Family was poor and lived in the middle of nowhere and the chances of them coming together as leaders of the world was you know . And they realized that and said Something Special happen to me, you and Something Special brought us together. And i think one thing i should have added that maybe people were right and the house was haunted. What happened there was so extraordinary and in a way so mysterious and so extra worldly that, you know, maybe they are right, maybe it is a ghost house or haunted house. Host well it is an ex extraordinary story and thank you for your time. This was a lot of fun. Welcome. On the next washington journal, former u. S. Ambassador to iraq, James Jeffrey is here to talk about the latest options in iraq and options regarding isis. And a look at the proposed 12 percent increase in the high gas tax to increase highway funds. Later, draw breakspear from the state bank super visors conference on the emergence of currency. Washington journal is live every morning at 7 45 on cspan and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Remind your children in this year when we are the first generation to experience the tax on the United States. We are the first generation of americans to feel what it is like to have our government buildings attack. Remind your children are freedom isnt free and the countrys grea greatness is found in one another. That is what the starspangled banner is about. A threeday fourth of july weekend starts on thursday. Visit joe howl talking about the radiation experiments and sunday at 8 p. M. , a preview of Jeffrey Angles manuscript on george h. Bush and the peaceful end of the cold war. Craig nelson writes about the history of atomic science and the development of nuclear weapons. He talked about his bock at the New York Public Library. This is just over an hour. I remember going to the library when i was 11 and checking out a big beautiful illustrated book printed in 1956 ent titled our friend the atom by a german science author. It featured a preference about a man who rubbed a lamp and brought forward a genie and that was an atomic weapon. He had he had to be handled carefully. The man didnt want this responsibility but the genie told him now he was freed, his discovery couldnt put him back into the bottle. He had to decide how best to use him. Tonights presentation of the the age of radiance relates the tail of the man and the genie in more detailed form. The book tells of the science whose interest in the atom killed them and how hitlers scientist were driven from the country and the peaceful sources taken by nuclear research. The fireman who battled the disaster at chair noble loom as long as einstein. The power of the atom is neither an unalloyed good or evil in and of itself but very much the p product of how carefully we use items we discover. He has produced several books. The first hear heroes was about the dolittle raid in japan and lets get lost features the authors travel to unusual parts of the world and the odd experiences that accompanied them. Other things have appeared in vanity fair, the wall street journal and the saloon. Please welcome the author of the age of radiance, craig nelson. Thank you so kindly. It is such a thrill to be invited to the New York Public Library because i have been a patron since i moved here. As a historian it is a major part of my work and my Branch Library is mulberry street and a dr. Sues book was one of the first i read to think i saw it on mulberry street. There is nothing in this book as good as seeing david bowie who lives on my street. So you can see how history folds in and some of things we will be talking about. Five years ago when i started working on this book if you asked me what radiation was i would say it is scary, it is dangerous, it is cancercausing, it is evil. And probably this is what many of you think, too. And now i still think many of those but they are tempered with other ideas. First i learned about radiation is caused by atoms that are chubby and fat and they were adorable and so fat they break the bond of nature that create the Material World and spit out little pieces of themselves. So that is what radiation is. It is sputing out particles or gamma rays. So you can think of them as being the hollywood starlets of the periodicaleriodicalleriodic are balemic. And they create a charm about them. For example, when marie curie would go into her lab, she would leave out her radium so it would be glowing like fire flies on the wall. But after she put the radium away it was noticed the walls were still glowing. One person said when you picked up the silver plutoniom it was warm like a puppy. But the solution for holding that puppy too long was called high amputation. So it is a scary puppy we are talking about. But the entire subatomic world has this disturbing quality. We talk about radiation overtime as a half life and thing about this object that is sending off rays that is dangerous to us. But really the entire subatomic world is like that. Here is an example. Lets say you are flying in a plane. You look at the window and see a bunch of specks. And because you are a world class doctor you create a mathematical portrait of the speed they disappear and you have created a problem to define them and you know there is not a lot of melody but there is a a lot of rhythm. You take the new set of calculations based on the waves. This is how in the subatomic world we can use two different int instruments to noting the particles are waves powering the forces underneath. And this is how something in the subatomic world can be a particle and a wave. So all of that is creepy and disturbing. But before we get too much of the science, i want to backup. One of the things that is sad about history the way we learned it is the way to this and that when this great man was born and when he died and the guy who started history had a different idea all together. He had that history is about one thing and one thing only and that is have i got a story for you. Once upon a time there was a little girl who was the youngest of five children when was once prospering but then they fell on hard times. So a deal was made to work for two years while i go to university and then i will turn around and do the same. In that moment it was illegal for women over the age of 12 to get an education and they were getting around that by attending a floating university. It floated so they could not track down who was running it and throw them in a labor camp. It did a fantastic job because she got into medical school at the university of paris and off she went. And the first couple jobs she is unhappy and it is terrible. Then she starts working for a family that runs a sugar beet plantation and they love her and their six kids are adorable and then the oldest son comes home from school. And he and manya fall head over heels in love. They are dating for a year and he said finally i am going to tell my parents we are going to get married. He goes and does that and all of the kids know and Everybody Loves her but in fact the parents say no way. You are not marrying this moneyless no body. You are marrying up. And he said i am going to work this out and talk them into marry you and they see each other secretly for six months, the parents find out and fire her. She is back in warsaw and heartbroken living at her fathers home. And the letter comes, i finished school, i am engaged to be mur married and now it is your turn. Come to paris. But she is so in love she can not give up. And then the letter arrives forget it. My parents are never going to let me marry you. Decades late she became a famous mathematici mathematician because she didnt marry him and left for paris. I love this story because it shows you, first of all, dont always follow your heart, especially if you are 19, but it shows you what would happen if she had never left poland . She went on to discover the forces of radium and polonium and realized radiation came from within not the outside and they discovered you can use it to treat cancer because it has an affect on fast growing cells. And i happen you heard the comments on the couple and how good they were. But after piere died marie had an affair with paul. And this is the only women. Here is maria. Here is our white cap idea. Here is einstein. Okay there we go. These are the greatest mind of science in 1927 and they were nappy dressers. Marie has an affair with this man next to einstein. She and paul had a fantastic relationship and they rent a house and their letters back and forth are passionate and she comes back to live after piere was dead and probably affected by working with radio active materials. And they are madly in love and it is like she has a second life except there is a problem and paul is married and even though his wife doesnt mind he has a m mistris she fiends it is the most famous person at the time. And they Start Talking about how she is a home wrecker and a polish immigrant and saying she is jewish and she is almost the only person in the book who is not jewish. It becomes such a scandal that when she is ready to go off to sweden to get her second noble prize they say maybe you should come and get this next year. She called einstein and says what should i do . And he said g get the prize. That relationship falls apart and paul goes back to his wife as the women in the audience guessed. But paul says before it breaks i have this gogetter named fred and you should hire him. She does and after a year fred says maria i want to marry your daughter. And she makes him sign the first prenup in history. Marie was wrong. They a they have a fantastic method and discovered fundament fundamental radiation. And the reason i told you this story is at the end marie curie was the first women to win a noble prize and her daughter was the second. Isnt that fantastic . Fred was a hunk. After fred and iran discover artificial radiation everyone around the word start said e eradiating everything. And a chemist in germany and none of you have heard of these even though she is the center of the history and i would like to tell you her story. Lisa might ner was the First Women University professor in the history of germany and the second women to receive a degree at the university of viena. She was kicked out for having j j jewish ancestry. There she is at the age of 60 all washed up. Her boss hates her, should see not being paid, she feels washed up and alone and cant believe this happened to her. Her nephew comes for a visit on christmas and they have something called loot fisc and that is like when you go to a 7eleven and by beef jerky except it is fish and feels like jello. Then they go for a walk and all she can talk abo expartner auto hahn and his findings he is having. What auto is doing is pointing a strome of neutrons at uranium and getting bazaar results. They think maybe their instruments are wrong or their chemist. Lisa sits down, takes out a pencil and a piece of paper, and takes uranium atom and how much it weighs and the stuff they are getting out and applies einstein in the middle and it fits. She has discovered vision. When auto goes back he asked his neighbor what they call it when bact bacteria splits and the neighbored fishing. In the United States especially all of the Anglo American scientist are working on radar. They dont care about this. They think splitting atoms is whacky. But everyone fleeing hitler is thinking what it hitler gets the atomic bomb and we dont have it. So normally we are told the story that einstein and others wrote calculations on a board and poof. But it took three of the most terrifying experiments in the history of science to make these bombs. The first one happened in the middle of the city of chicago in the argon woods. The university of chicago president said we dont have football here any more so no one is using our football stadium so you can use that. And they found this squash court inside the football stadium in the middle of the city of chicago and this is where the First Nuclear reactor was created and this is called the third most dangerous experiment in history because what if something had gone wrong. But nothing went wrong. It was the most perfect experiment anyone had seen and he has the paton on this style of Nuclear Reactors today. One thing very funny happened with the soviet spies who were sending word of this back to mouse moscow and there was a translation issues so instead of moss court they thought the First Nuclear reactor was in a pumpkin patch. I know you heard there was going to be a reading and so i will read a little for you so you are not disappointed. In 1921 a young woman named catherine that she would soon die. Catherine decided to spend the rest of her day as a wife to a chicago millionaire as old as her daddy and live out west on the page family ranch named for the sun sets where the peek snow caps burned red. A pale jewish boy the following year had a cough and showed up to stay at the ranch and she taught him how to ride a horse in every weather. A few seasons later bob returned to mexico with frank and this time catherines page took them 9500 feet to a cabin with a fire place made from clay, surrounded by 154 acres of meadows. The two boys convinced their dad to rent the place and robert would continue as an adult until he could die it for 10,000. He and frank went there every chance they could living our great guide dreams and riding horse back thousands of miles and living on sausage, chocolate covered raisins, cheese and whiskey. If you have a man, ladies, who is the object of your interest and he is not paying enough taverns attention, history suggest chocolate covered raisins and whiskey should be tried. He wrote my two great loves with phys physics a new mexico. It is a pity they cannot be combined. He took a ride with catarrhine to a volcano crater and a stream which cotton wood flourished. You know i grew up in a jungle town and i love the southwest and think it is beautiful so i get this part of the story. Now, two kind of bombs were made. The first from uranium and it was so simple they never tested it before dropping it. The first time it was tested was when it was detonated. This was a shot of uranium was thrown into a bowl of uranium. So the one who helped discover fishing went off into the cannons and created the second more dangerous experience in history where he created a guillotine advice and did a set of washers where you could change the size of the plug and another set of washers where you could change the size of the bowl and he would drop the washers with his guillotine and they would pass through the bowl for a couple seconds and create a very split second super criticality and one american said we were trying to come as close to an atomic explosion without blowing ourselves up. Carefully notice what this bomb looks like and this is the plotonium. And they had the concept that plutonium would be pure but it wasnt. They had to compress it from the size of an orange to a marble and that would make it work. The only way to do that would be to employ it on both side. These are are firing at the same time to compress them and my favorite scientist came up with this. He createded the fundamentals of the mordern computer. He was such a good mathematician his wife said johnny can count everything but calories. He like today play german music loud. He did the calculations that made the plutonium bomb work and he was a natty dresser that when he wore a three piece suit going bury riding in the country. And he liked to drive his car and read a book at the same time and crashed so often into this corner here it is named for him to this day. Right after the bombs were dropped, america became excited about this and the government explained tht that the reasons we had was because we knew atomic secrets. And what they were doing was an engineering and the real genius was going done at oak ridge, tennessee because they were creating the fuel that goes inside the bombs. And they had to do it with different methods. One was a thermal defusion, one was a drip, and they had a prot proton. And they had a thermo or plutonium device. But the great thing from oak ridge was they discovered a special sealant and that entered american homes. One thing i am sad about the fact that the atomic age is ending is that the bombs were beautiful. Lets look at 13 of them together. I would like to see one. Im sorry. Now we have the most dangerous experiment in the history of science in america. Having lunch together here with Edward Teller and he said i dont know why we are making fishing bombs because it is growing to create heat. You could merge hydrogen and become a fusion bomb and adam spent 20 years trying create themo nuclear or fusion weapons. He would sit at his desk and come up with bomb ideas. The backyard bomb was my favorite. It was emormious and kill tons of people and you could just set it off in your back yard. And here is Edward Tellers first test in 1952. This is when the bikini was first introduced because like the fusion bomb it is small and devastating chat devastating. This is called the bravo bomb which is 15 mega tons and created a fire ball four miles in diameter. The people said it was like watching a diseased brain appear overhead. It started snowing and that was radio active fallout from the island it was sitting on. One of the incredible side effects of this is the infected a japanese fishing boat and one of the fischfisherman died and f the tuna affected was sold in the japanese market. And godzilla came out after that and many of us thought it was funny, but many japanese watched it and saw the movie being about the monster american inflicted on them and also what their children were turning into that their descentants were going to be like this. And many japanese would get so upset and run out of theater. And here is a slide out of order. Many people ask isnt there a possibility there will be dirty bombs that terrorist will have nucle Nuclear Bombs and the worst terrorist attack was done with box cutters and flying lessons so i dont think the next step is Nuclear Science. But this is something that could make you nervous and that is that we have a huge number of atomic plants all over the United States. Some are where weapons are stores, produced, or where power plants are and the lines are the Transportation Network and since we dont have a way of disposing Nuclear Materia