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And now im so pleased to introduce tonights speakers, Nicholson Baker, author of ten novels, human smoke, substitute, going to school with a thousand kids and bestselling author, cath rib porter award from the American Academy of arts and letters, tonight he will be joined by journalist and host of wbr Christopher Lydon and they will be discussing nicholsons book. Convincing case for opening government archives to public scrutiny and Seattle Times called a genre transforming blend of history and memoir offering behind the scenes glimpses of efforts and home life and worst fears about his own country. That makes baseless trying to grapple. We are so happy to have them both here tonight so without further due, the digital podium is yours, christopher and nicholsson. Hilary, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Nicholson baker is a friend and weve had this conversation quite a number of times before and always an education to me. Let me just say i dont really need to introduce nick bake the other this audience but i think of him he writes 3 kinds of books, one sort of photo realist pros, minute things about shoe laces, opening book, but also his his childlike should i say but grown up in but then theres a special category and this book baseless, nonfiction but history never i wouldnt say never, antiimperial, and not the grand scope how the englishspeaking nations took over universe and all of that, literature and intimate and selfconscious, consciousness, modern consciousness in a nightmarish world and this genre in nicholson world, incredibly moving book in substance and in the way he went about it, but having said all that, as you have with me, nick, detective story. Its a story of a reporter story but also at the highest level of writers dairy, and all the great writers, most intimate writers. Yes, first of all, i want to say hello to everybody. Its amazing to me that these things can happen and a bunch of people, 60 people are here. I cant see you, but im so happy that you are here. Yes, the Harvard Bookstore is one of those places in my memory thats i can remember individual books that ive bought there and i remember buying edmund gross goss father down in the base rent and basement and i love the bookstore and im happy to be a part of it even though im not in the bookstore. I was trying to write about something that happened a long time ago in this book and, but it just occurred to me that since i didnt know everything about what happened along time ago because the documents were being withheld that i would write about what was happening while i was trying to write about what happened a long time ago, so i i ended up instead of having one timeline which is the timeline of the early cold war, harry truman, korea, china, a gathering sense of us possession and paranoia, i also was i wanted to write about my own life as i was trying to make sense of that early period, so just so happened, amazingly and wonderfully that my wife and i got to rescue the day before i started this i sort of it was like a clapper, start to seam and i started the book but it had happened that we had gotten two very difficult but very lovable dogs the day before, so they kind of accompanied me through it and ended up being important story. So its a book about trying to write trying to write a book about what happened a long time ago. A lot of stuff. I didnt know or i had forgotten that George Kennon was deep into the story. Alan douglas, one of the main players, frank, senior, into the job, new weapons, Harriet Truman was more involved. Who are the main players . Theres a lot of players. I think that bob bush, scientist and huge figure. President of mit. I can see him in the cover of magazine. We have not postwar but entering formally consciously along cold war with russia. Set us back there. Well, bush was one of the most famous and fascinating characters at the time. Life or time said that he had shock of hair, very intense guy. He liked to carve pipes and give them to he gave a carve pipe to alan dolis, to the people he admired he would give a pipe. He was a tremendously powerful figure at mit and he was in charge of the adam bomb project in world war ii but also in charge to have biological warfare project and thats where it all began, in world war ii. So it just so happen that after the war was over, he stayed on in the government and he started to, because he was deeply suspicious and unhappy about the russians, he decided that what was important to do is to ramp up the Germ Warfare Program in the United States in order to triumph over the numerical superiority of the russian army with germs. And that was his his solution to the cold war, was to make russian plants sick and russian people sick. That was a bad idea. We cant beat them on the ground in human force, we have to have Something Else . That was a refrain that was repeated over and over by the secretaries of defense, by all the people in the pentagon. They were aware every minute of every day that if we try to fight the chinese armies and the russian armies and the east german armies that we were going to lose and therefore we had to come up with a smarter solution, a new kind of weapon, because by 1949 the russians had developed the atopic bomb so there was parity there. What were we going to do . How would we win this war that seemed to be in the offing. It became worrisome when the korean war started. It was a war that was not called a war by harry truman but because there had been artificial line drawn across the country by korea by two functionaries meeting in the pentagon. The north became communist and the south became an ally of the United States and therefore there was sort of polarization and it became and became involved in civil war in area. As soon as that happened as if it was an electric shock that went through washington and everything that had been plans, schemes, suddenly became specific and especially when the United States started losing, there was a feeling that, well, the russian tanks were better than the american tanks, for instance, and things like very concrete things started questions started to be asked and the main question was, what do we have what do we have in our arsenal that will win this apocalyptic war thats just around the corner. Nick, there are two very specific questions that you ask in this search and one is, did they actually put all these bugs and and chemical agents together . We knew they actually did they actually have serum or whatever it was going to be and the final smokinggun question, did they ever use it . They have never they never quite deny that they wanted to find something and they were working on it, they were commissioning scientists to build it but theyve always denied that they never used it, the chief of the government in north korea and also china eventually accused the United States of planting smallpox during the war. Get to that fundamental question. Did we or didnt we, did we have it and did we use it . Well, unfortunately i think the answer the short answer is, yes. [laughter] the chinese and the north koreans were very furious when they brought these charges. They sent a cable to the united nations. It wasnt something they just did casually one day and thought that was a nice thing to say. It was a very serious set of charges and what they said initially that in november of 1950 when the americans fled to the south of korea after a massive defeat, after the chinese counterattacked, that the americans had left behind diseases and then the americans said thats ridiculous and silly and, of course, we didnt do that. And then several months later a mysterious new disease appeared in north korea called korean hemorragic fever and exited in series of dots along the belt of korea, along the 38th parallel which mystified the american epidemiologists so that i think actually happened. Then there was a second massive propaganda battle between the communists and the anticommunists, the americans and the british and the french, and that battle hinged on whether the americans had flown over individual airplanes and dropped mysterious insect bombs, if you can believe it, on in the snow of the the very rural areas of china near the korean border. And that, i think, is has a slightly different answer and it hinges on the books title, the books title is baseless, the reason its called baseless is because operation baseless was the name of Top Secret Air force program that aimed to perfect biological and chemical weapons at the earliest possible date and it was a project that sprang into motion on an emergency basis as the korean war got bigger and became more well, just everything got worse in korea. So project baseless was what was interesting about the word is that it has denial built into it because the state department was saying that this is a baseless accusation, these are baseless charges and the expectation was that these particular weapons, if they were used, one of their advantages and this was written about, one to have advantages of biological weapons is that its very hard to determine whether these things happened spontaneously because there are diseases or pandemic to a country or whether they happened because some other foreign airplane has dropped feathers doped with various diseases. Let me just say they decided to yeah. I want to quote your man tom kennedy because didnt manage to put in podcast but we did on this book. Right. The United States government, of course, denied they had planted this hemrragic fever no less than New York Times wrote story, theres no evidence for this charge at all, but you spoke to an exmarine tom kennedy who had been there, you talked to him in manhattan and he said that he had been told on, you know, must have been in hospital that he had a new did called hemorragic fever carried by tick and there was no history of hemorragic fever in korea. This is in 2015, only 5 years ago. I, he said, one of those American Service members exposed to the secret crime against humanity. Thats pretty close to the horses mouth. How do we weigh that . Well, hes the guy who woke up with a fever one day in korea and he was medevec out and he said theres 3 hut, hut 1, hut 2 and hut 3. If you go to hut 3, you are going to die, hut 2 you have a chance and he went to hut 3 and he survived and then discharged with a completely false diagnosis. Hemorragic fever was something that spontaneously happened. Hes trying his best to explain to himself something immense that happened to him as a young man in korea and it happened to a number of men and there were people who americans who died. The thing is that hemorragic fever is still a problem in korea and it was a problem that was studied by japanese germ experts during the Second World War and purified and intensified by them and then the americans hired the same germ ware warfare experts and the fever appeared. Theres a very strong case to be made that a small very evil program happened in somewhere around november of 1950 in which the americans decided to use japanese know how to infect people in north korea. I do think thats true and i think that one of the victims was tom kennedy. Can i add a little bit of the japanese background which i happened to know because a wonderfully, marvelous writer, dear friend of open source and of all all good people, Gene Sullivan wrote a book about the tokyo war crimes, tokyo trials of war crimes that never really took place. We all know about the nuremberg trials of germans, matching trials in tokyo which were we will block out in some face because we would have been called about the Nuclear Weapon we dropped on nagasaki and hiroshima. Theres no question that the japanese had dropped all kinds of evil bugs on china before world war but the japanese, they were the World Leaders in this technology and part of this story youre revealing or confirming is that the United States caught onto this and were using the japanese in some fashion in this whole project. Have i got it right . This is a global monstrous story. And gene did a good job in telling the story, absolutely indispensable book and im sorry that shes gone and she would be incredible witness in this covid moment. Shes she was the wife of matthew who is also a major figure in this book. I quote both of them in the book because they are both so important, but what she what she chronicled was the fact was something that other people have talked about too but she did the best job of it that there was a desperate attempt to get as many of the japanese germ warfares and get them away from russians and into american whoever orbits and hide them from view and they decided that the war crime trials should take place and they had a huge germ japanese experts and they held their own trials and theres a full transcript of the trials and its really an appalling book because theres no question that everything that people are saying in that book is is absolutely, its an absolute transcript of what people actually said and the japanese scientists said, i am so i so regret what i did and its just an amazing book, actually, its an amazing book, but what the result of it was that the russians were upset, worried, frightened of the United States plans. The United States meanwhile had teams of experts interviewing all of the japanese savants of biological weaponry and figuring out how best to take what they had learned, they had done experiments on humans so there was it was actually priceless into their way of thinking and pulled those things back to camp, germ warfare in the United States and see if the diseases could be further perfected and intensified so that we could then apply them in a hostile to the russians. That was the flow. Quick emphasis and i want to go some place else. Here we are, trump calling coronavirus the china, the china virus. China every once in a while humbles under its breathe, well, maybe its an american bioweapon, maybe its all politics. We hear incredible depth in the history. What is possible in the manipulation of the coronavirus even now since you finished your book . Well, i think the history of germ warfare in the United States is history of american scientists getting sick from their own weapons. The Lab Accidents are just a constant. In this book theres National Institute of health, theres a man who decided he will study cue fever and study it because its dangerous disease and he will weponized and takes it and people die. This is a refrain in history of American Laboratory science that diseases get out of laboratories. The first thing, if theres a murder in a couple, you want to ask did the husband do it and the first thing you always explain if theres exotic disease that breaks out in a certain place and you always want to look to see if theres a laboratory in the area. So i think i do not think that the chinese are involved in some sort of evil plan to cook up a germ weapon, they are like the americans very concerned about getting a lucrative vaccine for various viruses and they and all of the american laboratories were doing the same kind of work, National Institute of health was paying to do this kind of work, the fact is that it may be something that happened in a laboratory but the first thing you want to do is ask the people who are in charge of the laboratory to open their freezers and their notebooks and explain what happened. And that hasnt happened, so i want to digress because assaying in the outset, this is a historical inquiry but its also as we theres a lot of nick baker. Would you read a paragraph and i bet you will find it. I think its page 225, but youre talking about your method , your house, your dogs, your wife, your weather. There you are. Why do you write these books . Well, this is the book is so this chapter, the title to have chapter is april 15th, 2019 monday, each chapter is titled by the day of the week and i just had gotten wound up and i sort of half revealed my theory about what happened with this mysterious 700volts that dropped from the sky and i ran up steam. Every day i tried to write something and i would get exhausted and be done, so the next day starts, the edges of old secrets are blurred and the middle is spongy and there are bits of recorded troops spread around in the secrets like pieces of ceramic. Ive been thinking about japans rice crop and then i go upstairs, come back downstairs and then i make a note. You do some of your best work on the staircase, nick. [laughter] thats so nice of you, chris. Upstairs, i thought, what do i really want from a book. I want truth in every paragraph, i want surprises, i want a sense that everything is not hopeless, that we can do better. I want a sense that life is a complicated mixture of emotions and inconsistencies, life is a sandwich. I want to include or simulate the pleasure of eating a sandwich. [laughter] and then i finally say and i have to get to this and the dogs are so important to me, when i woke up, whenever it was, hours ago now i guess, i reached out with my hand and found out that cedric had screwed it up that he was elongated sleep between emma and me. I held