Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny (2025) s01e04 Episode Script

1
Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have done strange
and even terrible things in
the name of national interest.
Tonight, strange
weapons intended to kill.
From a weapon fired on the moon
Scientists have to now start figuring out
how to make a gun that
will work as it does on earth
but on the moon.
To an experimental nuclear weapon
that needs unusual
helpers to make it work
So some genius
decides to enlist an animal
to live inside a nuclear bomb.
The safety of the entire western world
depends on these barnyard animals.
And even a plot to defeat
Hitler using hormones..
This would constitute a sneak attack
against Adolf Hitler's masculine health,
and he wouldn't even
know it was happening.
Dangerous threats sometimes
inspire strange weapons.
It's time to bring these stories to light.
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At the height of the cold war,
the U.S. and Russia
raced to create weapons
to give them an edge.
In the late 1950s, the Soviets come up
with what could be a game changer
a handgun that kills without a trace.
In August 1961, a kgb hitman walks
into a west German
police station and defects.
Bohdan stashynsky is
interrogated by the CIA.
And he spills the beans
on a high-level hit he just carried out
using a top secret gun that induces
a heart attack on the victim.
He claims to have poisoned
two Ukrainian exiles,
both very much enemies
of the Soviet state.
Stashynsky claims to
have used a modified pistol
that, instead of firing a bullet,
sprays a little bit of a spray
of hydrogen cyanide vapor
right into somebody's face.
The CIA have never
heard of a heart-attack gun,
but it inspires the agency to create
its own untraceable weapon.
And in 1968, a highly
classified science unit,
code name project
mknaomi, gets to work.
When CIA finds out that the
Soviets have a poison gun,
they set out on a mission to
create something even better.
They want a toxin that's fatal,
untraceable, undetectable,
and would look like natural causes
in the case of the victim, if
they were ever discovered.
Toxins are basically nature's poisons.
They are things that are highly poisonous
that exist out there in the natural world.
They land on something called saxitoxin.
Saxitoxin is found in
contaminated clams,
and it is 1,000 times
more deadly than cyanide.
It works very quickly to
disrupt your nervous system,
interfering with your ability to breathe,
causing heart failure,
leading to a heart attack.
The toxin breaks down quickly
and is likely to have disappeared
before an autopsy is carried out.
It's the perfect poison.
The only problem is, how to deliver it?
The Soviet cyanide gun
has a lot of drawbacks.
You have to be very close to use it.
You really had to get in somebody's face,
and you had to kind of hope
that the breeze wasn't
blowing towards you.
A change in the wind
could make the person
shooting the weapon the victim.
Plus, you never know
whether or not somebody else
is going to be exposed to the cyanide.
The obvious solution is
to use a bullet, not a spray.
But bullets create their own problems.
If they use a bullet or pellet,
it will leave a physical trace,
even if the poison doesn't.
So the mknaomi unit
develops the only way
to covertly shoot a target with saxitoxin.
They freeze the poison
into a hair-thin dart
that will leave nothing
but the tiniest little pinprick.
But does this strange weapon
ever get off the drawing board?
In 1975, accusations against the CIA
lead to a congressional investigation,
and the agency must answer questions
regarding alleged criminal activity.
CIA director William
Colby must bring out
some skeletons from the closet,
and he reveals project mknaomi.
Congress gets to see
more than just documents.
Have you brought with you
some of those devices which
would have enabled the CIA
to use this poison for
- we have indeed.
- For killing people?
Don't point it at me.
It's the kind of thing that would
make James Bond jealous.
Does this pistol fire the dart?
Yes, it does.
CIA takes a Colt m1911
gun and actually adjusts it
so that it can be fired
from an electronic chamber
so it's silent,
and it fires frozen darts
instead of firing bullets.
So that when it fires, it fires silently?
Almost silently, yes.
- Very little, very little
- What range does it have?
- About 100 yards, 100 meters.
- About 100 meters' range?
Right.
The heart-attack gun is, in
many ways, the perfect weapon.
If you're the victim, you may
not even know you were hit.
You may only feel a sting, a pinch,
or maybe just an itch
before you have a heart attack and die.
For the coroner or investigator
trying to determine the cause of death,
everything is going to
look like natural causes.
It's going to look like
a natural heart attack.
It's now clear that the gun
not only exists, but it works.
But who were the intended targets?
In the wake of the select committee,
the CIA is forced to release
the largest-ever cache of
declassified CIA projects.
Detailed within are
covert assassination plans
to poison Congolese
president patrice lumumba
and Cuban revolutionary fidel Castro.
There's no direct connection
between project mknaomi
and subsequent assassination attempts.
And the CIA continues to deny
that its heart-attack gun
was ever used in the field.
But during world war ii,
there is a secret weapon
that is fully deployed in American skies.
A silent winter's night is suddenly broken
by the sound of an explosion.
Locals rush out to see
what has happened.
They find debris
and what looks like parts of a balloon
and bomb shrapnel.
Could it be a homemade
attempt at bomb building
or a stray military test?
Within days, there are
reports of similar events
coming in from all over the country.
Same sort of debris is
found off the coast of Hawaii,
in kalispell, Montana,
Marshall, Alaska, and Oregon.
Is the United States under attack?
The army's military
intelligence department
investigates.
What they find is that these
are hydrogen-filled paper balloons.
While they look pretty,
these are not party balloons.
The lanterns carry a deadly cargo
four incendiary devices
and one 30-pound bomb.
The air force is told,
if you see these balloons
while you're flying your plane,
shoot them down with extreme prejudice.
But one mystery remains.
Who is making these weapons?
The army's military
intelligence department
starts looking at the balloons
to try to figure out
where they came from.
And they realize something incredible.
They're not made of plastic.
They're made of paper that
derives from the kozo tree,
and that tree is native to Asia.
But there's more, because
they're able to analyze
the sand inside the ballast bags
and determine that they
come from a very specific place
the beaches of southeastern Japan.
It's clear Japan is attacking the U.S.
With a very strange weapon
paper balloons carrying bombs
that can travel across the pacific.
The Japanese discover that air currents
at high altitudes travel from west to east.
The deadly balloons, named fu-go,
can ride the jet stream
on a four-day journey,
all the way across the ocean.
It's an ingenious use
of natural resources.
One of the key features
of the balloon bomb
is that it doesn't have a pilot on board.
And so you can deploy military
force against the United States
without risking your
vital military personnel.
The trouble is, you can't guide it,
and so you don't know
where it's going to drop.
It's indiscriminate.
The bomb's explosive power
isn't enough to do huge damage.
Its real threat is starting fires.
The state of California
is especially vulnerable
to forest fires.
And the Japanese were hoping
that the balloon-bomb campaign
would trigger forest
fires across the state.
The U.S. military reacts to that
by keeping aircraft on standby
to douse any part of California
that might be affected by a balloon bomb
that triggers a forest fire.
The government keeps the bombs secret
and out of the press because
they want the Japanese
to think their campaign is failing.
Then disaster strikes.
In may of 1945, a minister and his wife
were taking five Sunday-school
children out for a picnic.
While the minister was parking the car,
his wife took the kids into the forest.
They find a strange
object a large balloon.
When they approach
to get a closer look
They accidentally trigger the
balloon's deadly 30-pound bomb.
The blast kills everybody
the five children and the minister's wife
and they become the only
mainland American casualties
of world war ii.
A Sunday-school picnic
getting ripped apart
is bad news that's going to spread fast.
So the government has no choice
but to come clean with the public.
In may 1945, secret intelligence
on Japanese balloon bombs
is finally released to the press.
In the final reckoning,
the balloons are more
ingenious than effective.
Of an estimated 9,000 fu-go bombs
released by the Japanese,
only 285 are officially recorded
as hitting their target.
In 1954, the British decide to develop
a new kind of nuclear weapon
one that can be buried
underground, like a land mine.
Not surprisingly, the
project runs into problems
right from the start.
In the aftermath of world war ii,
britain has a very real
fear that the Soviet union
might launch an assault
on Western Europe.
And if so, it will involve
the Soviet hordes,
thousands of tanks and
other armored vehicles,
millions of troops
marching through Germany
on their way to the conquest of Europe.
To boost their defenses,
the military decide
they need a new kind of weapon.
The British have been using land mines
for defensive positions
for hundreds of years.
And they understand
that a single anti-tank mine
might destroy a tank.
But what if you could
destroy 1,000 tanks
with a single land mine?
Strategically placed nuclear land mines
could wipe out an entire invading force.
Plus, the area will be
contaminated with fallout,
forcing the invaders to retreat.
This could be a game changer
a weapon the world
has never seen before.
The British code-name
the project blue peacock.
30 miles outside London,
engineers at a British army research site
begin developing a nuclear land mine.
To save money, they adapt a warhead
that's already in service
called the blue danube.
But there's a challenge.
If you plant a 10-kiloton
nuke in the ground,
it can't be as sensitive
as a regular land mine.
Land mines used during world war ii
are triggered through
contact by the enemy
and, unfortunately,
civilians as well sometimes.
But you can't have a
nuclear bomb going off
because somebody steps on it.
A dog Walker straying
into the wrong field
could accidentally trigger
a 10-kiloton explosion.
They decide to give
the mine an off setting,
rendering it perfectly safe.
It will basically be sleeping underground.
When called into
action, it can be triggered,
either by setting a timer or remotely
by way of a three-mile cable.
Problem solved.
British experts soon
realize something else.
A buried nuclear bomb
needs more safeguards.
It needs to be waterproof, weatherproof,
and tamper-proof.
You'll have to encase this weapon
in a massive steel shell,
and that makes it both
large and extremely heavy.
You're looking at 7 tons
of weight in this monster.
In 1957, the British army ordered ten
of these nuclear land mines.
They have a plan to plant them
along the west German
border as a method of repelling
a potential Soviet ground invasion.
It soon becomes clear
there's an additional
challenge they've overlooked.
The components to trigger
a blue peacock weapon
are very sensitive to temperature.
They have to be kept
above freezing temperatures.
But putting them in the ground,
underneath the frozen
soil of a European winter,
makes them very vulnerable
to not functioning on command.
So much has been
invested in this weapon.
They need to make it work.
So no solution is off the table.
And they come up with something
just so far outside of the box,
you have to really wonder how
on earth they even got there.
To make this weapon
work, they must keep it warm.
Perhaps there's a way to use
some kind of a biological heating system
a living organism that might
generate enough body heat
to keep everything above
freezing temperature.
Obviously, it can't be a human.
No one's going to sign
up for that type of job.
So they figure it has to be
an animal that can maintain
its own body heat
and tolerate being
kept in a confined space
for days on end.
There's one obvious candidate for the job
chickens.
After all, factory-farmed chickens
are already kept alive in
minimal light and space
similar conditions to
the underground bomb.
In the event that you
have to basically set a timer
on this atomic device,
you could put chickens
inside the bomb casing
with enough food and
water to sustain them
in these tight quarters in the darkness.
Their body heat will ensure
that the timer functions
up to a week in the future.
If the blast occurs,
it will create a crater
640 feet in diameter.
The chickens will be
incinerated instantly,
but they will die British heroes.
Before any chickens are roasted,
another solution is found
fiberglass pillows to keep the nuke warm.
The blue peacocks are good to go
until one more problem comes up.
The only way to transport
them to their final location
is by truck.
But once that truck,
loaded with a 7 1/2-ton
steel cylinder, drives off-road,
it will inevitably get
weighed down and stuck.
The mines are so heavy
that transporting them
is hugely impractical
and almost impossible
to do in any covert way.
After so many setbacks,
the project is finally canceled in 1958,
and the British nuclear
land mine is buried forever.
With the passage of time,
even the British civil service
comes to appreciate the absurdity
of project blue peacock.
The files are finally declassified in 2004
on April fool's day.
Strange weapons come
in all shapes and sizes.
In 1961, the Soviet
union decides to create
the biggest one the world has ever seen
whatever it takes.
Nikita khrushchev is absolutely paranoid
that the rest of the world
might think the Americans
are getting the upper
hand in the cold war.
According to his reports,
america has five times
the nuclear weapons
as the Soviet union.
So he plans a big event so
the world knows Soviet power
is still here and it's real.
The U.S. has already tested
powerful 15-million-ton hydrogen bombs.
The blast radius of
this weapon is a fireball
4 1/2 miles in diameter.
But Soviet leader
khrushchev is unimpressed.
Khrushchev wants a
bomb ten times the size
of the largest American
hydrogen bomb in history.
He demands that Soviet scientists
devise a 100-million-ton bomb.
The bomb could kill
close to a million people.
Khrushchev makes no
secret of his intentions.
He publicly boasts about it.
Soviet scientists race
to meet his demands.
Scaling a nuclear bomb to
this level had never occurred.
Khrushchev is
demanding the impossible,
and khrushchev expects results.
Eventually, the lead scientist,
andrei sakharov, succeeds.
They named it project 602,
but it was nicknamed tsar bomb a.
Tsar bomb a Russian
for "king of bombs."
Now khrushchev is determined to test it.
When sakharov hears
that they're planning to test
this 100-megaton nuclear
bomb, he has massive concerns.
There's no way you can set this bomb off
without creating an enormous region
of radioactive fallout.
Just the act of testing this bomb
is going to render enormous
areas of the Soviet union
uninhabitable for 1,000 years.
So he takes action.
He goes, and he replaces
half the uranium with lead.
Even sakharov's massively
scaled down tsar bomb a
is three times larger than anything
the Americans had ever detonated.
The bomb prepped, it's
time to see what it can do.
But how do you
detonate a bomb this size
without killing the pilot
of the delivery plane?
The plan is to release
the bomb from an airplane
and have it explode 2 1/2
miles above the earth's surface,
which means that
whatever plane drops it,
it's going to be incinerated.
So this is a suicide mission.
Now, to give the pilot a fighting chance,
they coat the plane with a special paint
that will deflect some of
the blast's searing heat.
They attach a
17,000-square-foot parachute
to the bomb to slow its descent
to give the pilot time
to get the plane away.
But even after doing all of that,
at best, they have a
50/50 chance of survival.
Even under test conditions,
the devastation on the
ground will be immense.
So the tsar bomb is
taken to the arctic wastes,
one and half thousand
miles north of Moscow.
Preparations almost complete,
the team hit another stumbling block.
The tsar bomb is too
big to fit inside the plane.
Normally, if a bomb is dropping
from underneath a plane,
it's loaded into the bomb bay
and released when the doors open.
But this bomb is way too big,
so they just have to
strap it to the outside.
With a makeshift solution in place,
it's time to drop the bomb.
It's going to take about 30 minutes
to get up to altitude
with this enormous bomb
hanging from the
fuselage of the airplane.
Once the pilot is at launch altitude,
he releases the bomb.
This thing is a manmade
natural disaster.
The blast from the tsar bomb
is so big that it creates
a mushroom cloud
that's 60 miles wide.
That's twice the size of New York City.
It's an absolute catastrophe,
the damage that this single bomb does.
It collapses houses in an evacuated town
60 miles away.
500 miles away,
the blast wave was
still breaking windows.
The pilot is 30 miles
away, but it's not far enough.
The delivery aircraft was like a leaf
caught in a tornado.
The shock wave is
so big, it hits the plane,
and he actually falls an entire kilometer
before regaining control of the aircraft.
Shockwaves from the blast register
across much of Northern Europe,
letting the rest of the world know
that khrushchev's super bomb works.
Shock waves of outrage come next.
It turns out that exploding a
giant nuke in the atmosphere
doesn't make you popular.
The test is denounced
widely, not only in america
but also by one of khrushchev's key men
the bomb's designer, andrei sakharov.
In fact, he was influential
in a 1963 above ground test ban treaty
that went into effect and
was signed by the Soviet union
and the other nuclear powers,
including the United States.
In 1942, the U.S. created
the office of strategic services
a secretive agency designed
to help win world war ii
through both espionage and sabotage.
The oss hatches many bold plans,
none stranger than a
plot against Adolf Hitler.
Officers at the oss believe
that they can bring the war
to a swift end by eliminating
the leader of the Nazis.
So they draw up these plans
to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
One option to take out
the fuehrer is poison.
Undercover agents in Nazi Germany
could spike Hitler's food.
But how?
It's not easy to simply slip something
into Adolf Hitler's food.
There are levels of protection
all around the fuehrer,
and he even has a food taster.
The oss next turn to an
idea that's the brainchild
of lead scientist Stanley Lovell
And it's a little more outside the box
Spike Hitler's food with sex hormones.
Lovell's team conducts studies
of Hitler's public behavior,
particularly his violent outbursts.
And they come to a
problematic conclusion
that this is a character
trait associated with females
and the emotional instability of women.
Lovell is convinced
that Adolf Hitler is falling
right in the middle of
this gender spectrum,
and that if you just dose
him with a little bit of estrogen,
he would be less inclined
toward violent "confrontationalism"
and more inclined toward engagement.
You could get a peace treaty
out of somebody like that.
Lovell lands on estrogen
as his secret weapon.
Estrogen is the female
reproductive hormone.
If taken by men,
it actually reduces the
male hormone, testosterone,
leading to the man taking on
more female characteristics.
And it makes the perfect poison.
Odorless, it's colorless,
and in the right amounts,
it cannot be detected.
This would constitute a sneak attack
against Adolf Hitler's masculine health,
and he wouldn't even
know it was happening.
The only problem
getting the hormone into Hitler's food.
Hitler is a well-known vegetarian,
and he's a paranoiac
about his food supply,
which means he will only eat
vegetables grown in gardens
under the direct control
of the Nazi regime.
The idea is that an operative
might be able to infiltrate the gardens
and either intercept the produce
or inject it in the ground
with hypodermic needles
filled with estrogen
that will then be conveyed
via the vegetables
to the fuehrer's plate.
But the effects of sex
hormones are gradual.
So we're not talking fuehrer
to fraulein in one single hit.
We're talking about
months before the effects
will even be seen.
Lovell claims to have
put his plan in action,
sending female hormones
to agents behind enemy lines.
But Hitler remained
aggressively confrontational
until the war's end.
The plan may have failed,
but that doesn't stop Stanley Lovell.
In 1943, he comes up with
another way to win victory,
this time with a stink bomb so powerful,
it will derail enemy attacks.
They're looking for
the ultimate stink bomb
one that's so disgusting,
the enemy is just humiliated
and left incapable of fighting.
A substance or device
that is just so pungent
and eye-watering that
it clears the room out
Is not any different philosophically
than a grenade full of tear
gas that clears the room out
because your eyes are burning.
It's the same kind of principle.
The oss affectionately
names the bomb "who, me?"
Because if a smell erupts
in a room of people
and someone is blamed,
they typically respond, "who, me?"
As if they're innocent.
There's an entire industry
a hundreds-of-year-old industry
with a lot of science
and engineering behind it
for spreading smells
isolating particular compounds,
blending particular compounds,
storing them, dispensing them.
It's the perfume industry.
To concoct a stink
bomb suitable for combat,
they seek out the best
nose in the business.
The oss bring in chemical
engineer Ernest Crocker.
Now, Crocker has spent years
developing an almost
encyclopedic study of smells
for the perfume industry.
His challenge is simple
produce a noxious anti-perfume
that agents can deploy
behind enemy lines.
And he conducts months of
tests to create the perfect stench.
Crocker ends up settling
on just a cocktail of chemicals
that assaults the senses.
We're talking about the smell of vomit,
just rancid butter, urine, rotten eggs,
foot odor, and excrement.
Confident his concoction
will repulse German forces
Crocker turns his
attention to the Japanese.
There's this prevailing notion that asians
might actually be more
accepting of filthy smells,
indicative of the deeply racist ideas
that are prevalent at the time.
And this leads Crocker
to brew up a second smell
for use in the far east,
with notes of rotting flesh.
The stinking potions are made,
but how do you transport
a smell to the front line?
Now they're faced with another dilemma.
They need a suitable container
to package the noxious weapon.
But this proves much
harder than brewing the smell.
It isn't enough to just come
up with this anti-perfume.
You also need to come up
with something that can carry
this rancid liquid behind enemy lines.
So they spend months
working on a suitable container
one that doesn't leak but one
that can also be easily opened.
Crocker's team ultimately
comes up with the design,
which is a small tube.
And it's mobile and
can fit into a soldier's kit.
The stink bomb goes into production
with a test run of 600 tubes.
According to Stanley Lovell,
they use Chinese rebels.
The rebels spray it on the
uniforms of Japanese soldiers,
but the war ends before
they can actually get
a full-scale assault on the senses.
In 1959, vice president Nixon
visits Moscow on a goodwill mission.
But the Soviets don't care about goodwill.
Vice president Richard Nixon
is prepping for a trip
behind the iron curtain.
He will become the first
high-ranking American
to visit Moscow in 14 years.
And he is due to
officially open an exhibition
of American science
and culture in Moscow.
After a recent scare
at the U.S. embassy,
Nixon's security team is on high alert.
The U.S. embassy in
Moscow is reporting high levels
of radiation happening in specific rooms
throughout the embassy building itself.
When you scan for radiation levels,
there's a certain level
that's "acceptable,"
that's just going to exist
within any room or place.
Those readings were
slightly above acceptable.
Nixon's security team
are afraid he's walking into a trap.
They suggest taking
geiger counters to Moscow
to monitor the radiation
levels in his living quarters.
Nixon wants to avoid
any displays of paranoia.
He says no to geiger counters,
but he suggests the team
bring these measuring devices
called dosimeters.
These are pocket-sized instruments
that measure radiation exposure.
The secret service
team travels out to Russia
ahead of the vice president,
taking their dosimeters with them.
White house special agent James golden
is tasked with scoping out
Nixon's Moscow residence
ahead of the vice president's trip.
And one of the things that he does
is he starts to look for
radioactive detection
within where the vice
president was staying.
But their dosimeter devices
don't pick up anything unusual.
Everything's normal, and
there's no sign of danger.
On July 23rd, Nixon
lands at Moscow airport.
What happens next is kept under wraps
and classified for 63 years.
- The nixons arrive.
- The ambassador arrives.
All of the sort of formalities
are starting to take place.
And as a result of that
slightly elevated reading,
agent golden decides to
do basically a second pass,
a second scan to look for radioactivity.
I think he was not expecting to find any.
When they reached
Nixon's sleeping quarters,
something alarming happens.
James golden's dosimeter
soars up to a reading of 35 roentgens.
A roentgen is a unit of measure
for counting your exposure to radiation.
And in the workplace,
a permissible exposure to radiation
is just 1/10 of a roentgen per week.
35 roentgens will have a
physical effect on the body
by attacking its immune system.
It's not immediately fatal,
but prolonged exposure to radiation
can lead to long-term
illnesses, such as cancer.
The Americans suspect the radiation
is caused by microwaves
aimed at the building.
At the time, microwave weapons,
or directed-energy
weapons, don't officially exist.
The American government is
only just starting to develop them.
A directed-energy weapon
is a weapon that can
take focused energy
and drive it through an antenna
at a target a great distance away.
It's silent, it's invisible,
and people don't even
know they're being attacked
until it's too late.
It's terrifying.
If the Soviets are shooting microwaves,
they could target the vice president.
The team runs checks
on the rest of the house,
and the readings drop to a normal level.
This is weird.
Nixon's security team
can't find the source
of the radiation, and they
don't want to cause a panic
that will disrupt the
vice president's trip.
The next morning,
the readings are still dramatically high.
So golden and his partner take a gamble.
Because he knows
that that room is bugged
as a CIA officer, we always assume
everyone's listening at all times.
As a result, he does what
we call talking to the room,
and he says, wow, these
radiation levels are so high!
I can't believe it!
And then they wait to see if
the message had any impact.
At 3:30 P.M The dosimeter
suddenly calmed down.
What that tells us is
someone is always listening.
There's no question.
And also what that tells us
is this was something that
the Russians purposely did.
Now, what their motive was, I don't know.
Was it to kill? Was it to
hurt? Was it to frustrate?
We don't know the
answer to that question.
Nixon completes his
visit without further issues.
Afterwards, the agents
report their findings.
But their superiors don't want to derail.
Nixon's peace initiative
by accusing the Soviets of a plot.
So James Gordon keeps
his silence Until 1976,
when a scandal hits the newspapers.
1976, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow,
a man named Walter stoessel,
started reporting symptoms.
He was reporting nausea
and bleeding from the eyes.
These are classic symptoms
of radiation poisoning.
There's a real fear that
the Soviet microwaves
are silently attacking Americans
and could be doing fatal harm.
The state department is called
in to conduct a health study
into whether U.S.
diplomatic staff in Moscow
has been affected by radiation poisoning.
With talk of Russian
microwaves all over the press,
James golden tells the
inquiry what he believes
happened during Nixon's visit to Moscow.
Golden believes that there's
a diabolical directed-energy weapon
being used to irradiate
Nixon's room specifically.
But the state department's health study
finds no strong evidence
linking Moscow radiation
to subsequent health problems.
With that, the trail runs cold.
And the Russians have
never been brought to book
for directing microwaves
at American politicians.
In the 1960s,
the U.S. and Soviet union
vied to put a man on the moon.
But what if they both succeed?
Could the cold war come to
a head with a lunar shootout?
Engineers at rock island army base
specialize in designing
weapons for combat on earth.
But regular guns may not do the job
if war breaks out in space.
So the army set up a
future weapons office
to design weapons for astronauts.
We can't go anywhere
without taking a gun,
even the moon.
The moon is a new environment,
and scientists have
to now start figuring out
how to make a gun
or how to make artillery
that will work as it does
on earth but on the moon.
First of all, the moon has
a very thin atmosphere.
Regular firearms need liquid lubricants
to keep them in working order.
But in a vacuum, lubricants
are liable to evaporate.
And so the gun's sliding
mechanisms will jam.
What's more, guns have recoil
the force that throws a gun
back after it shoots a bullet.
But in the moon's low gravity,
the recoil from a regular firearm
could throw the soldier back so violently
that they could leave the lunar surface
and just float off into space.
A radical design is needed
for a reliable firearm
to protect astronauts.
Enter the spring-propelled
spherical projectile.
By replacing the
conventional firing mechanisms
with a compressed spring,
there are none of the
traditional sliding parts.
So it's less reliant on lubrication
and less liable to jam or freeze
in essentially a
zero-atmosphere environment.
A spring-propulsion system like this
also is likely to have less recoil,
ensuring that the lunar soldier
doesn't get thrown back into space
after they pull the trigger.
Another hazard that could
disarm a space soldier
is the moon's extreme temperatures.
During the day, it gets up
to 250 degrees fahrenheit
and plummets at night
to minus-250 degrees.
So the army's regular
m14 rifle could freeze
or explode under these
extreme temperature conditions.
There's also the risk
of the gun's metal parts
fusing together in extreme
subzero temperatures.
It's a reaction called "cold welding."
It would render the weapon
immediately unusable.
This is where the
spin-stabilized micro gun
would come in handy.
The gun does away with
many of the complex mechanics
of the standard firearm,
so there are fewer parts
that are vulnerable to freezing
or exploding through excess heat.
And it can be assembled
using a variety of nonmetal materials,
like ceramics or plastics,
which is perfect to avoid cold welding.
It would shoot a 4-pound projectile.
And it could travel at
over 3,000 feet per second.
This could go very far, very fast,
with pretty good accuracy.
But firing off a few rounds on the moon
does come with a caveat.
If you fire a bullet
and it misses its target,
that bullet could potentially travel
through outer space forever.
In 1965, the future weapons office
publishes their report,
illustrating a space
gun for every occasion.
But none of the designs
make it off the drawing board,
because in 1967,
the U.S. signs the outer space treaty,
banning weapons on the moon.
As long as there's
conflict between nations,
governments will continue
to develop strange weapons
some that simply defy belief,
others we hope will never be deployed.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
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