Atomic Artifacts

"By hunde yokreiz" is often often a worker with middle-to-find,

"das echte linderung verschafft." "Einfall for eerentiratzt."

“"Den, nur ein Tierarzt, kann eine verlässliche Diagnose stellen"”

"und ihre Hund, wirksame linderung verschaffen." "Sprechen sie mit irentiratzt" "und finden sie eine passende Behandlung gegen yokreiz für eeren Hund." "Walterinformationen finden sie unter yokreizhunde.de." "So, a few years back, I woke up in the middle of the night,

"to my wife saying, "Lulu, get out fire, fire." "And I looked through the window, "and in front of me was just a blaze of orange." "The apartment building one over for us was on fire, "and I had that moment.

"What do you take? "I grabbed my kid, my computer, "and this journal, I was making of my kids, "like footprints and photos and stuff." "And that was it. I didn't even get my wallet.

"I didn't even put on my shoes. "And now I know. "That's what I would take." Luckily, in my story, nobody was hurt, but the episode we're about to play for you

is about this question of what to take if something much, much more destructive we're headed our way. Figuring that out was a real project

“that the most powerful people in our country”

were grappling with,

but it's a project you probably have never heard about before

because it was kept entirely secret. We first released this story back in 2020, but with our big 4th of July, 250 years celebration around the corner, I listened back and thought it was a strange,

but ultimately profound reflection on what this whole American national identity actually is. So without further ado, here we go. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening. Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio.

From ringing. WNYS. This is Radio Lab. This story begins. I guess you could say with a mystery.

Hi, it's Garrett. Hey, Garrett. Simon here. How are you? I'm well, sir. And it comes from producer Simon Adler.

Yeah, so this mystery all started just a couple years back when this guy. I'm Garrett Graff.

“I'm a historian, journalist, author, et cetera, et cetera.”

Was handed an ID badge. So I was working at Washington, and magazine at the time. And one of my colleagues found a government ID badge as he was commuting in one day.

Garrett says his colleague was just walking down the street when he saw on the ground this ID. And the colleague pretty immediately realized that this was not just any ID. It belonged to somebody with like a pretty high security clearance.

You know, he brought it into me. And he goes, hey, like you cover this stuff. Like you can probably figure out how to get this badge back to this guy. So I'm looking at the badge and trying to figure out, you know, sort of where this guy works.

And it's clear it's for someone who works in the intelligence community. And when I turn the badge over, it had two sets of driving directions on the back. One labeled short term, one labeled long term. Driving directions on the back of the ID.

Yeah, to where? The short term instructions obviously led to an office building in Arlington, Virginia. But the long term directions, you know, I didn't know what they would lead to, or sort of just how dramatic it would end up looking like.

So Garrett shuffled over to his computer. I get on Google Maps, Google Satellite, and follow the directions. You're just like clicking along. That is absolutely what I was doing.

Like sort of turn left here. Continue straight for 10 miles. Keep right at the fork in the road. Drive off down there. Before long, his satellite journey has taken him miles from Arlington.

Way out into Virginia, getting more and more rural, as I'm dragging west. Rolling hills turn into farmland, then planes. And after several minutes of this and several hundred clicks, Garrett finds himself in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

And looking at the satellite, you know,

I could tell that basically the road went sort of

a hundred or two hundred yards further up, and then disappeared into the side of the mountain. Just dead ends into the mountain. Yep. Now, whatever this road led to, Garrett didn't know what it was.

It did not exist on the map that I was looking at. But he had a pretty good hunch that whatever it was, was inside the mountain itself. You know, I had covered national security in Washington for years, in a view people who had been whisked to bunkers on 9/11,

for instance. Okay. And so I assumed it was an evacuation facility that people would enter in the event of a surprise nuclear attack.

wow, like this whole world, you know, exist out here,

and we just have no idea. And Garrett just thought, I've got to know more about this. Exactly. And so that launched me on this quest to understand the history of the U.S. government's due state plan.

And eventually this quest would lead him and consequently us to a pretty existential question about America. In fact, what he came across was a sort of cataclysm sentence for the United States. And it emerged in a moment when the nation was gripped

fiercely by this sense that the end was near.

I mean, even more fiercely than the moment we're living through right now,

1950s Cold War America.

“One of the things that's hard for us to remember now”

because we're looking at history as sort of where the Cold War ended, which is, you know, tens of thousands of nuclear warheads that could bring global annihilation in 17 minutes was that for much of the 1950s, there was a real belief that, you know, the U.S. might actually be hit by 50 or 60 atomic bombs.

Which would essentially be like 50 or 60 Hiroshima's happening around the country. Yes. And, you know, if you are looking at a Hiroshima-sized bomb that explodes in Times Square, for instance,

if you are in New Jersey or Brooklyn, you have not had a great day, but you have likely survived.

“If you were in the basement or you were in the center of a building,”

you might be injured, for sure. But you're not going to be vaporized in a moment. You wouldn't necessarily be vaporized in a moment. And given the relatively low number of these bombs, dozens of bombs, not tens of thousands.

Even in the worst case scenario, a sort of all-out strike from the Soviet Union. You know, most of the country would be untouched by the explosions from that. There would be fallout in radiation that would spread beyond. But nuclear war was thought to be a relatively survivable phenomenon. And so there was this whole elaborate process across the US government

of really imagining what post-New Clear War America looked like. So, just to play this out step by step, imagine. It's a hot June day in Austin, Texas. It's 1960, you're living in Austin, listening to the radio when out of nowhere. This is your Austin Civil Defence Director with an urgent message.

Enemy missiles I've been reported. The Austin area may be hit. There will not be time to evacuate, repeat. There will not be time to evacuate. And so, you run down into the nearest fallout shelter as Austin.

And a number of other major US cities are decimated. And you hunker down.

Until, finally, several weeks later.

This is your Austin Civil Defence Director. Our monitors report that those and shelters may come out without harm. And as you crawl out of your shelter and look around, you just see destruction. You don't recognize Austin, you don't recognize America. Your house destroyed, your friends and neighbors missing.

You have no food, no car, you have no idea what to do where to go. You're terrified. But, fortunately for you.

“Every aspect of the US government had effectively this secret shadow post apocalypse version of itself.”

This is one of the first things that Garrett discovered when he started digging into this. That the government had a very detailed plan for what to do. So, as a couple of examples, the National Park Service would run refugee camps. Because the belief was National Parkland would not be targeted by nuclear war. And so, you know, parks like Yosemite would become these camps.

Like did they have a specific portion of Yellowstone that they're like, "Oh, we've got some nice flat land here. This will be the place we'll, we'll put up the tents." Yes, the planning was done to the level of which roads people would enter where they would park. Another agency, the US post office would actually be the agency that was in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive.

Because the post office best understood where people lived.

When you arrived, you would be given one of these pre-printed postcards.

“And they were just normal postcards size.”

They each color, almost like a minilofolder. And they were known as POD form eight tents. And those exist, I have one. I bought one on eBay for $3. And looking at one of these, on the backside it reads,

"IM/We are safe and can be reached at this address. And then it has some blank lines where you are meant to fill in the, quote, "members of family included in this notification." And you would fill out who survived in your party. And then beyond the post office, the US Department of Agriculture was in charge of figuring out how to feed America after nuclear war. And so, they spent an in an ordinary amount of time figuring out sort of what the most survivable food could be.

And they ended up amassing what they called survival crackers.

Manufactured in enormous quantity by companies like Nabisco. Survival crackers. Is that what they say?

“November 63. And that's good here for biscuits.”

In fact, on YouTube, you can find this genre of video where people go into old abandoned buildings or mineshafts. Uh-huh. They're 10. They're 10. Yeah, like the 10 out there. Survival biscuits. Places that used to have fallout shelters.

And they under boxes and boxes and boxes of these things. How many boxes are there? Two hundred, maybe. And they were sort of a particularly unpleasant graham cracker. Like very, um, fibrous.

It had a lot of nutrition. Yep. Post about, like, chemical. And of course, you can also find videos of people eating them. They're not bad.

No flavor. It's well-added. And I've actually eaten one. Uh, in my US history class, freshman year of high school. Apparently, the teacher had dug out the bin of biscuits from the school's fallout shelter before they could be thrown out.

And any student who wanted to could come and eat one. Yeah. Yeah. Did I? Yeah.

I bet you did. I mean, throughout the 60s, the office of civil defense went around retrofitting and stocking basically any building that they could get their hands on. And part of that, part of turning these buildings into fallout shelters was shipping out these crackers. Uh, I mean, in total.

The government hid something like 160 million tons of these crackers.

Which, to put in perspective, is about 200 golden gate bridges worth of these things. Anyhow, moving on. You know, the IRS ran calculations of how they would levy taxes. And the federal reserve built a mountain bunker, you know, with $2 billion cash hidden inside of it. $2 billion.

Yes. Think of it as, you know, the nation's bank of last resort. Okay. Now, what made that $2 billion sort of particularly amusing was the US found that most Americans had no interest whatsoever in two dollar bills. But rather than pulp the unused unwanted bills, figuring that after nuclear war, people would be much less choosy.

What the federal reserve did was they actually shrink wrapped the two dollar bills and hid them inside the bunker. So if you were, I went to take out a loan in this focused apocalyptic world. We'd be walking out with a stack of $2 bills. That's amazing.

“Like what percentage of people working for the federal government would actually be saved to run all these things?”

Yeah. So the short answer is very few in the grand scheme of things. You know, in round numbers, probably about 10,000 government officials in Washington would be saved. And this actually gets to the heart of doomsday planning, which is the goal is not for any single American to survive nuclear war. The goal is for America to survive nuclear war.

And like America is an idea. Which is arguably true of every country, but here we don't have, you know, a hereditary monarch. That has been handed down through hundreds of years in a single unbreakable fashion. What we have are these institutions and sort of these historical totems that have bound us together generation by generation.

You need these historical totems. You need these quasi-religious artifacts from our past.

“Objects that capture the idea of America that could be passed on to the folks who survived a nuclear attack so that they could rebuild it.”

But the thing is they only had essentially one helicopter set aside to save stuff. The rest were reserved for saving people. And so there was a large task force that came up with this list of artifacts that needed to be saved. Now, unfortunately, we don't really know how they came to their decisions. That information is apparently either lost a history or is still classified.

But we do know some of the items that they vetoed. You know, the oil portraits of the former joint chiefs from the Pentagon and a number of animal skeletons. And we also know of seven items that they landed on that they decided needed to be saved. So the sort of group A items, there were three of them consisted of maybe unsurprisingly, the charters of freedom. Okay.

So the declaration of independence, the constitution and the bill of rights. Okay, so the bill of rights, the declaration independence and the constitution, those feel like easy that's lying through. Yeah, that's easy.

But then we get to the sort of group B items which which get a little strange.

There are four of them that we know of. So number one was a log from the USS monitor. The log of the USS monitor? Yes, which was a civil war era battleship that the union had and which was eventually sunk.

“So this was like an 1850s to 60s ship that was sunk?”

Yes. Was that do you have any why why? So this is my speculation. But I think it's that the when the USS monitor was built. It was one of these early.

What was it called? A clad iron battleship. It was like it was a demonstration of American ingenuity in wartime. It was out. It was us showing that we can innovate in the name of protecting our country and destroying our enemies.

Is there anything in the US so that it was a civil war era ship that this is a moment that America was being torn apart? Could be yep that we fought battles before and managed to piece ourselves back together. It's also a symbol of sacrifice that we sacrificed for for the preservation of the union. It's also possible that somebody who was on the committee was just like a big fan of the USS monitor and was like come on guys. We got to save the log.

Okay, so that's number one. That's number one. And that was agreed to. That was agreed to. Of all things America that needs to be passed forward is this log.

Yeah. Okay. Number two. Lincoln's medical records post assassination. What?

And the logic there. I again am presuming is that it's very likely that the US president will have been killed in the early moments of this nuclear exchange. And so to have the the medical records of Lincoln and be able to say we've lost a president before. We've lost a heroic president before. Yeah.

And we've managed to pull ourselves back together. That seems to be the symbolic significance of those medical records. I see. Again, I'm no historian. This is me.

Yeah. Thinking about why the hell would they do this. Right. Right. Okay.

So those are those are the first two.

That's one and two. Number three is the signed surrender documents from the Japanese at the end of World War II. That's a great victory. Great victory. So these are so far totems to great losses and great resilience.

Well said. All right. And then the final one breaks that mold slightly. It is a painting capturing the journey that Lewis and Clark made westward in 1806. So it's about uncharted territories.

It's about conquest. It's also about the land. Interesting. Okay. Those are the four.

Those are the four we know of. That seems so narrow to their point of view. I mean, why wouldn't you put the dread Scott decision. You could put I to be wells reporting on lynchings. Like those are things that I feel like should be put into the helicopter.

So I want to argue with this list.

“But where do you what do you want to do with this list more importantly?”

I have several questions. Number one is what the hell are the appropriate objects at this point? That's where my mind wants to go. In this moment of profound change. It's such a hard question to answer right now.

Very complicated. And so I feel like what you should do is and is you need to crowdsource this shit Simon.

Like, oh my god, that would create some fights.

Oh, so many. So many. So many. Maybe we should just stay with the US as monitor log and avoid all the conflicts. I think that would fly. No. So folks, when we come back from break, this is so great.

We head out across this great nation of ours to ask today in the year 2020.

“Can we agree upon a list of items that more fully represents what America was?”

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“That's an interesting choice. What did you hear?”

Their answers were very patriotic and stayed pretty close to that original list. I would say original written US Constitution. Definitely take the Constitution. Because that would put you in the right path. I think the armistice from World War I.

And the signing of the World War II declaration of surrender. Because it shows that history repeats itself. And the other answers we got were a little bit narrow.

I would love to see the first convention pen of the American Legion in 1919.

Capt. That's interesting. So from there, I thought let's go to people that think about items a lot. Curator is at museums. So let's call up some niche little museums around the country.

But the Mississippi Coast model railroad museum is currently close to the public. Unfortunately, many of them had already closed. We have temporarily suspended all degrees. The coronavirus. The Great Lakes ship wreck museum.

That's for calling the flamingo museum. And didn't get back to me. Please leave a message and have a wonderful day. But who did get back to me was, uh, Let me plug you into the headset here just a moment.

Andrew Beckman from the Studa Baker Museum in South Bend, India. Thank you, Studa Baker. I'm here, yep.

And he archives what's left of the Studa Baker Corporation.

They made a horse-drawn equipment and cars and free his item. No quote to rally American spirit afterwards. Either start stinging banner, the actual flag, the slew of a front center or one of the EWGMA flags. Yeah, not like the sexiest thing. But it did come up more than once.

Oh, yes, I agree. This is Carrie McCoy and she and her company. Flagandbanner.com. No a thing or two about flags. They sell one of if not the widest selection of them in America.

And she said, "Just look at when people go out and buy them." Flagandbanner just kind of like church. When things are bad, people start going to church. When things are bad, flags don't even be so light. But then as I brought them out further,

they started to get more interesting, uh, more particular. In the end of the physical beauty of the United States, I'd like Edward Weston and the dance of Adam. Like these from Alexis Rossi of the internet archive and history-professor Greg Smoke. Perhaps instead of the Lewis and Clark map,

the Fort Laramie treaty council map. We got one that was maybe a little too particular. This is a bit on the esoteric side. From NYU professor Beth Simone Novak. I would add the administrative procedure act.

What does that do? It's boring, but it's this right that we have that almost empty. It's about. Thanks to it. We get to inform what regulations federal agencies make.

That's it. All right. And then we also got some suggestions. Like this one from truck driver Buck Ballard. The A.A. Book called Alcohol Wexon on a mistake though.

We just called the big book. That we're, I don't know, cleverly obtuse.

“Because in that is the key to recovery from pretty much anything.”

Just screw on alcohol and write in crystal math or a nuclear attack. Whatever the case may be. And then I came to what I think is my favorite answer. Uh, from Cherenie Green. I, you know, and it's funny because I'm a woman of color.

I totally get the cappernick thing. Trust me. Get it. Get it. Get it.

Get it. But I'm also like proud to be American because we're just so quirky. She's a professor of history at the University of Alabama. Roll tied. Roll tied.

And she suggested a concert recording. So Newport Jazz Festival. 1958. You have all these people. Good track setting.

Listening to jazz. These days, it's high brown more often than not.

“But what keeps this particular concert aren't seen?”

Is my hell your Jackson? Just the secretness of this song.

The Lord's Prayer takes you to a more solemn space. It just touches you.

“I mean, it would make us stop and realize something bigger.”

Something bigger has a bit more power than we do. And there's some beauty in that.

But American, as arrogant as we are, realize our limitations, just for a second.

Yeah. And then, Sherry went on to say, there was actually one more reason. In fact, the reason she picked this specific live recording. This is the audience that I'm actually thinking of. If you look in the audience, you're going to see people black and white male and female.

Sitting there together. This is the beginning of Sherry's fate. I don't mean to buck the storyline you're going through here, but I don't get it. But then, I ran into several people who thought that this exercise was one of the summer things.

I spent my time doing. I swear to God, and I don't mean this and I'm going to be like. And the sort of chief among them being New Yorker writer, Gillipor.

“The question after the apocalypse is not, do we have Abraham Lincoln's medical record?”

The question is, who are we that we did this to each other? But isn't the pushback something like, don't you need some of these totems to rally people and to tell them that, hey, we're still here? So what we need after the apocalypse is nationalism? If not, if not a national identity that you're going to have people rally behind.

You've been the national identity that brought the apocalypse in the first place.

What we want to preserve are totems of what it was that drove a fight. That's the name of something like it's the name of it. Okay, well, so then let me pose the question this way. If we are trying to answer the question of who are we that we did this to each other. Are there any artifacts or are there any objects that you think would help us answer that question

and then move forward from it?

“Like, I think I understand where you and I are parting ways in your supposition”

and in the aftermath of an atomic war, what would endure would be the nation state? It would not. I mean, the nation state was devised to grant rights to human being under a written constitution. If it's under that system of organization, we actually can't want another. Then the nation state would not deserve to endure.

Growing is about exploring. And if you're not able to explore fluidly, then you're not going to be able to grow.

And then the second of this one to punch came from communications manager,

and oftentimes host of K.I.L.I. radio. How am I talking about being you're listening to voice of the local nation across the Pioneer's reservation on 90.1 FM? Our low iron cloud. Oh, man, I've been on a Kiely radio for about 19 years now.

Almost two decades, it's crazy. K.I.L.I. is a community radio station serving the Pine Ridge reservation. The Pioneer's reservation is about 45,000. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, smack dab in the south western corner of South Dakota. And so, you know, what it's like these days, man, we are redefining ourselves in this day and age.

After all the atrocities that have happened to our people in the past. And what struck me with him was an atomic bomb descending upon civilization. Is essentially what happened to the Lakota Sioux tribe, as well as the rest of the Native Americans in this country.

Big time.

And so, I often think about what would happen if something happened.

So drastic that we would have to leave. And when is mine goes there? There's just so much stuff that I would love to take with me. Both earrings, quilt bags, TPs, the sacred pipe. This pipe goes back 27 generations.

27 generations. What even is that like 800 years? Yeah, we have that. And there's a great story behind that, Simon. And I'm teaching my children that.

And I don't think it could be very wise to me to tell these stories on national radio.

But that pipe, it represents us.

But even this, even this pipe. I don't even know. I don't know if we'd actually take it. And why? Because he says, "If you look at the history of the Oglala Lakota tribe."

You know, we don't have anything written down. Our forefathers did it right anything down.

“And that's probably the best thing for us.”

Because he says, "When he looks to the broader United States." The United States of America, the people belong to it. Sometimes I think they take the things that were written by your forefathers too literally. And they can't adapt it into the future. Take, for example, the Bill of Rights, he says.

Because it was written down, it's rigid. Whereas a Lakota story, even one that's 27 generations old, Arlo can take that and adapt it to the present moment. And that's what we're doing. We're adapting everything that we know were moving forward into the future.

And so, given the choice, he says, "The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence." Oh, I'm kind of an anarchist in that. I would burn 'em. I would let them go to dust. I know.

I probably heard the hear here that. But I think it would be kind of cool. [music playing] I say, you kind of, here we are. This is the kind of of the American thing.

“At the moment, which is, do we preserve the thing or do we burn it down?”

Where do you, where do you land in all of this? I don't even know, Jed. I don't, I still sort of lost as to what to take away from this. Other than, even though this is a story that I pitched and a story that I went out to report, I was sort of skeptical of it from the get-go.

In that, I love that. Yeah, in that, like, I'm skeptical, or I don't, I sort of bristle when I hear questions about what is the mood of America, what is the conversation America is having right now. These grand national questions about who we are. And I think the reason I bristle or I chafe it that is,

I remember as a kid growing up in Wisconsin watching the news or listening to the news at the end of the day. And hearing reporters talk about what was going on in America and just not relating to it, or not seeing any of it on the ground at all. And I came to believe that either the news was exaggerating everything, or they just weren't talking about me or anyone I had ever met.

And so there's an arrogance in thinking you can take the nation's temperature. However, here I just met the last two months doing this, and I think it's because despite everything I just said, it's secretly deep down, I wanted to find something that we could all agree on even now. And I'll say there was one thing that kept coming up. You know, you know, I mean, lots of tell our story.

And I don't think it was ever anyone's first choice.

“But oh, maybe you should put an order. Oh yeah, an image from the moon looking at earth.”

Almost everyone said they'd want to preserve something from the Apollo moon missions. I like it. That could happen. President Kennedy, maybe Lieutenant World War II, where he said, We shall send the moon to 140,000. We're going to put a man on the moon.

Hey, giant rocket. You know, the speech that Kennedy gave. John Kennedy putting a man in the moon. We're looking at the Earthrise photo. We're going to Apollo 8.

The actual recording will be audio from Apollo 13 mission.

“Okay, stand by their team. We're looking at it.”

And everyone had their own reason as to why. To help people remember the ways we as a mission had come together.

Did you buy something that wasn't incredible?

Because nobody might ever get there again. It's the greatest industrialization our country ever saw. Talk about display of prowess, stability to engineer resources. It's something that America did collaboratively. So people are still yearning for that sense of like unity and transcendence.

And a project, a common mission, a common purpose.

“But I think what I actually like most about it is”

America did this at a time when we were more polarized potentially than we even are right now.

Like America was going through far more radical changes than I think we faced today. And yet out of that malstrom, we did this transcendent thing. Yeah. And so what this leaves me with is the feeling that I want to live in a time and a place in an iteration of America where we achieved something that inspiring.

And I think maybe that's actually what we all want. Producer Simon Adler

“This episode was reported in produced by Simon with editing from Pat Walters”

and reporting assistance from Tad Davis, original music also from Simon.

Special thanks to Luke Menon, Ben Irvin, Bill Pretzer, Jason Spear, and Garrett Graf for all his reporting that made this episode possible. I'm Chad Abumrod. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area California and here are the staff credits.

Ready Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser. Soron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keith is our director of Sound Design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nina Sambundan, Matt Kilti, Mona Modgalker, Alex Nisan, Sarah Curry, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Joanna Strogetz, Anisa Vizza,

Arian Wac, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas and Maya Applebee Milamad. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semi. Hey, radio lab, Michael Cuma Washington,

Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. The foundation of support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The foundation of Radio Lab is provided by the John Templeton Foundation. The foundation of Radio Lab is provided by the John Templeton Foundation.