Nuking the Moon And other Intelligence Schemes Left On The Drawing Board

This is a Closer Look at Vince Houghton, intelligence historian, US Army Vet and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Houghton Joins former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt to talk about his new book, “Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes And Military Plots Left On The Drawing Board.” The book looks at covert projects and technology from WWII to through the Cold War that were seriously considered, but didn’t make the grade. Some were ultimately deemed too risky, expensive, dangerous, ahead of their time—or even certifiably insane.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a closer look with Arthur Levitt. Arthur Levitt
is a former chairman of the U S Securities and
Exchange Commission, a Bloomberg LP board member, a senior advisor
to the Promontory Financial Group, and a policy adviser to
Goldman Sachs. This is a closer look at Dr Vince Houghton,
intelligence historian, the United States Army VET and curator of

(00:24):
the International Spy Museum in Washington, d C. He's here
today to talk about his new book, Nu King the
Moon and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on
the Drawing Board. The book looks at covert projects and
technology from World War Two through the Cold War that

(00:48):
were seriously considered but didn't make the grade. Some were
ultimately deemed too risky, expensive, dangerous ahead of their time,
or even certifiably insane. He joins me. Now for a
closer look. Vince. In the introduction, you say that this

(01:10):
is a book about desperation. What does that mean? Well,
the reason I chose the Cold War in the Second
World War as it's the kind of foundation for the
stories for this book, because there's there's stories like this
throughout all of history. But These two periods are particularly
interesting because the United States in Britain during these time

(01:31):
periods actually had existential threats. Do use that word a lot,
and that word is overused a lot, but the word
literally means a threat to our existence. And when we
have threats to our existence in our way of life
and our very live are under risk, then we start
making decisions that we might not make otherwise. And in
this case, these were desperate decisions. These were attempts by

(01:55):
these governments, particularly the American government, to do something any
thing that can possibly minimize or mitigate this threat from
either the not to Germans and the Imperial Japanese, or
from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and in
other cases in times that we're not existential threats, I

(02:15):
would argue it's very unlikely you would get some of
these policy proposals. What were your sources for the book
and was some information hard to get? Did you ever
run into a secrecy wall, anti intelligence issues, you run
into classification problems, And that's certainly true for these even
though some of them will go back again as far

(02:36):
as the nineteen forties. UM which means that an intelligence historian,
which I am, I have to be creative. I have
to find innovative ways to come up with ways to
tell these stories. And in some cases this meant grabbing
people who are still alive that may know stuff that
other people don't, hoping that they'll talk to me to
try to read between the lines. Even when I have

(02:58):
redacted documents, there are ways to try and end arounds,
not necessarily to make some something public that should remained secrets,
but to try to explain the story in a way
that you maintain the supercy. But at the same time
you at least have some kind of narrative that you
can reside provide to the public. And in this case,
I try to be very honest in this book about

(03:19):
when I ran into secrecy issues or when I ran
into unknowables uh, and I lay those out for the
for the reader. And in some cases I actually tell
two different stories because there's not certainty about which one
is right, because the CIA is not going to tell
us and um, and so I have two different versions.

(03:40):
One story you tell every audience about acoustic pity, yes, exactly,
and that's the one that has two different versions. And
that's the one where you have someone who bless the
CIA in a huff, wrote a book that was very
critical of the agency, UH and then wrote about this
case acousticity in operation in the nineteen sixties to try

(04:02):
to turn an average, every day housecat into a covert
listening device. And so you take what he's saying with
a bit of a grain assault, because you do have
another source, a man who's actually on our board here
at the Spy Museum named Bob Wallace, who was the
director of the Office Technical Services. So he was the
if you've seen a James Bond movie, he was the
American version of Q for the CIA, and he comes

(04:26):
after the Acoustic Kitty program. He's not old enough to
have been in charge in the nine sixties, but he
certainly had access to all the same documents and access
to other people who are involved in this program. And
he tells a very different story than the other version.
And so I try to lay that out for the
for the reader, and like, look, we don't we don't know.
We're not a percent certain. We know this program existed,

(04:47):
we know this program ended. It's the middle part of
the story that we're unsure about. And so here are
the two different versions that I've heard. This another story
about an animal project that almost weren't tell us a
little bit about back bombs. Yeah, this is one where
to the day he died, the guy who came up
with this idea swore that it not only would have

(05:08):
ended World War two, but it would have done it
was less casualties than the two atomic bombs. And this
is an idea that they came from a very unlikely
source of dentist named Little Atoms. And it's not super
unlikely because he actually had some some patents, some inventions
that he had done. But he was on his way
back from vacation in the Southwest United States when he,

(05:28):
like many other Americans, heard on the radio that Pearl
Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese and he had
an instantaneous light bulb moment or an idea came out
of nowhere to say, Okay, I just came from vacationing
inside caves and other places in the Southwest United States
where I just saw millions and millions and bats. And

(05:49):
that's of course during the daytime, we'll do everything they
can to find a cold, dry and dark place, which
in a lot of cases means case, but if not caves,
it could mean attics of houses or eaves or nooks
and crannies inside buildings. But he combined this thought with
what he knew about Japan, And what he knew about
Japan was that many of these houses and buildings were

(06:09):
made of wood and paper in the nineteen forties. So
A plus B equaled C for him. Because if you
can affect it incinder a device to a bat and
then drop bats over Japan, they would automatically and instinctively
find a cold, dry, dark place to roost in that
many cases would be the attic or eve or nook
and cranny inside a wooden or paper house. So the

(06:32):
incenery device went off, it would set fire to that building.
And enough of these you could burn Japan to the
ground without nuclear weapons. Please tell us Fens about trying
to end the war with Japan using a psychological operations
idea glow in the Dark Foxes. Yeah, so yet another

(06:54):
animal project. And I want people to know the whole
book is not all animal projects, but they're just so
easy to find gray information about. And this was an
idea that really kind of hunkers down to are deep
seated misunderstanding based on stereotypes and discrimination and racism towards
the Japanese in World War Two. We assumed that because

(07:15):
the Japanese all were not all the Japanese believed in
some form of Shintoism as a state religion, and within Shintoism,
a fox has a very unique place in some cases
of fox can be a good omen, but most of
the time foxes to no evil spirits. They were they're
associated with evil, and in Shintoism, foxes can be even

(07:39):
shape shifters and people that can people animals that can
possess humans. And so what better way to scare the
Jesus out of the Japanese soldier who wasn't afraid of
the U. S. Marine, He wasn't afraid of bombs, he
wasn't afraid of tanks. He would stay in fight to
the death. But maybe, just maybe, if he come up

(08:00):
with a way to scare him at a visceral level,
at kind of a spiritual level, then maybe he would
drop his weapon and run away. And so the idea
of this project was it was devised by the OSS,
the Off Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, and
they thought, what if we took foxes, real live foxes,

(08:21):
and we spray painted them with luminescent day glow glow
in the dark paint, so that when they went up
on the beaches at night, there would be growing, spiritual
looking foxes that could be sent in ahead of the
Marines and hopefully the Japanese soldier will freak out, drop
has gout and run away, and then we can take
these islands one by one without firing a shot. The problem, however,

(08:45):
that they didn't realize and I don't know how many
they just get excited about. The idea was I think
we're going to parachute in the foxes, which were but
were kind of kind of coolest they did. That wasn't
the plan. The plan was the foxes would arrive on
the islands the same way the Marines would, and that
they'd be up off on boat and they'd wait up
on the shore in somebody, and we don't know who.

(09:05):
Somebody had the question and and said, okay, well, won't
these foxes to have their paint washed off by the
time they get to the beaches, because of course, you know,
we'd come up and go in the dark paint. But
this is so it wasn't waterproof glow in the dark paint,
and that could have been a problems. Any would just

(09:26):
have normal foxes running around on the beach, which probably
wouldn't have the same psychological effect as the glow in
the Dark ones. And regardless, the oss wasn't deterred. They
figured that this would be that they could get beyond
that somehow, So they actually did the test of these
foxes in Central Park in the middle of the war.
They spray painted foxes blow in the Dark paint. They

(09:47):
released them into Central Park and it scared the hell
out of New Yorker. There's a wonderful news article talk
about sources. There's a wonderful newspaper the article that talked
about this, about how they're glowing foxes running through Central Park.
And the program was eventually scrapped um mainly because of
the two atomic bombs, because the idea that the war

(10:07):
could be ended much much faster than doing island hopping
all the way to the Japanese mainland. And he didn't
need to anymore because we could add no war, you know,
in a very particular way, without sacrificing the hundreds of
thousands potentially Americans to try to take Japan proper. You
write about chemist Stanley Lovell, who signed up to contribute.

(10:29):
When the United States joined the Second World War, he
was put in charge of the Office of Research and Development.
And you write about the many ideas he had to
stop Hitler. Tell us about the plot that involved spiked
flower pots and the Pope. Yeah, so this this one

(10:52):
was one of these ideas that never even got close
to the drawing board. Um. There were multiple things involving
the hope. One of them was to try to smuggle
a chemical inside the water of the flowers that would
be kind of the centerpiece of the table during a
meeting of Hitler and Musolini in some of the top

(11:12):
Nazi leadership, with the idea that this would make them blind.
This would would cause them uh to the chemical would
seep into their eyes and destroy their optic nerve and
they would go blind. Now this would be combined with
the Pope making a people pronouncement that God had smited

(11:33):
Hitler and Mussolini for their their evil ways and by
making them go blind. I guess there's an old adage
of the whole you'll go blind if you keep doing
that other things. Um. But the idea behind it was
to get the Pope to lie um and to coming
up with this pronouncement. And and of course the Germans
weren't gonna The Germans were not prominently Catholic, but the

(11:54):
Italians certainly were. And this could be a way to
knock Italy of the war if they thought that Seleni
and Hitler were we're literally smited by God by them
going blind. And so that was an idea that probably
was thrown around with an NSIS headquarters. Maybe they even
toyed with the idea, but it never really got beyond
that point. Tell us, Dr Howton, the story that references

(12:18):
the title of your book, Nuking the Moon. This is
an extraordinary story, um, and if you really want to
talk about how afraid people were, this is really ground
zero for this. This is a story that comes right
on the heels of the launched a spootnik, the first
artificial anything launched by men into space, and of course
the Soviets were the first to get something into space.

(12:41):
And this really was really problematic for several reasons. One
is that Stuck was shot into space on top of
a missile that could easily be used sort was intended
to be used as an i CBM as a way
to launch nuclear weapons. To the United States, but more
importantly for the broader diplomatic scope of the Cold War,

(13:01):
what Sputnik did was to beat us at our own game.
The United States had always been the leader in science
and technology. We had invented everything worth inventing during the
twentieth century, with a few exceptions, and the whole world
looked to us as being the scientific and technological leader.
That mattered during the Cold War, where the developing world

(13:21):
Latin America, Africa, East Asia was choosing who to follow,
was choosing what side they wanted to belong to the
United States and the Eastern or the Western Bloc and
or the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc, and science
and technology played a role in this. The idea was,
if you were developing country, you wanted to join up
with the country that actually had the greatest scientists and
inventors and engineers, because that's how you went from a

(13:43):
developing country to a developed country. And the Soviets all
of a sudden looked as though they had the better people.
So we had to reclaim this very quickly. We had
to show the world that we were really boss. And
the idea was and the Air Force came up with
this plan. Let's detonate a mult the megaton thermal nuclear
weapon on the Moon so that the entire Earth all

(14:04):
at once could watch. The United States was still the
top dog on the block. You write that the movie
The Day After is the reason for who you are
today and also influenced Ronald Reagan tell us about that
I study nuclear weapons. I study intelligence in nuclear weapons,
and that's something that I've done now for all of

(14:26):
my adult life, and certainly um very informally when I
was younger. And it all started when I was seven
years old and my parents made a very poor parenting
decision by letting me stay up way past my bedtime
to watch a TV movie called The Day After. And
this was a movie that if you were alive and
you remember it, you'll know why it had such a

(14:47):
huge impact on certainly a seven year old, but on
most people. Um Loder Reagan was one two that wrote
in his diary how impactful that film was. If you
don't know the basics, it's essentially it's World War three
for the viewpoint of Manhattan, Kansas, so it's right in
the middle of the United States. It's not a coastal city.
It's Hey, no matter where you live, no matter where
you are, you're going to get touched by this. And

(15:10):
that really warped my my sense of the world around me,
and it made me fascinated with nuclear weapons and it
made me really want to understand what made them work
from a scientific perspective, but also what made them so unique.
And this is a weapon system that really changed the
way we looked at the world instantaneously, everyone could die tomorrow.

(15:33):
That's a big change. And it really made us refocus
our strategy about how we dealt with the world. And
it was most fascinating to me, and now this is
using my hindsight. Was the fact that the most devastating
and horrible weapon ever created by human beings is what
kept us out of World War Three. It's what prevented
us from fighting another war that killed millions and millions

(15:55):
of people. So it was really this kind of wonderful dichotomy.
It was this really your dynamic that made me so instatuated,
for lack of a better word, with these weapons. And
so my specialty is nuclear intelligence, and that's what I've
been focusing on. That's that's a big chunk of this
book focuses on that as well. Um, incidentally, I've got

(16:16):
another book coming out in September that focuses exclusively on that. Uh,
and so I can really kind of talk it back
to my parents deciding to not make me go to
bed in and let me watch this movie, because that's
a real debt. What's what guided the rest of my life? Now,
you remind us in your book that in the two
thousand and sixteen election, Russian intelligence convinced a huge chunk

(16:40):
of the American population that a local DC pizza place
at a child sex slave ring in the basement. How
concerned are you about the easy access to minds that
social media offers to anyone, not just governments. Well, that's
the kind of the big challenge now the twenty one

(17:01):
century is information. And so if you look back at
warfare fought in the past, I mean, deception and disinformation
played a huge role. It's it's been a technique in
a strategy of intelligent agencies and governments going back to
the beginning of time. I mean you look at the
stories of the Trojan Horse and ever, you know, even
stuff beyond that. There's biblical stories of deception and disinformation.

(17:22):
But now it's so much easier to dissipate. It's so
much easier to get people to see your information. Used
to be, you'd create flyers or you know, playing cards,
and you had to drop them over areas and air
drop them so that people maybe would pick them up
and read them. Now, with the click of amount, so
you can send your deception, your disinformation, out to a

(17:45):
billion people since you write that, the good news is
that none of the ideas in this book ever came
to fruition. Are we just lucky or is there a
process in place that should make us feel better about
all of this experimentation? No, I, this book is not
going to make you feel better about life. There are all.

(18:06):
There are very few instances in here where somebody stood
up and said no, no, no, no, we shouldn't do this.
In most cases, these programs were canceled because of superseding events.
A technology was canceled, be as a better technology came out,
or a particular operation or plot which canceled because the
war ended, because nuclear weapons worked, because someone decided that um,

(18:30):
something would be better, not necessarily that this was bad. Uh.
And that really kind of in many ways shook me
to my core. And that's I had no intention. Actually
he talked about the introduction. I had no intention of
writing and a kind of a meaningful introduction. It was
just going to be a bunch of chapters of fun stories.
And then I realized I kind of had to I
kind of had to find a way to explain why

(18:51):
all these plots almost happened, and why accidentally some of
them didn't, and only because of happenstances, some of these
don't don't happen. And that's where you going to get
this this argument about desperation, and that's where perhaps we
can feel a little bit better about ourselves because we're
not in that world right now to where we have
an existential threat. I mean there are a couple. I mean,
Russia technically is an existential threat because of their nuclear

(19:13):
weapons capability. Climate change is going to become an existential
with that really soon. So maybe we'll start thinking about
new and innovative ways that might work that can help
out with that. And you could argue that we're an
existential threat to ourselves. You want to get really metaphysical. Uh.
And so that's an instance where we are in a
position today hopefully well we're not going to fall for

(19:36):
this stuff. We're not going to decide to do these
kind of programs and we won't need someone to step
up and prevent this from happening. Um, that's my hope.
That's where I can feel a little uplifted about it. Um.
But I'm not. I mean, I know human nature, so
I'm not necessarily uh feeling great and optimistic. But I
don't think anyone really will be once they read this.

(19:58):
But hopefully you can laugh along the way at the
kind of human foibles and laugh at kind of ourselves today.
The curatorseum, Well, I have a unique set of skills
that kind of came together, you know, in a very
specific way. Um. I worked with both military and civilian

(20:19):
intelligence agencies and several capacities back in the nineties and
the Balkans, which gave me some practical experience practitioner experience,
and then I have a PhD intelligence history and kind
of this the academic background combined with the practical experience
made me somewhat uniquely qualified. Uh. And I just kind
of came around at the right time where about five

(20:39):
and a half years ago, we were looking that we
the museum was looking for someone to with a science
of technology background, which I have, uh to help, you know,
be a part of the rebuilding the museum. The museum
itself just moved to a new location in Washington, and
we just reopened about a couple of weeks ago. Uh.
And there's a lot of new and innovative science and

(20:59):
technology in the museum, and I think I played a
pretty big role in that. UM. And so I just
kind of came together of the many stories that we
haven't had time to deal with today, Do you have
a favorite to share that I missed. I mean, I'm
from South Florida originally, UM, as I mentioned in the
book several times. Uh. And so I've been through twelve

(21:21):
hurricanes in my life, and I always appreciate someone doing
anything to try to make those less damaging. Not necessarily
the planets in the book, but I get it. I
appreciate what was tried in this case. Um, there was
an attempt, or at least an idea to try to
at least redirect hurricanes, but at best to destroy hurricanes

(21:45):
using nuclear weapons in the nineteen sixties. UM. If anyone
thinks that's abstinuitely crazy, it was. Um. The average hurricane
has enough strength of like thousands of even our strongest
nuclear weapons. But there was a plan by uh an
Air Force meteorologist to try to use nuclear weapons to
try to divert hurricanes, to try to push them north

(22:07):
so that there um their direction would change before they
hit land. The problem in the end, of course, was
the only way to actually test this was to actually
explode a nuclear weapon inside a hurricane. And of course
if it fails, then you have a two mile our
circulating radioactive hurricane instead of just a normal one, and

(22:27):
no one really wanted to take the chance of that happening.
You ask in the book good ideas as absurd, dangerous
and outright abominable be funded and explored. Now what's your answer,
And is there an agency of ow did the box
thinking today? Yeah? Well, I I think that no one

(22:48):
worth their weight who's working for a government agency at
that level, if they're not thinking in new and innovative ways,
they're not doing their jobs. And not necessarily these innovative ways.
But these innovative ways are only ridiculous because of hindsight,
because we realize how ridiculous they were. The ones that worked,
like the building of the SR seventy one spy plane,

(23:10):
for instance, or the building of the Internet. The Internet
was considered a whack of doodle idea when ARPA decided
to kind of diddle around with it back a couple
of decades ago, and it was one that like, oh,
he's wasting money. But of course today we know how
important it was. And I hope that there are people
with an intelligence agencies in the Pentagon here in the
United States who are doing ideas like this, are coming

(23:33):
up a brainstorming new and innovative ways to to fight wars,
new internative ways to do intelligence work, new innovative ways
to prevent or because that's what they're paying to do.
I mean, there's hard problems that need to be solved
and there's usually no real easy way to do it,
and so we need people who are thinking way, way,
way outside the box. But we also need people who

(23:55):
are there to say no, no, you went too far,
let's take a step back, We're not to go this direction.
And you don't see a lot of those throughout history.
But my so my hope is there's two things going on.
One is there's people being really creative, people thinking way
outside the box. But to that there are people there
when they get a little too far that can bring
them on back and say, no, we're not going to
go that direction. We're not that kind of people. He's

(24:18):
the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington,
d C. Who just published a history of a desperate
and outlandish military intelligence schemes that thankfully never became operational,
called Nooking the Moon if you want more spy stories.

(24:41):
He's also the host and creative director of the museum's
podcast called spy Cast, which reaches a national and international
audience over three and a half million listeners each years.
Dr Vince Houghton, thanks for joining us. By the way,
if you have comments about the show or suggestions for topics,

(25:05):
please email me at a Closer Look at Bloomberg dot net.
That's a closer Look one word at Bloomberg dot net,
and follow me on Twitter at Arthur Levitt one word.
This is a closer Look with Arthur Levitt.