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Dec. 2, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:17:24
Edition 421 - Dr Vince Houghton

Author of "Nuking The Moon", Dr Vince Houghton, who heads the International Spy Museum, on the crazy ways military science has devised to beat the enemy...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
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And if you haven't, as we come to the end of this year, please do consider that because it's very important for this show.
Now, the topic and the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is not something that we haven't done before.
We have touched on this topic before, but I don't think we've ever done it in quite this way.
And it is prompted by a new book called New King the Moon.
We're going to be talking on this edition with Dr. Vincent Horton in America, who's the curator of the International Spy Museum.
And we're going to be talking about some of the ingenious, amazing, and stunning exploits of security services and governments, both in covert operations, assassination, bids, and strange technology.
That kind of undercover stuff.
Everything that we read in the papers suggests that all of this stuff is going on.
There was probably a golden age of all of this in the Cold War era, but it seems to be going on to this day.
So we'll talk about some cases from the past, and we'll also talk about ones that are very much contemporary.
All of them, I think, fascinating, and all of them, I think, very interesting.
There is a lot to talk about with Dr. Vince Horton on this edition of The Unexplained.
So I hope you enjoy that.
Don't forget, if you get in touch with me by email, and I would love you to, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Very important to me to know all of those things.
So if you can, please send me an email now and let me know all of those things.
And if you have a guest suggestion or any thoughts about the show, then you know that I would love to hear from you.
All right, let's get to Washington, D.C. now.
Five-hour time difference between wintry old London and Washington, D.C. and speak with Dr. Vincent Horton.
Vince, thank you very much for coming on my show.
I appreciate you having me.
Well, Vince, we are about to talk about something pretty remarkable.
And I don't think there has been another book quite like this.
It is a piece of research about the sorts of projects that are undertaken by governments, security agencies, and others.
Some of them very well-meaning.
All of them, it seems to me, ingenious, and some of them simply bizarre.
Why do a piece of research like this?
What is it that prompted you?
I wanted to do something different.
I mean, every history book ever written is about historical events that actually happened in the past.
I think this is one of the only, if not the only, history book about things that never happened.
But for me, it's important to look at some of these programs because these were tested, funded, organized all the way up until the very end.
So there was an intent to actually do these programs.
And intent in many ways matters as much as outcome.
In this particular instance for the stories in this book, these weren't programs that were canceled because someone had a, you know, someone said there were bad ideas.
These weren't programs that were canceled because some important historical figure said, no, we're not going to do this.
In most cases, these are programs that were canceled because of happenstance.
The war ended.
Another technology superseded it.
So we can understand a lot about why people were thinking the way they were thinking during World War II, during the Cold War, by looking at these programs even more so because they don't happen.
We're not kind of distracted by the outcome.
We can kind of look at this almost purely as a kind of an educational opportunity to say, okay, why were they thinking what they were thinking?
Why were they so afraid?
Why were they so desperate?
And that really appealed to me as a historian and appealed to me as someone that, you know, likes fun stories and all of these are.
And as you say, in many of these cases, the particular plans and gambits that were proposed and worked upon extensively didn't happen for reasons that nobody could have foreseen.
For example, and we'll get into the stories in the book in just a moment, but in one case, Adolf Hitler did not return that much to the Berghof, his house in the mountains, his home in the mountains, because there'd been an attempt on his life and various other things.
And nobody who'd planned a particular bid on him could have foreseen that eventuality.
Right.
I mean, in a lot of cases, these were plans that were going to happen if it wasn't for something getting in the way, nothing to do with someone saying they were bad ideas.
Okay.
At the beginning of the book, and I love this little line, you say, this is a book about desperation.
When innovation and desperation meet, trouble usually follows.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation is the drunken uncle.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's something that we in 2019 don't have the ability to think about how our fathers, our grandfathers, our grandmothers were feeling during these times of the early Cold War, during World War II.
You know, we watch the movies, we kind of hear stories.
But what I want to do as a historian, first and foremost, is to try to put people in an empathetic state to where you can actually start to actually feel or at least understand how people were feeling during this time.
And this word desperation gets thrown around a lot.
You know, we overuse it.
But in most cases, this is a strong word.
This is a word that means you're truly willing to do anything in order to, in some cases, win the war or to prevent the Soviets from defeating you.
And that's where a lot of these plans come from, this true feeling of desperation that just doesn't happen all that often.
And it certainly doesn't happen today in 2019 because we don't have an existential threat against us like we did with Hitler, like we did with the Soviets.
I get a feeling from the book that you feel that we need to be celebrating not only, as history does, it's the outcome version of history that we tend to get, that we should be celebrating not only those who were victorious, but those who tried.
You know, to me, intent matters as much as outcome.
And that's not normal for historians that, you know, kind of historians, the vast majority of us focus on outcome.
But to me, outcome matters, of course.
But outcome is not the only thing that should matter.
I mean, intent matters a lot too.
Think of it this way.
If I plan to murder somebody and I planned it for a year, I mean, I read all the books on crime scene investigation so I could cover up my murder.
I got a weapon that couldn't be traced.
I was ready to do it on the day I was going to kill somebody.
I'm walking up behind them, ready to kill that person.
And instead, they get hit by a bus.
I didn't actually murder that person, but does that make me any better?
Does that make me a good person all of a sudden?
Because I didn't actually do the deed?
Of course not.
And history would have just said, this person was hit by a bus and ignore the fact that my intent was to kill them for over a year.
I know that's an extreme story, but I'm trying to get the point across that historical intent can really matter and it's been ignored by most historians.
I try to fix that.
And do you think in some cases, and like I say, we will get into the detail of the book and there's plenty of it.
Do you think that in some cases, the efforts of these people who mostly have been airbrushed from history, the efforts of these people perhaps contributed in examples like the war against the Japanese, Second World War, all of those things, that maybe along the way, even though they don't get recognition and even though their projects are seen to have failed or not been initiated, they actually contributed to the overall process.
Well, absolutely.
And I think that, you know, history has a habit of just looking at these great people.
And there's only so many great people you can look at, but there's so many people during that time that have contributed in their small way.
And small, looking at it from, again, from 2019 perspective, but at the time, it could have been incredibly significant.
And certainly some of these programs that were canceled, they don't just end.
They change into something else.
They get to a point where there's research, there's development that's done that can be actually put into other programs.
So even though people may not do the particular program that I talk about in the book, some of the research done, some of the innovation, some of the science that's accomplished during this program can be used for other things.
Right.
And some people may make their reputations assisting the people who are airbrushed from history.
Exactly.
I mean, the title chapter of the book is a great example, right?
I mean, a lot of the research that went into that program was later used for the actual Apollo missions, putting people on the moon.
So I think that, you know, those are things that just get ignored or they're just undertold.
And I think this is an interesting way to get this information out to the non-history buff, the general reader.
Okay, before we unpick the four sections of the book, the title that you've just alluded to, Nuking the Moon, I know this speaks to what you talk about at the very end of the book, but I think it just puts it in context if we just explain how you arrived at the title.
I had to pick something and it really kind of jumped out because it is a chapter in the book.
It's the final chapter in the book.
And this is really, if you said which is the craziest plan of all of them, it probably is this one.
This was a plan in 1958, the United States Air Force decided as a show of force, they wanted to detonate a multi-megaton nuclear weapon on the surface of the moon, essentially to show the world that the United States is still the scientific leader.
And of course, this comes right on the heels of Sputnik, where the Soviets actually kind of put the shot across the bow of the Americans saying, we put a satellite up into space before you did.
And so this was the desperate attempt at a quick response that the U.S. Air Force came up with.
Not the brightest idea, but what's interesting about it is it had some of the most important scientists in the 20th century working on it.
Right.
And did nobody in those days in 58 think about our responsibility not only to our own planet, but to other things out in the solar system?
Clearly not.
I mean, this was, you know, probably, but it really comes down to the point that people who are desperate are willing to look beyond those kind of things, are willing to just focus, in this case, on the fact that the Cold War was a war of ideas.
And in this case, the ideas were trying to convince Latin America, Africa, East Asia, the developing world that the United States was the premier science and technological power in the world.
Well, of course, the problem is Sputnik made it look like it was the Soviets.
And so these countries in these areas of the world were trying to determine what side should I pick.
And the fear was they'd pick the Soviet side.
And so the desperate response to that was, let's blow the living hell out of the moon.
Right.
An astonishing plan.
And just briefly, and we will get into that section of the book very soon.
Why didn't it happen?
Well, we actually don't.
I'm not convinced we know why it didn't happen.
And that's one of the interesting parts of the story is no matter who you ask, if you ask the scientist, you get one story.
Actually, you get three different stories if you ask the scientists.
If you ask the Air Force, you get a different story.
If you look at some of the archives of the U.S. government, you get an entirely different story.
What I think, and the most convincing answer to me, is if you've looked at some of the early footage of the Mercury program, which was the program that put the first American astronauts into space, for about a year, every single rocket we tried to send up into space either exploded, flew about 50 feet in the air, and then came crashing back down, or took off nicely and then flew sideways and landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to.
That was in 1960 and 61.
So we're still talking now, two years before that during this program.
I think the fear was you stick a five-megaton nuclear weapon on the top of one of these untested rockets.
You might launch it in the direction of the moon, but the fear was it would land in Miami or Albuquerque or London or somewhere other than the moon.
I think that probably is why they canceled the program in the end.
And you said at the beginning of this, and it is very true, that a lot of people today don't understand the context.
If you set this into context where an awful lot of the rocketry was not actually succeeding and was going spectacularly wrong, then of course, if you're going to send an, you know, I don't know how many megaton bomb, you said the number of megatons, you know, upwards, chances are in that era, it would also go sideways, and that's not what you want.
Well, absolutely not, right?
I mean, talk about the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish.
Nuking one of your own cities is probably not the way to show the world that you're back on top.
Okay, all right.
I promise in seconds we're going to get into all of the sections of the book.
But why did that not occur to somebody at the beginning of this?
Well, I think that when they got into some of this, this desperation, I keep going back to that word, and you're right.
It's literally the first sentence of the book is this is a book about desperation.
So I keep going back to it.
That's when you start not thinking about certain things.
I mean, the Air Force wasn't full of stupid people, but for whatever reason, they thought they were going to get a beautiful mushroom cloud on the moon.
And just basic knowledge of the fact that mushroom clouds don't exist unless you're in an atmosphere.
So the moon has no atmosphere.
You would not get a mushroom cloud on the moon.
You would just get a lot of dust flying in a lot of different directions.
But no one at the Air Force stopped long enough to think about that and instead just said, we got to do this, we got to do this, we got to do this.
So I think it really came down to people were desperate to do something, anything, to combat what Sputnik meant as a symbol of Soviet power.
And these things then, once they get started, they get a momentum of their own.
Okay, the book is divided into four parts.
And I've paraphrased some of the titles.
But basically, part one is about animals.
Two is about cunning plans.
Three is about inspired technology.
And four, as we've already discussed, is about things that people were planning to do with the power of nuclear technology.
Have I got that right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay, part one, animals.
And it begins with a real stunner of a story.
The story of the CIA's acoustic kitty.
Now, you talk about the history of surveillance before you go into this, but the CIA came up with the idea of training a cat and making a cat and wiring a cat to be a listening device.
This sounds to us here bizarre.
Sure.
And what's fun about it is Acoustic Kitty was the actual CIA code name for the program.
So somebody at the agency had a sense of humor, at least.
But this sounds bizarre at first, but if you put it in context, in the context probably behind this operation was that someone at CIA who was assigned to Istanbul, Turkey, had an interesting idea.
Now, Istanbul, if you've ever been there, is just flowing with stray cats, stray cats everywhere.
It's kind of one of these cities that if you love cats, it's fantastic because they're just, you can pet them all over the place.
And the CIA personnel noticed the cats could go in and out of the Soviet compound with impunity, walk right in the door.
No one paid them any attention.
They could go into the courtyard.
If there were generals or diplomats sitting in the courtyard, they'd jump right up on their laps and sit down.
And the guy said, wow, if we could get a covert listening device on one of those cats or what would eventually happen in one of those cats, we have the keys to the kingdom, right?
This is everything we could possibly ever want to know because the cats weren't given a second look.
So they brought it back to the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and said, all right, can you do this?
And they said, well, I think the technology makes sense.
And they actually tested it.
They brought a cat into a veterinary suite.
They had a veterinarian open the cat up, put a power pack inside its abdomen, put the actual microphone up through its, into its ear canal.
So its ears were used as a filter.
And then the antenna went up into its tail, of course, the natural place you'd put the antenna.
Now, by today's standards, and I just have to put this in here, this sounds cruel.
Oh, well, by anyone's standards, it sounds cruel.
And I think even the people at the time understood that it was cruel because some of the people who were writing about this at the time, like, tried to emphasize, we have a veterinarian, the cat was euthanized.
The cat was anesthesia, given anesthesia, went to sleep.
It wasn't like the cat was awake.
But it's the kind of thing that you would not do to any living thing.
And, you know, certainly not a domesticated cat.
Well, yeah, no, and I think that that's very different ideas about the way we treat animals back in the 1960s than obviously we have today.
But there was a big flaw in the plan, wasn't there?
And again, rather like the nuclear thing, it's obvious.
It's obvious what the flaw was.
Well, and what's funny is when I start telling the story, people get to, you know, the idea is that, you know, they turn this into a listening device.
The listening device works.
But of course, then they have to train the cat.
And that's usually when any audience I'm talking to starts to chuckle because, of course, cats are untrainable.
And that's really where the trouble they run into.
But they hadn't really thought about that.
And then when they got far enough into the program to think about it, well, then they started adding bolt-ons and other ideas and saying that through programs like MKUltra, that we've talked about here on this show many, many times, and you can explain what that was, that we were learning more and more about brain manipulation.
So if we can manipulate the brain of the cat to be more pliant, then we can make this work.
Well, I mean, MKUltra is misunderstood, maybe not by your audience, because, you know, people just look at it as this LSD mind control program.
But MKUltra is actually over 130 different programs.
And yes, LSD was one of them, but also using electronic brain stimulation to try to change instinct, to try to change the way the brain is used chemically was a big part of MKUltra also.
And it's very hard to do with humans, but not so hard to do with cats whose brain is the size of, you know, a plum.
And so one of the stories of Acoustic Kitty goes that they went back in surgically to the cat And rewired the brain to ignore things like the instinct to want to wander off in search of food if it got hungry, or to stop and lick itself, or to do whatever else cats do, and instead to follow commands.
And the version of the story, and this is, again, one that's a little more dubious than the other, is that they actually are able to train the cat to do what they want it to.
Right.
So why did this not actually see the light of day?
Well, well, it sort of did.
Before they sent it into service against the Soviets, they wanted to do one field test.
And the story goes that they brought Acousta Kitty up into northwest DC to do a field test.
Basically, they were going to send it into a DC park to just kind of sit and listen to people sitting on a park bench.
These weren't spies.
They're just normal people.
And so they drove it there in their CIA van.
This is electronics from one end to the other, vacuum tubes and lights blinking, oscilloscopes doing whatever oscilloscopes do.
And they hit whatever buttons they needed to to activate Acoustic Kitty, set it down on the road and watched in amazement as it went straight for the two men sitting on the bench.
It was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.
And the CIA techs in the van were stunned.
They were happy.
They were thinking about the raises they were going to get and the promotions and maybe they'd buy that summer home somewhere else.
They were paying attention to everything except for traffic.
And sadly for our feline hero, the story goes when Akusa Kitty got halfway across the road, Akusa Kitty got run over by a taxi.
I mean, that's enormously sad.
I mean, they experimented with the poor creature, and then it had to end like that for their own espionage reasons.
I mean, I'm very pleased, and I'm sure everybody listening to this, and especially, you know, my audience who love animals are going to be very pleased that this didn't happen.
But as we will hear a little later, this is not the first time that living things have been brought into service or nearly brought into service.
Yeah, sadly not.
I mean, I think that when we get to the point of desperation, we're willing to sacrifice a lot of our ethics in order to do whatever it takes to win.
One of the weirdest stories, and this involves human beings, was an idea to use Japanese prostitutes against members of the Japanese army in World War II to deliver toxins that would kill army officers who were having sex with them.
The delivery methods, well, I guess you can use your imagination how they would be, might be.
But ultimately, no Japanese officers died, and this one was a failure.
Can you talk to me about this?
Well, this is where doing a little too much might get you in trouble.
The OSS, they had a, within OSS, they had a group of people.
That's the Office of Secret Service.
Strategic Services.
Yeah, so this is the precursor to the CIA during World War II.
And the OSS had a division within it that did science in very, very far off, non-traditional science.
And one of the things they had developed was a strain of botulism that was invisible, which meant that the prostitutes could very easily hide it on their bodies that they were not wearing any clothing and was almost instantly lethal.
So this strain of OSS was sent out from Washington to being used by the OSS members in the Pacific.
And instead of just putting it right into service, which they could have done, they said, you know what?
We're good, smart soldiers.
We don't want to set up our agents in the field to get killed using a faulty chemical weapon that may not work.
So they tested it and it didn't work.
And they said, wow, geez, you know, thank God we tested this because it would have gotten our people in big trouble.
And they sent a letter back to Washington saying, look, we tested this stuff.
It didn't work.
And Washington was flabbergasted.
They said, how did this not work?
It worked on every single thing we possibly did here.
Try it again.
And so the Pacific guys, they tried it again.
They tested it.
It didn't work.
What turned out to be the problem was the Pacific OSS team tested it on a donkey.
Now, botulism is one of the most deadly things on Earth.
It will kill almost every living thing on the planet.
There is one animal, however, that is immune to the effects of the botulism.
The donkey.
The donkey.
So the OSS Pacific team picked randomly the one possible animal that this would not work on and determined that it wouldn't work.
So this is not something that failed.
This botulism was going to kill the hell out of every Japanese soldier that it came in contact with.
It was because of just a rare, random happenstance.
If they'd picked a dog, a cat, a bird, a gerbil, whatever, the thing would have been dead before it hit the ground.
But they picked a one animal that is immune to this strain of botulism.
One of the other flaws in it, though, would be even if it had worked, it wouldn't have taken very long for the Japanese to work that one out and start literally taking precautions.
Sure.
And in that case, you'd want the women to target the highest-ranking Japanese officers, not just some private.
That really wouldn't matter.
But even then, that brings a real psychological element to warfare.
If you think that anyone that you have any kind of a relationship with is going to potentially be working for OSS and could kill you, that really helps win the war.
It's called PSYOPS.
That's something that could actually make life far more difficult for the Japanese, even if there isn't anyone out there trying to kill them.
If they think there is, that makes life much harder.
So it's almost like a kind of terrorism.
The scare effect, the stabilization effect is much more important than the number of people you kill.
Well, absolutely.
And I think that terrorism now has terrorism used to be a word that didn't have a negative connotation to it.
And obviously it sure does now, right?
Because nowadays terrorists Target mostly innocent people, target people that are non-combatants.
Terrorism goes back centuries and centuries and centuries.
The idea behind it was, yes, to instill fear.
And fear is a key component of warfighting.
And so the idea of instilling terror is something that is important for a country.
I mean, that's why people wore war paint back in the day.
That's why they have whoops and yells.
And that's why the drum cores and others were created to try to create a psychological effect over your opponent in warfare.
Some of these stories cause you to mildly titter, like that one, at the way that the brains of the people who devised these things work.
And your book has both the humorous element and the respect in it, I think.
But there are some that make you laugh out loud, and this is one of them.
The plan to deal with the Germans in North Africa in World War II using the poo of goats.
Exploding poo, essentially.
Who came up with that one?
Well, it was synthetic goat poo, so it's not even real goat poo.
The OSS was actually going to manufacture fake synthetic goat manure and goat manure that was so potent that it would wake the North African fly out of hibernation.
So they were going to synthetically bring in an odor that would be so strong that North African flies would come out of hibernation.
So it wasn't exploding goat poo.
It was goat poo that was laced with something that could be delivered.
Yes, so the idea was to lace it with what the OSS called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, essentially a biological weapon.
That's what you have to call this, that wouldn't kill the Germans because if all of a sudden 10,000 Germans died all at once, they would know that they'd been hit with a biological weapon.
But it was to make them wish they were dead, make them so sick and so miserable that they wish they were dead with the whole idea that the Germans would assume that everybody just got sick all at once, which would be great because then they wouldn't respond in kind.
So this was the plan.
The issue with this plan, and somebody, we don't know who it is, someone at a very low level at OSS may have raised their hand in a meeting and said, hey, look, great plan.
Sounds like it might work.
But how are we going to deliver this goat manure to North Africa?
And the answer was, we're going to airdrop it in, right?
So we're going to basically bring airplanes and just drop this stuff all over North Africa.
And so the same guy probably in the back of the room said, okay, great.
Airdrop's fine.
But all the roofs of all the houses in North Africa are flat.
So about half of our synthetic goat manure is going to land on the roofs of the houses in North Africa.
So unless we are developing genetically engineered goats that can fly, how the hell do we explain goat manure on the rooftops of all these houses in North Africa?
And everyone kind of looked at each other and said, well, by the time anyone notices, it won't matter because the Germans will be sick already and no one will pay any attention to it.
So that was one where clearly they identified the problem beforehand.
They just didn't care about it.
And they didn't seem to factor in beforehand the idea that this would also affect innocent people.
Sure, yeah.
No, I mean, the flies are not going to be discriminating against just Germans.
And that was something that, again, a use of biological weapons in World War II would have been a game changer, right?
You know, it never happened, but it almost did.
And the only reason it doesn't is because of something the Germans, it's actually the Soviets and the Germans.
There was a plan to dump a bunch of extra German soldiers into North Africa, and that's why this plan was come up with.
But at the last minute, Hitler decided not to because of Stalingrad.
There's a siege of Stalingrad.
The Germans were losing, and Hitler decided to send reinforcements to Stalingrad, not North Africa.
So the plan never happened.
Right.
Well, I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief about that one.
Then there was the idea, and this is bizarre, to affix, and in this country, bats, quite rightly, are a protected species these days.
But in those days, World War II, certainly not, apparently in the U.S., to affix bombs to bats.
And I think they harvested 3,500 bats in order to do this.
To essentially start the campaign against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, I think.
You know what?
So there are still millions of bats in the United States.
And so at the time, there were even more than that.
And the idea was that what we all learn about bats when we're little kids is that if you drop a bat in the middle of the afternoon, it will do everything it possibly can to find a warm, dry, and dark place to hide out.
You know, that is its number one instinct is to get somewhere warm, dry, and dark.
In Japan, that would mean attics, easements, nooks, and crannies of houses and buildings.
Now, Japanese houses and buildings, the vast majority of them in the 1940s, were built of wood and paper.
So if you affix an explosive device, in this case, an incendiary device, to a bat with a timer on it and drop bats over Japan, they will find the attics and nooks and crannies of buildings.
And then when the incendiary device goes off, they will burn Japan to the ground.
And that's the simple kind of version of this story.
And you know what?
If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
It's one of these programs that I think actually could have worked if it had gone through.
How do you stop the bat from maybe if you've got forces in the area or agents in the area or friendly locals in the area?
How do you stop the bats homing in on them?
Well, that's the idea is that you wouldn't even need to invade anyone into those areas.
This would be completely independent.
You'd only do it in the most hostile territory.
You would drop them over Tokyo.
You would drop them over major Japanese cities.
And the bats would swarm all the buildings and land in the attics and dark places.
And then when the bomb went off, it would set these massive fires that would burn Japan to the ground.
And the idea behind this, that the man who came with this plan, to the day he died, and he died several decades after the war ended, said this would have killed less Japanese than the atomic bombs did because if parts of Tokyo start on fire, you can actually leave and get out of the way, and it would just basically burn down the city, and the people could escape.
And we have to say that in those days, a lot of their buildings would have been wood, right?
Wood and paper, and they would have just annihilated these buildings, as we saw when we started actually firebombing the Japanese cities at the end of the war.
So this is an idea that had some merit.
And it's an idea that in this case is literally only canceled because of the atomic bombs, because they get to the point where, like, look, we're not going to harvest tens of thousands of bats when we have these two bombs that can end the war in an instant.
And that's the only reason the bat bomb program doesn't happen is because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war.
What kind of a person, and there are a few of them detailed in the book, what kind of a person, what kind of a mind comes up with ingenious schemes like these?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
That's an interesting question because the people who come up with these ideas are very different from one another.
So it's not like there's one type of person that is just this ingenious mind.
They have very different backgrounds, very different ideas.
In the case of the bat bombs, it was a dentist named Lyle Adams, who was a tinkerer.
He was an inventor of his own.
And he was driving through New Mexico when he heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor.
And he had just been to all these caves that had all these bats and just kind of had this light bulb moment of we could use these bats.
And, you know, if you look at the nuking the moon plan, which we already talked about, these were some of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century.
Carl Sagan was involved in this plan.
A guy named Leonard Reifel was involved in this plan, and Reifel becomes the deputy director of the Apollo program later on.
So it's not like he's some weird scientist in the basement of the Pentagon.
This is a real 100% scientist who becomes a key member of putting men on the moon, not just blowing it up.
And we have to remember that in this day and age, in the day and age that we're talking about, there were no drones.
There was no robotic technology to speak of.
Right.
And that's why animals seem to make a ton of sense because you could keep people out of harm's way.
And you had just an almost endless supply.
Certainly in the case of bats in the United States, we're talking about millions and millions and millions of bats here.
An endless supply of your little mini soldiers that you're sending in on Kamikaze.
And I feel very sorry for them.
You were describing the biggest concentration of bats, which I think were in the Carl's Bad Caves.
Yep.
Which, you know, I'm glad we don't do things like that now.
Well, as far as we know anyway, Vince.
Okay.
The idea of having nuclear land mines, but then they discovered that nuclear land mines won't detonate in the extreme cold, so they find a way of heating them up.
Well, so this is the earliest version of the nuclear landmine, which used the design that was the first British atomic bomb.
Now, the problem with early 1950s electronics technology is that it was very susceptible to the cold.
So you had electronics that could freeze with an extreme cold.
Now, of course, the idea behind these nuclear landmines was to put them into Eastern Europe so that they would be along the path of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, where if you've been there in the wintertime, it gets really, really cold.
So the fear was that your nuclear landmine wouldn't go off because the electronics would be frozen.
So how do we actually warm these up?
They went through a lot of different ideas, whether it was fiberglass insulation or fluffy pillows or lots of different ideas.
And they finally landed on one that is pretty creative and unique.
And the idea was put some chicken feed inside the land mine and put some live chickens in there.
And their body heat would keep the electronics from freezing.
Now, this sounds ridiculous, but there's science behind it.
Chickens among all the animals, if you think, so think about humans, right?
If we are if our body temperature drops, you know, seven, eight degrees, we're close to being dead at that point.
That's close to having the hypothermic, you know, potentially dying of that.
Chickens can actually drop 20, 30 degrees in body temperature before they drop dead.
So there's a lot of heat that they can radiate into the area around them, which made them perfect for keeping these electronics from freezing over.
You have to have a remarkable capacity for lateral thought to do this kind of stuff, though.
It seems to me.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, these are some of the most creative people who have ever lived.
I mean, you could say creativity sometimes is really problematic, and it is.
But these are people that are thinking so far outside the box that you kind of have to admire them.
Even if sometimes these ideas you might think of as being kind of evil to animals or evil to people, you kind of have to admire the people who say, all right, forget all the normal ideas.
Forget all the things that you're trying to figure out.
What if we did this?
In 1943, you say, there was a project I didn't entirely understand for using a lot of balloons, balloons covered in luminous paint.
What was that for?
So this goes back to when we're talking about psychological operations.
And this was really trying to feed into our perception of the Japanese as a backward people who were very superstitious, who were really kind of tied to their religion.
And in the Shinto religion, which is the vast majority of the people in Japan practice Shintoism, foxes were considered sometimes good spirits, but most of the time evil, or at least, you know, almost kind of like tricky, kind of like a Loki, if you think of it, in kind of a way of that perspective.
And in this case, the idea was to use that against the Japanese, to use this superstition, or at least this perceived superstition against the Japanese.
And this was to create balloons with phosphorescent paint and kind of have them go up to look like flying foxes to try to scare the Japanese and get them running away because there's these spirit foxes that were flying in.
You also would have people making fox noises, you would have people walking around within the Japanese people, like agents who had fox smell that they would kind of be releasing into the air.
I mean, that sounds to me like the planners who came up with this one have been reading too many comic books.
A little bit.
And actually, that was the most tame of the fox-related ideas that were developed by this team.
They take it a step further and they said, forget the balloons.
Let's just take some live foxes and spray paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint and then drop them into Japanese islands right in front of the Marines.
So hopefully the Japanese soldiers will run away and the Marines won't have to kill everybody.
This was planned all the way up to the point where General MacArthur, who was the commander of all Allied Pacific forces, was shown the idea.
And MacArthur somehow was the first person to say, well, how are you getting the foxes onto the islands?
And the planner said, well, they're going to do just what the Marines did.
They're going to get dropped off these landing craft and they're going to wander up onto the island out of the water.
And MacArthur said, well, this, won't that wash off all the paint?
And everyone kind of looked at each other and said, oh, yeah.
Oops.
So another idea born out of a kind of desperation and that need to deliver results for your superiors.
Yeah, what was fun about this is that they actually did test this in New York Central Park.
Really?
And they dropped some spray-painted glow-in-the-dark foxes into Central Park, unbeknownst to anyone in New York.
And basically, it scared the living bejesus out of everybody.
People just running for the exits because all of a sudden these glow-in-the-dark spirit foxes were running around Central Park.
So the concept made sense.
It's just, again, with many of these programs, concept didn't translate very well to actual production and actual reality.
Gee, seems not.
Part two of the book, Astonishing Operations, and there are quite a few of them.
One of them is a plot to kill Hitler that you say astonishingly the British passed on, didn't do.
Well, that's the wonderful thing about is that there are so many different reasons that these plans don't happen.
In this case, Operation Foxley, which is the plan you're talking about, was a relatively straightforward plan.
It's not all that crazy when it comes down to looking at it compared to the other plans in this book.
But what's great about it, I think, from a historical perspective, is that the reason it doesn't happen, it's not because it would have been too hard to get close to Hitler.
It's not because no one would volunteer for it.
It's not because we couldn't really get to Hitler.
It's because the British high command realized that Hitler was the gift that keeps on given, that he was perfect for being in charge of Germany at this point, because he was such a horrendously bad, horrible military strategist that it was better that he was in charge than anyone who might be able to do a better job.
So they determined that Hitler was better alive than dead.
Right, because Hitler was basically the greatest thing that the Allies had going for them was Hitler's bumbling and stumbling his way through military strategy.
If you had taken Hitler out, they may have replaced him with a Rommel or a Gudarian or someone that actually knew how to fight a war.
And then all of a sudden it would have been very, very difficult for them to win versus Hitler, who was just kind of silly.
And then there were, in the book, you describe the manifold and numerous ways that the U.S. came up with, or plans certainly came up with, for destabilizing or even unseating Fidel Castro, the bogeyman for the United States in the 50s and 60s, you know, who he lived to a ripe old age in the end.
They didn't unseat or kill the man.
But one of the plans, and you'll tell me about some of the others as well, but one of the plans included dropping one-way air tickets over Cuba so that in the hope that to get away from the place, thousands of people would use them and go to the U.S. and freedom.
And even if they didn't use them, it would kind of make the Cuban security services run around, you know, frantically trying to prevent people from using them.
The idea was that, you know, we believed that no one wanted to live under Castro's state, that no one wanted to live under communism.
So if they had a chance to escape, they would.
So we'd give them a chance with air tickets.
But even, again, even if that fails miserably and no one flies, it would make Castro's security services so nervous that they would not have to not be able to stop running around making sure that no one is taking these tickets.
Did you include in the book?
I didn't see it, but I only did a speed read.
I want to, over Christmas, I'm going to read every word of the book.
But in my speed read, I didn't see the exploding cigar plan.
It's probably there.
Well, I mention it.
It's just, it's something that everyone knows so well now that I didn't spend a lot of time talking about it, but I certainly mentioned it in the book.
I mentioned there's a, according to Castro's bodyguard, the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 600 times.
600?
Yeah.
So that number may be inflated a little bit, but that's according to Castro's, but we certainly tried a lot.
And yes, and exploding cigars was one of these.
Exploding seashells, all sorts of things.
And most of these were very much like Bond villain plans, like, you know, these very intricate, overcomplicated ideas that I tried actually, the real strange outlier idea was the one I talk about in the book, which is sending a single person in with a rifle to shoot him.
Felix Rodriguez.
Yeah.
And that one is so strange compared to all the other ones that it really stands out as being, you know, kind of the unique plan as someone is like, just give me a rifle, sneak me in there, and I'll shoot the guy.
And it was too normal for the CIA in the end.
They decided to go against it because it was just something that didn't make a lot of sense.
Well, it would have been pretty obvious that the Americans were behind it if Castro was assassinated by a man who was working for the CIA at the time.
But there's a lot of, I mean, they never could get him in, which is extraordinary to me if you think about the fact that how can you not infiltrate somebody into an island?
It's surrounded by water.
There's a lot of different ways to go.
And a lot of people who may be sympathetic.
But then there are also those people who would say that the reverse of that plan, and conspiracy theories we know all these years on abound, but the reverse of that plan was what did for JFK.
Yeah, so Operation Northwoods is one that I almost didn't include in this book, just because it is a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists.
And it's one that people still talk about today, about the U.S. government is willing to start wars and make it look like somebody else attacked us.
And you still even have like 9-11 truthers who kind of look at Northwoods as being an example of this.
And really what it is, is from historical documents.
So this is not conspiracy theory.
We actually have historical documents from the military and from the CIA.
There was a proposed plan to make it look like the Cubans had attacked the United States, which would give us the legitimacy to invade Cuba and kick out Castro.
And the ideas were everything from having another, remember the main incident, essentially where an American ship would blow up in Havana Harbor, like which led to the Spanish-American War in 1898, or to the extreme of having terrorist attacks in the United States that we would blame on the Cubans.
This didn't sit all that well with me.
My parents met in Miami around this time.
I was more than likely a direct result of being able to have my parents safely live in Miami.
And so I've seen Back to the Future enough to know that if there are bombs going off all over Miami, that could be a real problem for my future self.
So I'm not particularly happy about this idea.
But really, in the end, this is one where, according to the story, there was a kind of a calmer voice.
And finally, John Kennedy said, no, we're not going to do this.
Do you think that the false flag notion there?
I get emails all the time from people who say there are so many false flag operations happening and have happened through history.
Do you think perhaps that it just simply these days gets too much publicity and that too many people have too vivid an imagination about false flags?
Yeah, conspiracies are insanely difficult to pull off.
We're talking about trying to get, in this case, dozens, if not hundreds of people all doing the same thing and keeping it secret somehow.
You can't get more than three or four people in Washington to keep something secret.
I don't know how you think hundreds and hundreds of people are going to do it.
And what's really interesting to me, and I live kind of in this world through the Spy Museum and around the CIA all the time, is people in the same sentence will say the CIA is behind everything.
It's the deep state.
They're overthrowing governments everywhere.
And then talking about how incompetent the CIA is and how kind of Keystone cops they are.
So you can't be both of those things, can you?
You can't be incompetent and super clever.
You can't have it both ways, right?
So if you're incompetent, then you're never going to be able to pull this off.
But even then, look, keep a secret with more than three or four people.
It's just, it's impossible.
And for me, that's what kind of dooms these conspiracy theories from the very beginning is this idea that there's no way anyone is this good at keeping secrets.
Also under the title of Astonishing Operations was somebody's big idea to actually engineer a tsunami.
Yeah, so this is this is something where we probably should have listened to you guys.
The British had attempted this and did the math and realized it wasn't going to work.
The Americans, on the other hand, said, what do they know?
We're going to still spend a lot of money researching this and did a lot of testing out in kind of the Pacific, New Zealand, Australia area, trying to see if underwater explosions, bigger and bigger ones, could potentially create a tsunami effect.
They never quite got there.
They got to where they created waves.
They created relatively large waves, nothing tsunami-like, maybe ones you could surf, but nothing that's going to take out a Japanese city.
But they put a lot of testing into this and a lot of attempts to try to create this artificial tsunami during the war.
And what was interesting, again, I picked this story because of modern day applications, because there was a computer simulation during the Cold War where they said, could nuclear weapons possibly create a tsunami?
And there are people who thought they could.
And then more recently, Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he talked about all these new weapons that the Russians were designing.
And one of them was this underwater drone submarine that he argued could create an artificial tsunami.
And, you know, what goes around comes around.
It's amazing that we're still having conversations now 70 years later about a technology that was first investigated by the British back in the 1930s.
And you know what?
The British were right back in the 1930s.
It's impossible to create an artificial tsunami.
They were the smart ones.
They gave up the research, you know, 80 years ago, and everyone else spent a ton of money trying to figure it out after the fact.
But Vladimir Putin's still intrigued, apparently.
Well, I think a lot of that, when you talk, everything that comes out of Putin's mouth has to be taken with a grain of salt.
A lot of what he's doing is for domestic consumption, is to try to convince his people that he's all-powerful.
Most of the time, the things he says are complete nonsense.
As you say, a lot of these things come straight from the files of James Bond, and you would think they were fiction, but then you realize that they're documented fact.
Over the years, a lot of people have tried to come up with the concept of the death ray.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, so the sun gun is an idea that goes back to Archimedes, right?
Ancient Greece.
There's the story of Archimedes at Syracuse destroying the attacking ships by redirecting the power of the sun with big mirrors.
This is something that, like you mentioned, was literally in a Bond movie.
Not all that great Bond movie, but it was a Bond movie.
And it was also something that was a huge plan by the Germans in World War II, was to harness the power of the sun to redirect it using massive mirrors in space so you could have a single beam that could basically melt people anywhere on Earth.
I can see Roger Moore's eyebrows raising as you say those words.
Well, I absolutely mean that you can imagine that kind of a weapon in the hands of Hitler.
Good evening, Mr. Bond.
You are here in time to watch the demonstration of my new technology.
I want to, you know, and for me, this is really interesting science because there is science behind this.
And the Germans, of course, are fantastic scientists.
But the need for kind of levels of resources that were way beyond the capabilities of the Germans is really what dooms this plan in the end.
You would need a mirror in space, essentially the size of like half of London in order to have enough power to redirect the sun to kill someone.
So this wasn't a problem actually for the Germans because, look, they're dealing with a thousand-year Reich, right?
They're going to be around forever.
So this was going to be a long-term plan for them.
They just kind of miscalculated their thousand-year Reich by 990, whatever years, and they never really got a chance to put this in practice.
But the people who were involved in this later on would be heavily involved in the U.S. space program.
Werner von Braun was part of this operation.
His mentor was part of this operation who later on comes and works for Von Braun in the U.S. space program.
So these are real scientists who are trying to develop these ideas.
And later on, von Braun, even in the 1950s and 60s, was still talking about maybe we could create one of these that could do exactly what the Germans were trying to do in World War II is create essentially a space laser using the power of the sun.
There are those who say that America has had a secret space force for years, for decades.
Do you buy any of that?
Well, a dedicated space force?
No, that does not exist.
But it's clear that a lot of the American space program was designed to be, you know, to help national security.
The first rockets that put men into space were clearly rockets that were designed to be ICBMs.
A lot of the early missions were to put defense satellites into space, to put reconnaissance satellites into space.
The space shuttle itself was redesigned by the National Reconnaissance.
This is all in public domain.
It was redesigned by the National Reconnaissance Office to be bigger, a bigger payload area, so that it could carry NRO spy satellites into space.
So there's always been this interesting relationship between NASA and the spy agencies or the military, because the understanding is there's no way NASA would get enough money to do their actual missions if there wasn't some kind of a benefit to American national security.
So there's been a close relationship since the very beginning.
What do you think this space plane that landed, I think, a week or two ago after hundreds of days flying around in space, what do you think that's about?
Well, exactly what everyone thinks it's about.
I think it's an attempt to, well, not an attempt, I mean, it's a clear mission to create an aircraft that's reusable that can, you know, once you're in space, you're moving at about 25,000 miles an hour.
So you can get anywhere on Earth in instant.
So it's not like the flight time from Washington to Moscow is going to take you 14 hours.
It's going to take you 14 minutes in space, right?
So it's, you talk about the ability to get anywhere and everywhere.
Now, this certainly could have an offensive mission, but more than likely, it's for surveillance.
More than likely, it's the ability to put an aircraft or a spacecraft anywhere on Earth at any time.
There are real limitations to satellites.
And satellites, we've been using them for decades now, but they're limitations.
They only appear over a target for a short time period, and then they continue to rotate around the Earth.
But if you could put a spacecraft right above any target you need to on Earth, then you can do some really interesting intelligence work.
Right.
Well, thank you for clearing that up.
The next section of the book, Extraordinary Technology, has more wonders and surprises.
Boy, including the idea to use, now tell me if I got this wrong, the idea to use an iceberg as a kind of aircraft carrier.
Well, the hope was to use an iceberg at the very beginning.
Like, let's go and chunk off a piece of the Arctic and find a nice flat iceberg that we can use to take off and land for an aircraft carrier.
And this makes some sense if you think about the idea that in World War II, aircraft carriers were incredibly vulnerable, vulnerable to German submarines.
And you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an aircraft carry and have it get sent to the bottom of the Atlantic very quickly by a couple torpedoes.
This is not something the British or anyone else really wanted to kind of get into this resource battle with the Germans that they're sure to lose.
Instead, there was this idea to use something that's unsinkable, right?
You can't sink ice.
Ice is going to float no matter what.
You can hit it with 100 torpedoes and you're not going to sink it.
And of course, it's free because ice is everywhere up in the, you know, the North Atlantic.
The problem was ice is not a material that we can be very confident is going to be the same everywhere you get it.
So they tried a lot of different tests on regular ice and they realized that ice was not consistent.
It was not all the same.
Just like all snowflakes are different, all chunks of ice are different.
And in some cases, ice would be able to stand up to hundreds of pounds of pressure.
In other cases, it would break under like 15 pounds of pressure.
They said, Well, that's not going to work, right?
We can't have an iceberg aircraft carrier that the first plane lands on it and it cracks in half.
So they're ready to give up until actually a group in the United States came up with a way to strengthen ice.
And essentially, this was to mix in what we basically the material that goes into newspapers, you know, kind of like that paper, the paper mache that goes into newspapers.
Is that cellulose?
I'm not sure.
It was cellulose-based.
The idea behind it was that this mixture they called picrete, actually, behind the guy named Jeffrey Pike, who was a man who originally came up with the iceberg aircraft carrier idea.
Pycrete took this wood pulp, this newspaper material, mixed it in, and it made it consistently strong.
In fact, stronger than steel.
So if you could construct an aircraft carrier out of picrete, then you'd have an unsinkable aircraft carrier that would rule the oceans of the war.
It's brilliant.
Now, the problem was they went up to Canada and they built the scale model of these aircraft carriers.
And when they did that, they realized that it would probably take every resource that Great Britain had for everything to build just one aircraft carrier.
So you'd have to stop building planes and tanks and cars and tires and food and everything else just to build one aircraft carrier.
It was that resource intensive.
So it really was only not done because of how expensive it would have been.
What I love is this, the kind of the coding of this story is that essentially when they realized this, they abandoned the scale model aircraft carrier in Canada and they said, all right, well, you know, we'll just leave this here, right?
It's too big to lug away.
It's going to melt anyway.
They came back a year later and it had just finished melting a year later.
So it took an entire year for their scale model carrier to melt in Canada, which shows how rugged this would have been.
I wonder why they haven't thought of doing something like this.
Maybe the environmental impacts would be too great to stabilize disintegrating ice flows.
Well, yeah, there's a lot of interesting.
I mean, I lead off this chapter by talking about the fact the United States government just spent billions and billions of dollars building the USS Gerald Ford, which is their new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier.
And one $100,000 Chinese anti-ship missile could send it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
And so I don't know why people haven't started thinking about potentially different ways to rethink the way aircraft carriers and other things are done.
Maybe not using picrete, but trying to think of different kinds of materials that might be more effective.
Well, maybe the hidden hand of commerce is part of that.
Who knows?
There was another plan just before we leave this section of the book about, which I didn't quite understand, but I know that you can explain it.
Let's just see.
And this was Project Bambi, intercepting nuclear missiles sent out by the Soviets in space.
Yes, we've been trying, and it's still in the news today, we've been trying to come up with a way to intercept ballistic missiles.
Star Wars, yeah.
Right.
Well, Star Wars and even some of the ABM systems that exist today, like Iron Dome and SAD and other things that you deploy around the world, we still haven't figured out a way to intercept the ballistic missile before it hits us.
We're getting kind of close.
It depends on kind of the metrics that you use.
But back in the 1950s, we were nowhere near.
And so a lot of the early ideas thought about, hey, look, let's fight fire with fire.
Let's use nuclear weapons in an attempt to stop nuclear weapons.
This was Project Nike.
Project Bambi was an idea in the boost phase, essentially, which would mean hit it before it kind of reaches its apex of its trajectory.
Lots of different interesting ideas that were thrown around.
Every one of them, technologically infeasible.
Not a single one of them would have worked.
Not only do they not work with 1950s and 60s technology, none of them would work today.
That's how, you know, how difficult this problem is, but also how technology, even though it's advanced so dramatically, still can't shoot down a ballistic missile.
So you got to give it to these guys in the 50s for being as ambitious as they were, right?
They're like, you know what, we can figure this out, even though people today can't do it.
But yeah, so that's part of a chapter where I kind of trace the path of our attempts, the United States particular attempts, to develop weapon systems that will protect America from Soviet ballistic missiles.
One of the most effective possibly was called Brilliant Pebbles.
And this was as basic as it gets.
Let's launch projectiles at the missiles and smash into them and try to destroy them that way.
It may have worked, but the funding was cut when the Cold War ended.
But it probably wouldn't have worked because, again, it is almost impossible to do this.
It's just, it's like shooting a bullet with another bullet if both of you are standing miles and miles and miles away from each other.
But, you know, ingenuity has its way quite often and people will always come up with ideas.
The last section of the book is the one that includes the title concept, nuking the moon.
And we talked about that at the beginning.
But there were other problems or other problems.
There were other potential solutions involving nuclear weapons that you talk about in part four of the book.
And one of them was to use nuclear weapons, this tremendous nuclear technology, for peaceful purposes, including trying to deal with hurricanes.
Right.
So I'm not sure how much the news of the stupidity happening here in Washington trickles over to the UK.
Quite a lot.
All right.
But a month and a half ago, President Trump threw out this idea of using nuclear weapons against hurricanes.
And what I thought was I laughed because I'm like, hey, you read my book, which he clearly didn't because there are no Pictures in the book, and it's not written in coloring crayon.
But the concept was not a new one.
In the 1960s, late 1950s, actually, there was an American meteorologist who had been working during the Bikini test.
So these are these huge tests out in the Pacific of all these massive atomic bombs.
Most everyone's seen footage of them, though, you know, the big, massive nukes going off over the water.
So he watched this and understood the power of these weapons and said, I wonder if I could do the math.
So let me sit down and figure out, can a nuclear weapon, even if a very, very large one, would it have enough power to blow out the eye of a hurricane, enough power to turn a hurricane into something other than a hurricane, a tropical storm or even less?
Plan A was to do that.
Plan A, he presented actually to not only the American Meteorological Society, but also a group called the Plowshares Committee, which was a people trying to find peaceful uses of nuclear weapons.
And most everyone came back and said, this isn't going to work.
And it's obvious it wouldn't work because every hurricane has enough power to equate to like 10,000 nuclear weapons, right?
So just way too much energy inside a hurricane to blow it up.
But his plan B was interesting.
I still find it interesting.
This was the idea that when hurricanes come from the east coast of the United States, they eventually turn north.
It's a natural progression based on everything from wind patterns to currents and everything else.
So it makes almost a check mark where it moves straight west and then moves north at some point.
That's why some hurricanes will hit Miami and then go through Florida and go up and hit New Orleans, like Hurricane Katrina did and Hurricane Andrew did.
That's why some hurricanes will hit North Carolina and then ride straight up the east coast of the United States and hit, you know, New York and D.C. and all those places.
Reed's idea was, what if we could turn them north before they actually hit land, out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere?
And he thought, what if we could detonate nuclear weapons on the outside of the hurricane to try to turn it before it got a chance to get to the United States?
Now, this is an idea that theoretically could potentially work.
The problem is there's only one way to test it.
And that's to actually detonate a multi-megaton nuclear weapon on the outskirts of a hurricane, which is fine if it works.
But if it doesn't, you now have a 200-mile an hour radioactive hurricane bearing down on Miami.
That's really not a good idea.
And that's one of those things that, you know, the idea is an interesting one, but the downsides potentially should really have occurred to whoever came up with the idea at a very early stage.
Yeah, and I think that this was a time when everyone was thinking kind of lofty thoughts about, look, we created these bombs.
They're the worst weapons anyone has ever created.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could find peaceful uses, things that would actually help humanity?
And so they were willing to kind of go beyond logical thought and try to find ways to justify creating the worst weapon anyone's ever seen.
And that's what Plowshare was all about.
And this was part of this program.
And, you know, hurricanes are really, really dangerous and they can kill lots of people.
And I understand the idea of a meteorologist, especially, saying, man, what if we could use nuclear weapons to stop people from ever dying from a hurricane again?
And yeah, sure, the whole idea of testing was one that he probably didn't think through as much as he should have.
But you got to kind of appreciate the effort in some of these cases.
Yeah, you know, full marks for ingenuity and for power of thought.
Not maybe so full marks for, you know, for the execution and the effects.
It's not in the book, but of course, somebody this year had the idea, I think a number of people may have suggested this, but it made the news anyway, both sides of the Atlantic, of dropping a nuclear bomb, I think, on Mars to try and terraform the place and make it habitable by changing the climate somehow.
Yeah, well, Elon Musk is.
Elon Musk.
Yeah, he needs a stick of cars.
This is a really stupid idea.
It's as bad as nuking the moon.
I think that people, for whatever reason, don't realize that nuclear weapons are very limited in their abilities to do anything.
They are really, really good at killing people, not so good at anything else.
In other words, they're not a surgical weapon.
Well, they're not a surgical weapon.
They're not a weapon system that will be used to terraform or a weapon system that will be used for building dams and rivers and other things that people were talked about during Plowshare.
They are designed to kill a massive amount of people all at once.
Now, nuclear power, on the other hand, we can talk about nuclear power all you want.
That's the different ballgame.
But when you're talking about nuclear weapons, they have one purpose and one purpose alone.
And I think people trying to find other ways to justify them is somewhat ridiculous.
And we can only look through history at the effect that they've had on this planet.
But the thought that you might use them on other planets where you cannot predict their effect is just astonishing.
And I wonder why he, before that story got out there, I mean, subsequently he thought again about this.
And, you know, there was an, you know, I think not a retraction, but there was another version of all of this put out.
And I think he went away from the idea.
And maybe it was a joke in the first place.
Who knows?
But, you know, it is an astonishingly blunt tool to use for anything, as you say.
Back to the wartime style and Castro's Cuba style efforts of subterfuse, et cetera.
Are we still doing those things today, do you think?
I hope so.
You hope so.
And I would rather the subterfuge, I would rather the kind of covert action, I would rather the kind of sneaky plots than invading countries.
You know, if there's a choice between sneakily going in and trying to take out Fidel Castro versus invading Cuba and killing thousands of civilians and many of our soldiers, I'll take the subterfuge every day.
In my experience, and certainly as a historian, and what I've looked at, is intelligence agencies have multiple jobs.
One, of course, is to keep the leadership of whatever country appraised of what's going on around the world.
What are the threats and other things?
But in many cases, the job is to keep us out of war.
And most of the time when we go to war, that means intelligence has failed in some respect.
You've failed to prevent that war.
And the more kind of underhanded we are, the more sneaky we can be, maybe the more we can keep out of full-fledged shooting wars, which we're so good at getting into nowadays.
And that's true on both sides of the Atlantic.
For whatever reason, you guys follow us into stupid places.
And every generation fails, it seems to me, to learn the lessons from the previous one.
So we had World War II following World War I. And, you know, we've had other conflicts like Vietnam following World War II and Korea.
We don't learn.
Right.
And well, it's the politicians don't learn, right?
And the politicians are so quick to send other people's kids into the combat and to fight wars that keep happening.
And, you know, and that to me is something that can be possibly solved or at least slowed down by really good intelligence agencies that can kind of have the ability to do covert action and to do somewhat sneaky things to prevent wars.
I mean, look at Stuxnet.
It's a great example, right?
So Stuxnet, if you don't know the background, it was a computer virus that destroyed at least a quarter of Iran's ability to enrich uranium and set the Iranian nuclear weapons program back years and years and years.
Didn't kill anybody.
Didn't even hurt anybody.
The alternative to that would be to bomb the hell out of the Iranian nuclear weapons plants.
That would have killed a lot of people and maybe started a war.
Yeah, but certainly turned opinion in some sectors of the world well against you.
Yeah, I'll take the computer virus every day.
You know, and that's something that was very innovative.
That was something that was a plan that maybe wasn't going to work.
And we said, you know what, we're going to do it anyway because it's better than dropping real bombs on real people.
So the point of the story is that we still have people sitting in offices quietly today coming up with the modern day equivalent of tying a bomb to a bat.
I hope so.
Because, you know, the guy who came up with that idea, Lydal Adams, his whole point was to end the war without having hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.
And that, to me, is a pretty noble cause.
If you can come up with ways to stop wars or end wars without killing millions, then you're okay in my book.
I mean, that's really what I consider to be what the intelligence agencies can be very good at if they're given a chance.
Well, I've loved the book.
I've loved the conversation.
I'm going to read the book in more detail over the Christmas holiday, Vince.
You are, I should have said this at the beginning, you are the curator of the, is it the International Spy Museum?
That's a really cool thing to be.
Yeah, no, it's a job that I'm the only one that has it, which is great.
In Washington, D.C., it's a museum dedicated to intelligence.
We have the world's largest collection of espionage artifacts on public display, talking about thousands of artifacts.
Everything from, you know, something as small as, you know, miniaturized cameras that could fit inside a buttonhole to large submarines and all sorts of crazy gadgetry in between.
It's a cool museum, if I do say so myself.
It's certainly something to go to, even if you've been to DC before.
Come check us out.
We're right in the middle of DC.
Relatively new.
We've been around since 2002, but we just redid the whole museum.
So it still has a new museum smell.
Still have a chance to see it before just about everybody does.
Well, you know, like a lot of us around the world, I'd love to see that place quite soon.
Vince, thank you so much.
The book is called Nuking the Moon.
I'll remind my listener again at the end of this.
Have you got a website or anything that you want to reference before we close?
No, I mean, if you want more information about the Spy Museum, just go to spymuseam.org.
Great.
And hopefully you and I can do maybe a radio show about the spy stuff in the Spy Museum at some point.
I'd love to do that.
I'd love to.
Vince, thank you very much indeed.
All right, thank you.
And you've been hearing Dr. Vincent Horton.
The book is called New King the Moon.
And I think it's the kind of book that would make maybe a great Christmas present for somebody.
You know, not that I'm in the business of suggesting what you buy for Christmas for people if you buy Christmas presents these days, but I think it would make a good one.
Lots of good stories in that.
And very, very unusual topic, don't you think?
Your thoughts about this guest and any other guests that we might have on the show, suggestions for them?
Always welcome at my website, theunexplained.tv.
Would love to hear from you.
So please send me an email.
And when you do that, I know it's the second time I've said that in this show.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline.
So please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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