Unity and the Apollo Missions

So a few years back, I woke up in the middle of the night my wife saying Lulu Get out, fire, fire I looked through the window And in front of me was just a blaze of orange. The apartment building one over from 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 were 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 twenty twenty, but with our big fourourth of July, two hundred and fifty years celebration around the corner, I listened back and thought it was a strange ultimately profound reflection on what this whole American national identity actually is Without further ado Here we go ait wait, you're the thing l listening to radio labs Radio from WNY. Three wise Radio Lab, I'm Jad Abmod. This story begins I guess you could say it with a mystery. Hi, it's Gart. Hey, Garret Simon here. How are you? I'm well Well, S it comes from producer Simon Adler. Yeah. so this mystery all started just a couple years back when this guy. I'm Garret Graff. I'm a historian, journalist, author, et cetera, etcetera. was handed an ID badge. So I was working at Washington magazine at the time and one of my colleagues found a government ID badge as he was commuting in one day. Garret 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 deep directions You're just like clicking along. That is absolutely what I was doing. Like sort of turn left here, continontue straight for ten 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, gettingting more and more rural as I'm dragging west. Rolling hills turn into farmland, then plains And after several minutes of this and several hundred clicks, Garrett finds himself in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And looking at the satellite, you, I could tell that basically the road went sort of one hundred or two hundred yards further up and then disappeared into the side of the mountain deead ends into the mountain Yeah 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 was inside the mountain itself. You know, I had covered national security in Washington for years and interviewed people who had been whisked bunkers on nine eleven, for instance. Okay. And so I assumed it was an evacuation facility that people would enter in the event of a surprise nuclear attack And I was like, you know Wow, like this whole world You know exists out here and we just have no idea Garret just thought We've gott to know more about this. Exactly. And so that launched me on this quest to understand. the history of the U.S. government's doomsstate planning. 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 the sense that the end was near I mean, even more fiercely than the moment we're living through right now nineteen fifties 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 tens of thousands of nuclear warheads that could bring global annihilation in seventeen minutes was that for much of the nineteen fifties, there was a real belief that, you know, the U S might actually be hit by ty or sixty atomic bombs, whichich would essentially be like fifty or sixty Hiroshimas happening around the country. Yes. And you know, if you are looking at a Hiroshima size bomb that explodes in Tes 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 a 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 and radiation that would beyond 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 nuclear war America looked like. So just to play this out step by step Imagine. It's a hot June day in Austin, Texas Since nineteen sixty, you're living in Austin listening to the radio when out of nowhere. This is your Austin Civil Defense director with an urgent message Enemy missiles have 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 Sveral weeks later. This is your Austin Civil Defense director. Our monitors report that those in 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 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 Yosemane 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 put up the tentents Yes, I mean, the planning was done to the level of which roads people would enter, where they would park anotherother agency. The US. post offffice 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. So let's say you made it to one of these national parks turned refugee camps after the attack. When you arrived, you would be given one of these pre printed postcards. and they were just normal postcards size. Beige color, almost like a manila foldern as POD fororm eight hundred ten s. and those exist. I have one. I bought one on eBay for three dollars. And looking at one of these, on the backside it reads, quote I am slash 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 thenen beyond the post office, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was in charge of figuring out how to feed America after nuclear war And so they spent an inordinate 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 by companies like NBisco Is what they say? Yeah? November sixty three. Yeah, that's good year foriskuits. In fact, on YouTube, you can find this genre video where people go into old abandoned buildings or mes shafts Oh they're ten. They're ten, yeah, like that ten out there. Survival biscuit. Places that used to have fallout shelters and they unearthed boxes and boxes and boxes of these things. How many boxes are two hundred, babbe? And they were sort of a particularly unpleasant graham cracker. L very fibrous. It had a lot of nutrition? Yep, it smells like chemical. And of course, you can also find videos of people Eating them, they're not bad. There's no flavor. It's well edged. And I've actually eaten one. In my U.S 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. You had a fallout shelter in your high school Y is under under Did I? Yeah, I bet you did. I mean Throughout the sixties, 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. I mean, in total, the government hid something like one hundred sixty million tons of these crackers, which to put in perspective is about two hundred 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 two billion dollars cash hidden inside of it. twowo billion dollars. Yes. Think of it as, you know, the nation's Bank of L Rort Okay. now what made that two billion dollars sort of particularly amusing was the U S found that most Americans had no interest whatsoever in two dollar bills 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 shrinkwrapped the two dollar bills and hid them inside the bunker. Oh my God. So if you or I went to take out a loan in this pocused apocalyptic world we'd be walking out with a stack of two dollar 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. I presume know, in round numbers Probably about ten thousand government officials in Washington would be saved. And this actually gets to the heart of doomsday planning, which is goal is not any single American to survive nuclear war The goal is for America. to survive nuclear war And like America is an idea is arguably true of every country, H 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 And so if you are trying to preserve America If you want to say that the America of the Apocalypse is the America of before. you need these historical totems, need these quasi religious artifacts from our past. objects that capture the idea of America passed on to the folks who survived a nuclear attack so that they could rebuild it 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 to history or 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 they decided needed to be safved 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 of Iependence, and the Constitution those feel like easy, that's lying in fruit. Yeah, that's easy. But then we get to the sort of group B items, which get a little strange. U 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 eighteen fifties sixties ship that was sunk. Yes Was that do you have any why why? So this is my speculation. But I think it's that when the USS monitor was built, it was one of these early what is it called like clad iron battleships. It was a demonstration of American ingenuity in wartime. It was us showing that we can innovate in the name of protecting our country and destroying our enemies is there anything in the that it was a civil War era ship that this was a moment that America was being torn apart and Yp, that we fought battles before and managed to piece ourselves back together. It's also a symbol of sacrifice that we sacrificed 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 Mm. 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 two Lincoln's medical records post assassination What? And the logic there I again am presuming is that it's very likely that the U. S. president will have been killed in the early moments of this nuclear exchange And so to have the medical records of Lincoln and be able to say we've lost a president before We've lost a heroic president before, 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 thinking about why the hell would they do this? Right, right, right Okay, so those are Those the first two That's one and two U number three is the signed surrender documents from the Japanese att the end of World War twoI. That's a great victory Great victory. So these are these are So far tootems to great losses and great resilience Well said. Right. And then the final one breaks that mold slightly It is a painting capturing The journey that Lewis and Clark made westward in eighteen oh six So it's about uncharted territories. It's also about conquest. It's also about the land. Interesting. Okay, thoseose 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 The Dred Scott decis Ida B. Wells reporting on lynchings, like those are things that I feel like should be put into the helicopter. So I wna argue with this list But where 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 That's such a hard question to answer right now. Very complicated. And so I feel like what you should do and is you need to crowdsource this shit, Simon likeike, I don't know, like, uh Oh my God, that would create some fights. Oh, so many. so many. Maybe we should just stay with the USS monitor log and avoid all the conflict. I don't think that would fly. No So folks When we come back from break J We head out across this great nation of ours to ask today in the year twenty twenty, can we agree upon a list of items that more fully represents what America was America is and what America could be So me come back from break. T a Ameracle The home of the free This is radio Lab. I'm Jad Am Rd here with Simon Adler. Yes, yes, yes And u Okay, Simon Do it. Okay. Well, so as we as I told you before the break We came across this list of objects O Cold War era government planned to save, to rally America after an atomic attack. Remind me of log from the US. Oh yeah,ah, sorry, you're about to do it. A log from the USS monitor Abraham Lincoln's medical records post assassination, the signed Japanese surrender documents And then a map of Lewis and Clark's journey west. Right, right. All weighty objects, but a bit musty. Right And so the thought was Let's go out and ask Americans people other than the cigarette smoking pocket protector wearing bureaucrats of the nineteen fifties, what they would want added to this list. Check check. And is your sense that you're going to find the one thing that we all agree on or Well I think the exercise itself is sort of foolish too convince oneselves that you're gonna get down to one item is just completely insane. So no, this was just me setting out to try to get some new answers It's by no means comprehensive or in any way scientific It was just sort of a coronavirus interrupted attempt to kick off a conversation. All right, walking down Canal Street here on Sunday february sixteenth. And so for my first stop Hello Wow, busy sp Sunday.. I'm Sed. Very nice to meet you. How are you? I wanted to go to a variety of American Legion halls. Thiss sort of a vets association? Yep, It's like a social club for veterans. The Meran Legion is a national organization. Right now it's a close of two million members This is Gabe. My name's Gab Moy. I was drafted into Aammi during the Vietnam era. I spoke to him at the Chinatown American Legion post twelve ninety one, which is actually the largest in the city Really? Yeah, I wouldn't have guessed it. And we also swung down to post fifteen forty four on Staten Island This is an interesting choice, but what did you hear? Their answers were very patriotic and stayed pretty close to that original list. I would say the original written US Constitution. Definitely take the Constitution. because that would put you in the right path. I think the Amistice from World War I and the signing of the World War two Declaration of sururrender. 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 Pvention pen. of the American Legion in nineteen nineteen Cpp. Okay, that's interesting, ish. So from there I thought like let's go to people that think about Items a lot Curatorors at museums So let's call up some niche little museums around the country because Ma Railroad Museum is currently closed to the public. Unfortunately, many of them had already closed. We have temporarily suspended all the operations the coronavirus the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. Thanks rec callalling 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 Let me plug you into the headset here just a moment. Andrew Beckman from the Studabaker Museum in South Bend, Indiana.ak I'm here, Y. Craftsmanship with fl. And he archives what's left of the Studabaker Corporation. They made horse drawn equipment, then cars and for his ideem. How qu to you know rally American spirit afterwards Either Starpangle Banner, the actual flag that flew over Ford Sumter or one of the Ewo Jima flags. Yeah. 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 flag andbanner d. comot Know 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. Flags are just kind of like church. When things are bad, people start going to church. When things are bad, flags sellven orry But then as I broadened out further, they started to get more interesting, more particular. Images of the physical beauty of the United States by Edward Weston and Dansel Adams, L these from Alexis Rossy of the Internet Archive and History Professor Greg Smoke. Perhaps instead of the Lewis and Clark map, the Fort Lamy 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 Aministrative Procedure Act What does that do? It's boring, but it's this right that we have that almost nobody knows about. Thanks to it, We get to inform what regulations federal agencies make. Hi sir. And then we also got some suggestions like this one from truck driver Buck Ballard. The AA book called Alcohol's Anonymous that we just called the big book. that were, I don't know, cleverly obtuse. Because in that is the key to recovery from pretty much anything scribblele on alcohol and write in crystal meth or a nuclear attack. whatever the case may be And then I came to what I think is my favorite answer from Sharony Green. You know, it's funny because I'm a woman of color. I totally get the Kapppernick thing Get it, get it getet 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 Tide. Roll Tide. And she suggested a concert recording. So Newport Jazz Festival, nineteen fifty eight, you have all of these people in this picturesque setting listening to jazz These days, it's highbrow more often than not. But what keeps this particular concert earthy is Mahelia Jackson Re H Okay Just the sacredness of this song, the Lord's prayer takes you to a more solemn space What K H Well M Is this touches you Wh Yeah Be I mean, it would make us stop and realize there's something bigger Something bigger somethinghing bigger has a bit more power than we do And there's some beauty in that that Americans as arrogant as we are realize Our limitations just for a second. Yeah And then Shary went on to say there was actually one more reason In fact, the reason she picked this specific live recording. That's the audience that I'm actually thinking of And if you look in the audience, you're going to see people, black and white, male and female getting there together. This good beginning of shared space Like I don't need to buck the storyline you're going when here, but like I don't get it but then I ran into several people who who thought that this exercise was one of the dumber things I I could spend my time doing. I swear to God and I don't mean this the wrong way, but And sort of chief among them being New Yorker writer Jill Laaport. The question after the Apocalypse is not, do we have Abraham Lincoln's medical record the question is are we that we did this to each other Okay, but isn't to 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 What would have been the national identity that brought the apocalypse in the first place? Like what we want to preserve are totems of what it was that drove uside Bananas s like it's bananas. 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? 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 that in the aftermath of an atomic war what would endure would be the nation state It would not was devised to grant human being under a written Cstitution. Under that system of organizations, we actually kill one another then the nation state would not deserve to endure Drawing is about. Bloring. 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, two punch came from communications manager and offimes host of KILI radio. Hamatakabi, you're listening to Voice of the Lakota Nation across the Pinege Reservation on ninety point one FM. Arlow Iiron Cloud. Oh man, I've been A Kille radio for about nineteen years now. Almost two decades, it's crazy. KILI is a community radio station serving the Pine Ridge reservation. Pine reservation is about forty five thousand people, roughly the size of Rhode Island, Smack Dab in the southwestern 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. It's happened to our people in the past And so I often think about what would happen if a something happened so drastic that we would have to leave. And when his mind goes there, there's just so much stuff that I would love to take with me. Bows, earrings, quilled bags, tepees, the sacred pies. twenty seven generations. twentywenty seven generations. What even is that? like eight hundred years 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' be very wise of me to to like tell these stories on national radio, but that pipe It represents us. 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 didn't write 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 that 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 rightights, he says. Because it was written down, it's rigid Whereas a Lakota story, even one that's twenty seven 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. we're 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 them. I would let them go to dust I know I it probably hurts to hear hear that But I I think it would be kind of cool you kind of it's you here we are. This is This is the kind of the American thing at the of the moment, which is Do preserve the thing or do we burn it down Um, where do you Where do you land in all of this I don't even know, Jet. don I'm still sort of lost as to what to take away from this. O 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 Yeah Okay. 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, theseese grand national questions about who we are. And I think the reason I bristle or I chafe at 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 talkal about what was going on in America and just not relating to it or not seeing any of it on the ground at all 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' there's an arrogance in thinking you can take the nation's temperature A However, here I just spent the last two months doing this, and I think it's because despite everything I just said 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 What would tell our story? And I don't think it was ever anyone's first choice. Oh, maybe you should put I know where it is. 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 President Kennedy. Navy Lieutenant in World War twoo, where he said 're gonna put a man on the moon. Giant rocket You know, the speech that Kennedy gave. John Kennedy, putting a man in the moon the Earth rise photo on Apollo Aoleven makeial contact the Apollo eleven space capapsule. The actual recordings of the audio Le Aapollo's thirteen mission. Okay, stand by thir D. And everyone had their own reason as to why help people remember the ways we as a nation have come together to survive something that doesn't seem survivable. because nobody might ever get there again. It's the greatest industrialization our country ever saw. Talk about display of prowess, the ability to engineer resources. It's something that America did collaboratively peopleople are still yearning for that sense of like unity and transcendence. And a project. Yeah Con 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 face today and get out of that maelstrom I 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 achieve something that inspiring And I think Maybe That's actually what we all want prodroducer, Simon Edler This episode was reported and produced by Simon editing from Pat Walters and reporting assistance from Tad Davis, original music also from Simon Special thanks to Luke Minon, Ben Irvin, Bill Pretzer, Jason Spear, and Garret Graff for all his reporting that made this episode possible. I'm Jad Abumroad. Thankks for listening Hi, I'm Gabbie. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latf Nasser Sarn Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keef is our director of Sound Design Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom W Harry Fortuna David Gable Maria Paz Guterz Sindu Nina Sambandan Kuilty Mona Mod Galker Alex Neeson. Ssara Kari Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand Join us Droads Anisa Viza Arian Wack Molly Webster and Jessica Young. With help from Gabby Santis and Maya Applebe Muhammed Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Semayi He radio lab Michael Leadership support for radioab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation National support for radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Fm