informed decisions about risk baby teeth according to the press release announcing the study were an Irreplaceable source of scientific information about the absorption of strontium-90 in the human body and because strontium 90 only comes from
Nuclear explosions the activists hope to use it as an index to Americans exposure to Fallout baby teeth were readily available the aec didn’t control access to them the way they control access to the test grounds in Nevada or the Pacific and the aec didn’t control the purse strings for
The experiment either within months the baby tooth survey had collected thousands of teeth and questionnaires from St Louis and Beyond by the time the study ended in 1968 it had examined well over 200 000 teeth the results Were Striking an early study published in November 1961 showed that the levels of
Strontium-90 and baby teeth tripled between 51 and 55. children fed formula diets had higher levels of strontium than children who were breastfed which tied the levels directly to Fallout ingested through dairy milk the baby tooth study was groundbreaking for the first time the public had successfully broken through the aec’s
Monopoly as the most reasonable voice on nuclear information this wasn’t a study headed by radicals or Eggheads it was a study run by Housewives and pediatricians the baby tooth survey mainstreamed the suspicion of the aec as Egan puts it the committee on nuclear information gambled on political neutrality and it won but elsewhere
Anti-nuclear activists dropped all pretense to neutrality Grassroots movements to ban the bomb were popping up everywhere from Acura to Zurich in January 1958 Caltech chemist Linus Pauling delivered a Test Ban petition to the United Nations it bore the names of more than 11 000 scientists demanding a nuclear test ban in the name
Of Public Health that same spring Khrushchev scored a global propaganda Victory when he declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests all evidence suggests that Khrushchev sincerely believed that a nuclear test ban could increase Global Security without damaging the Soviet Union’s military position but the halt also made the Soviet Union look like the
Real champion of peace that fall Eisenhower agreed to join the Soviet Union and temporarily suspending nuclear tests with a temporary moratorium in place negotiations for a permanent Test Ban could begin a negotiating a permanent Test Ban was tricky business at the beginning of 1960 the nuclear Club had only three members the United
States the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom but several others were already knocking on the door France was nearly there already France tested its first atomic bomb in February of 1960 in Algeria over its allies objections and China was thought to be close behind The Test Ban negotiation strained
Relationships within NATO and between Soviet Union and China a total Test Ban would shut the door on the nuclear Club but the toughest sticking point involved verification if one could figure out how to elude detection it could gain an advantage over its enemies the superpowers came closest to reaching an agreement in the
Spring of 1960 but two weeks before a scheduled Paris peace Summit Soviet surface-to-air missiles forced down a high-altitude American plane from Soviet airspace at first NASA claimed responsibility according to the Space Agency the flight was an errant weather Mission but when Khrushchev produced a plane the pilot
And some of its photographs of Soviet territory Eisenhower was forced to admit that the United States had been conducting high altitude surveillance flights over Soviet airspace Khrushchev accused the United States of spying Eisenhower refused to apologize and the peace Summit was canceled still by some miracle the moratorium
Held President Kennedy had no such luck in September 1961 the Soviet Union resumed its test program the United States quickly followed suit in October 1961 the Soviet Union exploded the largest weapon ever seen Tsar Bamba produced a yield of at least 50 megatons 1 500 times the size of the bomb used in
Hiroshima the United States never detonated anything this large but it conducted other equally disturbing tests in 1962. one of these codenamed starfish Prime took place in outer space the blast disabled communication satellites and briefly knocked out the power grid in Hawaii we can only speculate where this game of
Nuclear one upsmanship might have led had the Cuban Missile Crisis not spooked Kennedy and Khrushchev back to their senses in July 1963 Khrushchev signaled that he would accept a more limited Test Ban Treaty instead of banning nuclear weapon tests outright the treaty would prohibit explosions in water air and
Outer space this time negotiations proceeded quickly on August 5th 1963 representatives from the United States the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty the wording of The Limited Test Ban Treaty centered on the dangers of Fallout on top of banning tests in water air and
Outer space the treaty prohibited tests and I quote in any other environment if such explosion caused radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control such explosion is conducted the treaty in other words solved the problem of Fallout kodak’s
Film and the children’s teeth would be safe but the treaty did not quite solve the problem of nuclear weapons because it only applied to the countries that signed it it didn’t prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons the existing nuclear Powers could keep the weapons they had they could even
Develop new and more powerful ones all they had to do was figure out how to test them Underground Imagine that it’s 1965 in Texas you’re an engineer with El Paso Natural Gas Company still boom time for oil and gas workers here in West Texas oil rigs and gas flares dot the Arid landscape last year your company raked in a record-setting 540 million dollars in natural gas sales
Your truck bounces along the gravel road on your way to work you slow down when a roadrunner dashes out ahead of you you don’t mind since it gives you a chance to take in the early morning sun flowing on the Franklin Mountains to the West your geologists are convinced there’s
Much more gas to be had underneath those mountains under all the Rockies actually by some estimates they’re 35 billion dollars worth of gas there they just can’t figure out how to extract it for any reasonable sum of money so when you get a call with a possible solution in all ears
This is a Frank Franklin Bureau of mine we’ve got an idea for extracting gas reserves and we’re looking for an industrial partner what do you have in mind atomic curation full nuclear explosion I’m sorry what yeah I must not be understanding you correctly you want us to use an atomic
Bomb to recover natural gas you heard me right 10 maybe 15 times more gas than you can get with conventional techniques ah yeah I can say sense your hesitation species on board for this and your company owns the perfect site up in New Mexico it’d be good for National
Security and great for business well sure if we could sell the gas but we can’t sell it if it’s Radioactive It’s a risk but a small one sure we’ll shoulder the risk we’re eager to show this thing can be done what about the water table we only have
Mineral rights to the land we own not the surrounding water is there any chance it could be contaminated look you want answers we want answers too that’s why we want to do this if this project Works it’ll transform the oil and gas industry it’d be a windfall for El Paso
Despite the reservations you and your company can’t argue with mammoth’s logic in 1965 the real-life El Paso natural gas company entered into a partnership with a bureau of Mines the aec and the Lawrence radiation laboratory to explore a nuclear gas extraction project they called it project gas buggy this
Sounds ludicrous right but perhaps the most remarkable thing about project gas buggy other than its name is that it was only one of a series of planned civil engineering projects based on Atomic explosions weapon scientist Ed teller first hatched the idea for project plowshare in 57 the project took its name from Biblical
Verse first half of Isaiah 2 4 reads they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their Spears into pruning hooks in other words Atoms for Peace project plowshare took the idea of Atoms for Peace to its logical conclusion instead of using the byproducts of nuclear explosions like radioisotopes to
Create public goods it would build new things from bombs themselves teller referred to this concept as peaceful nuclear explosions or pnes now teller remains a controversial figure among both scientists and historians his anti-communism and his passion for nuclear weapons was legendary but even his fiercest enemies had to acknowledge teller’s genius as a
Scientific salesman he sold President Truman on the hydrogen bomb and in the late 1950s he sold President Eisenhower on Peaceful nuclear explosions and once the project was approved it was hard to shut down between 1957 and 1975 the U.S government spent hundreds of millions of dollars devising ever more outlandish uses for
Nuclear weapons as you might expect most of these projects involve excavation of one kind or another teller referred to this as nuclear Earth moving the Ambitions of project plowshare knew no bounds its Champions proposed using nuclear weapons to build a new Harbor in Alaska speed up construction of I-40 in
California and even build a new Panama Canal from today’s perspective it’s hard to take any of this seriously project plowshare has become a synonym for a particular kind of technological hubris associated with the Cold War according to historian Scott Kaufman who’s written a book on the topic by 1963 project plowshare accounted for
About a third of the aec spending on weapons programs we’re talking extraordinary sums of money as much as one million dollars a month on plans for nuclear Earth moving and as you might have guessed by now none of these projects came to fruition El Paso natural gas did not gain a
Competitive advantage through nuclear explosions the aec did conduct an explosion as part of operation gas buggy but as our hypothetical engineer feared the natural gas released was hopelessly radioactive the next Panama Canal would not be built with nuclear explosives either Especially after the results of the baby tooth survey were published plowshare proposals met public resistance in Alaska local Inuits feared that Fallout would contaminate Caribou feeding grounds endangering their haunt and their health in Pennsylvania public health authorities refused to issue a permit when plowshare authorities proposed using nuclear weapons to create
An underground natural gas storage facility in the middle of a State Forest so why then did the aec keep at it when any sort of careful analysis showed nuclear Earth moving to be a really bad idea there are two answers to that one more cynical than the other the first has to
Do with the difference between a nuclear experiment and a nuclear test if Americans were to stay within the law of The Limited Test Ban Treaty they had to find ways to test them underground but with popular opposition to nuclear testing mounting no one wanted to call these explosions tests
So underground nuclear tests became experiments ways to test out ideas for more politically palatable uses of nuclear weapons the second answer is more philosophical almost existential ever since the first atomic explosion lit up the New Mexico desert sky in 1945 Americans wanted to find something hopeful in the bomb
Maybe radioisotopes could cure cancer or generate cheap energy or maybe at the very least they might create new kinds of Petunias to Delight hobby gardeners when the engineers at Kodak held up their ruined film they saw an alternative future one in which the bomb produced silent invisible threats
Housewives in St Louis used their children’s teeth to make those threats visible to all Americans now imagine maybe against your best intentions that you spent your entire scientific career working on weapons the temptation to find something useful in this work to find a way to turn swords into plowshares must have been
Overwhelming the weapon scientists were technological optimists the first half of the Cold War wasn’t optimistic time when scientists engineers and doctors embrace the idea that Science and Technology could get us out of any crisis science had won World War II so far despite a few close calls it had
Held off the Communists too anything seemed possible yet by the early 1960s this technological optimism was increasingly out of step with the American public concerns about Fallout had sparked a new environmental movement in 1962 Rachel Carson published her Landmark book Silent Spring civil rights leaders asked hard questions about whether the
Country’s investment in weapons research was distracting it from solving problems at home yet the U.S government had one last scientific and technological trick of its sleeve on July 20th 1969 NASA would put a man on the moon from wondering this is episode 4 of the Cold War from American history tellers
On the next episode the United States didn’t quite destroy itself in 1968 but it came awfully close the calculus of the Cold War changed in the 1960s and with it Lyndon Johnson Vision of a Great Society the emergence of the conservative movement and how left and right found surprising areas of
Agreement when it came to the Cold War thank you American history tellers is hosted sound design and edited by Me Lindsey Graham for Airship this episode is written by Audra wolf PhD HD executive producers or benedair and Hernan Lopez for wondering