Sabotaging the Nazi Atomic Bomb

Guest: Sam Kean, author, “The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb”

Consider this scenario for a film: At the height of World War II, a famous retired professional baseball player—who happens to be multilingual—schleps into Switzerland as an American spy. Posing as a Swiss physics student, he’s carrying a loaded Berretta 9mm and a cyanide pill in his suit pocket. His mission is to assassinate the chief scientist behind the Nazi atomic weapons program. The cyanide pill is for himself—in the likely case that he gets caught after he’s done the deed. He attends the lecture and then walks through the dark streets of Zurich, chatting with the Nazi bomb maker on the way to his hotel, fingering the gun in his pocket.

What a cheesy dime novel spy plot, right? Well, folk's that’s history. The baseball player was named Moe Berg and the Nazi bomb maker was Werner Heisenberg. Did Moe Berg pull the trigger on Werner Heisenberg? Tune in to find out. 

 

Salty Moon

Guest: Samantha K. Trumbo, NASA Fellow and PhD candidate, Planetary Science, California Institute of Technology

 

Europa is our next best bet at finding life in this solar system.  Researchers have just discovered that the ocean we’ve known about for decades is most likely salty—just like our own.  We now know that the building blocks for life are there.

 

The Uncertain Success Of the Apollo 11 Landing

Guest: James Donovan, author, "Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11"

It all went like clockwork, or so it seems in the history books. Nearly airbrushed from most people’s historical memory are the sacrifices, the near misses, the pressure from Russian rivals, and the crazy, adrenaline-filled final moments racing an emptying fuel tank to find a safe landing spot. Meanwhile, NASA’s organization and systems were rebuilt on the run, and some engineers snapped under the relentless pressure to perform. In racing to the moon, NASA was racing two clocks—one set by President Kennedy to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade—the other to beat the Russians there. Along the way, three astronauts died on a launching pad—and Neil Armstrong nearly crashed to his death testing the moon lander. When the astronauts finally landed on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, they no doubt felt relief, but the name nonetheless is thick with irony.

 

The Staying Power of Dungeons and Dragons

Guest: Stephen Marsh, early contributor to Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons is both a cultural touchstone, and extremely dense, and is making its way back into mainstream American entertainment.