Transcripts For CSPAN2 Vince Houghton Nuking The Moon 202407

CSPAN2 Vince Houghton Nuking The Moon July 14, 2024

Thanks in part to the generous support of sponsors and volunteers the book festival has been going on for 10 years, when you see them, please give them a thank you. A few but very important announcements, please silence all of your devices. We hope youre following gathersburg festival, if you post about festival use gbs, your feedback is very important, services are available at tent and website by submitting survey you will be entered into a drawing for a 100dollar visa gift card. Will be following books immediately after presentation. Copies of his book and i already have mine are on sale at politics and pros tent right across. A quick word about buying books, its a free event and does help festival if you buy lots of books. Purchasing books from festival partner politics and pros helps support one of the best independent bookstores, it benefits our local economy, jobs, excuse me, and, of course, books make the best gift. So if you enjoy this program and youre in a position to do so, please buy books here today. As i said in the beginning, i am super jealous of the city of gathersburg and festival, jealous in a good way as im please today see elected body come together to support a great idea as we all know, that doesnt always happen. When it does, Everybody Wins especially the community. The author we are going to hear from this morning vince is a historian and curator of International Spy museum. In nuking the moon, he writes of intelligence plans that went from conception to planning to testing to cancellation, what was most interesting to me was how out of the box these ideas were, how potentially catastrophic some of them could have been, spying, using iceberg as floating airfield, remember, it was during world war ii and the cold war not now with global warming. And could atomic power be used for something more than bombs . The stories and remember they happen are mindbogglingly and in some cases mind blowing but the real take away from me, reader of lots, et cetera, et cetera, its what makes bold idea and out of the box strategic Intelligence Mission worthy of risking the very soul of the United States of america. Thank you, and give a please to speaker vince. Thank you, appreciate that. I didnt know that i was going to be introduced by the mayor of rockville, a bit of an honor for me. You were here for the last speaker or if you were wandering around in the end, what an inspiration. Such an inspirational speaker but power of community and power of coming together. [laughter] this is not that. [laughter] i have to follow this guy, yeah. So this book was a bit of a passion project and i had written academic for University Press and i have to do something different. I have to do something thats going to get me out of wanting to rip my eyes out because i start at thousands and thousands of pages of documents and i wanted to write something that could be read by the layperson and and academic history is important, we need it, we need to be able to understand the world around it but its so confining to those in the ivory tower, its so confining to those who have the time to go through footnotes and read through what my ph. D adviser would say dont you any add adjectives because theres a noun that would go for it. Sorry, i love you. [laughter] but i wanted to write something that also coincided in this case with opening of new museum, 2 seconds, if you dont know, the spy museum reopened, we had been down for a little while. Come by and check it out, this is a great complement to that museum. The idea that a fun book that you can read just, i think, chapter by chapter like 1 every night if you wanted to, actually has real purpose and real meaning to it and i promise i didnt set out to write a real meaning, i just we wanted to write a fun book that was made you laugh and made you kind of smile and go, oh, my god and i was writing it i realized that there was a bigger point to all of this, the before we get there, the book itself is split into four sections and this wasnt on purpose, this was a result of the research that i did for this and i didnt do the research for this on purpose in the beginning, i was doing research for the other book and kept running in the archives into stories that made my eyes open and my jaw drop. I cant believe this actually happened and i think im going to win a pulitzer,i will have an affect or because its crazy plan that no one ever heard of this. I spent a couple of days, forget the research, sorry again, doctor, im going to follow this to natural end and if this happened and top secret, i can win all the awards and then id spent 3 days and realize it was canceled before it actually happened, i find that one document where it was like this plan is canceled and youre not suppose today supposed to growl loudly, but if youre in new York College Park and heard somebody, that was me. I was going to be stuck with another program that didnt exist, but after i kept seeing more and more of these and and after i realized how much resources were spent, the personality involved in planning the extraordinary missions, technologies, operations, i said theres a book here, but not that i have time to open museum. I was proofreading another book, the one thats coming later on. In the backiomind i started listing programs, policies, technologies and said when i have time, everyone says that, when i have time, i didnt mean to write this when i did. I run a podcast out of International Spy museum, i get to sit down with authors and be on the other side of all this, authors, historians, spies, people i find interesting and i was talking to one of them and said do you have any ideas for books, shes like, you have to talk to my agent, okay, sure, i will talk to your agent. What the hell just happened. Of course, i told everyone in the museum im writing this book, no, youre making a museum, what are you talking about writing a book, a lot of it was coming in early and staying late and putting this together and i had a lot of wonderful people that helped me do this and proofread stuff for me and told me what jokes worked and i didnt because im not a comedian, im a historian and within the historian realm got cool, but in normal people realm im not. Hey, does this joke work, no, no, dont do that. That might work in her head but doesnt work in reality. So it ended upturning into four sections, the first one is on animals, anybody see the story about the russian whale spy if not go check it out. Thats an operation that actually happened, the russians seemed to turn the whale in operator, fortunately for us it deflected in norway, wanted freedom in the west, not only human spies, animals are defecting to the west, so that kind of spurred on the ideas and what you see in the book are several and i will talk about those specifically attempts in the past where during the Second World War of the cold war we try to turn animals into allies in very unique and somewhat disturbing ways. We talk about technology and Nuclear Weapons, thats my passion, im obsessed with this topic but so many things went awry when we started talking about what we could possibly do with Nuclear Weapons and i will talk about why as we get further on, i want to get you an insight. Any chance i get at the muis veem, this is the official cia e and turned into covert listening device. This doesnt mean putting a collar on his neck, full fledge, cutting open the cat, putting a power pack inside abdomen, turning tail into the antenna and you laugh, this has to be out of a movie, no, real government documents, cia document that is detail this project and to take a step back, sounds ridiculous, the idea probably came from istanbul, turkey where the soviet embassy was somewhat open, now very difficult to get inside of it. When an american spy noticed that stray cats, would wonder in and out of soviet embassy, certainly inside the courtyard and would sit down and get scratched behind the ears by diplomats and in some cases jump and sit of the laps of kgb member that is were chatting and someone said, i wonder if we could do something with this and the idea kind of filtered back to the agency and this is a time when the agency was thinking big things. We can do big things with science. Anybody hold of mk ultra, cia had to do mind control. Usually losing lsd and other drugs. Understand how the brain work with electronic stimulation, a lot of experiments done on animals. The idea i know people laugh on the idea using a cat for anything because cats dont get trained, they dont do what you want them to, we are going to train a cat to be a spy, sure you are, pal. The idea was can we combine this knowledge of animal brains and to be able to use electronic timulation stimulation with a cat and fun part of the story is we dont know how it ended. We have two versions of how it ended. One comes from a mend of mine who is a member of board and actually former director of the office of Technical Services at cia. Top engineers at cia. He knew all the people who were involved in it and had access to classified data, he tried to train the cat, they realized they wasted too much money and canceled the program. Great story, probably the true story, but if it was the only story it wouldnt end up in this book, trust me, the other version comes from victor, highlevel cia executive who got disallusion with the agency, gives you idea of his book and talked about it in a very different way. He said that they trained the cat, when the cat had its natural instinct to wander off in searching for food, they grabbed it again, went back inside and did surgery and rewired the brain to overcome instincts to the point where it could do Laboratory Test according to what the cia wanted to. All right, weve got, now we need to do a fullscale field test over new robo kitty, the full scale test took place in northwest dc where cia drove kitty, maybe it was all black and spooky from the movies, maybe white van that said bobs landscaping or meryls flowers, lots of lights brinking blinking and they got kitty and they said, all right, theres two men sitting there randomly and we will see if our cat can go listen to their conversation, so click some buttons and they push some lights and twist open the door and put kitty in the street and hit the go button. To their amazement made a b line straight for the men. These are tech guys, these are nerds, these are my kind of people sitting in the van probably saying, i cant believe this is working. I cant we will get raises, we will get to go on vacation, buy the harley ive always wanted so the cia operation guys think im cool. As they are thinking they may not have been thinking to traffic patterns that were going on and hero got halfway across the road and got run over. Thats how one side of the story end, sort of. Thats when mind takes over and thinks about the poor agency techs are sitting there not only are they not getting their harley but they have their kitty road kill sparking and smoking in the middle of connecticut avenue and they have to go to scrape it off the pavement before soviets see it or god forbid the washington post. Thats an example of stories that are in the book. Another interesting one goes to world war ii, the primary focus, world war ii and cold war, this is a time when after pearl harbor, most certains, patriotic ones, most of us, figuring a way to help the government win the war. Theres a dentist, area near philadelphia, Michael Adams, Michael Adams wasnt just dentist but also adventure, he had great ideas, patents, u. S. Patent office, he had ideas for how to help move faster and ship communications, the idea was to create a Fried Chicken vending machine which is not what the story is about but the genius doesnt come around every day. [laughter] the idea was spurred on by listening to reports, but as he was driving back from vacation in southwest United States where he had spent several days going in and out of the cave system in southwest United States looking at all the bats that existed in the southwest United States, and something clicked, ive been looking at bats and i understand that bats will always try to find warm, dry, dark places during the day, right, when in doubt their instinct to find place to hide out when its light out and he had the second thought, japan is made of i wouldings and wood and paper, wood and paper and explosives, if we can fix an explosive to the leg of the back of bat and drop it over japan and naturally find way to attics and nooks and crannies and explosive goes off of timer and burn building, if we can find hundreds of thousands of them we can win war without firing a shot. A plan that might have worked. Lots of testing, it had some pretty good chance of doing so. The first test they did was a bit problematic, this is where knowledge of bats wasnt as high as we would like it to be even though manmade recruited was actually to top bat person in the whole country, learned in second grade that bats navigate using echo location. The top bat dude in the country, the top bat person, i cant figure out what word i want to use here, anyway, itll come to me at some point, and this is someone that you think would understand the physiology of bats, the first test that canister full of bats that would wake up halfway down and then spurs out. They miscalculated. When they dropped canister full of bats, they didnt wake up in time. I dont think if you have wings, first test didnt work out so well. Its not a failure, its a learning experience, they went back and collected more bats, the good thing that we have lots of bats, got more bats and decided this time we will get it right, we will put ourselves in a position where theyre not going to be asleep, miss calculated in the other direction and when they had the big refrigerator truck where they had the trucks, when they were asleep, devices, they opened the big doors to get the bats, they are all awake, they all complying out of the truck, now, the good news is they set up a fake japanese town as test site, half of the bats flew right to test site and burned the test site to the ground. Oh, my god, this works perfectly. The bad news is the other half of the bats went to u. S. Army airfield with towers and barracks and hangers and planes and burned that to the ground. [laughter] making matters worse, he didnt have the need to know, this was top secret program. He had no idea why his airfield running to the ground, when he showed up with Fire Department he couldnt get to his own building because he was told it was classified. He had to sit there and watch it burn but in tend it worked. Yeah, we lose airfield here and there, the whole idea is to burn japan to the ground. Admiral level and had to tush to chief of naval operations, the Top Navy Admiral and said we have this great plan, its georgia to win the war for us. Now, i didnt tell you what time period this was, that would have given away the ending, early 45 when admiral was told about the bomb situation, we have this gate idea, theres all the bats out in new mexico and training out in new mexico, testing, oh, i thought you were going to mention Something Else happening in new mexico because thats whats going to end this war not your bat bombs, we will not spend millions of dollars when we spent 2 billion in 1940 money on building the atomic bombs, as crazy as plan was, wasnt canceled because it was wacky or canceled because we were going to win the war another way and thats whats fundamentally found inside the stories, the vast majority of them worked so crazy that they had worked, the vast majority were so crazy that somebody, no, no, we will not do this. Most of them were canceled because they were superceded by events, some other technology came along that worked better because the war ended, because the cold war ended, and so its not like we stepped up and someone said, we will not spend money on that, it just went a very different direction, i want to make sure that i cover the topic that the book is named after before i cut off with time this is the last chapter in the book, i say its the last for a reason, project a11a, and this was program that came right after sputnik. None of you were alive when sputnik was around. Cspan is not looking around. You are all in your 20s. Thats one part of the issue, the second part of the issue is that diplomatic one, its a cold war big picture, we were the scientific and technological kings of the world or at least we thought until 1957, everyone looked to the United States as a scientific innovators knowing had we developed the atomic bomb, we built the first airplane, microwave popcorn, we were the scientific heros of the world but now all of a sudden the soviets had beat us on our own game. Why this mattered was that the developing world latin america, africa, east asia was looking for people to follow. This was the game of the cold war, what side do we want to join up with and science had always been our club, right, we can innovate your country, we have all the technology, we have all the innovation, you want to become part of the developed world, we can be your guy but now the soviets had beaten us at our own game so we needed something big, something to show the world that we were the top dogs. Essentially we needed something to say, no, no, not so fast, americans are the ones that invented big things and so there was truly a plan right after sputnik to detonate a thermal Nuclear Weapon on the moon and do it on terminator, the dark side and the light side meet each other with all of us here on earth would stair up and at the Mushroom Cloud that developed as sunshine through the back of it. This was an idea that the u. S. Air force had. Now, you might be thinking to yourself what kind of crazy scientist would agree to research this plan, well, the man behind it, the head of the entire operation was leonard riffle. I guaranty no stuff that hes done, started assistant to enrico, prominent scientists in 20th century, helped us built the atomic bomb. After the program he went to do Deputy Director of apollo program. Men on the moon, not nukes on the moon. He was in 1980s called to ukraine and belarus to tell them how to deal with attack, disaster and anyone watch football or sports or the weather or everything else, you watched weather before, leonard invented when people write on the screen, the guy goes, that was leonard rifle. This is a guy who was inventor,

© 2025 Vimarsana