HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This one goes out for my grandfather. This is for you, Pop-pop.
BEN KISSEL
I'm not proud of you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, you know what?
BEN KISSEL
Hey, you know everything you do is kind of gay to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't mind it because hey, you're finally talking to me.
BEN KISSEL
What's a podcast?
MARCUS PARKS
I disapprove of every major decision you've made in your life.
BEN KISSEL
Hey Henry, are you Rush Limbaugh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wish we used the atom bomb on America.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. Today's episode, episodes to come are going to be historic, exceptionally violent, and dare I say USA! USA! USA!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait.
BEN KISSEL
USA!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait.
MARCUS PARKS
You are daring there. That's a big dare. That is a big dare that I think you might lose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta wait.
BEN KISSEL
Goddamnit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta wait. First of all, the Manhattan Project, is that the red or the white?
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! All right, we are onto the Manhattan-
MARCUS PARKS
Clam chowder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay, gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We are covering the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like we need more fanfare because this is gonna be big. You gotta remember. This is our basic cable episode right here.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right here, right up top. This is old school at your nana's house-
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
History Channel viewing. We're dead in the center of it. We're gonna say come a lot more than normally they would on the History Channel.
BEN KISSEL
Oh nice. Henry Thomas, Henry Thomas, it's your grandmother. They told me if you eat Skittles, you're gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Die! Die!
BEN KISSEL
That's what my husband said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stay in hell!
BEN KISSEL
That's what your grandfather says.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stay in hell!
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean what this series is is that this is something that I been wanting to do for fucking years, been talking about doing this.
BEN KISSEL
What took so long? It's just the Manhattan Project.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we kind of put it into full gear because of the fucking Oppenheimer movie that's coming out this June.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what I'm hoping truly is that what we talk about in this series is going to take a massive shit on whatever the Oppenheimer movie has to say. I'm sure it's gonna be a great film.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Love Christopher Nolan. We're not remotely associated with them.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As a matter of fact, I feel like people are immediately are like oh they got an Oppenheimer tie- in. I am certain they want to distance themselves from our content.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We do not speak for Christopher Nolan.
BEN KISSEL
No, we don't. And I know Oppenheimer, ooh, something bad happens. It still sounds like someone who needs a swirly, doesn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does.
MARCUS PARKS
And I'm also gonna say having Matt Damon played General Leslie Groves-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Is the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my fucking life.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leslie Groves, he has the body of Foghorn Leghorn. Like he should not be played by Hollywood famous handsome person Matt Damon. He's Porky Pig with a howitzer.
BEN KISSEL
If they do what they did with Charlize Theron's face when she played Aileen Wuornos to Matt Damon's butt and legs to make him look like a dumpy weeble wobble-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. No, never. No, no.
BEN KISSEL
Then he will win an Oscar.
MARCUS PARKS
They're gonna give him a fucking mustache and then put an end to it.
BEN KISSEL
They should give him a butt Oscar. A Boscar. All right everyone, the Manhattan Project episode one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm more of a Queens project.
MARCUS PARKS
The Manhattan Project was America's collective effort to create the world's first atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while it is one of the most impressive achievements in mankind's history, the greatness of the Manhattan Project is not just in how it was developed, built, tested, and dropped. Rather the bomb is also objectively impressive because the aftermath of that first atomic explosion on Hiroshima created quite possibly the most concentrated period of misery, suffering, and horror in human history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not good.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. I thought that was Woodstock '99.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually that's just under it.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dropping of the atomic bomb, it was the perfect cherry on top to the deadliest conflict in human history, WWII.
BEN KISSEL
You guys don't watch all of your WWII documentaries with Limp Bizkit playing in the background and watch them on mute?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I mean honestly as you could see, Oppenheimer in the end, he did do it all for the nookie.
BEN KISSEL
He did. He did break stuff indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did. He really did. Our goal on this series is... Because we are three, as y'all know, we bleed red blood. Red, blue, white! Right?
MARCUS PARKS
You're talking to a man here because my roots go back before the Revolutionary War. We didn't come over on the Mayflower because the Mayflower was a bunch of fucking pussies.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, wow.
MARCUS PARKS
We came over with the fucking criminals like the rest of America did to fucking trap wolves and shoot shit up and fight in the Revolutionary War. We've been here since the fucking 1600s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My grandparents didn't land in Staten Island until the 1940s, so I'm innocent.
BEN KISSEL
My father got here in the 70s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, in a sort of reverse way. And also first of all, we're gonna say number one, we're gonna say some maybe unfair things about Kissel's lineage-
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
During this entire period.
BEN KISSEL
Oh you pretend like people didn't mine the most intelligent people from Nazi Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's just do a blanket Kissel, you're just gonna have to take it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's not me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And number two, our goal is because we are so American centric, we have been trying to figure out a way to kind of break out of the mindset of the American narrative about the atomic bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, yeah. Was it big? Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was it messy? You better believe it because it's what we do best.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was not like cool.
BEN KISSEL
No. Did it need to happen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People were mad, people are super mad.
BEN KISSEL
Did it need to happen? We shall discuss.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in terms of lives taken, only the Nazis beat the concentrated death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had a little thing called Operation Reinhardt. With that undertaking, approximately 1.47 million Jews were killed in death camps in just 100 days. That amounts to 25% of the entire Jewish death toll in all of WWII. But as we'll see, it was the justified fear of a Nazi victory that those people would win. It wasn't the threat of the Japanese, it was the Nazis that led the Allies to believe that the development of the atomic bomb was not only urgent but morally necessary.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can we actually for this episode, can we go back to calling them the old fashioned Nah-zis?
BEN KISSEL
Nah-zis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamn Nah-zis.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yeah, Nah-zi works out. I'll put a fucking couple of Nah-zis in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Fuck yeah, pile them up.
BEN KISSEL
It's sort of an interesting thing that's kind of like parallel parking. It's not so difficult to get in but getting out is hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what they say about war.
BEN KISSEL
With war, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the American myth has always been that we dropped the bomb on Japan to save the lives of a million American troops who would have been killed during the invasion of the Japanese mainland. We were all being told that every man, woman, and child were being trained to fight to the death for every blade of grass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, you wouldn't even believe what the Shiba Inus were trained to do.
BEN KISSEL
Also it's like such a horrible thing because that's completely true, one foot of land costs like one human life. And it'd be like you can have the soil. What the fuck? My life is worth one blade of grass to the United States government?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pocahontas was wrong!
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it was more the opposite. It was more that my life is worth a blade of grass to the Japanese government.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what many of the Japan Japanese were thinking because the concept that every Japanese person was going to fight for every inch was propaganda of the highest order. It was a half truth. There were certainly children being trained to kill American soldiers, women being trained, old men being trained.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But most of them were like hey, we'd love to eat more.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By the end of 1945, a lot of them were like hey, how long is this going? I'm looking at my watch here. Oh it's glowing. That's incredible. Who did this?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we could wrap it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean there were multiple avenues to peace with Japan, avenues both bloodless and aggressive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we could have gotten it all. We could have done all of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But at no point was a full ground invasion of Japan even a good option.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Much less the only one that laid before us at the end of the war. Cause the war was fucking over.
BEN KISSEL
The sad thing is, and I know I'm supposed to bring levity, but I'll bring a little truth to it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
The children were so young during this war, they actually called it Operation Teletubby. And I thought that was ridiculous. And I said that's ridiculous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ridiculous. That is ridiculous. Also again blanket, remember a lot of opinions are gonna get thrown around in our show, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we're gonna talk about this in our opinionated way. But it's also trying to break out of an American-centered view of history.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we'll get into some details.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well definitely we're gonna break out of the Amerocentric ideas of course but at the end of the day, we still fucking did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My thing is is like, my other side of it is like yeah, we're mad now, right, mad America.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But did you want them to get it? Did you want the Nazis to get the atomic bomb?
BEN KISSEL
No, you didn't want them to get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you want it? Is that was you fucking wanted?
BEN KISSEL
They did not want them to get it. This is human nature at its worst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're just generous!
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But really that's what the story we're gonna tell over the next five episodes is gonna be all about. We're gonna cover why the atomic bomb went into development in the first place, we're gonna cover how America pulled off such a massive undertaking, and how the Allies engaged in the ultimately unnecessary task of keeping the Nazis from getting the atomic bomb too. And at the end, I promise you that we will fully cover over the course of two episodes the unimaginable, almost unspeakable horror, almost unspeakable horror-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Almost because we gotta talk about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Because we're gonna speak about it, yeah. It's audio medium.
BEN KISSEL
We have to talk about it, yeah. Right.
MARCUS PARKS
The horror that resulted as a result of our decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's some of the worst shit I've ever read in my life.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's pretty fucking bad. And so that's why for those of you who are like oh I wish you guys were doing another Chicago Rippers series-
BEN KISSEL
I don't think anyone asked for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's all they want.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Pretty filled on nipple cutting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right now we're just gonna do a bunch of radiation poisoning and 1940s hijinks but we're gonna get to 200,000 dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So don't worry, it's coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
What did you say to me the other day? You're gonna get real tired of hearing the word sloughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna be real mad at that word.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in just three years at the cost of $2 billion, America created an infrastructure that was as large as the entire automobile industry of the United States at the time to research the necessary methods to build and deliver an atomic bomb to a foreign enemy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the superpower of unfettered capitalism.
BEN KISSEL
It does show you how times have changed. $2 billion is like a hammer and a screwdriver now for the Pentagon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This isn't that expensive.
MARCUS PARKS
No dude, that's $2 billion in 1941 money.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
That's gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lot of money.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know the math on that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know the math on that.
MARCUS PARKS
i mean it's not like the trillion dollars we spent on the Iraq War but it's still pretty impressive.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's pretty impressive.
BEN KISSEL
It's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this effort included multiple locations in three different regions of America. We built cities to get this shit done. We built cities in months to get this shit done and it involved thousands of people. And most of these people had no idea what they were actually working towards.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What I like about this series is that it's sort of like if you looked at Mordor in Lord of the Rings and you were like man, it took a hell of an architect to put all this together.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it really is looking at that giant factory of violence and just being like holy shit, they all showed up to work on time. How did you get orcs to all arrive for their shifts?
BEN KISSEL
We just simply don't know about the orcs nor do we know about their sex life. How do they procreate? Why do they procreate? Can they, can they not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well some of them are built and they're grown.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the Uruk-hai.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the Uruk-hai.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, but the Uruk-hai, yeah, they're a form of orc.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Orcs fuck. There's women orcs.
BEN KISSEL
There's a lot of debate on that. But we're not here to debate that today.
MARCUS PARKS
But the dark shadow of that impressive feat is that since the Manhattan Project was such a massive undertaking engaged entirely in secret, it gives conspiracy theorists fuel to justify the feasibility of the most Byzantine conspiracy theories. See most of the big conspiracies, like just say for example 9/11 was an inside job-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They fall apart when you start looking logically at the massive infrastructure needed to pull off such an operation without anyone knowing anything about it before, during, or after. But if you make that argument, conspiracy theorists can always say hey, if America can keep the Manhattan Project a secret, then they can keep anything a secret.
BEN KISSEL
Sure. And then of course when it comes to lies by omission or allowing things to go undetected, I mean 9/11 has a lot of loose threads where you're like how did that occur?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you know the idea of-
BEN KISSEL
Stupidity, perhaps?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think we're gonna see a little bit of that here too because-
MARCUS PARKS
But what you're talking about is inaction.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm talking about full action.
BEN KISSEL
Action.
MARCUS PARKS
And the thing is we didn't keep the Manhattan Project a secret.
BEN KISSEL
Oh we didn't?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. The way we did it was a secret but the whole fucking world, I mean the people we were all at war with were all racing to do the same exact thing at the same exact time.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Everybody knew we were working on an atomic bomb. I mean it wasn't front page news. But even the most innermost circle of scientists developing the bomb, they had spies feeding secrets to the Soviets. There was this dude Fuchs that put the Soviets like two years ahead of where they would have been without us. And there were other people, like there were dudes like Richard Feynman who would like pull pranks on security.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, just rolling by like hey guys, what you working on? What's that bubbling? Like sticking his finger in like he's Guy Fieri visiting another set on the Food Network channel's fucking studio center.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Hey man, I have massive PTSD from WWI, could you please stop playing pranks on me like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey! You want some mustard on that hot dog?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He'd like sneak in and out of classified areas just to see if he could and he knew they couldn't shoot him.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, we didn't keep it a secret. This shit was Swiss cheese. And perhaps even more germane to the conversation is the fact that as soon as we dropped the bomb, the president went on TV and said surprise! It's called an atomic bomb, you fucking morons!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're all like whoa, cool!
MARCUS PARKS
America, we do awesome shit and here's how we did it. Look at how much it took for us to fucking do this. Can you do it? I don't think so.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Be afraid motherfuckers.
BEN KISSEL
And you could subtitle that with literally like now who's the small man now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I tell you what, my name's Harry Truman, they would say Hairless Truman.
MARCUS PARKS
But the point is that yeah, we did keep it mostly a secret for a couple years.
BEN KISSEL
True.
MARCUS PARKS
But we immediately told everybody what we did, we didn't keep the Manhattan Project a secret forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well the bomb explosion itself blew the cover literally.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I do think that where you see the hints of 9/11 in this is actually on the other side, like when we get into the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we will talk about the fact that they did have some vague warning that some mysterious plane was showing up that wasn't acting like any...
BEN KISSEL
That's what I was told, that they did have warning to move but I'm not sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had an opportunity to knock it out of the sky and then they didn't. So we'll see. It's like that same thing where-
MARCUS PARKS
It's weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like how 9/11 might have been allowed to happen could have been done by a small group of people that had some idea of a long view for the United States of America. The Manhattan Project, it's very difficult to get that many people all pulling in the same direction without it being a sort of like positive pro nationalistic thing. Not everybody's gonna be fighting for a country to fail.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, there is. And that's the thing is that those conspiracy theories are active conspiracy theories. Henry, what you're talking about, those are passive conspiracy theories.
BEN KISSEL
Well we're gonna make Marcus work today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And active conspiracy theories take massive amounts of infrastructure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cooperation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, it's cooperation. And that sort of thing cannot be kept a fucking secret. And really at the end of the day, keeping it a secret completely misses the point of doing something like this.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Because when you tell everybody look, this is what we did and this is how we did it, it tells them we can do this to you again. And it also tells them we have the power and resources to do this over and over and over again. And if we can do this, imagine what the fuck else we're capable of.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we're still the only people to use it in war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's also we'll get into the mentality of why we dropped it because of that. It's kind of showing hey, not only did we build this big stick, we're gonna whap you with it too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it's also not only we'll build this big stick and we'll whap you with it too, but it's also going to Congress and saying like hey, thanks for giving us all that money to build this big stick. Yeah, we'll use it.
BEN KISSEL
Well Congress is like well no problem, thank you for the kickback. We do appreciate that. But I think one question that I would posit is human nature, was it just bound to be used? If we didn't use it... But I'm interested in that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a philosophical question.
MARCUS PARKS
Honestly that will actually be one of the central questions of specifically this first episode.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And in the future. Henry does have some interesting ideas about that that we were talking about earlier that we'll get to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All I need is one atomic bomb. If I just had one-
BEN KISSEL
One. Just one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could change so much.
BEN KISSEL
You could.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could change.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as sources go, we've got a bevy that our research team has done an incredible job with. We've used like five books for this series. And we'll put that full list on our Instagram. But for this episode in particular, we used quite a bit from a fucking fantastic book called 'The Bastard Brigade'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Bastard Brigade'!
BEN KISSEL
Awesome name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a great name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. By Sam Kean. It's written from the perspective of the Allies vs the Nazis in respect to the development of the atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
And of course the Bastard Brigade, they were brought together when the general said all right, who amongst you hasn't had a father? Who has no father?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Funny.
BEN KISSEL
And then they said I don't have one. And then he's like you're willing to die for the country. Uncle Sam's your father, come over here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean yeah, yeah. He starts fingering you under the table.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as such this first episode is gonna have a whole lot of Nazis because had we not been so-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah-zis!
MARCUS PARKS
Because had we not been so afraid that the Nazis were going to make a nuclear weapon happen, it's almost positive that we ourselves would not have put the Manhattan Project into motion.
BEN KISSEL
And it turns out all those facilities were just cooking up more meth for the troops and Hitler.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of it's meth, a lot of it's meth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of it's drugs, there's a lot of drug building and there's a lot of like... You know, they love rockets.
BEN KISSEL
They had fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They loved rockets.
MARCUS PARKS
And so let's start with the people who discovered the scientific and mechanical principles that made the mass slaughter of up to 226,000 people possible.
BEN KISSEL
See kids, science can be fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see?
MARCUS PARKS
It can be. It's a quarter of a million people.
BEN KISSEL
That's fun!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow!
BEN KISSEL
See Stan, science is cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And not all of them died immediately.
BEN KISSEL
See, they suffered, Stan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Now we're not gonna get too into the weeds with the science of the atomic bomb because after all, this is still a room full of liberal arts majors who have avoided science and math at all costs for our entire lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say some of the more challenging reading I've done was some of trying to understand how all of these things work.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'm still mad about when they added the fucking letters, I'm still mad.
MARCUS PARKS
You talking about chemistry?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I'm still mad. I was like I thought it was numbers.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh you're talking about algebra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not even joking.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know, the one where they added the letters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's completely real.
BEN KISSEL
Very upset.
MARCUS PARKS
It's called algebra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm good with letters but then I was looking at the letters. That's all chemistry is is using letters like they're numbers.
BEN KISSEL
I hate it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I was like what in the living fuck?
BEN KISSEL
And then they tried to be like no A is 3. And I was like well then put 3.
MARCUS PARKS
You're talking about algebra and Henry is talking about chemistry.
BEN KISSEL
I hate it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I look at it and it all is dumb.
MARCUS PARKS
You guys can't even have a conversation about science talking about the same branch of science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what science this is.
BEN KISSEL
I know-
MARCUS PARKS
It's physics. It's nuclear physics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There we go.
BEN KISSEL
My level of science is still like what if I mix garlic butter with peanut butter? Does it make a baby?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you put it in a woman.
BEN KISSEL
We don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean we're gonna do our best to not gloss over it too much because while the science is indeed complicated, it's fucking nuclear physics-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Explaining some of it gives context to the people who discovered it, important essential context, and it tells us the motivations for why certain people did what they did and why some of those same people didn't do things that they should have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow. Sounding judgy.
BEN KISSEL
A little. That's the one thing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When you are not in favor of it, you do sound a little prudish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You're like okay, Mr. Beatnik.
BEN KISSEL
The bombing.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm actually talking about the Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They really dropped the ball.
MARCUS PARKS
They did drop the ball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly the Nazis fucking bumbled this whole fucking shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's what we're gonna get into. And furthermore, the science also gives us insight into just how horrible of a weapon an atomic bomb really is. Because we knew full well the consequences of setting off a nuclear explosion in a city long before we actually did it, we knew exactly what would happen.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now put simply, America began developing an atomic weapon for one reason and one reason only, which was both understandable and necessary at the time. Namely all of our intelligence and all of our best scientists were screaming that the Nazis were developing an atomic bomb themselves. And if the Nazis were to succeed, and we had every reason to think they would, then it was goodbye London, followed soon after by a fond farewell to Washington, DC. And then New York and then Baltimore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh not Baltimore!
BEN KISSEL
Don't you take Baltimore!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! I gotta go to Baltimore now!
MARCUS PARKS
Okay, Baltimore probably would have been taken out with Washington, DC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might have been Milwaukee.
BEN KISSEL
I think Baltimore is gonna be taken out with bad liberal policies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
But did you know that MSG, Madison Square Garden and the big old Nazi event-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I feel like it would have just taken a couple of years just judging by the modern American society, I think it would have just taken a couple of years for the Nazis if they did win to be like US states of Adolf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the whole Charles Lindbergh thing. I mean Charles Lindbergh was almost elected president and he was a Nazi. He was a straight up Nazi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You also literally just said what Heisenberg said. Werner Heisenberg literally said (German accent) if we just give the Nazis a chance, in a couple of years they'll cool out. Like literally that was the idea, being like (German accent) no, no, no, they'll cool out, they'll figure it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, they're treating them like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) They can't be mad all the time.
MARCUS PARKS
They're treating them like a fucking toddler who's like fucking destroying your kitchen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Like just let him tire out and eventually he'll fall asleep on the floor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's still a fringe idea here as well that we just give a lot of air because they make a lot of noise.
MARCUS PARKS
But to understand why we knew that a Nazi atomic bomb was basically the end of free society the world over, the Wolfenstein scenario if you will-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Then we get to do it!
BEN KISSEL
That game was so fricking... All three of those games are awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We've got to understand how the world knew, how scientists knew just how powerful an atomic bomb could be. And for that we need to go back to a little element called radium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Are you ready to learn about radium?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I better be.
BEN KISSEL
Hey Shoe, you wanna go get stoned in the bathroom really quick?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, don't worry. I got a bunch of hand sanitizer we can chug.
BEN KISSEL
Sweet, perfect. Let's get the fuck out of here.
MARCUS PARKS
Radium!
BEN KISSEL
Mr. Parks is fucking boring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Mr. Parks. Teach me about your funny little metals.
MARCUS PARKS
(old timey voice) Radium, the element that we all owe the future to.
BEN KISSEL
Now he's doing his old timey voice, trying to keep us interested.
MARCUS PARKS
Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 is the most radioactive naturally occurring substance in existence. And it opened the door to radioactivity research. See in the early 20th century, radium was thought to be a sort of miracle element. It was used in everything from medicines to the minute and hour hands on glow in the dark watches were being manufactured for WWI soldiers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, so they could be constantly bombarded by radioactive material at all times.
BEN KISSEL
It's a big price to pay just to know what time it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Well from what it seemed like at first, radium was saving lives even in the smallest of applications.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they just took a rock out that literally glowed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a rock that glowed.
BEN KISSEL
Crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're like ooh nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's kind of interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean all the glow in the dark watches, all these soldiers have them, they can tell the time without having to light a match-
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
That would have got their head blown off by a fucking sniper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember that in Band of Brothers when he was like the thing is it's unlucky for you to light three cigarettes off of one match.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's how long it takes for a sniper to see you. That's why I don't do it.
BEN KISSEL
There's a new series coming out after 600-Lb Life called Lap Band of Brothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Keep it coming, Kissel.
MARCUS PARKS
Keep it coming, keep it coming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Keep it coming.
MARCUS PARKS
That's why you're here. But these radium watches came with a price. See the women working at the factories manufacturing these watches would paint the radium onto the watch hands with little paint brushes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And with the painting of each hand, oh no my brush, it's gotten a little swishy there, I'm not gonna be able to paint these little hands. Lick lick.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
And then they go back to another radium, they'd go back into the radium, lick lick, back into the radium, lick lick, all day, all day, all day, eight hours a day. And as a result, a number of these women developed sores, anemia, mouth cancers, and a horrifying condition called radium jaw in which your jaw just fucking falls off.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Roger Ebert.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It makes a whole army of Roger Eberts.
BEN KISSEL
That's not good. And it's bad for the movie industry. Everything's a thumbs down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're eating tongue sandwiches and it's not from Katz's.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's worst case scenario. Best case scenario in radium jaw is that you just get like extra jaw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, jaw plus.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Like a grapefruit sized tumor on your jaw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh god. God, that's gotta be bad. Just like ugh god.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you don't even want to be near them if they're all learning how to whistle. (garbled blowing)
BEN KISSEL
Great for blowing out a birthday cake though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God. Don't want to see them with a taco.
BEN KISSEL
No, you don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh god. Get me out of this lunch!
BEN KISSEL
Very good. Very good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's been a long time ago, I'm allowed to make fun of the radium girls.
BEN KISSEL
Oh you are, you are.
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually 100 workers died from radium poisoning in those watch factories, enough where the women who worked there were nicknamed the living dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is normal industrial work.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like oh, those are the living dead. Look at them. They're about to drop at any second but you wouldn't know it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(garbled blowing) Hope we're not having Salisbury steak.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the living dead, those were the people who didn't have radium jaw. Those are the women whose insides were just fucking cooked. Because that's the way radiation sickness works. That was the one of the big mysteries after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that there would be the survivors-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't spoil it. Don't spoil it.
BEN KISSEL
All right, all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay. I won't spoil it. I won't spoil about how, yeah, people died of radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't want to give away that fucking crucial plot point.
BEN KISSEL
Did they get superpowers? They could have gotten superpowers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's more about like how we showed up saying hey guys, don't worry, we'll fix it. And then we just watched people melt.
BEN KISSEL
That's one way to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But even with the bad press concerning what came to be known as the case of the radium girls, business interests artfully dodged the dangers of radium radiation and they continued contributing to America's obsession with better living through chemistry.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
We trusted radium, we trusted atomic power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because the scientists said it was okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we didn't know how it glowed. We just figured that god did a poops.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to be fair, yes, it is god's little poop-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Radium is still used in some medical treatments today. Although they mostly phase it out of cancer treatments by like 2015.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that the same material that they inject into you to see... Because I know that they do sometimes inject a light radioactive material in you to chart through your blood.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think so.
BEN KISSEL
I thought it was just a dye that they use now.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a dye, yeah. No, they definitely don't inject radium into you, absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man.
BEN KISSEL
I'll inject radium into you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah I mean honestly I'm loving it now.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not for what you're saying. I mean yeah, cause I had that done not too long ago and it definitely... That wasn't radium. They would have told me if it was radium, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah dude. They would have told you it was radium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, definitely, certainly. They're always completely transparent.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. A lot of doctors work out of their cardboard box.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I mean once I started my treatments it was incredible because now I don't need the night light at night.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just walk through glowing everywhere, scaring my neighbors.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in 2015, radium, while it was used up til 2015, it was used with far more care than the original methods.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, not sucking it off a fucking paintbrush? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bunch of people making watches.
MARCUS PARKS
No dude, I'm talking about when they were using radium for cancer treatment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Because they used radium for cancer treatment up til about 2015 and they still use it every once in a while to this day. But back then in the original times they just cut you open, took a piece of radium, popped it onto the tumor, and sewed it on. And then just left it there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man. Too simple.
BEN KISSEL
It's just a nice day to be a doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was easier then.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Or they'd take a radium needle and they'd just stab it. Just pap it, pap it, pap it. They'd just stab, they'd lance the tumor.
BEN KISSEL
That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
They'd lance the boil.
BEN KISSEL
Nurse Nancy, what we're gonna work on today is skipping the radium into the body. So you wanna get two skips right by the heart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen I have a great idea. What if we cut the hole open, right, we cut him open, split him open, right, we put him over there.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you give me a ball of radium.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Free throw line!
BEN KISSEL
Free throw line, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Free throw line and it's a swish into his liver.
BEN KISSEL
It's a swish. Although basketball wasn't invented I don't think.
MARCUS PARKS
I think James Naismith had put up that pear basket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I miss white basketball!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When the men didn't jump and they were allowed to dribble without interference.
BEN KISSEL
Bob Cousy.
MARCUS PARKS
But of course the most famous death associated with radium is Marie Curie herself. You know Marie Curie?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I fucking know.
MARCUS PARKS
Polish.
BEN KISSEL
You got one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And she died of melting to death.
MARCUS PARKS
Well no, that actually is a bit of a misnomer. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934. But she was also fucking 66.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For a woman that like free balled radioactive material for a couple of decades, that's a long life.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a very long life.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But to this day, her notebooks and papers are kept in lead-lined boxes and handled with protective clothing because they're still highly radioactive almost 100 years later. Even her fucking cookbooks.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Just the shit that she used in her house will give you cancer.
BEN KISSEL
You don't want all of your books to be stored next to the Necronomicon for safety reasons.
MARCUS PARKS
No. But it is a bit of a the myth that she died from radium exposure. She's famous for dying from radium exposure but she didn't actually die from that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it didn't help. She wasn't fucking on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
BEN KISSEL
See this is where I can come in with my argument about COVID statistics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well radium, in order to actually die from it, to get sick, you have to ingest it. You have to eat it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Or it has to be absorbed in your body somehow. You can't just like play with radium.
BEN KISSEL
But don't we have these little things that get absorbed? I mean it would absorb into the body a little.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slightly it does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you gotta get a chunk in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you can't just be in the same room as a chunk of radium and get radiation poisoning.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't work that way. Marie Curie's death by a radiation probably came from her extensive use of unshielded X-rays during WWI. But that only further exposes radiation as a slow silent killer even if you aren't vaporized in the first blast of an atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's like the jelly, radiation poisoning is the jelly of the month club of slow deaths.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Slowly but surely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause it just keeps coming back.
BEN KISSEL
But you don't know if it was the marmalade or the grape jam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't know which one it was.
BEN KISSEL
It was an amalgamation perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while Marie Curie was a scientific genius in her own right, it was her daughter Irène who played a central role in developing the theories and practices that led to the creation of the atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The first.
BEN KISSEL
Good job, ladies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's the first nepo baby.
MARCUS PARKS
She's not a nepo baby. She was a brilliant woman and researcher. She won the fucking Nobel Prize.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've seen these guys.
BEN KISSEL
Probably with a little help from her mom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, come on.
BEN KISSEL
Mr. Parks is really in love with this woman, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, born on third base with radiation poisoning.
MARCUS PARKS
See in 1926, Irène married a junior scientist named Frédéric Joliot who was working under Irène at the Marie Curie Institute in Paris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Half of 'The Bastard Brigade's chapter on Irène Curie does basically say that... It's weird, it roasts her the whole time.
BEN KISSEL
Power difference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But how Frédéric was like too hot for her and then they called him her gigolo and that he was like pounding her out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She was a handsome woman. She was definitely more concerned with radiation than dressing.
BEN KISSEL
He loved her for the mind. I mean have you ever seen Sarah Huckabee Sanders' husband? He's not totally ghoulish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he married her for the free transportation because he hops on her back and she can go 25 miles. You just strap to her front. You'd be surprised what she can do. Mud, sleet.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. She has the ability to reverse her knees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's got a four bit stride.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
SHe's a mudder. Her mudder was a mudder.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. Nepo, nepo.
MARCUS PARKS
Well mirroring the work-marriage relationship of Irène's parents, Irène and Frédéric built on radiation experiments performed in 1932 by German physicists. That's 1932, just a year before Hitler came to power and only 13 years before America dropped the first bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
To put it in the simplest way possible, physicists in the 20s and 30s began to understand the fundamental principles of the universe at an extraordinarily rapid pace. The work of one scientist exponentially built on the work of another until mankind had a relatively deep understanding of how the universe work on a subatomic level.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's crazy that it went from math to boom boom in 13 years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it went from fully just theoretical ideas about the universe.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was about where these ideas got hatched.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean these same physicists unfortunately realized almost immediately after discovering these principles that this understanding of the universe could be used to make weapons.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
It's basically the story of the human race. We are far too violent to be this smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there's something about it because we're kind of talking about it... If this had happened in a peaceful country during a peaceful time, the first thing you'd imagine-
MARCUS PARKS
Just a peaceful world I think.
BEN KISSEL
Energy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A peaceful world maybe.
BEN KISSEL
Clean energy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If we split the atom, we get free energy, no one will ever have to fight for energy ever again.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can fuel the world. That would maybe be the first idea. But because it happened in truly, yes, height of Nazi Germany was extremely dangerous. But if we want to talk about in my mind one of the most dangerous time periods is right before, in those like early 30s time period when Nazis were still kind of cool, when they were up and coming, when they're just building their heat. You know what I mean? When they were coming in there.
MARCUS PARKS
The Reichstag fire hasn't quite yet happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They got like 33% of the Reichstag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, where did you get your haircut? Like that type of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. When fucking Madison Square Garden could be filled with Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. At that time period, these scientists, they're all largely either Jewish people that definitely were going to be the focus of the ire of the Nazi party, they just saw like oh, they're gonna kill everybody with this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well then I would question would it have been made in a time of peace?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
Probably not.
MARCUS PARKS
Well would the atomic bomb have been made? I'll let you decide at the end of this series.
BEN KISSEL
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
But basically Irène and Frédéric's experiments with radioactive substances helped another scientist to discover the existence of the neutron. Then another scientist discovered how to split that neutron and so on and so forth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It happened real fast.
MARCUS PARKS
Real fast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As soon as that thing kicked off, they were really all jumping on top, one discovery on top of another.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But when it came to the further discoveries of the Joliot-Curies, the creation of the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible had they not discovered the ability to create artificial radioactivity, which is the process that creates the enriched uranium that lies at the center of an atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
And that's why you can find that same enriched uranium in your classic white bread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what keeps it white.
BEN KISSEL
And rich.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Keep your whites white.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But because we understood immediately that in order to get the proper train reaction they needed to make something like an atomic bomb, you need very specific isotope of uranium or whatever the term is. Uranium-
MARCUS PARKS
I think isotope, uranium-235.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And it's that thing.
MARCUS PARKS
And we'll get into that here in a little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then they had to figure out because that happens rarely. Originally like oh then no one will be able to make a bomb. And then they figured out oh but then we can figure out how to make that stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because that's the thing is that trying to get the uranium-235, it was almost impossible to get it. They said it would take decades to collect enough naturally to create enough to get an atomic bomb. But then they figured out with this, oh here's how you just do it in a lab.
BEN KISSEL
Well and doesn't the atomic bomb show us the power of working together?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what this is all about.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That really is what this is all about. Once we start truly getting into like the development of the Manhattan Project, you're gonna have your mind blown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's a whole episode of (singing) work together, come on, come on, let's work together.
BEN KISSEL
Hey man, did you eat my sandwich out of the goddamn lunch room, dude?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oppenheimer, you got me again.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the discovery of artificial radiation, artificial radioactivity, it was so impressive that Irène and Frédéric were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1934. But in a sign of the times, the winner of the Nobel Prize in biology that year was a full-on Nazi named Hans Spemann shoehorned a tacky Sieg Heil into his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a time period where people were like what's he doing?
BEN KISSEL
What's that? Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It'd be like now if I time traveled, imagine if I time traveled back in time, right, I won the Nobel Prize. And I do my long speech about how fucking great I am, how smart I am, how I crush it.
BEN KISSEL
Humble speech, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Day by day by day, everybody wants to fuck me, everyone wants to suck me, buy me dinner, buy me beers. Of course I'm the lord of chemistry.
BEN KISSEL
That's gotta be illegal, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then I dab. Whoa, dab!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they'll be like whoa, who's that cool future guy?
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, what's that? Yeah, that would be cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It would be.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean in 1934 the Jewish people definitely knew what he was doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it wasn't good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They knew what he was doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were like uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's not right, I didn't sign up for this kind of... Sounds like CPAC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a man named Gruber Kissel that was there giving out these incredible peanuts. Was he in the catering company?
BEN KISSEL
My grandfather was working with labor unions at the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Labor unions that were manufacturing what?
BEN KISSEL
Labor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! I can't wait. Yes, we got him! We got him against the ropes!
MARCUS PARKS
Now concerning the Nazis in science, we established in our MK Ultra and in our Josef Mengele series that most of the brightest scientific minds in Germany didn't buy into Nazi ideology, physicists in particular, most famously Albert Einstein, left Germany in droves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can we use this series to correct? It's Ein-shtein.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay, Ein-shtein. Ein-shtein. Albert Ein-shtein.
BEN KISSEL
Ein-shtein.
MARCUS PARKS
Does that make you feel better if I say it like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
He doesn't care. He has a sense of humor. He would like the show.
MARCUS PARKS
He actually would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He sticks his tongue out.
MARCUS PARKS
He sticks his tongue out and his ears are big and he closes eyes, it's so funny. And I'm back in college again.
BEN KISSEL
He's funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a funny man.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Walter Matthau played him in that one movie.
BEN KISSEL
That was great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He ate out Meg Ryan or something.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think they're actually gonna get the corpse of Walter Matthau to play Henry Kissinger now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's fun. But all this contributed significantly to a huge brain drain in Germany. But it's important to remember that while Nazi Germany was definitely stuck with a bunch of psychopaths who thought that the height of medical science was sewing two twins together to see what would happen-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mengele!
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
There were still plenty of brilliant minds who decided to stay behind and roll the dice. Most of them were as we know in the rocket program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In labor unions.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Most famously you had Wernher von Braun who was brought to America after the war to head the Apollo program, which eventually took America to the moon. During the war he developed the V-2 rockets that terrorized England.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just know that a lot of the names we'll say that are involved on the Nazi end of the atomic program, they do end up eventually at some point in the 1950s waving little American flags.
BEN KISSEL
They do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah. (German accent) Betty Boop. Betty Grable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Betty Boop. Love your denim blue jean! Love it.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) Betty Grable, what a dish.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Betty Boop. Violently, violently hurt as a child. Harmed, harmed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually why are you busting about this about how the whole second episode is about the story of Betty Boop's molestation?
BEN KISSEL
Oh I would love that. Oh my goodness, I was watching some old Hollywood films from what they did with these young actresses. Not good. The interviews. Shirley Temple.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Holy hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What about her?
BEN KISSEL
She was straight up not good, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We gotta get back to Wernher von Braun.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We can do a whole thing on Shirley Temple later.
BEN KISSEL
We actually could.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
But besides von Braun-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Only if she killed people. That would be incredible.
BEN KISSEL
She could have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean for the show, not for society.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But besides von Braun, Nazi Germany managed to hold onto one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, a man whose arrogance, narcissism, and moral bankruptcy made him the perfect alias for Breaking Bad's Walter White. That man was Werner Heisenberg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) My name is Werner Heisenberg. And if you cannot handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best.
BEN KISSEL
What's your worst?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm developing the atomic weapons program for the Nazi war machine.
BEN KISSEL
What's your best?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm really good at making toast. Always know the perfect, I look at the texture of the bread so I know exactly what heat to apply to it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. One seems a lot worse than the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least I was bad at doing the atomic program part of it, I was bad at it. My bad entirely.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Heisenberg was a bit of a boy genius at this point in history. He'd just won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932 at the age of 31. These were for theories on quantum mechanics.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
I can't explain them to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nope.
MARCUS PARKS
And this had been preceded by the publishing of his famous Uncertainty Principle in the mid 20s. I also can't explain to you Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tried to understand it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's... Okay. So on a quantum... Fernando, you know it? Oh god.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quantum levels-
MARCUS PARKS
He just furrowed his brow at you in anger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was an engineer!
BEN KISSEL
Quantum leap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quantum, is it quantums? Real small, right, things operate as both a particle and a wave. And basically it's about how hard it does happen to be. But location is a tricky thing in physics. That's basically what it's about. About how saying where something is in space-time is actually very difficult to actually ascertain on a quantum level.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it the principle that you change something simply by the act of observing it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. No. Well it's about how-
MARCUS PARKS
Actually Fernando is giving me an almost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kinda. But it's also about how there's a point-
MARCUS PARKS
What does the two mean? Does that mean almost?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a point and a wave.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh it means both! Hey!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, good. Hey, good. Good.
BEN KISSEL
Look at that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, we're just gonna get-
BEN KISSEL
Brilliant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is all people are gonna talk about. We don't know the physics.
BEN KISSEL
Nope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We are history people. I look at history like stories. I play them like movie in my mind. When I see fucking science writing, I just go dead.
BEN KISSEL
Go dead, yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My whole mind just goes black.
MARCUS PARKS
I had an English professor in college who used to wear a wizard hat to school sometimes to class because he taught literature of the fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah. And how much did that class cost you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Welcome to Asperger's University.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was quite possibly the most valuable class I took in all of the whole entire English department.
BEN KISSEL
And of course Quantum is Quato's brother and he used to hang out in Arnold Schwarzenegger's asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, don't run out of steam on this episode, my friend.
BEN KISSEL
I'm not. Oh buddy, the steam train keeps on going.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's getting steamy.
MARCUS PARKS
But the point is that Werner Heisenberg had a reputation in the world over for being a top mind in the field of physics. And history proved him to be one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, despite the fact that he actively worked on making an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well there was also the massive whitewashing process that happened after the war-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To try to distance him and his legacy from what he did for Adolf Hitler.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now in private, Heisenberg claimed to loathe Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever.
MARCUS PARKS
But if you read between the lines, it seems like Heisenberg more found Nazis to be like annoying and kind of embarrassing.
BEN KISSEL
Right. I can see it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he said that he wanted to be apolitical. And so that was his idea, he's like all he wanted to do was pure science.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He hated the activity of the world. He wanted to be, what, isn't it Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen where he's like I'm sick of being in these humans lives and dealing with their cycles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was kind of like that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where he just wanted to do science in a room. But when it's the Nazis, then you gotta choose a side.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like for something like this, especially it's like yeah, you're not just serving peanuts in a catering world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean it's not like he's deciding like oh I can't fucking work for that guy because I don't like his opinion on the capital gains tax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. It's different.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the fucking Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I can't work with that guy. Fucking bullshit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Heisenberg claimed that what mattered most was the continuation of his beloved homeland of Deutschland, Germany, the fatherland. And it didn't matter to him who was running it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It means nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this of course was a convenient excuse, this was a justification. What mattered most to Heisenberg was Heisenberg and how smart people thought Heisenberg was.
BEN KISSEL
If you've seen German women, you know it's the motherland. Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh man. Because that's the idea of like he thinks all countries can talk like they're a part of the Peewee Herman map. You know what I mean? They can't.
MARCUS PARKS
They can't, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Germany doesn't give a fuck. Germany's tectonic plates and mountains.
MARCUS PARKS
Germany doesn't exist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a land map. Borders ain't real.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Germany is a construct, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You guys are really helping out the world here. Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though Heisenberg was often harassed by the Nazis for practicing the quote unquote "Jew physics of Albert Einstein"... Yeah, they were like (German accent) why are you always doing Jew physics? Why don't you do Aryan physics? Aryan physics is so much better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Aryan physics are all like how many bratwursts can you fit into a canister? Well also it's ancient math.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all stuff that's completely rolled over by the theory of relativity.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's like Orgone energy. It's shit like that. It's like how can we use crystals to levitate continents?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like they're talking about the science of Lemuria.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Well there's a lot of people that still believe that. I think a former president as a matter of fact believes you just get a certain amount of time alive on earth and then you just die, so there's no need to exercise. Exercise actually hurts because it drains your energy and then you die earlier. There's like a lot of people...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't make any sense. God.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that weird?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Well just like Walter White made meth with no thought towards the consequences of his decisions just so long as his ego was fed, so too did Werner Heisenberg develop atomic weapons for the Nazis without caring what the Nazis might do with an atomic weapon.
BEN KISSEL
But to that analogy, they also realized they were going to die. They knew that. No way did Adolf actually think that this was going to last forever. I was talking with my grandfather-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god.
BEN KISSEL
And the one thing is Germany is the size of Wisconsin. They knew they were fucked. So I think there was also-
MARCUS PARKS
At the end.
BEN KISSEL
At the end.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At the end.
MARCUS PARKS
At the very, very end they knew they were-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is at them at their most confident.
BEN KISSEL
Most confident. So they didn't know they had terminal cancer yet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Not only were they at their most confident at this point, they were at their most powerful, like they're about to put the entirety of Europe on its heels for years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody rolled over for them. They just got done. At this point you're watching them take Poland, take Denmark, take all these things out.
MARCUS PARKS
Not quite, we're almost there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know what I mean? At that point that machine was gearing up.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were ready.
MARCUS PARKS
The military machine was gearing up and they had a plan for that, like they had a plan for turning it from Wisconsin into the Midwest.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's cause they'd just flip everyone because they all thought like once everybody gets a whiff of this Nazism, they are gonna love it.
BEN KISSEL
Some did.
MARCUS PARKS
And did some did.
BEN KISSEL
Especially your people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Polish, they fucking loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was bad. It was bad. It was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in the beginning when the Nazis were trying to root out anyone with Jewish sympathies prior to WWII, Heisenberg was given a lot of shit for not declaring his support for Hitler in public. Like Hans Spemann had done with his Nobel Prize Sieg Heil. But the thing about Heisenberg was that his mother was friends with Heinrich Himmler's mother. So...
BEN KISSEL
It's all just about women that quilt together?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically. Well they called him a white Jew in the newspaper. That was the whole thing. They kept calling him a white Jew. And then he freaked out because again the neutrality swung both ways. He was trying to have it all in one go.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't want to choose a side and he wanted to make sure he could play whoever was there to pay him a check, he wanted to be there for.
MARCUS PARKS
So Heisenberg went to the head of the SS directly, Heinrich Himmler, one of the most terrifying people in Nazi Germany-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
To complain that he was being harassed and he felt that he had the right to do so because their mothers were friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) My son is getting flamed on the internet. That is literally what it is.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like you have your mom go yell at Donald Rumsfeld because somebody is fucking literally making fun of you on Instagram.
MARCUS PARKS
I put it right here and anytime someone comes into the room or opens the door, it doesn't matter if I have my headphones on, no one's sneaking up on me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you bought... Are we recording?
BEN KISSEL
Well don't, it's a non sequitur at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. But we just did a bathroom break and Marcus just said he bought rearview mirrors for his computer monitor so that we can't sneak up on him.
MARCUS PARKS
So nobody can sneak up on me.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like a real Himmler to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Why are you being a Himmler? Also orcs do reproduce.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, no kidding.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Heisenberg was important to Nazi Germany but he wasn't that important. So to prove that he wasn't sheltering Jewish people because he practiced quote unquote "Jew physics", he actually requested a full up the ass investigation from the SS.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Complete with wiretaps and spies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is the whitest thing I've ever heard. Ratting yourself out to the Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well it was a fine investigation. Did come through with a couple of different sexual kinks though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's crazy. Nobody wanted the direct attention of the SS.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because if they find something, they are going to kill you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Out of principle. Now this of course infuriated Heisenberg's wife, she resented the intrusion. But all Heisenberg cared about was that his scientific honor was intact.
BEN KISSEL
Don't worry baby, we're gonna to brand it as Vanderpump Rules.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
He even capitulated to the Nazi command when they said that he couldn't mention the names of any Jewish scientists. It made the teaching of the theory of relativity particularly difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well again, it's fascist dumb brain games.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they go and they're like (German accent) you can teach these principles but you cannot say who made the principles because then everybody gets all like oh, they sound nice. Oh, they sound cool.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Albert Einstein, his new name Florf Gorperson. Say Florf Gorperson from here on out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Speak in code, yeah, yeah. Cherry Daddy Michaelson.
MARCUS PARKS
Well even after Kristallnacht, arguably opening night for the Holocaust-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow! It's a show, everyone! It's a show!
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's fucking horrible. It's a fucking Kristallnacht.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Heisenberg saw this, he was there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was like oh.
MARCUS PARKS
He refused to leave Germany. He said that someone needed to stay behind, someone needed to defend German science. He said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "Germany needs me."
BEN KISSEL
Aw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually they don't though.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Actually Germany does not need you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no.
MARCUS PARKS
We don't want Germany to have you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Not at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I sometimes think if it wasn't for Hitler, like truly the most brilliant minds on earth were in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was fucking incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is where Heisenberg is coming from. Germany was like the center of nuclear physics, on the forefront of all of these sciences. And as the Nazis took over, the brain drain happened, they all went scattering and running. But that's what Heisenberg meant by I need to defend German science.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is basically it's Lebron staying in Cleveland, right. It's that thing where he's just like well I have to stay.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have to because now he becomes number one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody else leaves, now I'm the big bad daddy left.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sometimes you gotta go and come back though to win that championship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We learned that the hard way by sitting at home watching it on television.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though America's work on the atomic bomb was a closely held secret all throughout WWII, every physicist worth their salt had known that an atomic bomb was not only possible but inevitable since the mid 30s, before WWII even began.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, it sounds like how I have been talking about AI and drones because a drone just killed a soldier.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess. We haven't gotten there yet, I hope we don't.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie accepted the Nobel Prize for their work on artificial radioactivity, an Italian scientist named Enrico Fermi figured out before Irène and Frédéric's speech was even over that their discovery could lead to a weapon that could create an explosion the likes of which the earth had never seen.
BEN KISSEL
You know what? I think that the Italians, yes, very smart, but you can't be that smart when the food is so good. Because you gotta take breaks. It's just you're happy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been saying this, we gotta do... I was talking about as we were prepping for the show about like I really want to do a Mussolini series.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that is the one thing I know the least about in terms of WWII.
MARCUS PARKS
Me too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is Italian fascism and what sauce goes with that?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I know, Mussolini. It sounds so good. Clams and everything else. I could definitely see it. Hitler sounds like a plate of rocks that has shit in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's like I don't even know how to say it because maybe I'm completely incorrect but it does sort of feel like Italian fascism was kind of like fascism lite.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like a groovy fascism but I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd say it's fascism with a smile.
BEN KISSEL
I think it's still petty strong over there, isn't it?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's bad but it's fascism with a smile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Longer mustaches.
BEN KISSEL
I guess. Better food, true.
MARCUS PARKS
Well working off Irène and Frédéric's discoveries, Enrico Fermi discovered that under the right conditions any element could become radioactive, which put in place the next piece of the puzzle of how to make an atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
See after Fermi, radium had been the primary element for radiation experiments. However radium had become extremely expensive because of its wide commercial use at the time. They were starting to use it in hair tonics, bath salts-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh man.
MARCUS PARKS
Face creams, suppositories.
BEN KISSEL
You got a kid that has teeth that are too good? Try radium cereal every breakfast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Suppositories! You trying to make your butthole glow?
MARCUS PARKS
One of the most popular toothpastes at the time was radium toothpaste.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into that later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hole glow.
BEN KISSEL
Hole glow for your asshole. Have hole glow for your asshole!
MARCUS PARKS
My favorite though was radium condoms. Radium Condoms were made by a company called NUTEX.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not NUTEX.
MARCUS PARKS
They have the slogan, this is seriously the slogan printed on the tins:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get next to NUTEX.
BEN KISSEL
They called it nut back then too?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Maybe it was new-tex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
New-tex?
MARCUS PARKS
New-tex? But get next to NUTEX. I don't know. But it said ask for them by name.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Give me some of NUTEX.
BEN KISSEL
Well usually I go to the store and just point and grunt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I get some cummy cancer socks?
BEN KISSEL
Please and thanks.
MARCUS PARKS
But as a result, radium was sitting at the extremely high price point of $4 million per gram in today's currency.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dang.
BEN KISSEL
Whoee.
MARCUS PARKS
But with the discovery that any element could be made radioactive under the right conditions, the element of choice for radioactivity experiments became the element that radium was extracted from. It was considered a junk element at the time, nobody wanted it. But pretty soon everybody wanted uranium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody wants some!
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed, uranium.
MARCUS PARKS
And uranium I think, I think, I think it was chosen because the right conditions for making uranium radioactive was easier than making like say iron radioactive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because it already coexisted with a naturally radioactive substance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Your hypothesizing is lost on us.
BEN KISSEL
He's completely crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He must be.
BEN KISSEL
I'm just gonna record everything that he said for the test and I'm gonna regurgitate it. I'm gonna get an A.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
I think. I'm just using logic for why they didn't use fucking dirt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm really just mad already because the Oppenheimer movie is not gonna do this but I know that there's gonna be a movie that comes along where it's just every sequence is gonna be set to some 1980s song where they're all like (record scratch) I think we just found uranium. And it's just gonna be them all with sunglasses on and surfboards and shit.
BEN KISSEL
I like that idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is the Oppenheimer gonna have that? Is it gonna have a (record scratch).
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait a second, I've just become deaf. Destroyer of worlds. And his sunglasses down and shit.
BEN KISSEL
Well he doesn't have that much fun. I mean he's creative but not fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Oppenheimer? Oppenheimer is a complicated character. Oppenheimer is a very interesting character, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm more interested about the movie Oppenheimer.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh the movie. He's gonna be a brooding little bitch, I guarantee it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cillian Murphy is great though. If you're gonna have one, that's him.
MARCUS PARKS
He's great but if you put Cillian Murphy in there, he's gonna brood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here, I'll do an impression of Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. All right, you ready? That's it. Just silence, staring. Because you know there's gonna be 10 words in the movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If they made him a rabbit, they could call him Hoppenheimer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Save it!
MARCUS PARKS
Save it.
BEN KISSEL
For what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Save it!
BEN KISSEL
This is what I'm saving it for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna do a whole Oppenheimer episode!
BEN KISSEL
Hoppenheimer.
MARCUS PARKS
Now up until 1938, the idea that one could split an atom and release the incredible energy contained therein, it was theoretical. It's the idea of chain reactions. If you split one atom, then another atom will be split and another and another and they will then split so fast and so many of them will split so fast that it will create a massive release of energy. An explosion, a nuclear explosion.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. It's like if you order Sonic and Taco Bell, consume that in the same night, the next morning you're gonna have a cosmic explosion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. But you see the element you're truly missing is what they'll have to figure out is if you really want to expand your range, your splatter range of your liquid shit-
BEN KISSEL
Yes, always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna want to get as thin and as strong of a toilet paper tube that you could put right against your asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You concentrate the force of the splattering diarrhea up through a tube and up and out and direct the energy outwards. That's really how you get yourself an atomic shitbed.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Thank you, Professor Zebrowski. Mr. Parks, you can learn something from this guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do things a little differently. No pants.
BEN KISSEL
No pants at Crappy University.
MARCUS PARKS
Remember, this is 1938. Hitler has been in power for about five years. The concentration camps are built, the tanks are massing on the borders, shit is about to go down. And so it was particularly frightening that the man who took the splitting of the atom from theoretical to practical was a German named Otto Hahn.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Nuclear fission had been achieved, the power of the sun had been unlocked, and it had all been done inside Nazi Germany.
BEN KISSEL
Well at least it was in safe hands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly it was in safe hands because they fucked it all up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Otto Hahn had no love for the Nazis. So he leaked his findings to scientists outside of Nazi Germany, saying oh fuck, guys, guys, the Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I figured out how to do this, they're eventually going to have access to this knowledge, do something.
BEN KISSEL
This is a real life horror movie, this is opening up the box in fucking Hellraiser. This shit is like wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, dude. This is all the opening I imagine of this movie. Because especially in the book 'The Bastard Brigade', it's all like these forces all running towards the center, towards each other, about to collide.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Enrico Fermi immediately recognized that nuclear fission could be harnessed into a weapon, especially in the hands of a group as aggressive as the Nazis. Another scientist who realized this was a Jewish refugee from Hungary named Leo Szilard. Szilard knew that Fermi and Frédéric Joliot had confirmed Otto Hahn's findings on nuclear fission and they planned to publish their finding. Szilard begged them not to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Do not do it. And Fermi agreed but Joliot, being stubborn in a way that only the French can be, he refused. He argued that (French accent) if they did not publish, they would be betraying the very principles of free speech that Hitler was threatening to destroy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
The French are immoral people in their own way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. It's just sometimes speech, like that can be too free. You're talking about willy nilly speech. There's a difference.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But basically he was saying that if we don't do this thing that might help Hitler win in reality, Hitler would win in principle. And really which of those things is more important?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm walking away.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That makes me wanna walk away.
MARCUS PARKS
Which of those things is more important?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In principle.
BEN KISSEL
This is French logic, it's very important.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are we doing here? You know what it is, man?
BEN KISSEL
It's about principle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what? Life ain't theoretical.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Life is works, not your precious words.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Life is the philosopher, life is some form of box of candies.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And each candy is different in its way.
BEN KISSEL
It's really actually not even a great analogy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then some candy is radium and you're like oh now (gargling sound) some candy is full of come.
BEN KISSEL
Full of come, yeah. Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
And so where prior to 1939 no one had heard of nuclear fission, Joliot made sure that the whole world knew of the existence of nuclear fission, quite possibly the most destructive force known to mankind.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. Just pulling that string, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile Otto Hahn was working from the inside doing his best to keep what little uranium Germany had out of Nazi hands. But that became a moot point when Germany gained access to the richest uranium mines in Europe when they annexed Czechoslovakia. Thank you, Neville.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you, Neville Chamberlain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, good. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
God, Jesus Christ. You fuckers know nothing about history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How much else can I know?
BEN KISSEL
I just feel like you threw a shade on a man that's been dead for 70 years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah well it's because they signed the non aggression pact.
MARCUS PARKS
Peace in our time, my ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They signed a nonaggression pact and they all were like now Hitler, you promise you're not gonna attack the rest of us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was like I swear.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you, Neville.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he did not. So I do know.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you, Neville.
BEN KISSEL
No, I know. Just the way you said it was like he's not here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly, yeah. He's throwing shade. It feels like we're on an after Oppenheimer talk back on Bravo.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you, Neville.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, Neville.
MARCUS PARKS
Now building off the previously published works, Leo Szilard figured out how to make a simple nuclear reactor using graphite and uranium. He concluded that even though he couldn't tell you the how of the process, it was possible to use this technology to make a devastating weapon that could destroy the world, a nuclear weapon.
BEN KISSEL
You could just hear the buttholes of every world leader get warmer and warmer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes.
BEN KISSEL
I think someone's just developed a weapon that can end the whole world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes!
MARCUS PARKS
He also deduced that if he had come to the conclusion that such a thing could be constructed, it was only a matter of time before the Nazis figured it out too because remember they still got Heisenberg. With this information at hand, Szilard knew that he needed to tell somebody but he needed some heavies on his side, someone who could both understand the concept and have enough social clout to get the information to the right people. So Szilard set out for the magical land of Long Island.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, get The Situation. We need him here immediately.
BEN KISSEL
Indeed!
MARCUS PARKS
That's where the most famous scientist in history, Albert Einstein, was cooling his heels after he fled Germany years before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's in fucking Long Island.
BEN KISSEL
Long Island.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Would you fucking believe?
BEN KISSEL
Why not Long Island? It's a beautiful place.
MARCUS PARKS
What was that story you were telling me about what happened when Szilard went to Long Island?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, so at that time period, because this is when my dad was a kid in Staten Island and he was like it's all farmland, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you go, it's still farmland except for the major city parts, Long Island was like a farm town. And so these scientists, this is back in the day before you could figure out, also they're trying not to let everybody know that they've rushed from Europe to America to reach Albert Einstein to ask him these highly sensitive questions about nuclear weaponry.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so they get to Long Island, they show up, and they're literally like I don't know where the fuck he is. They don't got his address.
MARCUS PARKS
Just some dude from Hungary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just know that he's there. They don't know what to do. And they're like well okay, we're lost. We're here, there's some guy trying to sell me Stromboli and he's also trying to detail my car. But what's a car, you ask? But then he's like how the fuck do we figure out where he is, right?
MARCUS PARKS
They had cars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like well Albert Einstein's the most fucking famous scientist in the world. We can just ask somebody. So they found proto little dirtbags, like little kids playing in the street just being like hello children, do you know Albert Einstein? Do you know where Albert Einstein is? And like two little prototype Long Islanders going like yeah, I know where fucking Einstein is, come this way. And so literally they followed two kids to go find Albert Einstein.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they just found him just in the most daffy scientist way where they showed up and he was like washing his pants. So he was in his underwear and his shirt outside being like welcome! Honestly he invented the most pinnacle Long Island thing on the face of the planet which is washing the stoop.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, wash the stoop.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally just in a wifebeater which was an old term that we used for an A-shirt.
MARCUS PARKS
We call them A-shirts now, Henry.
BEN KISSEL
A-shirt.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm wearing one right now, I wear one every day of my life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been wearing one and calling them a wifelover.
BEN KISSEL
There you go, real nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when Szilard showed up and these other scientists, Szilard showed up, he explained how a nuclear reactor could be made. And Einstein said something along the lines of like oh man, I never fucking thought of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No shit.
BEN KISSEL
Goddamnit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, positive aspects, theoretical aspects too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And it's still building on Einstein's work.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, just kind of excited about these concepts now because it's interesting. Imagine if we found out that, not to be anything and some people might say it, that true crime comedy podcasting was one of the most devastating forces on the face of the planet. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
Sure, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you told us that now, you know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Now, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being like you know it's about to destroy the whole thing. And we're like I just wanted to do a show that we didn't have to pitch to somebody.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Just to show that we could do on our own.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And so Einstein, Szilard, and a handful of other scientists sent a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an effort to convince him to immediately start a massive nuclear research program to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis could do so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And as soon as FDR read that he jumped over his desk-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah he did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he ran down the hallway-
BEN KISSEL
Yes he did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got in his little vulnerability chair and rolled out to let everybody know what was going on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You think it's fake.
MARCUS PARKS
You thought it was fake.
BEN KISSEL
You don't think he's in a wheelchair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not the only conspiracy theory I might believe in.
BEN KISSEL
That one doesn't even make sense. Why?
MARCUS PARKS
That one doesn't make sense at all.
BEN KISSEL
Why? Why would he fake it? It didn't help him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was my main one.
BEN KISSEL
He had to hide that he was in a wheelchair.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sympathy.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think America-
MARCUS PARKS
From who? From who?
BEN KISSEL
Americans don't need... We don't like that in our leaders.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. At all.
BEN KISSEL
No weakness can ever be shown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like, I don't know, I think I might be right here.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think he may have stabbed a pencil into his leg and not felt it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that would be cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now either these scientists were actively lying to themselves about what they knew about human nature or they were showing just how little they understood people, but they reasoned that the creation of the atomic bomb would actually accomplish world peace.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure!
BEN KISSEL
But in some ways it did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean they had the theory of mutually assured destruction.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They figured that once countries possessed atomic bombs, then there would have to be a higher authority established to keep countries from using them because we'd all blow up the entire world if nuclear war were to occur and nobody was crazy enough to do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody is crazy enough to use an atomic bomb!
BEN KISSEL
USA. USA. USA. But if you look at like India and Pakistan, totally worked. They haven't killed each other yet because they both got the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's simmering.
BEN KISSEL
The Russians and the US.
MARCUS PARKS
Simmering. I mean that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
The Russians and the US, we would have had a land war without a doubt during the Cold War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We would have won that land war!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we would have won. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe. They still have the Soviet Union.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just don't go in the winter.
BEN KISSEL
They were pretty tough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, don't go in the winter.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they're very, very tough. But they were also decimated by the end of WWII.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We had our opportunity then. We had our opportunity then!
MARCUS PARKS
Had a real good chance of catching them with their pants down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There is some truth, I mean technically this is four steps away from me saying we need to arm teachers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
But there is some truth to the idea of if everyone is armed with deadly force then peace can be assured.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel that is a philosophical point that one can argue.
BEN KISSEL
There's some evidence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it mostly just shows that how many wars can be fought by proxy and in a cold fashion, you can get real creative.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the thing. Vietnam still happened. Korea still happened. Afghanistan still happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're doing it right now. We're fighting Russia in a land war in Ukraine right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Both Afghanistans still happened.
BEN KISSEL
Could have been worse. Could have been worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It could have been worse because we might not have gotten all that great music.
BEN KISSEL
But actually, again going back to my earlier thing, we probably would have just used it during Vietnam.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing is that we will get in a later about how the spies that were within the Manhattan Project actually prevented America from using nuclear weapons in Korea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were just so excited.
MARCUS PARKS
We were really jazzed about it.
BEN KISSEL
That was really big boom.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like when I get a new pair of shoes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wanna wear them immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You just wanna wear them on the rainiest, muddiest day possible and ruin them immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well and the thing is that these guys did sort of foresee the UN-
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Which was there to negotiate things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You need all of this shit.
MARCUS PARKS
We need all this shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need a lot of new rules.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But the problem was that they thought that if nuclear war was abolished, because they thought that there would be this thing, this gigantic organization that was going to abolish nuclear war because everybody had nuclear weapons, then all war would be abolished. There would never be a war again.
BEN KISSEL
Little do they know biological warfare is so fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never to go to war again!
MARCUS PARKS
Never go to war again!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come one guys though, war is pretty nice, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, there's a lot of ways we can kill people, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
War is really good. But that's the thing is that they thought that they were harbingers of peace. They thought that by creating the nuclear war, it would usher in the age of science. And that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sadly, this is the exact same thought Alfred Nobel had when he invented dynamite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, dyn-o-mite.
MARCUS PARKS
He thought this exact same thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like they didn't learn the lesson!
BEN KISSEL
They didn't even finish Mount Rushmore.
MARCUS PARKS
It's also the same argument that was made by the tech utopians of the 90s who created the second most dangerous weapon born in the 20th century, the internet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you're gonna say the hot pocket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a weapon at dinner time.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's very true.
MARCUS PARKS
But no matter how naive these physicists were, the creation of the nuclear program started sounding pretty damn good to FDR as summer turned to fall in 1939.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. You just see FDR like Martin Short in Arrested Development where he's like pick my legs up on the desk, I've got something to say!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like I would-
MARCUS PARKS
Dragon, toss me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Toss me!
MARCUS PARKS
Well in September of 1939, Hitler kicked off WWII, he invaded Poland. And he was soon giving speeches saying that the Nazis would soon have access to a weapon that no country could defend against.
BEN KISSEL
What's that day like? Where you're just like oh my god. Like the night before.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Like what is Hitler, is it like glee? Is it Christmas?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think that he was.
BEN KISSEL
Is it let's have a beer, is it let's do a bunch of drugs?
MARCUS PARKS
It's a lot of rocking back and forth because he was on a lot of meth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was a weirdo too. He was pretty weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's the worst thing you could say about Hitler is he was a little bit of a weirdo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Weirdo.
MARCUS PARKS
Well with these speeches, the Allies assumed that Hitler was talking about the atomic bomb and as it turned out, the assumptions were correct. Two weeks after the invasion of Poland, Hitler summoned a handful of German physicists to a secret conference in Berlin. There they were given the task of developing an atomic bomb for the Third Reich. And they dubbed this group, they gave it the goofiest fucking name in the world, they called it the Uranium Club.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It sounds like they opened up for Duran Duran in the 80s.
MARCUS PARKS
It sounds like a shitty after school science fair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hate it.
BEN KISSEL
Really it sounds like the place where kids who get bullied a lot just have to go for an hour after school for the bullies to leave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the hiding place. But Werner Heisenberg also, these guys all got the ability to not go to the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Hitler had given I think it was like a small amount of passes.
MARCUS PARKS
Like 400 passes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were exempt to go.
BEN KISSEL
They could have just faked bones burst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, it's very interesting. It was actors, singers, artists. That's who, people he handpicked, people he liked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Including a couple of Jewish people because he decided was the thing, he can pick and choose who he wants. And then a lot of these scientists, other ones, they had to go fight. They literally had to go get guns and they were drafted and forced to go. This group though, which is also very appealing to Heisenberg because one of his biggest fears during this whole time was please don't send me to war, please don't send me to war.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's rational.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Because they didn't want to go. But honestly technically at the time that makes you a pussy. Now I understand it but during WWII it made you a pussy.
BEN KISSEL
I'll take the term. Call me a pussy. You go right ahead and you call me a pussy and I'll call you a corpse in five years and move on. Also have you ever heard of stolen valor? I'll just pretend I was there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Werner Heisenberg was naturally a member of the Uranium Club, Germany had experienced a serious brain drain since the Nazis had come into power in 1933. It had only gotten worse. The scientists left behind were therefore not the brightest bulbs on the tree. And Heisenberg himself had his own problems because he completely lacked a moral compass amongst many other personal failings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he also showed up and he's used to being the smartest guy in the room, being the number one guy, everybody's literally trying to suck his dick. But then like the guy that's his boss on the Uranian Club is this like Nazi flunky, this guy that they all made fun of, this guy that they would joke about how like his hair was always messy and his lab coat was always fucked up. And he just was this like weird nebbish piece of shit. But he was an ardent Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, it was trying to cut all of the quote unquote "Jewish science" out of it which meant the correct stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's like how you fail up at News Corp, the parent company of Fox News.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you basically hate your way to the top.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But nevertheless, even with all that, the Uranium Club still came far too close to delivering an atomic bomb to Nazi Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This close.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in order to build an atomic bomb, one needs enriched uranium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which most of the time I bring uranium to my various pottery classes and we talk a lot about history and you know.
MARCUS PARKS
Enriching it culturally is what you are talking about.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god, that was horrible. That is so... Well you know what? You know what? You know what? That's okay though because the arts much like science, it's about failure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's subjective.
BEN KISSEL
Science is not really that subjective.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Art is my words.
BEN KISSEL
Yes but it's about failure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Life is works.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, life is work. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that became the Uranium Club's first task.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Briefly put, naturally occurring radiation is no good for the chain reactions needed to make fission. That's uranium-238. Uranium-238, that's naturally occurring. What the Uranium Club needed was uranium-235 which had to be separated from U-238 in a process called enriching that I can't explain to you.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You go and you take him to a painting class.
BEN KISSEL
God.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You take him to a natural history museum.
MARCUS PARKS
An opera perhaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, something.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The next step for the Uranium Club however would be the science experiment that unknowingly decided the fate of the entire world.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
The Germans needed to build a nuclear reactor which was the next step in understanding how to actually make an atomic bomb go boom. Now by this point, Heisenberg had fully put away any trepidations he might have had towards the Nazis. And for him the Uranium club became a chance to prove himself to the same Nazis who had admonished him for using quote unquote " Jew physics". In other words, Heisenberg was developing the atomic bomb for the Nazis out of nothing more than personal pride.
BEN KISSEL
Well the thing is the swastika is actually a Buddhist symbol of not giving a fuck. So I've decided not to give a fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't give a fuck! No, he was a real prick.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He definitely wanted to be the guy that invented the atomic bomb. And he would be whoever it was, whoever's team he was on, he wanted to be that guy. But he also was trying to kind of figure out where does he fit within the ecosystem of the scientific world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
While within Nazi Germany.
BEN KISSEL
So his ego was in real time. He was like this is gonna be huge, I'm gonna be historic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For me. This is gonna be for me. Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Basically he wanted to be Einstein. What Einstein became, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. He also kind of had this concept of because he was quote unquote not so much pro Nazi, pro Germany because he was like the problem is if somebody else uses the atomic bomb, they're gonna use it on us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh of course.
MARCUS PARKS
He didn't want it to be used on Germany.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing is that-
BEN KISSEL
Which ironically again, it wasn't!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It got real close.
MARCUS PARKS
The thing was that even though he's not Einstein, he's still fucking Heisenberg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
He's still one of the most brilliant men of the 20th century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very famous, Nobel Prize winning, known around the world.
BEN KISSEL
You guys seem to really have his accolades right on the top of your heads.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean hey man, it is just the truth. But the point is that that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to be seen as a guy who could do work on solid practical things, a guy who could build things, who can make things, move out of the theoretical into the practical. And he had absolutely no hesitation handing over the most powerful weapon to ever exist to the most evil people to ever exist if that proved that he could do something.
BEN KISSEL
Don't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There are some people that are more evil than that, like the people who sit in the center seat in an airplane row and take both of the fucking arm handles.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
That's really rude of them to do that.
MARCUS PARKS
That's really rude.
BEN KISSEL
Technically I would actually argue that's theirs because you have the aisle and the window.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Liebenstrum.
BEN KISSEL
I actually don't know. That is actually a construct of the airlines continuing to make the seats smaller, having us fight for less and less land and charging us more.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of anger, and a lot of rage.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm actually with Ben on this one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because the center seat, if they don't take both of the arms, which arm do they take?
BEN KISSEL
Where do you go?
MARCUS PARKS
Where do they go?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I find it interesting that a simple throwaway comment from me does generate conversation.
MARCUS PARKS
Are you arguing that you're currently enriching us?
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. It's a chain reaction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus Parks, 41. That's me enriching you.
MARCUS PARKS
That's me enriching, now I'm 41.
BEN KISSEL
Ah yes, got it.
MARCUS PARKS
I used to be Marcus, 32.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I'm 41.
BEN KISSEL
Now you're 41. Okay. Soon to be actually.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, really. As it was put in the book 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Heisenberg saw physics as bloodsport and he brought this attitude to everything in life. You did not want to play this guy in ping pong.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh. So he was an annoying piece of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was miserable as fuck, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by December of 1939, just three months after he was put on the project, and this speaks to the speed in which this shit happened, it seemed as if Heisenberg was on the fast track towards an atomic weapon. So he opened a test chamber for nuclear reactors in a small lab in Berlin codenamed Das Virenhaus.
BEN KISSEL
What that mean?
MARCUS PARKS
The virus house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, so nobody would go near it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
However it's at this point that both the brain drain and Heisenberg's own blind spots started to show. A scientist named Walter Bothe was put to the task of creating fissionable material. This is the same experiment Leo Szilard had done with graphite and uranium, the one that had set off so many alarm bells. But the thing was that Walter Bothe wasn't as smart as Leo Szilard.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
He did the same experiment with graphite and uranium but when Walter Bothe did it, it didn't work because the graphite Bothe was using wasn't pure enough and he didn't think to check if it was. He didn't even think that maybe it's not pure enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of interesting because there's some happenstance here because it's about the graphite that they mined out of Germany had too much boron in it naturally. And that's what caused the issues with it. While the graphite that we mined in America when we were working on the Manhattan Project naturally had less boron in it that made it already workable, like it made it already kind of workable.
BEN KISSEL
And Czechoslovakia too, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's where we got the uranium from.
MARCUS PARKS
That's uranium.
BEN KISSEL
Oh so that's the German uranium he got.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the stuff in here, there's a conspiracy theory about Werner Heisenberg, right. Because they're saying now after this fact, everyone's saying like but actually Werner knew secretly that the Nazis were bad. So what he was gonna do was sabotage the bomb from inside while working on it.
MARCUS PARKS
My ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is absolutely not true.
MARCUS PARKS
My entire fucking ass.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. No, it makes sense. It clears, it clears.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what they point towards-
BEN KISSEL
That's what my grandfather did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Honestly that would be incredible. I would love to reveal that in the middle of this episode.
BEN KISSEL
The Nazis wouldn't have lost without my grandfather.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, very good. All they need is the proper lazy German to find slower the machine.
BEN KISSEL
He was very handsome, very hard working.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But so Werner Heisenberg got called it. Because at some point they're asked about budgets, right. They want to come in, they wanna ask and be like okay, how much money is it gonna cost? We need an atomic bomb, we need it right now. We want a killing blow. We want this shit right now. We want to take over Europe, we want to hold the world hostage.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Werner Heisenberg purposely lowballed the project because he said (German accent) actually it will only take about a couple of $100,000. Which is why they're saying that he purposely sabotaged the program because he knew, truly knew that to make-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What he thought, according to his calculations, to make the amount of enriched uranium that you would need would not only be impossible within the decade, but it would cost a trillion dollars. So he basically said all of this shit because he made a massive mistake. Because he thought it would take something like hundreds and hundreds of pounds of uranium to make it explode.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But in America, we realized it actually is a smaller amount. We'll get into all those details later. But Werner Heisenberg said all of this shit, they gave him this lower budget.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the reason why he did it, truly the reason why he did it, this is again my full... I was watching a couple of documentaries on this so I'm stealing this point of view, which is the concept that he knew that if you give me a million dollars of Nazi money and I don't make the atomic bomb-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And right now you guys are looking on the fast track to win and then the Nazis win and I haven't done this job, you've given me all this money and I fail, I'm going to a concentration camp.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was still betting on Nazis winning but he thought we'd win the old fashioned way which is blowing up with rockets. And now he gets to do his fun little research on the side being funded in this project that's not gonna go anywhere.
BEN KISSEL
So less money, less responsibility, less his head is cut off if he doesn't do well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But I also think there's an element of ego there as well. How much more impressive would it be if he would have done it on such a small budget? I think he did in some part, some part of him did believe that he could still do it despite the budgetary constraints.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's interesting.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of money needed to be spread around.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then you look at what the Americans spent on it. $2 billion and we were already correct on the math that they were incorrect on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's nice when you don't have to fight a land war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well nevertheless, Walter Bothe came to the conclusion that graphite couldn't be used to enrich uranium, when in fact the exact opposite is true. As a result, the Nazis headed off in an entirely different direction, researching an entirely different and far slower method. The entirety of modern history hinges upon this blunder because had the Nazis not changed their research focus, if they would have kept it up until they enriched that fucking uranium with graphite-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It is entirely possible that Hitler would have obtained an atomic weapon while America was still trying to figure out how to get past Nazi forces in North Africa.
BEN KISSEL
So this is the Donner Party deciding to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
This is them being like yeah, fuck the storm, it's not coming for another couple days.
MARCUS PARKS
This is them taking the Hastings shortcut.
BEN KISSEL
Right, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And later on the Alsos Mission, right, the group that would go to try to stop the Nazi atomic program-
BEN KISSEL
Did they open up for ABBA?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But honestly, they're a badass group. Moe Berg, he was a catcher for the Yankees and an American spy.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this guy is one of the great characters of American history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Joe Kennedy Jr I believe was there. There's a couple of guys, a very interesting group of ragtag adventurers with no experience that America was willing to write off.
BEN KISSEL
It's like a suicide squad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, I cannot believe this is not a movie.
MARCUS PARKS
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Bastard Brigade. Is it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's The Catcher Was A Spy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, it's awful.
MARCUS PARKS
It got fucking wasted-
BEN KISSEL
If it's a bad movie, it doesn't count.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moe Berg, they had Paul Rudd playing Moe Berg. Moe Berg-
BEN KISSEL
Wait, this is recent?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean it's like 10 years ago.
BEN KISSEL
Paul Rudd?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like 2011 I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moe Berg looks like the evil baby from The Simpsons.
BEN KISSEL
They never cast these historical figures right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They never do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They never do because-
BEN KISSEL
They don't want ugly people. They're all ugly!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugly people created history! They're the most successful people in the world! All right?
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But not, when the Alsos Mission went to go looking for this shit, they said that one of the first things when they finally found Werner Heisenberg's famous nuclear reactor that they thought was gonna be this crazy underground cavern, because they've seen these Nazi buildouts, the Nazi build outs were huge.
MARCUS PARKS
No, there's a whole fucking TV show called Nazi Mega Weapons.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's crazy. But they went to go down and it's like a basement room. And they're like the entire nuclear program for the fucking Nazis was like two rooms.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He went in and was just like oh wow, you guys really lowballed this shit.
BEN KISSEL
It's like when we got to tour Sun Records. That's it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's like two rooms.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very small. But to the point of timeline, as the Germans came relative inches from discovering the secrets of atomic weaponry, America was barely getting started. Finally the letter begging FDR to start an atomic weapons program was delivered along with the presentation that somewhat soft pedaled the atomic weapons point.
BEN KISSEL
Mr. President, we have a huge, huge memo coming in. You're gonna want to stand up for this. Oh goddamnit, I'm sorry, sir.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Then he jumps up and they're like whoa, crazy! You crazy man, you crazy.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, we got that piece of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the scientists... Yeah, you got that piece of shit that took us through the fucking Depression and WWII. You got him. You got him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All I know is that this series is gonna be longer than FDR's entire presidency.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
It was 12 years.
BEN KISSEL
After him they were like we gotta stop that from happening again.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he was good at it.
BEN KISSEL
What do you mean you don't know why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was good at it.
MARCUS PARKS
He was really good at it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the problem, there's only one of him.
BEN KISSEL
I guess god taketh, he also giveth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the scientists charged with convincing the president said that developing weapons would be the third use of atomic research. First we're gonna use it to produce power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Then we're gonna use it for medical.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Then we're gonna make a bomb. But all FDR heard was the words Nazi, blow up, and unbeatable weapon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think those were the important words at that point in time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But since this was still a project that was going through government channels, FDR gave the go-ahead to start a commission that could look into the possibility of starting a program that might lead to research on ways in which an atomic bomb program could be started.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am asleep.
BEN KISSEL
God. This is what makes your eyes bleed.
MARCUS PARKS
But nevertheless, this was still the genesis of what would become the Manhattan Project.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And if you're questioning the urgency here, bear in mind that this was two years before Pearl Harbor. This is two years before we even got involved in the war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we wanted nothing to do with it at the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Well FDR did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, he did.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he knew, he was smart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause he understood, he understood.
BEN KISSEL
Two years before we allowed Pearl Harbor to happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Before we allowed it.
BEN KISSEL
If it even did fucking happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We still watched FDR hide a couple of leis in his desk so people wouldn't know. Wipe the poi off his mouth.
MARCUS PARKS
But after the Nazis had fucked up to such an incredible degree when it came to using graphite to enrich uranium, they decided to switch their focus on nuclear weaponry to something called heavy water. Basically heavy water is exactly what it sounds like, it's water but it's heavy.
BEN KISSEL
It's heavy water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's dense water.
MARCUS PARKS
Dense, dense water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
It's dense water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do I have to do the thing?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They put water in your water so you can wet your water while you water.
MARCUS PARKS
While you water, yeah. Well in WWII, the stuff was considered to be eerie, almost unnatural. It freaked Winston Churchill out for some reason. He wouldn't even say heavy water, he called it the juice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, it's scary, dude.
BEN KISSEL
That's so much scarier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just water that's like weird.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I'm happy that that's what freaked Winston Churchill out, not everything else he did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But really though all you need to know is that bombarding an element with heavy water intensifies nuclear chain reactions. So it's therefore possible to use heavy water to enrich uranium. This as I mentioned is necessary for creating a working atomic bomb. Now heavy water is rare, it does not exist naturally. And in 1940 there was only one plant in the world that made it, that was Norsk Hydro in Norway which at that time was the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. Now the market for heavy water was still small In the 1930s, the Norsk Hydro plant only sold 88 lbs between 1934-1938. But in 1940, the Nazis very suspiciously ordered several hundred pounds with a request for a further 220 lbs per month after that.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they knew that it was only used for nuclear experimentation.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They knew that that's what it was for. So when they start doing it because then Norway... And I mean again, it's nice when it's not just capitalism, where they can really be like oh I don't I know if we should sell all this to the Nazis.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And also a little isolated in their own way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean they're also right next to them.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean the Norsk Hydro, they asked the Nazis like hey, why you want all this? The Nazis were like (German accent) oh you know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) What if we say... Okay, all right, how to explain. So heavy water, right, is like super sick.
BEN KISSEL
We wanna make heavy soup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Yeah, we're trying to make super heavy soup.
BEN KISSEL
Heavier soup, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Good work. Good work, Gunther, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, no problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) I'm trying to make some crazy heavy soup.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Heavy tomato soup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Yeah, super fucking heavy soup.
BEN KISSEL
Being a soldier is hard but man, I love this really heavy tomato soup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) It really does build up against the winter months, it gets so cold on the front lines.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Norwegians rightfully assumed they're up to no good.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They said no, we're not gonna sell it to you. And back on the Allied side, physicist Frédéric Joliot knew that heavy water could be used in the application of nuclear fission. So Allied Forces spent 36 million francs, or at least they offered 36 million francs, to buy out every bit of heavy water to keep it out of Nazi hands. But in the spirit of fuck the Nazis, Norsk Hydro offered to hand over all their heavy water for free just so long as someone else figured out how to get it the fuck out of there.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah cause now the Nazis are coming for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right. So they wanted to save their own ass, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's spy time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Spy time!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Spy time! Spy time!
BEN KISSEL
I love spy time.
MARCUS PARKS
So to smuggle the heavy water to the Allies, a French intelligence officer named Jacques Allier came up with a plan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We find a big butt.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We shoot the water up the butt. I don't, I'm bad at ideas.
BEN KISSEL
It's a heavy enema.
MARCUS PARKS
Well first he had two custom built suitcases made, one for transporting the heavy water and one meant to act as a dummy. Then he recruited a second spy and bought two plane tickets from Oslo airport, one going to Scotland and another going to Amsterdam. And crucially, these flights were scheduled to leave on the same day at the same time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is before 9/11. So you could just drive to the planes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The Nazis had not fully invaded Norway just yet but they still had considerable power. So their intelligence, probably leaked by Agent Allier himself, told them that the heavy water was going to be on this flight to Amsterdam. This of course wasn't the heavy water's destination.
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm heavy water. I don't like to smoke weed. I actually would love to go to America. I heard they have hamburgers out there, I love heavy, heavy water isn't so bad. You should see my heavy cock. Heavy cock water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was the words of Rudolph Christie, Chris Christie's great grandpa.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, heavy water, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Jesus Christ, you've made me lose my fucking spot. Now Amsterdam was of course not its destination. So Agent Allier and his fellow spy paid a guy at the Oslo airport to cause a scene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes! That's me!
MARCUS PARKS
By demanding to be let... Yeah, that's Henry's job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's me!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They had a guy go in-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, guys!
BEN KISSEL
Honestly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which one? I better be on that plane!
BEN KISSEL
If we get Marcus off his meds for 10 days, perfect. You go absolutely nuts. I'll shit all over the place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL
We can cause a scene.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, we can. But that's the thing is that this guy was paid to go in and cause a scene to let him on the plane. He was supposed to show up to his flight late and say like let me on the runway, let me on the runway! Because they're not gonna let you on the runway after it's already left the gate. But he was there to argue to let me on the runway, I gotta get on this flight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's awesome.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course it eventually turned into a physical altercation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The most important pain in the ass in history.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, what a job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And during the commotion, Allier and the other spy surreptitiously switched their luggage from the flight to Amsterdam to the flight to Scotland.
BEN KISSEL
Cool!
MARCUS PARKS
Then they got on the Scotland flight. And while the Nazis were intercepting the Amsterdam flight mid air to divert it to Hamburg-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, scary as fuck. They set off fighter jets and they literally found the flight midair and grounded it and then took everybody out. Like very, very fucking scary.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Agent Allier and the other spy were telling the pilot of the Scotland flight that they were with the Allies and they needed to get to Scotland as soon as possible to outrun the Luftwaffe who were no doubt soon on their tail.
BEN KISSEL
Cool!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, that must be so much fun to tell a commercial pilot. Follow that cloud!
BEN KISSEL
Follow that cloud. I think it's fun for us. I think it would have been scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely terrifying, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Thankfully Agent Allier made it to Scotland and took the heavy water from Edinburgh to France, while the Nazis were left stamping their feet in Hamburg-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can see them, yeah, biting their hats and shit. No, they did it again!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They discovered that they were in possession of nothing more precious than 88 lbs of gravel. And I bet there was a fun note left by them, auf wiedersehen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See you in Scotland.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Well you can use that to make your Hitler as long as you shit on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh the gravel.
BEN KISSEL
The gravel and shit. The Hitler diet.
MARCUS PARKS
Now just a month later, Germany invaded Norway and although the Norwegian resistance was among the fiercest of WWII, legendary, the Nazis nevertheless quickly seized the Norsk Hydro plant, meaning they were now in control of the only heavy water production facility in the world.
BEN KISSEL
That's a big get.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they gotta figure out how to do it because what's interesting, I did not know too is that there is a way to make heavy water inactive. You basically just dump a juice into the other juice.
MARCUS PARKS
Cadmium, you put cadmium.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you put some Diet Coke in there.
MARCUS PARKS
It's either cadmium or castor oil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Something that mucks it all up.
BEN KISSEL
I think you shame it a whole bunch, call it fat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. You dumb water, you must not be healthy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You're never gonna be a comedic actress or a singer in America unless you lose some weight, heavy water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Clearly sad because I feel like the heavy water needs to be built up.
BEN KISSEL
I agree. I agree.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. How else are we going to enrich the uranium?
BEN KISSEL
Indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
if the heavy water has got no confidence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean the heavy water also needs to be learned as well.
BEN KISSEL
If it gets too big it's gonna start sneaking snacks after midnight and die of a heart attack.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the heavy water-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Life is works, not words.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the heavy water smuggled on the Scotland flight had made its way to the top French nuclear experts, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie. And since the Nazis now held NorsK Hydro, the smuggled heavy water was now even more valuable. They're not getting any more of it. After receiving the heavy water, Frédéric and Irène in turn arranged for it to be hidden in a bank vault 250 miles south of Paris. But after only five days, the bank manager freaked out and made them move it somewhere else.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(French accent) You take this fat people water and you put it someplace else!
MARCUS PARKS
And at this point, this is France and Britain working together. That's the Allies right now.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they're like okay, we gotta get this heavy water somewhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gotta be moving, it has to be moving because also the Nazis are coming straight for France.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. We gotta get this fucking heavy water and we gotta start making a fucking nuclear program now. And so after the bank manager kicked it out, it was placed in a women's prison. And after that, it was taken to a maximum security prison where it was stored in a death row cell.
BEN KISSEL
Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And there in the death row cell, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie planned to set up a laboratory to conduct heavy water experiments.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that a bit ironic?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
It's more appropriate.
BEN KISSEL
Fucking nerd.
MARCUS PARKS
If they were to say set up the heavy water experiment in say like a-
BEN KISSEL
You know what's so funny about you correcting me on that? It's an indictment on you.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah it is. Because sometimes just allow things to go. Almost like heavy water off a duck's back or an asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would poison it. I miss the Chicago Rippers.
BEN KISSEL
Remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Simpler.
MARCUS PARKS
See if they were to say set up a heavy water laboratory in a maternity ward, then that would be ironic.
BEN KISSEL
No it's because it's going to lead to a lot of death.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's what irony is.
BEN KISSEL
No. You're wrong. You're actually wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what would be ironic? You take heavy water experiments and you do it on a hot air balloon. That's ironic because it's hot light air.
BEN KISSEL
My point totally stands.
MARCUS PARKS
No because with the maternity ward, they would be creating an instrument of death in a place of life.
BEN KISSEL
You have any idea how many babies die in maternity wards?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not letting us go back to the script.
BEN KISSEL
No, we're not going. All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But as fate would have it, it became clear by mid June of 1940 that Hitler's meth-fueled blitzkrieg was gonna make short work of the French army. So the heavy water had to be moved to England. To take on this most dangerous task of transporting top secret materials across a body of water filled with German U-boats, the British called upon a Scottish coal steamer called the Broompark.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought you were gonna say Dorf. Dorf on heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
The roast of that heavy water must have gotten from the other water. You know how people are.
MARCUS PARKS
I know.
BEN KISSEL
It's like we make fun of each other a lot but we're like friends. But so thin water is like hey, heavy water, you enjoying the ride?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually it would sink. The light water would ride on the heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this ship, the Broompark, was captained by the 20th Earl of Suffolk, a man named Charles Mad Jack Howard who was basically a rich British Captain Ron.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy's crazy.
BEN KISSEL
You know the 14th Earl of where?
MARCUS PARKS
The 20th Earl of Suffolk.
BEN KISSEL
You know the 14th Earl of Suffolk? Yeah, yeah, I'm not him. No, no, no. I'm the 20th Earl of Suffolk so kiss me. Can you still kiss me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please kiss me. This is a story about the crazy characters that are all within the beginnings of the OSS as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's like these are all guys, this is all during the Bastard Brigade time period where everyone's running back forth. And you needed these crazy people to make these decisions that were deeply against their wellbeing.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you had to have crazy... You had to have civilians with balls of steel to pull this shit off.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And that was one of the strengths of the Allies, of the British, of the Americans. It was using erratic people to get shit done because nobody could predict what they would do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Also little known fact, balls of steel, another side effect of radium poisoning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so. They become almost like stone.
MARCUS PARKS
But when the laboratory assistants transporting the heavy water showed up to Mad Jack's boat, they found him strewn out on the deck shirtless, showing off his tattoos to two ladies while making jokes in a faux French accent.
BEN KISSEL
It's not called not Mad Jack's boat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I love the fact that he's this maniac.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, total maniac. He's like (French accent) look at my tattoo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they're like this is the man that is going to get the most important material currently in the world out of war torn Europe.
BEN KISSEL
It makes sense. It's Mad Jack?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
This is what Mad Jack does!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Mad Jack Howard.
BEN KISSEL
Totally makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore, the crew of the Broompark was massively hungover. And despite the obvious urgency of the mission, they refused to set sail until they recovered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
First mate! Go and get us 15 bacon and egg sandwiches.
BEN KISSEL
That's the best.
MARCUS PARKS
But eventually they set sail carrying not just the heavy water but two crates of diamonds valued at $300 million in modern currency. This is all shit that had been smuggled out of Amsterdam. They're just trying to get everything out of Europe they can because the Nazis are coming, they know that nobody can stop them, so let's get as much out as we can.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
It took the Broompark three harrowing days to make it to the coast of England. But Mad Jack kept his cool the whole time and reportedly once they got to England safe, he laughed, slapped one of the laboratory assistants on the back, and said man, we had a 50/50 shot of making that one.
BEN KISSEL
I love Mad Jack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love him.
BEN KISSEL
You're more likely to die on the way to the airport.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love him. Yeah, he's the equivalent of the most insane Uber driver you've ever had in your life.
MARCUS PARKS
Dude, he's Captain Ron.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love him.
BEN KISSEL
Mad Jack gets it done. He gets it done.
MARCUS PARKS
Now safe in England, the heavy water was thereafter transported to a prison called Wormwood Scrubs.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god. I don't wanna go there.
MARCUS PARKS
I think Wormwood Scrubs, I think it does have a weird history all on its own. It sounds familiar.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But after that, it was delivered to Windsor Castle for use in any future Allied atomic bomb project which was still at this point all but nonexistent because Hitler had put the entirety of Europe on its heels. Mad Jack meanwhile unfortunately did not survive the war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Diabetes.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he died being mad. He blew himself up while trying to defuse an unexploded German bomb.
BEN KISSEL
He's funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
BEN KISSEL
It's still funny though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It apparently was a real like past time amongst thrill seekers during that time period where they'd go-
BEN KISSEL
Find mines and shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they'd find mines and try to like-
MARCUS PARKS
It's not mines, these are bombs.
BEN KISSEL
Bombs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bombs, like duds that would land from the sky. It's crazy.
BEN KISSEL
What a time.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Nazis soon marched into Paris, they took France. And when Frédéric Joliot returned to his laboratory in the City of Lights, he found two members of the Uranium Club there waiting for him, no doubt flanked by two ranking SS officers saying how Joliot must (German accent) think himself very clever indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) How was your boat trip to Amsterdam?
BEN KISSEL
I hate a condescending Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the reason why the Nazis were there was because they didn't have access to a machine called a cyclotron, which was a necessary component in the study of nuclear reactions. Joliot had a cyclotron. He'd built one, a working one.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So the Uranium Club basically said (German accent) sorry but this is ours now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Yes, we'll take your spinning machine, we will do what we will with it. We'll spin it, we'll shoot the particles through it.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But at first they were gonna disassemble it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And bring it back to Germany.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then they're like (German accent) but the spinning is already happening.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) It's here and it's local. And I prefer the local, I like a local spin.
BEN KISSEL
Kind of artisanal, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Joliot meanwhile not only allowed them to do so but he agreed to help them, which got him branded a traitor by the French. But unlike many who made this claim later, like Heisenberg, Joliot really was staying behind to gum up the works.
BEN KISSEL
Double agent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
He as well as his assistants were essential to the effort that stalled the Nazi atomic program through active sabotage.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He really was the real deal. Yeah. Because he learned a lot from his wife and from his mother- in-law.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were both hard bitches. Like Marie Curie was a fucking hard woman.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she was hard on her daughter.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like her daughter did not pass muster with her very often. But she went and it was crazy. Because Irène Curie got famous for bringing X-ray machines, what her mother did during WWII.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually Joliot would become a valuable member of the French resistance, which also does not get enough credit for being fucking incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's a whole episode series. WWII, we could just spend so long.
BEN KISSEL
Something about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Something about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's thick!
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot going on, yeah. I mean, of course there was like the Vichy government but the French resistance was fucking incredible. I mean Joliot just himself, he staged fake car accidents to help people escape Nazi occupied France, he arranged fake ID cards to help French Jews to safety, he smuggled weapons, he organized raids, he personally murdered traitors and Nazi double agents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, this is a scientist who got his fucking hands dirty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds to me like he's committing some illegal activities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no!
BEN KISSEL
Interesting indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no!
BEN KISSEL
How you seem to praise what appears to be a villain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, wow.
BEN KISSEL
Intriguing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His grandfather is coming through. It's finally happening.
MARCUS PARKS
But back in England, the Allies were trying to figure out what they should be doing with all this heavy water they'd gotten a hold of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tell you what, tastes real funny.
BEN KISSEL
I would imagine. I wonder what it does taste like. Probably can't drink it.
MARCUS PARKS
I would imagine it tastes the same.
BEN KISSEL
No, you can taste it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think you're supposed to drink it.
BEN KISSEL
I can't imagine.
MARCUS PARKS
I wonder if you can drink heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
We'll figure it out later, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at first the Allies thought about just kidnapping Werner Heisenberg. They could kidnap him, he could just tell them what's going on.
BEN KISSEL
That would be my idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Drinking heavy water in small quantities does not harm but drinking in larger quantities can cause dizziness and low blood pressure.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Might be good to lower it then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe that's what I'm on.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But since the Nazis were at that moment at the height of their power in Europe, the idea of kidnapping scientists was tabled for later. It happened, it just happened later.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah because that's totally, I'll bonk him, you bag him. We kidnap him.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a lot like that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the meantime, the Allies figured that if they couldn't figure out what to do with the heavy water, then they could at least make sure that the Germans didn't have any more access to it. Therefore the British formulated a plan called Operation Freshman to blow up the Norsk Hydro plant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And right before there was the Operation Verve Pipe. That was very devastating to all of the students, they couldn't believe what they saw that first year.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Man, that song Freshman came on the radio the other day and it just makes me feel not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
Because it came out when I was a freshman in high school and I was like I think this one's about me but then...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's about seeing a murder.
BEN KISSEL
It sucks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry I brought this in.
MARCUS PARKS
I think it was a girl who died in a car accident or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Something like that.
BEN KISSEL
Let's just get rid of all the classes anyway. First year, why don't we just call them first years?
MARCUS PARKS
That's what they do in Hogwarts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what they do.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
This plan, put together before America entered the war, was formulated by the Special Operations Executive which was cheekily referred to by the British as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that a movie series now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when the ministry first contacted the plant's head engineer, he'd been covertly sabotaging the plant by pouring castor oil into the production lines. This however was only a short term solution because the Nazis in control were gonna eventually figure out that someone was sabotaging the process from the inside.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, you don't wanna double trick them.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you go to a concentration camp.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If you even make it that far.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you just get shot in the head most times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So the British planned a secret mission called Operation Freshman in order to break in and blow up the filtration cells that produced heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They didn't have to blow up the whole plant, they just needed to blow up the machine. A lot easier.
BEN KISSEL
Wow this is like the end of the Christopher Nolan first Batman with Scarecrow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The plan was to airdrop 30 British commandos into Norway. Then once they landed, the commandos would break into the plant and blow up the filtration cells before the Nazis knew what hit them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
BEN KISSEL
I hope they gave them parachutes.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a massive and deadly failure.
BEN KISSEL
Good job.
MARCUS PARKS
Total failure on all fronts. First of all, the soldiers were dropped into Norway not by parachute but on ill conceived contraptions called gliders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why don't we just use the parachutes?
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The ones that are proven, the ones that we've used for thousands, maybe thousands, I don't know how long parachutes have been around.
BEN KISSEL
My wife's brother-in-law, he makes these new things called gliders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh so we're taking your brother-in-law's pitch from Thanksgiving?
BEN KISSEL
Please god, take these gliders. If he fucking mentions them one more time...
MARCUS PARKS
Nicknamed flying coffins-
BEN KISSEL
Oh very nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't like the nickname.
BEN KISSEL
No, it makes sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we're taking these?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're at 40,000 ft, they're called what?
BEN KISSEL
Flying coffins!
MARCUS PARKS
Gliders were notoriously ineffective and dangerous. These 65 ft long craft were towed by larger planes and then at the right point, what they guessed was the right point, they'd just cut the rope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
And then you had to glide down on a fucking plywood craft with no engine in silence hoping that you would get to the right spot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Sir, can we just walk? Is there any, I mean it just feels like sir, I didn't mean to question.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) But it feels like this is stupid.
BEN KISSEL
I think we need to eradicate the commission of making war more difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't a glider, isn't that more obvious than parachutes?
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not. You do it at night. And the thing is about it is that you do it-
BEN KISSEL
But what's the difference?
MARCUS PARKS
You get to take your equipment with you. Like you get to take equipment, everyone is guaranteed to land in the same place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you got your gun, you got a bunch of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's very Deadpooly, very much everyone dies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Very much Brad Pitt is about to be seen electrocuted.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a good idea in theory.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but it's not the rocketeer... This is also so many years ago, we're just coming out with this shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just wasn't ready.
MARCUS PARKS
It rarely went how it was supposed to go. In Ken Burns' documentary The War, there is a very, very long segment on how awful the gliders were and how deadly they were, how much everyone hated them, how much everyone would argue, don't put me on the gliders, don't do it, don't do it, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, everyone dies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did they ever work?
MARCUS PARKS
No. But they just kept using them.
BEN KISSEL
Out of the 30, how many made it down?
MARCUS PARKS
Okay, let's get into it.
BEN KISSEL
Please.
MARCUS PARKS
Well and by the way, gliders were also constructed with corrugated iron floors so all the vomit could drain off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause of how unstable it was to fly them.
MARCUS PARKS
That's how scary it was, how unstable it was.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
Everyone threw up on the way down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because you could also barely control it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what really helps me destroy a secret heavy water facility inside of a well armed Nazi hydration plant is being super nauseous.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That always gets me right headspace to be ready to go.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And as it usually went when it came to Operation Freshman, the gliders were the source of its failure. The first glider lost control and plummeted into the sea. The second crashed and instantly killed 3 out of the 17 men, further wounding 6.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course while they're trying to get their shit together, the Nazis immediately found them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Nazis guarding Norsk Hydro were under secret orders to shoot all foreign saboteurs on site. But they were a little unsure of what to do with these guys because they're active duty military but they're also saboteurs.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So they could be saboteurs but they should probably be POWs. So the ranking commander called up his superior and in an incredible coincidence, his superior was a guy named Wilhelm Keitel who just happened to be uncle to Kitty Oppenheimer. That was Robert Oppenheimer's wife, Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, really weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking strange.
MARCUS PARKS
Nevertheless, Keitel gave vague directions saying that you got orders, you should probably follow your orders. He didn't explicitly say execute prisoners of war.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nazis are so good at like not... I don't know, they come up with euphemistic ways.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Very good about that. Yeah, I mean that it could be argued that concentration camps were an euphemistic way to exterminate the German people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because the way they spoke about them too, it's like everything was code. Because it's almost like they knew that everything they did was evil.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, because that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, the Jewish people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they had to find some sort of different way of killing. But that was not quite so horrible for the people who had to do the killing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
It was bad. Of course it was bad. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Not fun.
MARCUS PARKS
So the commander on site took the hint and shot each of the survivors in the head before dumping their bodies in a ditch. That was glider one. Meanwhile the boys from the glider that had crashed into the sea had also been found by the Nazis. Out of those 15 commandos, 6 had died on impact.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
4 had been injured and 5 had come out of it unharmed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord, you could just see the whole time just being like what did we say about the goddamn gliders!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Yeah, not good.
MARCUS PARKS
But with this group, they did not have the luck of coming across a commander unsure of what to do. They had the bad luck to be captured by a German officer who was known due to his brutality as the red devil. He ordered that the injured survivors from the first glider be murdered by morphine injection while the others watched, which is I mean far crueler and slower than a simple shot to the head.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To be honest it's kind of dumb.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, well it's about the cruelty. Cruelty is the point.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's about the fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
As such, after the first commando was killed by injection, the other three started resisting. So the red devil strangled one injured commando with his belt, killed another by stomping on his neck, and pushed a third down a flight of stairs before shooting him in the back.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's one fucking intense Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He pulled down his pants, looked in the mirror at his dog-like dick, and said that's why they call me the red devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now that's why I'm a red devil.
MARCUS PARKS
As for the uninjured survivors of glider one, they were sent to Oslo for interrogation with their hands tied behind their backs in barbed wire. And when they refused to talk, they were shot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
In all, every single man who went on Operation Freshman was killed, 30 dudes just fucking dead.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez. That's an 0-fer. The nice thing is though I do think if we were kidnapped and forced to talk, we can fill hours.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dude.
BEN KISSEL
What do you wanna talk about? Let's do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get right into it. That's all I'll say. Let's get right into it. And then just do impressions for 45 minutes. No, no, we're getting to it, we're getting to it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. By targeting Norsk Hydro specifically, the Allies had shown their hand. The Nazis now knew that the Allies knew about their atomic program. So the Germans reinforced their defenses around the heavy water plant, making the next operation even more difficult because this was not the last time they'd go after the Norsk Hydro.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What they needed to do was Operation Sassy Maid and have several men or boys, right, dressed in their finest, right, like we give them fake boobies with the nice makeup on there. Some of the more finer looking men.
BEN KISSEL
Why not just women? Why not just take women?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, no, no. We want the men in there. And what we do is we put a long wig and hair, French maid outfit, have them go in slowly but surely-
BEN KISSEL
Germans don't like the French.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But spend a couple of years, they like the maids. Go in there, slowly spend a couple of years building up trust, sucking some dick. You teach them... Honestly because that bussy can be snapping, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't necessarily need to have a pussy to have a fucking good time.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but at some point they're going to discover the cock and balls and the fake tits and probably kill them all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but by then you've already been like (German accent) well one hole is better than any other. I tell you what, this hole is my home.
BEN KISSEL
I guarantee you that happened during the war.
MARCUS PARKS
You're hoping they're gonna do the Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny thing in What's Opera, Doc? And that by the end of it he's still going to be falling in love because he realized that he was in love no matter whether he had the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because that bussy be snapping.
BEN KISSEL
Nice. Isn't that how The Crying Game ended?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually feel like there's more control over a butthole than there is a pussy.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what? Debatable.
BEN KISSEL
We don't know, we just don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Debatable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's another one of the secrets of WWII.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh by the way, the second raid on Norsk Hydro which we'll get into next episode-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't Operation Sassy Maid?
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't Operation Sassy Maid, no.
BEN KISSEL
No, it's a great idea though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
It's one of the coolest missions in all of WWII. It's so fucking awesome. But we'll get into that here in the next episode or two.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by 1941 the British had figured out how to use the Norwegian heavy water. They were working on their own nuclear program, codenamed Tube Alloy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, that's fine.
BEN KISSEL
I like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Germans meanwhile were obviously also working on their own nuclear program with the Uranium Club. The Americans however, having not yet entered WWII, still hadn't committed to a full nuclear weapons research program. Although they'd been thinking about thinking about it for a while now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Take some time, you gotta gum around, you gotta incept these people.
BEN KISSEL
You gotta pre debate before you debate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it is.
MARCUS PARKS
But by November of 1941 it was obvious to Roosevelt, if not the American people, that our inclusion in the war was inevitable. If anything, even if we stayed out of it til, the end FDR knew that if a man like Hitler had a weapon like an atomic bomb, we sure as hell better have a couple in our arsenal as well.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll bet my numb feet we can do it.
MARCUS PARKS
So President Roosevelt gave the go-ahead order to officially begin the scientific engineering and industrial production that would result in the atomic bomb, which slowly set in motion The Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
This turned out to be a prudent move because less than a month later on December 7th, 1941, Japan would bomb Pearl Harbor. America was in the war and it's with our entrance into the bloodiest conflict in history that we'll return for part two of the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Holy fucking shit.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, awesome. But you know now that I thought about it, of course FDR wants highways, he wants roads.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wants roads.
BEN KISSEL
You know how difficult it would be to be in a wheelchair with gravel roads and mud roads?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, that's why he kept say make the roads thinner. So he'd be the only one on it.
MARCUS PARKS
All FDR wanted to do is just go between upstate New York, go from Hyde Park back down to Warm Springs, Georgia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
Where he could be out in public with all the rest of the polio-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, please, no. We love Ken Burns.
BEN KISSEL
You know we love Ken. We love you, Ken. Listen to the interview we did-
MARCUS PARKS
Warm Springs, Georgia was really the only place where FDR could be himself.
BEN KISSEL
(snoring)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the ultimate weapon is boredom.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Because once he was with fellow polio patients, he could truly let his legs dangle.
BEN KISSEL
I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you know what truly is the most horrible force in the world? It's apathy.
MARCUS PARKS
That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's what that creates. And this is a two hour plus episode, 2.5 hour episode. We just started.
MARCUS PARKS
We just started.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS
America actually hasn't even started the Manhattan Project yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This was the run up to the run up. But we're gonna get her done.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna get her done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna get her done.
BEN KISSEL
We will.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is not gonna be a nine episode series.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it'll be close.
MARCUS PARKS
Next episode we're gonna introduce Robert Oppenheimer.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna introduce one of the great American military characters of the 20th century, General Leslie Groves. We're gonna introduce Niels Bohr and his massive head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He has a very big head, it made him unsafe. But yes, well maybe four or five. I don't know how many we're gonna do here.
MARCUS PARKS
I think we're gonna do five.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's crazy because now we're getting into Operation Paperclip territory. It's weird how you like at the end of this will have caught up to the beginning of the MK Ultra series.
BEN KISSEL
I was waiting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's true. It's weird how each one is now, we have covered this much history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because really the attempt to keep the Nazis from getting the atomic bomb, that was partly the genesis of the OSS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
So much history of the 20th century comes from just this fear that the Nazis are gonna have an atomic bomb. So it's one of the most consequential fears in fucking human history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Probably the reason why the American society, especially our leadership, has been so obsessed with casting a central villain for us again and again and again. Because they saw the productive power-
BEN KISSEL
You think the Nazis were wrongly maligned?
MARCUS PARKS
No! No, not at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Since since the Nazis.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because of how inspired the Nazis made us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, well it's the same thing that they tried doing with the Iraq War with Saddam Hussein and of course some people fell for it, a lot of people didn't. But that was definitely the idea behind it. If we cast a big enough villain then America will get behind us.
BEN KISSEL
You know my thoughts on Saddam. You can see me July 9th at Mic Drop Comedy in San Diego.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's gonna be talking all Saddam Hussein, all the time.
BEN KISSEL
Anyway, check out I got a couple of shows that people should go to. 7/16 Cobb's Comedy Club. I love this show. This is a funny show to be like and then you can check me out at Wise Guys in Las Vegas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
After two hours of thick-
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. I have to sell these tickets or everyone's gonna yell at me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you gotta come see him. He'll be funny!
BEN KISSEL
I'm not worried about... No one thinks... What else am I gonna do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You heard some stuff, he said some stuff today, it was funny, you want more of that.
BEN KISSEL
I'm not insecure about my humor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's gonna be funny! He's not gonna be bad at it.
BEN KISSEL
It's more that I'm just doing this to help out a friend. All right everyone, I can't wait to see you on the road. But thank you all so much for listening, hope you're doing well. Keep on supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network. Thanks so much for all the Sirius listeners, you guys have been so sweet on the phone calls. And do we have anything else?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're doing a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No Dogs In Space season three has begun.
BEN KISSEL
No Dogs!
MARCUS PARKS
The first series-
BEN KISSEL
The Monks.
MARCUS PARKS
The Monks, thank you. And the first series is now out. It's a two-parter.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
If you're waiting for the whole thing to come up before you listen to it, it's not fully out. Parts one, parts two. And we're actually jumping a little bit ahead with The Monks. This is like a big Germany month for LPN.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Because The Monks are banned in Germany, a lot of Cold War stuff. And then after that we're gonna get into a series that is rooted directly in post WWII Germany.
BEN KISSEL
So you want brand June from pride month to Germany month? Okay. Great. That's gonna work out for the numbers, that's really good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it turns out that in Germany a lot of people were proud of that raggedy old flag.
BEN KISSEL
It's true. All right everyone, hail yourselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me. And also Cillian Murphy, why don't you fucking answer my calls?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Do you have his number?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've just been yelling. I've been driving down Manhattan Beach.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been going like Cillian! Why so serious?
BEN KISSEL
That's not him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why so serious?
BEN KISSEL
He didn't do the Joker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I want him to do it for me.
BEN KISSEL
He wasn't that character! He was Scarecrow.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not even the right movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
He was Scarecrow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, do the other guy's line.
MARCUS PARKS
In the movie before that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do the better line.
MARCUS PARKS
Do the better line by the other guy.
BEN KISSEL
You are never gonna meet him.
MARCUS PARKS
I've been here six months and I've still only seen Stephen Root when it comes to celebrities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'll get there.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's a good one, that's a real good one.
BEN KISSEL
That is a good one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta go out to eat more.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing, I saw him when I was out to eat,
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it is.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I saw the gal from Queen's Gambit. Honestly we'll go to Smokehouse, we'll go 10 times, 7 times we'll see somebody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel saw Anya Taylor Joy and he didn't even scare her at all.
BEN KISSEL
No, I didn't say anything. All right, hail yourselves, bye!