[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: How did you even get onto—I feel like buttons has just become a fixture. How did this happen?

LATIF NASSER: Okay. Well, can I ...?

JAD: Who's to blame for this?

LATIF: Let me—let me start. I'm gonna start.

ROBERT KRULWICH: This is reporter Latif Nasser. And today on Radiolab, Latif and I are bringing Jad and you three wildly different stories about buttons—that are really about power and freedom and destruction. So ...

LATIF: So this all started because I could not convince any of my friends to go to the elevator history museum with me.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: There was not a single person out of the eight and a half million people living in New York who wanted to go to the button museum with me.

ROBERT: But you found one.

LATIF: Except Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT: I'll go to anything!

LATIF: Exactly.

LATIF: Jamie told me never to stop recording, but I think ...

ROBERT: So we go to Long Island City.

LATIF: We'll walk around. You think it's that door right there?

ROBERT: First of all, we can't find it.

LATIF: We got lost. [laughs]

ROBERT: This street is entirely taxi yellow.

ROBERT: The only thing we saw was a big old boring building covered with—with taxi signs. And we had no interest in taxis.

ROBERT: Do you know if there's a museum in here?

ROBERT: We—we found some guy on the street.

MAN: Yes, there is. You gotta go up the stairs, right?

ROBERT: Yeah. Yeah.

MAN: Actually, I'll take you there.

LATIF: Ah, thank you!

MAN: I'll show you the way, anyway.

ROBERT: All right.

MAN: You go all the way down, make a left. Make a right, go all the way down to the end.

LATIF: Thank you very much!

MAN: You're welcome.

LATIF: Ah-ha! Wow, that's quite a sign!

ROBERT: Elevator Museum. Founded 2011 by Patrick Carr.

ROBERT: So we open up the door.

LATIF: Wow!

ROBERT: We have no idea what's gonna be on the other side of this. Not a thing.

LATIF: Hello?

ROBERT: Whoa, this is different from what, like—like ...

ROBERT: And it's a large room.

LATIF: It's a world.

JAD: You're building up to something, I hope.

ROBERT: It's filled with ...

LATIF: What—what is it? What ...

ROBERT: ... stuff.

LATIF: Elevator matchbook here.

ROBERT: Pens or ...

LATIF: Switches and locks.

LATIF: Just random stuff.

ROBERT: These are things you give at sales meetings, yeah. The Rosenburg lubricant?

ROBERT: Small brass objects of one kind or another.

LATIF: And there are these giant paintings of escalators and moving sidewalks.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: And sitting in a corner ...

PATRICK CARR: Yeah?

LATIF: Hi, I'm Latif.

LATIF: ... across the room ...

PATRICK CARR: Latif, how are you?

LATIF: ... we see a guy, sitting. He's an older guy.

PATRICK CARR: Patrick Carr.

LATIF: He has his glasses down on his nose. And he's in charge of the place.

PATRICK CARR: They can call me if they want to come visit: (718) XXX-XXXX.

LATIF: Apparently, you're supposed to make an appointment.

PATRICK CARR: And if I'm in the mood, they'll get a song.

LATIF: Patrick has been the lead singer in a number of bands, and he even studied Constitutional law.

ROBERT: This is a man for all seasons. He's—like, he's got so much elevator stuff.

PATRICK CARR: I've been collecting since I was 11 years old.

ROBERT: Because when you were seven years old you walked into an elevator and had a—a meltdown?

PATRICK CARR: No, when I was 11 years old I started working with my dad. I went to college, got a couple degrees and stayed in the elevator business. Never left. I—actually, my first item is over on one of the walls here. Let me show you something. I'll bring you over here.

ROBERT: And as we're walking along ...

LATIF: Oh, that's like a hall of buttons!

ROBERT: ... we come inevitably to a series of elevator button panels.

PATRICK CARR: Here's a golden up and down. Here's a bronze up and down.

LATIF: Ooh, that's really classy.

PATRICK CARR: Here's a silver up and down.

LATIF: He has all kinds of antique buttons that—I mean, from just different eras, some ...

PATRICK CARR: Here's one where you go boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp.

JAD: So this is the genesis.

LATIF: Right there.

ROBERT: Right here is where the insult begins. And it is an insult, because what is about to happen is he's about to tell us that we are fools and have no power in the world in which he inhabits. And he does that by pointing to the 'Close Door' button, you know, where you push and the door's supposed to close. He says—just says matter-of-factly, he says ...

PATRICK CARR: About 80 percent of them are non-functional.

LATIF: Wow!

ROBERT: What? Because they're broken and no one fixed them? Or because they ...

PATRICK CARR: Because they were never wired up.

ROBERT: They were never wired up?

PATRICK CARR: Never wired up. Never. Most of the time we don't do it. About 80 percent of them don't work.

JAD: I just assume they don't work.

LATIF: You assume they don't work?

JAD: I assume they don't work.

ROBERT: All the time?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I thought no, no, no, no.

JAD: Of course it doesn't work.

ROBERT: No, this cannot be right.

JAD: What do you mean 'cannot be right?' Have you ever pushed a 'Close' button that—that has had any effect on the door?

ROBERT: Yes, I believe I have.

JAD: It's a psychological tool for you.

ROBERT: You need a button to go bang bang bang bang bang.

JAD: You gotta push something.

LATIF: But, like, you don't ...

ROBERT: But that's not—but he said also—he had also a very fancy reason.

JAD: What was his fancy reason?

PATRICK CARR: They're extremely intelligent, elevators. The elevators actually remember what happens every day. So the elevator system knows that between 8:55 and 9:00 we get 373 people on an average morning coming in. So we're gonna return two cars to the main floor as soon as we possibly can. We're not gonna park anything upstairs. But it knows that at 4:45, it gets 650 people leaving the building.

ROBERT: You get three wheelchairs, you get two old people, da da da, and so we program the timing of the elevator to accommodate the whole.

PATRICK CARR: So all you're doing is screwing up our timing by touching that thing.

ROBERT: I mean, you have thousands and thousands of people anxiously trying to urge the machine to do their will.

PATRICK CARR: [laughs] We like watching people just keep pressing this stupid button and not knowing.

ROBERT: That's cruel, I have to tell you.

ROBERT: His idea that we would somehow have the authority or the power to close the door was offensive to him.

PATRICK CARR: Yeah. Now in my building they work.

JAD: I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint.

ROBERT: How can you be sympathetic? You are a customer.

JAD: Think of what a building is: it's a crazy-ass vertical stack of humanity. How is that gonna work if not for beautifully-designed systems like the elevator?

ROBERT: This is about freedom!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: This is about freedom. And this is about ...

JAD: You're insane. You're insane.

ROBERT: So we then began looking around for some little soupçon of hope to give the Radiolab listeners.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Some tiny bit of power that they could have back in this utterly fascistic system. And you know what, Jad? We found it.

JAD: You did?

ROBERT: We did.

JAD: What did you find?

ROBERT: We have hacked the 'Close' button.

JAD: Really? Wait, now I'm suddenly—for the first time I'm interested. What—what did you discover?

ROBERT: The next time, Jad, that you walk into an elevator, the door closes and mysteriously, although you're going to the eighth floor it stops on five. The door opens, you peer out, there's nobody there.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: Six endless seconds will roll by, leaving you powerless and hapless. But not anymore. Now here's what you can do—and we checked this and it's true—you can put your arm through the door, breaking the beam with your arm, and then yank your arm back very suddenly. That will convince the stupid, stupid supine elevator that you have just—someone has just entered the elevator, and now it will close.

JAD: Whoa, really?

ROBERT: That will shave an amazing three, four even five seconds off your waiting time.

JAD: All right!

ROBERT: And it will give you that sense of being Superman.

LATIF: Yeah. That's 45 minutes of your life back. You're welcome.

LATIF: I should just say Patrick was actually a really awesome guy and everyone should visit the Elevator History Museum.

ROBERT: So the next story, this is maybe the most valuable button in the world.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: It's not a button exactly, it's—it's—he was a guy.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: And his name was Button Gwinnett.

ROBERT: What is it?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Button Gwinnett.

ROBERT: B-U-T-T-O-N?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Yup.

LATIF: Is that his real name?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: That's his real name.

ROBERT: That's Bobby Livingston from R&R Auction House in Boston.

ROBERT: Who is Button Gwinnett?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Button Gwinnett is one of two signers of the Declaration of Independence that were born in England and moved to the United Sta—or moved to the colonies.

JAD: He is a Founding Father?

ROBERT: He is a Founding Father.

LATIF: You've seen his signature thousands of times without realizing it.

ROBERT: And—and the thing about that signature gets interesting in a minute.

LATIF: But just to start at the beginning, Button Gwinnett was born in England in the early 1700s, and then he moved to Georgia in 1765.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: And he bought an island, and I believe he began an import-export ...

ROBERT: He bought an island? [laughs]

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Yep. St. Catherines Island.

ROBERT: Truth is he leased it, but whatever.

LATIF: Like, he's just like a wealthy guy?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: No, Button Gwinnett was a serial debtor, actually, and he owed everybody—he owed everybody money. So he failed in his business, and he became a radicalized revolutionary, and he joined Georgia politics late in the 1760s.

ROBERT: And when it got to be 1776 in Philadelphia, he was in Independence Hall and he signed the Declaration of Independence.

JAD: Really?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: To the left and below of John Hancock. But then he goes home to Georgia and gets in a duel with his political rival and is killed in 1777. And then I believe in 1780, his wife passes away, leaving only his daughter. And then by 1800, his daughter passes away and his lineage is disappeared. So ...

ROBERT: So the Gwinnetts pass into history.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Yes.

JAD: But his signature is on that very important piece of paper.

ROBERT: True. True. Which becomes important because ...

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Around the 1820s, the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were dying. So there was a nostalgia for the Founding Fathers, and that's when people began collecting the signatures that were placed on that document.

ROBERT: So people collected Jefferson and then Adams and a Hancock, and they started thinking ...

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Okay. I want a whole set of the 56 men that signed that document.

LATIF: People want the set.

ROBERT: They want the set.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: For an American, I don't think there was any more important signature than the signatures that were placed on that document.

ROBERT: Get 'em all!

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: And a problem arose: Button Gwinnett's signatures, they were almost impossible to find.

ROBERT: And even now, like, a hundred and some odd years later ...

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: One guy, I went to see his collection, and he had a beautiful house in Florida overlooking the bay—I won't tell you which bay, but he showed me some great stuff. And I said, "What else you got?" And he goes, I swear he pushes a button and a wall begins to rise.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: And on the wall he's got, like, you know, incredible, Wilbur Wright, George Washington, but I could see in the middle—my eye goes right to it—the unmistakable signature of Button Gwinnett is like the centerpiece of this secret wall that raises up. And I go, "My goodness, you've got a Button Gwinnett!" It was pretty amazing.

ROBERT: So this is the autographic equivalent of some really famous diamond, you know, or something like that.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: That's right. You know, it's the holy grail.

JAD: And how many signatures still exist?

ROBERT: There are 50.

LATIF: 51.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: 51 known examples in the world. And most of the things that exist are IOUs. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: If you have one of these things, what's—what are they worth?

LATIF: Well, I'll tell you this: it is more valuable than Lincoln ...

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Much more. A hundred times more than Abe Lincoln.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Really? What about George Washington?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Yup.

ROBERT: Ben Franklin?

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Yes. Yes.

ROBERT: Button Gwinnett outsells—outsells Ben—Ben Franklin was a world-famous person.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: But Ben Franklin was a man of letters. He wrote tons of letters. He was president of Pennsylvania. He was the ambassador to France. He wrote and wrote and wrote and signed and signed and signed, so ...

LATIF: Bobby Livingston told us with the—with the exception, possible exception of William Shakespeare, this guy, Button Gwinnett, ran up a bunch of debt and did basically nothing else with his life, he is the most valuable signature in the world.

BOBBY LIVINGSTON: Today what makes it extremely hard to complete a set of signers of the Declaration of Independence is because of the 51, 41 are in libraries or institutions and we'll never be able to get it. So there's only 10 examples in public hands.

LATIF: Hello, sir.

ROBERT: Hello, sir.

THOMAS LANNON: How are you doing?

LATIF: Good. Okay, you checked your—your bags and everything?

LATIF: So it turns out that there are four Button Gwinnetts at the—at the New York Public Library.

ROBERT: Which is right in our neighborhood.

LATIF: I believe the reading room is still closed, but we're going to a kind of super secret place where you need to ring a bell to get in.

ROBERT: Really!

LATIF: So I—so I emailed them up. I emailed a guy named Thomas Lannon.

THOMAS LANNON: And I work in the manuscripts and archives division at the New York Public Library.

LATIF: He took us into a special room on the top—on the top floor.

LATIF: Ooh, wow! This is awesome!

ROBERT: All by ourselves.

THOMAS LANNON: I guess we'll put them on the wood.

LATIF: We're standing at a wooden—like a kind of beautiful, old wooden table. And we have ...

ROBERT: On the table ...

LATIF: ... four Button Gwinnetts. Four.

JAD: Wait. Hold on, just so I can appreciate. Tell me what one of these is worth.

LATIF: Well, you don't know until they're sold because they're different quality, but the last one that we know of that was sold here in New York was sold for ...

ROBERT: $722,500.

THOMAS LANNON: I don't—I'm not in the business of estimating value of things, but I can say that Button Gwinnett autographs at the New York Public Library are classified as 'splendid.'

ROBERT: Is that the highest ranking? Splendid?

THOMAS LANNON: They're not—they're not simply cut autographs, they're documents signed.

ROBERT: Look at this! Look at this!

THOMAS LANNON: This is the most extravagant one.

LATIF: Oh wow! But it has, like, seals on it. Like, red wax seals.

ROBERT: There might have been like $4-million sitting on that table.

ROBERT: We got $4-million.

LATIF: So for me, the impulse—the impulse that I'm having right here is not just putting these in my pocket and running away. Like, the impulse I'm having—and I'm being totally frank here—is the same impulse I have, like, you know, when you want to pull the fire alarm? Like I want to just tear these all up right now.

ROBERT: Really?

LATIF: Kind of.

LATIF: I just wanted to take all of these papers that were on this table and just tear them all to shreds.

THOMAS LANNON: I can't—I can't speak to your desire to destroy history.

ROBERT: And then the guy really looked alarmed.

THOMAS LANNON: But you don't really want to tear these up, you have to admit.

LATIF: It's just so valu—like, it's so arbitrarily valuable. Like—like, I could just—I could just rip it up! Like, how could it be that valuable if I could just rip it up?

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: But it is. Okay, so taking a cue from Latif, when we come back we're gonna take a decidedly anti-button turn.

LATIF: We'll be right back.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today on the podcast, Latif Nasser and Robert Krulwich are talking buttons.

ROBERT: So we have one more button tale.

LATIF: In a way, this sort of—once we were onto buttons, this sort of presented itself because it is the most high stakes button ...
ROBERT: Ever.

LATIF: Yeah!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, film: Mr. President, we have a crisis situation at one of our missile centers, sir.]

ROBERT: A thermonuclear button.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, film: You mean to tell me a renegade general's got his finger on the button of a Titan missile?]

JAD: Is it a button? I mean, I ...

ROBERT: Well, that's what we wanted—we wondered.

JAD: It's depicted in Hollywood as a big red button.

LATIF: Big red button.
ROBERT: Exactly. So we just figured okay, let's go find the button that destroys the world.
LATIF: So we brought in a friend of mine, Alex Wellerstein. He's a historian of all things nuclear weapon related.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yeah.

LATIF: He sat down, and the first thing he told us was that ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: There's no button.

ROBERT: No button.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: No. There has never been a single button.

ROBERT: But wait a second, like, don't—when you get to, like, 1952, 1953, in ordinary parlance people say, "Well, the President has his finger on the button." I mean, I don't know—do you have any idea where that phrase comes from? "The button?"

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: It's older. It's much older than the bomb.

ROBERT: Oh.

LATIF: Really!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So 1910s is when all of this stuff, H.G. Wells is sort of famous, but there's—there's all this literature about the crazy scientist who invents a new form of gas that can, like, kill everybody. And he has a button.

LATIF: And is it a red button?

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: I don't know if they say red, but it's definitely a button.

LATIF: And according to Alex, by the time we developed nuclear weapons ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: This existing imagery about the scientist can blow up the world using their button transfers to a President can blow up the world using his button.

LATIF: Hmm.

ROBERT: And then Alex told us something that we—that really surprised us. He said when the US government dropped those first bombs on Japan ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So the bomb that they dropped on Hiroshima, they didn't take off with the bomb armed. They took off with the bomb missing a piece.

ROBERT: And the missing piece is ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: It's a—it's a chunk of uranium.

ROBERT: Oh!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And then one of the scientists who was also a military guy crawled into the back of this plane while it was en route, opened up the bomb, put the missing piece back into it and then closed it back up again and turned on all the electrical switches that said if we drop you out of a plane you're gonna have to detonate.

ROBERT: It will explode when it's a certain number of feet off the ground. So pressure will trigger it. And as for "Finger on the button," the finger, which belonged to Harry Truman, President of the United States, was 11 time zones removed and frankly unaware of the act.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Truman, he didn't issue an order himself. He sort of approved an order that was already being issued from the Secretary of War to the commanders out there. And it said, "You have two of these special bombs—" that's what they called them, special bombs. "And here are your four targets you can drop them on." You could drop them on Hiroshima, you could drop them on Nagasaki, you could drop them on Kokura and you could drop them on Niigata.

LATIF: Basically he says any day after August 3 ...
ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Feel free to drop the bomb.
JAD: What? He said here's a couple of different options. Choose?

ROBERT: Choose.

LATIF: Here's some bombs, here's some cities, here's some days.

ROBERT: Here's some days.

LATIF: Go for it.

JAD: No [bleep] way!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Other than that, the only considerations are operational. So the bombing order says you have to be able to see the target before you drop it. And that's it.

JAD: Wow!

LATIF: One of the interesting things that I found out later, there was a town called Kokura. And that was the plan B town—or city, rather—for Hiroshima, but the weather that day happened to be good in Hiroshima so they dropped it there. And then the next time, that was actually the plan A city for Nagasaki, but the weather was bad there, and so then they—they bombed Nagasaki. But so this—this city of Kokura got spared twice. Like, it was so close!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And so Truman doesn't even know.. He gets told, "Oh by the way, we dropped the bomb yesterday."

JAD: You mean when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He had no idea. Did not know.

JAD: ... he didn't know it would be Hiroshima?

LATIF: He didn't know.

ROBERT: He didn't know what day.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The second bomb, he seems to have been caught off guard, and he actually issues—this is his only way of getting involved, he issues an order which says, "Stop dropping atomic bombs until I tell you to."

JAD: I feel like if you're a president and you're gonna do that to that many people, you—I feel like you should be directly responsible. It should not be an arbitrary decision. Like, I kind of want a button in this case.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: No. No no no. You wouldn't actually want there to be a button, right? You could bump a button, right? A button is too easy, right? You don't want it to be easy enough that you set your coffee down on the Oval Office table and, like, kill the world, right? Like, obviously nobody wants to do that.

ROBERT: No. Nobody wants to do that.

LATIF: Right.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And I think it's—you know, I have to admit when you first were pitching the button thing, I was thinking, "Where are they gonna go with this? How is this gonna work?"

LATIF: Hmm.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And the more I was thinking about it, it's sort of a deep concept, right? It's about the ease in which you could actually destroy all of civilization because of the technology, which you could not do in the 19th century, you could not do with Genghis Khan. He could do a lot of damage, but he could not kill, you know, all the people in the world. A button is the symbol of how easy that is.

ROBERT: And the reason this becomes kind of crucial is we now are moving through the '50s into the '60s.

[NEWS CLIP: For the first time, the cities of the United States and the people who live in them are vulnerable.]

ROBERT: In the early '60s, the United States is in a face to face with Khruschev over the Cuban missiles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: The Soviet military units are in a state of combat readiness.]

ROBERT: And the world gets really really really close to annihilation.

LATIF: The way that it works at this time is that the President has an assistant, a military guy, who has all the nuclear codes in a briefcase handcuffed ...

ROBERT: ... to the assistant. And the assistant, if the President is in the bathroom, the assistant is outside the door in the corridor.

JAD: At all times?

ROBERT: And if the President is at a football game—at all times.

LATIF: And so weirdly, the suitcase is called the football, and I believe the page with the nuclear launch codes on it is called the biscuit.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Why?

LATIF: I have no idea why.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: I have no idea where it got the name.

ROBERT: So it's the 60s and things between the US and the Soviet Union are very tense. And there are generals on the Joint Chiefs, Curtis LeMay among them.

LATIF: He's called Bombs Away LeMay.

ROBERT: Yeah. Who are very—who are not at all troubled by the possibility that this would be a weapon they would use. And they advocated very specifically in a very specific case.

LATIF: So even though there are no buttons and there are all these codes, people are still worried at the time about just how easy it would be for the President to launch a nuclear attack.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Right. So ...
LATIF: And one guy in particular ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: This guy Roger Fisher, who's this sort of academic policy guy.

LATIF: ... he's a Harvard Law School professor. He advised Secretaries of State on the Iran hostage crisis, on the Israel-Egypt peace accord. He—he definitely had the ear of the Pentagon.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And he was troubled by this idea that, you know, the President could very dispassionately start a nuclear war.

LATIF: And so he proposed this idea.

ELLIOTT FISHER: I'll jump in. The notion comes from his long interest in reducing the risk of war.

LATIF: Roger Fisher passed away, but we were able to talk to his two sons.

ELLIOTT FISHER: I'm Elliott Fisher. I'm a professor at Dartmouth.

PETER FISHER: And I'm Peter Fisher. I'm a senior fellow at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

ELLIOTT FISHER: So his solution to this ...

ROBERT: And by the way, this would be just in the case of a US surprise attack, it's what's called a "First strike."

ELLIOTT FISHER: ... was to instead of having all the codes be just in a suitcase ...

PETER FISHER: ... his idea was to get a volunteer who'd have the codes put under their heart ...

ELLIOTT FISHER: You embed the codes in some sort of capsule in the guy's heart.

PETER FISHER: ... surgically. And he'd carry around a briefcase with a knife in it—a butcher knife. And if the President ever felt the urge to fire off the missiles ...

ELLIOTT FISHER: ... he has to go to the guy and say, "Well, now's time. Give me the knife."

LATIF: And then he would have to take the knife and drive it into the guy's chest.

ELLIOTT FISHER: And the President has to chop out this code from this guy's heart.

PETER FISHER: The President would have to kill someone and pull the code out of their body. He would have to first kill one person in order to get at the codes that would let him kill millions of people.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He'd have to look at someone and realize what death is, Fisher writes. What an innocent death is. "Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home." Fisher then says that he suggested this to friends in the Pentagon and their reply was, "My God, that's terrible! Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."

LATIF: That's the whole point!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yes. The strongest objection is it might work. And even now I think, you know, gosh, not a crazy idea at all to have the President be—if they're gonna pull the trigger and blow the world up, kill one person 'cause you're just about to kill tens of millions, mostly innocent people.

ROBERT: Huh. And the button is just too easy, so we'll just make it harder.

PETER FISHER: The button's too easy. Exactly. Yeah.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yeah, the butcher knife is the ultimate anti-button.

JAD: But how are you gonna find a guy to put the codes inside his heart?

LATIF: I would—I would volunteer. I would volunteer to be that guy.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: You would?

LATIF: Totally. In a second I would volunteer to be the guy.

ROBERT: You would volunteer to be stabbed in the heart by the President of the United States?

LATIF: And you know what I would do? I would make—like, I would be best friends with the President. We would take walks, we would go swimming together. It would be great! We would be best friends!

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: I would—I would—that would be my mission would be to make it as hard as humanly possible for him to carve open my chest.

ROBERT: Okay, we have some thank yous to make here. Latif, you go ahead.

LATIF: All right. First thank you to Catherine Kilickowski of the Elevator Historical Society Museum in Long Island City, New York.

ROBERT: And the Slade Elevator Company and Pride & Service Elevator Company, both in New York for helping us learn things. And to our friend Steve who helped us understand what goes on among autograph collectors.

LATIF: Thank you to the very indulgent New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts Division.

ROBERT: And Alex Wellerstein has a nuclear history blog. He calls it Restricted Data. Check that out.

LATIF: Alex in turn wanted us to thank John Kuster-Mullen, Michael Gordon, Eric Schlosser and Spencer Weir.

ROBERT: And special thanks to actors Michael Cherniss and Noah Robbins.

JAD: And also let's not forget Damiano Marchetti for production support.

ROBERT: And we thought we would just go out with our final salute to buttons by the one—one mechanism man created that hates a button.

LATIF: And the music you are hearing was arranged by the composer Keith Harrison. It is a zipper rag.

ROBERT: Zippers being mortal enemies of the button.

JAD: On that note, you weirdos ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: ... we should go. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Go ahead, Latif.

LATIF: And I'm Latif Nasser.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

-30-

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New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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