ROBERT KRULWICH: Sam, are you there?

SAM KEAN: I am here. Hello.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, Sam.

SAM KEAN: Hello. How are you?

JAD: Good. How are you?

SAM KEAN: Good.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: You're listening to Radiolab.

ROBERT: So to begin with, we're talking to author Sam Kean.

JAD: Radiolab regular.

ROBERT: And he has just written a wonderful new book called The Violinist's Thumb. And in it, he tells a story, which is actually kind of ...

JAD: Encouraging, I think?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: To get to that part, though, you have to make it through the worst luck imaginable.

ROBERT: And a thousand-year curse.

JAD: Yeah.

SAM KEAN: [laughs]

JAD: Well, maybe just tell us the fellow's name.

SAM KEAN: The fellow's name is Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

JAD: He is Japanese, of course. Story takes place in Japan, specifically ...

SAM KEAN: On August 6, 1945.

ROBERT: What is his job, this fellow?

SAM KEAN: He's a ship engineer. He designed big military and shipping boats for Mitsubishi.

JAD: And Mr. Yamaguchi had spent the last couple of months working in Hiroshima.

ROBERT: But now finally, he's about to leave.

SAM KEAN: The next day to return home.

ROBERT: And on the morning of August 6, what's happening with him?

SAM KEAN: He gets part way to work, and he realizes that he has forgotten his inkan.

ROBERT: What's an inkan?

SAM KEAN: It's a seal that they use to stamp documents.

ROBERT: Oh.

SAM KEAN: That was his signature.

JAD: Which, you know, was important for his work.

SAM KEAN: So he goes back home to his boarding house, gets waylaid by the owners of the boarding house he's at, and they say, "Will you come to have tea with us?" And he's very polite, so he sits down for tea for a while with them, then hops back on the bus.

ROBERT: Takes this bus to a streetcar, gets off the streetcar.

SAM KEAN: And he starts walking. And at this point, it's about 8:15 in the morning.

JAD: He's got about a mile to walk to get to the Mitsubishi plant. So he's walking by some farms to get to the city, when all of a sudden ...

SAM KEAN: He hears something overhead. He looks up in the sky ...

JAD: And he sees a plane.

ROBERT: Way, way up above him.

SAM KEAN: And he can just see a very tiny speck descending from the belly of the plane.

ROBERT: And he knows right away that's a bomb. I mean, Japan is at war, after all.

SAM KEAN: And he's been drilled in air raid tactics.

JAD: So he drops to the ground.

SAM KEAN: Covers his head, and he plugs his thumbs into his ears.

ROBERT: And he waits ...

SAM KEAN: For the big bang to go off.

ROBERT: But this time, before there's even a sound ...

SAM KEAN: There was a very hot flash of very bright white light that sort of bathed over him. Then after that came the roar. It actually picked him up off the ground and threw him. He could feel the air sort of raking over his belly, and it threw him down, and he landed unconscious.

JAD: Okay, before we move forward with Tsutomu's day—and it does not end here—let's just rewind this story about a fraction of a second back to that moment when he's on the ground, crouching with his fingers in his ears, and that light comes. Well, the thing about that white light is that it is filled with ...

SAM KEAN: Gamma rays, which are basically like really high-powered, intense X-rays.

JAD: And in that instant the light hits him, those gamma rays shoot through his skin into the cells of his body, where his DNA is, where they slam into ...

SAM KEAN: Water molecules.

JAD: That are clustered around the DNA.

SAM KEAN: DNA is a very thirsty molecule. It has lots of water nearby it. And gamma rays ...

JAD: When they come crashing in ...

SAM KEAN: ... they knock electrons ...

JAD: Right off the water molecules.

SAM KEAN: And it forms these very reactive molecules called free radicals.

JAD: Which become like hungry little beasts.

SAM KEAN: And they start to go after DNA. They're very greedy for electrons because they're missing an electron at this point. And they see this big molecule nearby, DNA, they go right after it, and they start ripping electrons off. They basically cut it at various points.

ROBERT: All of which is to say that the moment the light hit him, Tsutomu Yamaguchi's DNA got shredded.

JAD: Where did the bomb land in proximity to him? Like, right near him, or was it miles and miles away?

SAM KEAN: He was about a mile or so away. It's a little hard to judge, but he was about a mile or so away. And he just remembers waking up lying in the potato field.

ROBERT: So then what happens?

SAM KEAN: He wakes up, and he has no idea how long he was unconscious because the bomb sucked up so much dirt that it sort of made the entire area dark. It was like storm clouds over the entire city, so he couldn't tell how long he'd been unconscious. But he got to his feet.

ROBERT: He looks down at his arms.

SAM KEAN: It looked like he had this horrendous sunburn on both of his forearms, especially his left forearm, which was closer to the bomb. But he's walking by people who are torn open and bleeding or staggering. They're clearly not going to make it. And he's just sort of wandering through this field before he realizes that he should go report to work.

ROBERT: He's going to go to Mitsubishi?

SAM KEAN: He didn't know what to do. He was sort of dazed. That was the only thing he could think of to even try to do.

ROBERT: But when he gets to the Mitsubishi plant, it isn't there. It's just rubble. His coworkers are dead. So he decides what he's gotta do is he's gotta find a way to get home and back to his family.

SAM KEAN: And he starts hearing a rumor that there are going to be trains leaving Hiroshima to go south, which is where he's from. And he decides he's gonna get to the train station no matter what. The unfortunate part is that he has to cross over rivers to get to the train station, and most of the bridges have been knocked out at this point.

ROBERT: He finds himself walking along one river.

SAM KEAN: He goes a little bit downstream, and he finds that there's a railroad trestle across the river at this point, and there's one beam of it intact. So he climbs up this little tower, and basically like a tightrope walker, starts walking across this railroad trestle to get to the other side.

ROBERT: Eventually, he does find the train station.

SAM KEAN: And there's predictably kind of a mob waiting to get on these trains. But he pushes his way through, gets to the train, and he sits down.

ROBERT: And the train leaves to take him home.

SAM KEAN: To Nagasaki.

JAD: Oh, wait. He's ...

ROBERT: Nagasaki.

JAD: He's going from Hiroshima a day later to Nagasaki?

SAM KEAN: He's going to Nagasaki the next day.

JAD: I don't like where this is going. [laughs]

ROBERT: Does he find his family?

SAM KEAN: He gets to them. He finds them at home.

JAD: Spends a day swimming in and out of consciousness.

SAM KEAN: And the next day, August 9, he gets up, gets to Mitsubishi headquarters. He's bandaged up, not looking very good, and he starts telling his boss and his fellow engineers about this enormous bomb that had exploded and devastated the city. And after a minute or so, his boss cuts him off, and he says that this is complete baloney. You're an engineer. Calculate it: how could one bomb destroy an entire city? And as soon as he finished saying that, Yamaguchi felt the same flash that he'd felt in Hiroshima.

JAD: Followed by that same roar for a second time.

SAM KEAN: Yamaguchi's thought while this was happening was, "Oh, my God!" He thought the mushroom cloud had followed him from Hiroshima. In a sense, I guess he was right. It had sort of followed him there.

JAD: And again in that flash, gamma rays flood his body.

SAM KEAN: And they would have created free radicals again, and it would have attacked his DNA a second time.

JAD: A second time he pulls himself up, staggers out of the building.

SAM KEAN: It didn't collapse this time.

JAD: And he climbs up a hill nearby.

SAM KEAN: And he starts looking over at Nagasaki.

ROBERT: Which is burning just like Hiroshima was three days before. And the sky is black with clouds again.

SAM KEAN: And he could see where his neighborhood was. And it looked like his neighborhood was completely burnt out too.

ROBERT: He does eventually find his family. They've made it into an air raid shelter, and they do try to restart their lives. But within a short time ...

SAM KEAN: His health starts sinking pretty quickly. His hair fell out. He had boils erupting on his body. He kept throwing up. His face swelled. He lost hearing in one ear. His arm, he reported, looked like whale meat, this sort of bright red raw meat, because he'd had sort of this blackened crust over it. And when the second bomb came, it incinerated that and fell off.

JAD: Now the really scary thing for scientists at the time,who, you know, had begun to study the effect of radiation on the body, was that it seemed like all that physical trauma, that was just the beginning of the nightmare. Because remember, these gamma rays attack the DNA that makes you you. And that's not just a problem for you. That's the same DNA that you pass down to your kids and their kids and their kids' kids.

ROBERT: What if those genes stay broken down through time?

SAM KEAN: There was a famous quote from Hermann Muller, the person who first figured out that exposing genes to radiation could cause a lot of damage to them. And he told the New York Times if the bomb survivors could foresee the results a thousand years from now, they might consider themselves more fortunate if the bomb had killed them.

ROBERT: Whoa!

SAM KEAN: He thought that it would propagate.

ROBERT: Like a biblical curse.

SAM KEAN: Through the generations.

JAD: And when the actual damage was done, how long did that take?

SAM KEAN: It's over within a millisecond. The gamma rays coming in, that is over in a millionth of a billionth of a second. That happens pretty much instantaneously. And the free radicals doing their damage is over after about a millisecond.

JAD: Wow! So a millisecond creates this in Muller's, you know, forecasting thousand-year curse?

ROBERT: Hmm.

SAM KEAN: Exactly. It's over at that point.

JAD: And here was a guy who got blasted ...

SAM KEAN: Twice within the span of three days.

ROBERT: How many people on Earth were in both blasts?

SAM KEAN: There's only a handful of people that they know of who were in what they call the blast zone, about a mile or a mile-and-a-half zone in both cities. And Yamaguchi was one of those few people.

JAD: So the question was was Muller right? Did these bombs create some kind of genetic curse that would echo through time?

ROBERT: For the next 40, 50 years, scientists both in Japan and in America began to track birth defects, incidents of cancer in the children of those who had been hit or blasted by the bomb.

JAD: Which brings us back to Mr. Yamaguchi.

SAM KEAN: Couple years later, Yamaguchi and his wife did decide that they did want to have children.

JAD: So he recovers.

SAM KEAN: He does recover. He goes back to work at Mitsubishi again. It's been so good to him. He had to go back there.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I mean, it's not their fault.

SAM KEAN: Right.

JAD: Anyhow ...

SAM KEAN: So he gets back on his feet, his health returns. And in the early 1950s, he and his wife decide that they want to have some more children. As you can imagine, there was a lot of anxiety about this kind of throughout the world. People really didn't know what was going to happen, especially because the initial blast of radiation really hit pregnant women hard. There were a lot of birth defects. It ended up producing a lot of babies with very tiny heads called microcephaly, and they had very low IQs. They couldn't do anything for themselves.

JAD: Nonetheless, Mr. Yamaguchi and his wife decide they're gonna go for it.

SAM KEAN: And they do have children.

JAD: Children, plural?

SAM KEAN: Yeah. They had two daughters after that.

JAD: Oh!

SAM KEAN: And the two daughters initially are fine. They don't have any noticeable birth defects or any birth defects, but they ended up starting in their teenage years and then, especially as adults, having a lot of health problems. They had a lot of immune problems, and they quite naturally blame it on the fact that their father got exposed to the nuclear bomb twice, and their mom got exposed once.

JAD: But still no cancer, no birth defects.

ROBERT: And roughly 60 years later ...

SAM KEAN: As far as I know, they're still alive.

JAD: Really?

SAM KEAN: Yeah.

JAD: Now, here's the amazing thing.

SAM KEAN: In Japan generally, though, there's really no evidence that the next generation of people really suffered. The children of atomic bomb survivors in Japan really didn't have a higher incidence of birth defects or cancer or anything like that.

ROBERT: Now of course, the people who were directly exposed to radiation, obviously they had a ton of health problems.

SAM KEAN: But it somehow just didn't get passed on to the next generation, it seems.

JAD: Seriously? I find that so surprising.

SAM KEAN: Yeah. I just assumed that the next generation of children would have reported a lot of health damage, a lot of birth defects, a much higher rate of cancer.

ROBERT: But that didn't happen.

JAD: Why not? I mean, like, how could it not affect the next generation? I mean, given the way that the gamma rays attack the DNA, it just seems like it would have to.

SAM KEAN: Well, there are—there is evidence that ...

ROBERT: Sam says there's a couple of things that might have happened here. First of all, if you're talking about damage getting passed down through generations, the key thing for DNA is what's going on inside your sperm and your egg cells. Those are the sex cells.

SAM KEAN: That's the only DNA that gets passed to the next generation.

JAD: And he says maybe these sex cells are just hardier than we thought.

SAM KEAN: And probably even more importantly, it turns out that after four billion years, DNA can do a pretty good job of repairing itself. There's one gene in particular called the p53 gene, and that's sometimes called the guardian of the genome. And it looks for DNA damage wherever it can.

JAD: It's sort of like our guardian angel embedded in our genes. And there's a lot of different ways that DNA can get messed up.

SAM KEAN: DNA is a double helix.

JAD: Which means it's got these two strands of chemicals.

SAM KEAN: The A, C, G and T letters.

JAD: That all fit together sort of like a zipper, so that the letters always match.

SAM KEAN: A always matches with T, and C always matches with G. So if you can read one side of the DNA strand, you know what has to appear on the opposite strand.

JAD: So when one of the two strands gets damaged, this p53 gene ...

SAM KEAN: It sort of whistles over these certain handyman proteins. And they come over, they'll basically cut that strand out, throw it away.

JAD: And pop in a new one. Because if you've got A and C on one side, you know you need T and G on the other.

SAM KEAN: Pretty simple. It's an ingenious system. Other times, both strands get snapped, and that is kind of an emergency for your body.

JAD: When that happens, this little guardian gene ...

SAM KEAN: Will basically force the cell to commit suicide.

JAD: Because it can't afford to have that cell turn cancerous.

ROBERT: Now I don't think we want to leave the impression that, you know, you can stand in a bomb blast and your children will not be affected for sure, for sure, because I don't think we're that sure.

JAD: No.

SAM KEAN: There is evidence that people from Chernobyl, for instance, did show higher signs of birth defects, but there was different kinds of radiation that got into the food supply. And when radiation gets in your body, it's kind of like a bazooka at short range, and it does a lot more damage to your DNA.

JAD: Which is why in 2011, with the reactor meltdown, the Japanese government immediately quarantined all contaminated food and animals. But still, what's sort of beautiful here is that something that seems so unbelievably intricate and fragile like a strand of DNA, that little tiny flame that we pass into the future, that that can be so surprisingly resilient, that we can be so resilient.

ROBERT: What happened to Mr. Yamaguchi? What was ...

SAM KEAN: He actually lived all the way until 2010.

ROBERT: 2010?

SAM KEAN: He lived 65 years after that.

JAD: How old was he?

SAM KEAN: He was—let me look up to make sure. He was 93 years old when he finally died.

JAD: Oh, my God!

ROBERT: Big thanks to Sam Kean, who is—whose work is—well, we like what he does a lot. And he has a new book, which—it's a long title. Go ahead and read it.

JAD: It's called The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code.

ROBERT: And what he does is he just takes a look at everything that's happened in the 10 years since the Human Genome Project ends and he asks, "What have we learned?" And that's what the book tells you, tells you what we've learned, which is a lot.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Coming up next, we look at nuclear weapons from the side of the people who drop the bombs.

JAD: I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: Stay tuned.

[LISTENER: Hey, Radiolab team. This is Matt Snodgrass. I am a Radiolab listener from Portland, Oregon. Radiolab is supported by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing the understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: You're listening to Radiolab.

ROBERT: And before the break, we described a fellow who had been double blasted in World War II by American atomic bombs. Now we're gonna stick to the nuclear theme, but we're gonna switch perspectives and ask about people who drop these bombs. I mean, in every country that has atomic weapons, there are people empowered to drop them. And presumably there are people empowered to say, "Wait!" Or "Don't!" Or maybe not.

HAROLD HERING: And so your name again is?

CEDRIC: Cedric.

HAROLD HERING: Cedric. I'm gonna write that down.

CEDRIC: And they're on the line now, so you'll be able to talk to them.

ROBERT: So Harold can you hear ...?

HAROLD HERING: Yes, hello?

ROBERT: Hi. Okay.

JAD: A little while ago, our producer Latif Nasser brought us the story about a guy.

HAROLD HERING: My name is Harold Hering.

JAD: Who asked a question.

ROBERT: It was a pretty simple question.

JAD: Maybe a dangerous question?

ROBERT: Maybe a dangerous question. Certainly just the mere asking of it pretty much ruined the man's life.

JAD: And he never got an answer.

ROBERT: No. But today on Radiolab, we are going to re-ask Harold's question, and this time ...

JAD: We get an answer.

ROBERT: And Latif Nasser takes it from here.

LATIF NASSER: Yeah. So our main guy Harold, he's former military and he's 81 years old. So Harold grew up in this tiny town called Browns, Illinois, from a poor family. He was the eldest of 11 kids. When he was growing up, he would always hear Air Force planes flying overhead, and that's why from when he was very young he always wanted to be an Air Force pilot.

ROBERT: So why don't you just tell us a little bit about your military background?

HAROLD HERING: Well, most of my career was with the Air Rescue Service.

LATIF: This was in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. And if an Air Force pilot went down ...

HAROLD HERING: Got shot down, whatever.

LATIF: Harold and his team would jump into their helicopters.

HAROLD HERING: Two Jolly Green heavy-lift helicopters.

LATIF: They'd fly him in, hover over the survivors on the ground.

HAROLD HERING: Lowering the hoist cable.

LATIF: And then a para-rescue man would climb down to the forest floor, find the injured soldier and attach the cable to him.

HAROLD HERING: Yeah.

LATIF: And while that was happening, Harold had to hold the helicopter steady. He had to hold his hover.

HAROLD HERING: And a lot of times the enemy would wait until that process started before they opened fire. I had some wonderful experiences, probably chief among them was my crew and I, we picked up a pilot that ejected into the North Sea at night in the wintertime.

ROBERT: Whoa!

HAROLD HERING: 200 miles out to sea. And we picked him up and brought him back.

LATIF: So it was a super high-risk, high-adrenaline kind of job.

HAROLD HERING: And I had an outstanding record.

LATIF: And then, well ...

HAROLD HERING: Well ...

LATIF: ... he got old.

LATIF: How old were you around this time?

HAROLD HERING: Oh, about 30. I was old. [laughs] Pilots my age and with my experience were put into desk jobs, and I wanted to be on the front line if I could.

LATIF: This was 1973, middle of the Cold War. So Harold decided that the way for him to be on the front lines without actually having to be on the front lines, you know, because he couldn't anymore, was to go into training to become a missileer.

HAROLD HERING: A missile launch officer.

LATIF: Those are the people who sit in an underground bunker and just wait to get an order to turn their key and unleash a nuclear attack.

HAROLD HERING: In training I mean, you just—the information I can remember just virtually verbatim, is that each missile launch officer has under his direct control more firepower than all generals in all wars in the history of warfare.

LATIF: And so Harold started his training at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Nixon was president at the time, and at the time the prospect of nuclear war felt very real.

HAROLD HERING: There was a lot of responsibility there and there's no room for error.

LATIF: And so in Harold's training ...

HAROLD HERING: We were a very small class.

LATIF: ... he learned all about the technical stuff.

HAROLD HERING: You know, all the mechanical stuff and the emergency procedures that were involved.

LATIF: All the nitty-gritty details of how a missile actually launched.

HAROLD HERING: And then part of the time we had classroom instruction.

LATIF: Where he learned about the chain of command, and all the different safeguards and checks.

HAROLD HERING: Right.

LATIF: So imagine that he gets an order to launch. That order has to be decoded, so he would decode the order and then his partner would decode the order, and then they would verify it with one another. So one guy would be like, "Okay. I got the order Alpha Bravo One Two Four." And then his partner would say, "I confirm. Alpha Bravo One Two Four." And then they launch. So neither of them has the power to launch on his or her own.

HAROLD HERING: And both of you were armed. You carried a sidearm with you.

ROBERT: Why?

HAROLD HERING: Well, you know, it's serious business, and if you had someone that was—you know, if they threatened your life ...

LATIF: If one of the officers wanted to just go rogue ...

HAROLD HERING: You had a sidearm too.

ROBERT: Well, if I took my gun and pointed it at you and said, "Turn the key, Harold."

HAROLD HERING: I wouldn't do it. I may go down, but I'd be drawing my weapon.

ROBERT: And these keys have to be turned simultaneously, so if I shoot you, turn my key then run over, get your key and turn your key, it's too late, right? It has to be a simultaneous ...

HAROLD HERING: Yes. Yes.

LATIF: So the whole point is the system is designed so that no one person can launch a nuclear attack.

HAROLD HERING: I was very pleased, very satisfied with the checks and balances at the crew member level.

LATIF: You know, the bottom where they're turning the keys.

HAROLD HERING: I was not concerned about that at all.

LATIF: But then a few weeks into training ...

HAROLD HERING: There was some discussion about pre-emptive strike.

LATIF: Real quick. Obviously, if someone launched a nuclear attack against the US, we would be able to strike back, you know, in response. But a pre-emptive strike would be where we, for whatever reason, decided to strike first.

HAROLD HERING: And that raised the hair on the back of my neck a little bit. You know, it's just I thought we're receiving all of this information about all these elaborate checks and balances within the system, but ...

LATIF: They never got any information about how things worked at the presidential level.

HAROLD HERING: There is a complete void or blackout at the level that the order is initiated.

ROBERT: When you had this thought did you say to the other classmates?

HAROLD HERING: No, I didn't. It wasn't my intent to try to create a scene by involving other people, students, whatever. So ...

LATIF: Harold waits until the end of class, walks up to the front of the room and asks the instructor a question.

HAROLD HERING: A very reasonable question.

LATIF: He's like, "Just checking. There's a safety net in place if the president is making a crazy decision, right?"

HAROLD HERING: I wanted to find out more about checks and balances at the top level.

LATIF: And the instructor pauses, looks at him and says, "Can you put that in writing, please?"

HAROLD HERING: Okay. "There's presently a degree of doubt in my mind as to whether I might someday be called upon to launch nuclear weapons as a result of an invalid, unlawful order."

LATIF: This is part of the letter that Harold wrote explaining his question.

HAROLD HERING: "I asked myself, 'How will I know, or can I be sure I'm—I am participating in a justifiable act?'"

LATIF: In his letter, he says that if he were ordered to turn his key he would absolutely do so, but because he had not been told what the checks and balances are for the President, he would be doing so with "a conflict of conscience."

HAROLD HERING: "... a conflict of conscience." Which I've underlined. "I would be required to assign blind faith values to my judgment of one man, the President. Values which could ultimately include health, personality and political considerations. This just should not be."

ROBERT: So we've got a guy training to be the person who pulls the trigger, and he's sitting there wondering, "Okay. There's a lot of checks on me, but who's checking the President?"

JAD: And this struck us as a really kind of serious question. Because right now we have a president, President Trump, who is clearly interested in nuclear weapons. He talks about it constantly.

ROBERT: You got the thing with North Korea.

JAD: Yeah, escalating tensions with North Korea. Syria, for chrissakes. Sort of makes you stop and think, like, okay, if and when these decisions get made, how are they made? Is there someone else in the room?

ROBERT: Yeah, and who? If the president is—is determined. If he—if he's ready to go, is there somebody there who can turn to the President and say "Stop?"

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: That is a great question.

LATIF: This is historian Alex Wellerstein. He's the one who introduced us to Harold. He wrote an article in the Washington Post about this very topic. And he has spent so much time in just archives, behind microfilm readers, and FOIAing documents and doing all kinds of different things to figure out the history of our relationship to this uniquely destructive weapon. And—and what he found was a kind of tug of war between the military and the President that has gone back more than 70 years.

[NEWS CLIP: As the nation is plunged into mourning by President Roosevelt's death, Harry S. Truman becomes President. The seventh American president ...]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Truman learned he had a bomb the day that Roosevelt died.

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: This is April, 1945. At this point, America has been at war with Japan for over three years.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: It was impressed upon Truman that this was not just another weapon. That this was something that could be bigger and better than any other weapon before. But there's no point at which somebody says, "Hey, Mr. President, should we bomb Japan with this bomb?" It's assumed that of course you're gonna do it. You have the bomb, you have the enemy. And in fact, nobody ever goes to Truman and says, "Should we do this?"

ROBERT: Really?

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They go to him and they say, "We are doing this." So Truman writes in his journal, "We're going to use the atomic bomb, but we will not use it on a civilian target. We will use it on a purely military target." That's the term.

ROBERT: Purely military.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Purely.

LATIF: Now we can't get into his head to know exactly what he was thinking, but that is what he wrote in his journal at the time.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And then he says, "We will not be killing women and children."

ROBERT: So the first atomic bomb is gonna be dropped by a president who thinks that he's dropping it on soldiers only.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He's somewhat congratulating himself on that no women and children will be killed in this attack.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Harry S. Truman: The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.]

LATIF: That's part of Truman's announcement after they dropped the bomb.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The day after, they get casualty estimates from the Japanese, and he realizes this is not purely a military base.

[NEWS CLIP: There is reason to believe that the Japanese city of Hiroshima, approximately the size of Memphis or Seattle or Rochester, New York, no longer exists.]

LATIF: The total death toll was almost 200,000.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So there's a real switch that happens between Truman talking about the bomb, and also everything he says about the bomb before he hears about the casualties is how it's about the greatest thing ever, and this is the greatest day in history, and he's so proud and so happy. And then he hears about the casualties and he hears about the women and children, and suddenly it becomes a burden.

ROBERT: Now what happens?

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So on August 10, he gets a message from General Groves.

[NEWS CLIP: Nagasaki. Just three days after Hiroshima ...]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: That says, "We dropped two bombs. We're gonna have a third one in a week, just FYI." And it's not clear that Truman knew that two bombs were gonna be dropped so soon.

ROBERT: Whoa!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So he has just learned that Hiroshima is a city when he just learns that another city gets destroyed. He is not in control.

ROBERT: Wow.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And he has immediately written back to them and says, "Just stop. Knock it off. You are not gonna drop another bomb without express permission of the President of the United States." So the major theme of Truman's approach to nuclear weapons is to keep them out of the hands of the military.

LATIF: So they actually start to design and build these bombs to make sure the military can't launch them on its own.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The nuclear parts of the bomb have to be in the possession of the civilians.

ROBERT: The nuclear parts. So the plutonium.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The plutonium. The core.

LATIF: Right.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And the early bombs allow you to do that. The fronts of them actually open up and allow you to stick the core in and close it back up.

LATIF: Oh!

ROBERT: So the civilians walk into the room with the explosive part, the soldiers open the lid.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yes.

ROBERT: The civilians put the explosive part in, close the door, now you have an active bomb. Where does the President put the nuclear part?

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They have their own vaults with their own guys with their own guns. And their job is to shoot anybody who tries to take a core without presidential authorization.

ROBERT: Wow!

LATIF: So for the rest of his presidential term, Truman doesn't budge. The nuclear power is his and his alone.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: But the technology starts to make it trickier to do this. If you want a very small atomic bomb, you can't separate the pit out from that. It's just not gonna happen. It's physically, like, glued to the explosives and things like that.

LATIF: So it's 1953, just a few years before Harold entered the military.

[NEWS CLIP: The Commander In Chief returns to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he served ...]

LATIF: President Eisenhower comes to power. And he's a former general.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Right. Exactly.

LATIF: And so he's a little bit less concerned about who has control over these nuclear weapons. So he eases up a little bit.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And he says in his administration, atomic weapons, small ones, are to be treated as basically any other kind of weapon.

[NEWS CLIP: A nuclear age arsenal of awesome proportions!]

LATIF: This is archival footage from 1960, when President Eisenhower is getting a first look at some of the newest additions to the nuclear arsenal.

[NEWS CLIP: He pulls out his binoculars to watch helicopters and foot soldiers in the field.]

ROBERT: Does he continue to maintain authority over the bigger bombs?

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He allows them to be transferred to the military, but he says, "Don't drop them without my permission."

ROBERT: Oh!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: But there are some cases in which he says, "Under really bad circumstances, you can use some of these weapons without my permission."

LATIF: So compared to Truman, he's really shifting that power back to the military.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yes, but ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Good evening, my fellow citizens.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: ... by the time Kennedy is the president ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: It is an ironic but accurate fact ...]

LATIF: 1961. Harold is 24. He's a pilot in the Air Force.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John F. Kennedy: ... that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: The Soviet capabilities are greatly increased. So ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That signal means to stop whatever you are doing and get to the nearest safe place fast.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: You get real anxieties. And some of these anxieties bubble up in popular—these are kind of out there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: (singing) So long, mom. I'm off to drop the bomb. So don't wait up for me.]

LATIF: At this point, popular culture is saturated in nuclear fear.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, movie dialogue: First thing will be a white light that'll blind us. Then a hot flame that'll burn ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, movie dialogue: Take it easy!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, movie dialogue: I don't want to die!]

LATIF: People are building bomb shelters. Kids in classrooms are practicing hiding under their desks.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: First you duck, and then you cover.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: You have bombers flying from the United States, and on these routes that take them near the Soviet borders. And the problem is you put up a lot of bombers.

LATIF: It's only a matter of time before ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They'll expect one to crash or have a malfunction.

[NEWS CLIP: A SAC B-52 carrying hydrogen munitions ...]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And so indeed there are a bunch of accidents where bombers crash with hydrogen bombs on board. They crash in Spain. One of them gets dropped on Greenland.

[NEWS CLIP: The Thule air base, Greenland.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They crash in the United States numerous times. There's one in the South where a bomb basically lands on somebody's house.

LATIF: Someone's house?

[NEWS CLIP: An atomic bomb breaks loose from a mounting shackle in a B-47 jet over Florence, South Carolina. Plummets to Earth.]

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: It didn't detonate.

[NEWS CLIP: Six were injured. The home of Walter Greg was turned into a shambles.]

LATIF: Oh my God, that would be the most terrifying thing. Imagine you're just brushing your teeth and then ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Atomic bomb.

LATIF: Atomic bomb!

ROBERT: And there's a knock on the door and say, "Excuse me. We're gonna remove this."

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So there's all these accidents.

LATIF: And on top of that, America is keeping a bunch of its bombs in bases all over the world.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: And they start to worry that some of these bases are not American bases, and there aren't that many Americans on them. So ...

LATIF: For instance, some nukes are kept at a base in Turkey.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Now Turkey's our friend, right? Not a problem.

LATIF: But they are, like, two American guys guarding these things.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They have the keys to turn these missiles on. What do you need to do if Turkey wants to become a nuclear power?

ROBERT: Uh ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: They need to hit these guys over the head with a hammer and take the keys. Now Turkey's a nuclear power.

ROBERT: Oh!

LATIF: Whoa!

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yeah. This is more or less what Kennedy says.

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: So Kennedy actually has the exact same instinct that Truman did.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He issues a directive which says no weapons can be kept overseas, unless they have locks on them.

LATIF: Truman wanted it close to the chest, and then Eisenhower wanted it out there, and then Kennedy now is pulling it back in.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Right. Exactly.

LATIF: At the time, this felt safe. Who better to trust than the President with something so powerful it could end the world? And even after Kennedy, the laws around this solidify, the power stays with the president.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yes.

LATIF: But then, you get this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Nixon: People have got to know whether or not their President's a crook.]

LATIF: Richard Milhous Nixon.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Nixon: Well, I'm not a crook.]

LATIF: And this feeling of safety, and really all trust in the presidency just starts to erode.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So in the last days of his presidency, there's the Watergate break-in, there are all the investigations. Nixon was drinking more than the President perhaps ought to. He was under an intense amount of stress. He did a few things that made people uncomfortable.

ROBERT: Huh.

LATIF: The most infamous moment like this happened in the summer of 1974.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Yes.

LATIF: When all the Watergate stuff was really coming to a head.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He was talking with two congressmen, and he was trying to impress upon them what a waste of time this quote "little burglary" was. And to give an example of how minor this was, he explained that his responsibilities were huge. If he wanted to, he could go into the other room, pick up a telephone and in 20 minutes 60 million people would be dead.

LATIF: Whoa!

ROBERT: He said this.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: He said this.

LATIF: And that's exactly the kind of situation Harold was thinking about when he asked his question. Like, since I'm the guy with my hand on the key, just kind of curious here, is there a system for making sure a President doesn't just walk into the other room, pick up the phone and order me to kill 60 million people?

HAROLD HERING: "There's presently a degree of doubt in my mind."

LATIF: So he asks this question, first out loud, then he does it in writing.

HAROLD HERING: And then I was pulled out of training. I think it was about six days before graduation.

LATIF: That leads to a series of meetings with superior officers, where they basically tell him ...

HAROLD HERING: That I need to have more faith in our leaders. You know, not to question them. And I was told that I didn't have a need to know.

LATIF: That leads to a trial where he has this one meeting with this military judge who basically says, "Here, I have your question in my hand. I will tear it up and we can all forget this ever happened."

HAROLD HERING: But I still wanted the question answered.

LATIF: And then that leads to appeals. And he's writing letters.

HAROLD HERING: I would spend days and nights virtually continuously writing ...

LATIF: To congressmen.

HAROLD HERING: And writing and writing.

LATIF: To the President.

HAROLD HERING: But it really didn't matter at all what I had to say.

LATIF: And at that point he's basically like, "Okay, fine. I—I don't want to be a launch officer anymore."

HAROLD HERING: I asked to be, you know, reassigned if they weren't going to give the information.

LATIF: But instead of reassigning him ...

HAROLD HERING: My promotion to lieutenant colonel was withheld. I was removed from flight status, so I no longer would get flight pay. I was then permanently disqualified from the human reliability program, and along with that my top secret security clearance was taken away from me. And once you have a security clearance removed and you're permanently disqualified, there's no hope for your career.

LATIF: Wow.

ROBERT: Hmm.

HAROLD HERING: I pursued every avenue available to me to have my military record corrected, and to have the findings reversed and to remain in the Air Force. Only after I exhausted all of my appeals was I ordered to be retired.

JAD: What? I don't—why? Why? I mean, I know that, like, the whole military thing. You gotta stay in your lane. You don't question your superiors. But why would they ...

ROBERT: It's such an innocent question.

JAD: He just asked a question. And why would they—what's wrong with him asking the question? Why is it such a threat?

LATIF: Well, I'll tell you. Right after we take a break.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And so Latif, why was Harold's question such a threat?

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: Well, here's how it was put to me.

SONYA MCMULLEN: You know, the other side has to know. The only reason—the only way that—let me phrase it this way.

LATIF: Sure.

SONYA MCMULLEN: The whole—the whole premise is deterrence. That has been our founding philosophy since we developed these things.

LATIF: This is Dr. Sonya McMullen.

SONYA MCMULLEN: And I'm a former Air Force missileer.

LATIF: She had her hand on the nuclear keys from 1997 to 2001. And by 'deterrence,' she means ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There is only world peace where there is power to preserve order among nations.]

LATIF: We keep other countries from nuking us ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: B-52s represent a shield.]

LATIF: ... by making clear that if they do ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The missiles are ready.]

LATIF: ... we'll nuke 'em right back.

SONYA MCMULLEN: But if the other side doesn't believe that you will respond in kind, then it doesn't work.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: You have to believe my threat is legit. I have to be credible.

LATIF: So if you're the guy whose hand is on the key when the order comes down to launch, there can't be any doubt that you will do what you are ordered to do.

SONYA MCMULLEN: Exactly.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: So the problem with somebody like Harold is that you're—if you start allowing people to—at the bottom to start making up their mind, then it's not a credible threat because ...

ROBERT: So do you understand in your own mind why they had to have a committee to sit in judgment on him and review some sort of facts, or I don't know what ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: It's hard to know. I haven't seen their side of it. I'm filing to get access to that side. We'll see how that goes.

LATIF: Oh great! So I found this—I actually just—we got this this morning.

LATIF: So we actually ended up finding a statement by the Commander-In-Chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Russ Doherty.

LATIF: I don't know if you have seen it, Harold.

LATIF: And to be fair, we thought we should let Harold respond to it.

LATIF: Do you know what I'm talking about?

HAROLD HERING: No, but he was the CICSAC—Commander-In-Chief of Strategic Air Command.

LATIF: Right. Right, right. And so let me just read to you what he said.

HAROLD HERING: Sure.

LATIF: "The Major's hesitation initiated extensive hearings and administrative procedures. Later, he professed that he really would turn keys and that his hesitation had been misunderstood. I examined the record thoroughly and discovered that, for a fact, he had repeated several times in the record that he would readily turn keys. Then in each instance, his affirmative assertion was followed immediately by a personal subjective qualification. Yes, he would turn keys upon receipt of an authentic order from proper authority; if he thought the order was legal; if he thought the circumstances necessitated an ICBM launch; if he was convinced that it was a rational moral necessity, and so on. Every affirmative answer was qualified by a subjective condition."

HAROLD HERING: No, no, no.

LATIF: No. Okay.

HAROLD HERING: I did not say that anywhere. Nowhere did I say that. Nowhere did I use those words. And I'm sorry, but that's just—that's just false. That doesn't surprise me.

LATIF: According to Harold, he never wanted to doubt an order coming from the President.

HAROLD HERING: I assumed that there had to be some sort of check and balance, so that one man couldn't just on a whim order the launch of nuclear weapons.

LATIF: He just wanted to be told that something like that existed so that he and his fellow launch officers would not have to have a conflict of conscience.

HAROLD HERING: And that we not put anybody in a position where they're just following orders and throwing our conscience to the four winds. I think it's an affront to play the game of, you don't have the need to know of someone that's doing one of the most serious, grave jobs that there is in the Armed Forces.

LATIF: And so since Harold never got an answer to his question, we decided to make it our question.

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: Where do you get somebody who's allowed to question the President? Because we know that by the time you get to the bottom, there's no way that that's possible. So what about the guy above them? Let's say there's an officer who's one more up the tier. Is he gonna question the order? Well, I don't know. He's getting it from the generals who coordinate all of the nuclear attacks. If it got to him it must be a legitimate order, right? Maybe those top-level major heads of the military branches, maybe they get to. I don't know. And so my question is: where, if anywhere, if the President issues an order, can they, will they say no?

LATIF: After a lot of digging around, Alex says that he thinks ...

ALEX WELLERSTEIN: My guess is you're not allowed to question the President more than a couple steps down from the very top. If you're allowed to question the President at all, maybe the Secretary of Defense can do it.

LATIF: And when we talked to Sonya McMullen, our missileer, she also thought that the Secretary of Defense could probably provide a check.

SONYA MCMULLEN: The Secretary of Defense is the—is the first person to say, "Hey, let's—let's think about this. Let's think about this in detail."

BILL PERRY: All right, we're ready.

ROBERT: Okay.

BILL PERRY: This is Bill Perry, formerly Secretary of Defense, 19th Secretary of Defense of the United States.

LATIF: So we decided to ask an actual Secretary of Defense. William Perry served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997.

BILL PERRY: Yeah.

ROBERT: Let's just pretend for a moment that the President issues you an order that you disagree with, because you don't think the President is of right mind or sober or whatever. What authority do you have as Secretary of Defense, if any?

BILL PERRY: Well, the system is set up so that only the President has the authority to order a nuclear war. Nobody has the right to countermand that decision. He might choose to call the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get his advice or his counsel, but even if he does that he may—he may or may not accept that counsel.

ROBERT: If you as Secretary of Defense say to the President—he says, "Let's go," and you say, "Let's not."

BILL PERRY: First of all, if he calls me.

ROBERT: Yeah.

BILL PERRY: And then if I say, "That—Mr. President, that would be a very serious mistake. Don't do that." He might or might not accept my advice.

ROBERT: Are you necessary to launch? Like ...

BILL PERRY: No.

ROBERT: No. Suppose everybody in the room thought that it was a bad idea, would he still be able to do it?

BILL PERRY: Yes. He has the call directly to the Strategic Air Command to do the launching, and they will respond to his orders. They don't call the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman and say, "Should I do this?" They do it.

BRUCE BLAIR: Yeah, so in our training we were conditioned almost like a Pavlovian dog.

LATIF: This is Dr. Bruce Blair. He was a missile launch officer at the exact time that Harold was training to become one, and ever since then he basically spent the whole rest of his career studying nuclear command and control.

BRUCE BLAIR: I wrote studies so classified that the Pentagon demanded that I not be allowed to read them anymore.

LATIF: [laughs]

LATIF: And we asked him, like, why does it work like this? Why would we give one person that much power?

BRUCE BLAIR: It came out of the Cold War, you know, in the 1960s. I don't know. It's ...

LATIF: By the 1960s, the US and the Soviet Union were building ICBMs, which were these nuclear missiles that could go from a silo in one country to a target in the other in a matter of minutes. So if the Soviets ever launch their missiles at us ...

BRUCE BLAIR: If we're under a missile attack, there's very little time to assess the attack, to brief the President on his options.

LATIF: Because the assumption was that the Soviets would target our missiles.

BILL PERRY: Our ICBMs. And they would be the first to go. And so therefore, the President has to decide whether to launch our ICBMs before the other missiles land.

BRUCE BLAIR: Before any incoming missiles could destroy the command and control system, and that forces the President to make a decision on how to respond immediately, because missiles are flying in at four miles per second.

BILL PERRY: It's about six or seven minutes to make that decision.

LATIF: Oof. Six minutes, wow!

BRUCE BLAIR: The decision process just is too short.

LATIF: For any kind of thoughtful or serious deliberation.

BRUCE BLAIR: And the pressure is intense. And there I think you would find that different Presidents would respond differently. And their character, their temperament, are they thinking people or are they intuitive people who respond instinctively? And so, you know, you would see a lot of variation in the way Presidents react to a nuclear emergency.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dick Cheney: The President of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football.]

LATIF: This is then Vice President Dick Cheney, also a former Secretary of Defense, talking on Fox News Sunday back in 2008.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Dick Cheney: He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority, because of the nature of the world we live in.]

HAROLD HERING: It bothers me immensely that the only area that there is not a check and balance is the one that can literally result in the end of the world. That seems strange to me.

ROBERT: Have you thought about this at all and wondered whether there's a better way to do this?

BILL PERRY: Yes, I have.

ROBERT: Yeah, what would you suggest?

BILL PERRY: I have specifically proposed and continue to propose unsuccessfully ...

ROBERT: Again, former Secretary of Defense William Perry.

BILL PERRY: ... that we phase out our ICBMs, and to the extent we have to have a nuclear deterrence, we limit it to submarines and airplanes because they don't have to launch in five minutes or six minutes or seven minutes.

LATIF: And when it comes to pre-emptive strikes, he says ...

BILL PERRY: We have before the Congress now a bill making a modification which says that unless—unless the United States has been verifiably attacked, then the president has—before he launches his nuclear weapons, has to go to Congress for permission.

TED LIEU: So our bill is very simple.

LATIF: This is congressman Ted Lieu, and he and Senator Ed Markey are the guys who authored the bill.

TED LIEU: It basically says before the President can launch a nuclear first strike, the President must first get a declaration of war from Congress.

LATIF: I believe that you introduced this bill before the election. Is that right?

TED LIEU: Absolutely. Senator Markey and I believe we need a structural fix. We believed actually Hillary Clinton was gonna be president, so this bill would have applied to her. And that's because the fate of humanity and our world should not rest on one person. It's absolutely a systemic problem. And it's also a problem with the current person in the office of the President. But you can see future Presidents.

LATIF: Yeah.

TED LIEU: Right? That could be elected with judgment or temperament issues. Or maybe they simply go to advanced age and get Alzheimer's, right? Or some other sort of issue. That's why we can't have a system where there's so little checks and balances.

LATIF: Do you know about this bill, or have you heard of it?

SONYA MCMULLEN: No, actually I don't. And I—that's interesting. That is a very interesting bill. That's—let me say it this way.

LATIF: Yeah.

SONYA MCMULLEN: On one hand I agree because again, I always like to have checks and balances.

LATIF: Yeah.

SONYA MCMULLEN: On the other hand, I also think that it—it says to a potential adversary, you know, now there's doubt.

ROBERT: So there are two sort of values here. One is your humane interest in making sure that the end of the world, if it comes to that, is happening for a good reason and a just reason, as best you can define it. And the ongoing hope that by making this—our system credible, that we will never have an end of the world. So my question to you is like, how do you weigh those together?

SONYA MCMULLEN: Yeah. Well, and it's—that's a dilemma.

LATIF: Yeah.

SONYA MCMULLEN: You know, that's a dilemma.

LATIF: So after the military forced Harold to retire, he became a truck driver.

HAROLD HERING: And once I got that job I made up my mind that I was gonna devote my time to making a living for my family and to that company, and I wasn't gonna be off dealing with this subject anymore.

LATIF: And eventually he started doing addiction counseling at the Salvation Army, mostly with homeless people.

LATIF: How—what's your sort of emotional state around all this right now? Like, how often—is this something you still think about? How—what do you—how do you feel right now?

HAROLD HERING: Well, I'm—I'm just—I think that common sense, I think the goodness in human beings begs for a resolution of this. I just think that the need for that is at least as great now as it's ever been in the history of our republic. And I might add on a personal level, that I had—I mean, I was really committed to the military, to the Air Force. Volunteered several times, you know, to—to do my duty with respect to the Vietnam War. And I just felt that I had asked a very reasonable question that deserved an answer. And—and it was not for me alone, but it was for all of us.

JAD: This story was produced by Annie McEwen with production help from Simon Adler.

ROBERT: And a big thank you to historian and reporter Ron Rosenbaum whose research we relied on in some part for this story.

JAD: And to our special consulting researcher Alex Wellerstein who is by day a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

ROBERT: And to the US Air Force. To Captain Chris Mesnard and to Carla Pampy and to Lieutenant Esther Willette, and to Lieutenant Veronica Perez.

JAD: Also, thanks to Elaine Scarry, Ryan Pettigrew at the Nixon Presidential Library, Ryan Furtkamp, Robin Barry and Lisa Barry, Thom Woodroofe, Doreen DeBrum, and Ray Peter. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To hear the message again, press 2. Start of message.]

[BRUCE BLAIR: This is Bruce Blair at Princeton.]

[BILL PERRY: I'm Bill Perry.]

[BRUCE BLAIR: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.]

[BILL PERRY: Soren Wheeler is senior editor, Jamie York is our senior producer.]

[BRUCE BLAIR: Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell ...]

[BILL PERRY: David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich ...]

[BRUCE BLAIR: Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster.]

[BILL PERRY: With help from Tracie Hunte, Valentina Bojanini, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson.]

[BRUCE BLAIR: Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

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