Nuke the Moon.

Scott LaFoy 0:02

We have to specifically ram a nuclear weapon into the crust of the moon and blow it up.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:12

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott 0:27

And I'm Scott LaFoy, producer at the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, and a master's candidate over at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies.

Jeffrey 0:37

Scott, we're going to collectively moon our listeners.

Scott 0:41

We have, like, a weird episode today.

Jeffrey 0:44

Yeah, well, what I like about it is you've got a story you're going to tell me, and I haven't done any research. I'm going to sit here like an idiot and just take it all in. And I have a story that I'm going to tell you.

Scott 1:00

And those stories all have one central theme that isn't just arms control as it is usually. Well, it is arms control, but it's also...

Jeffrey 1:09

The moon! Yeah, you have like a Lunar New Year thing going on?

Scott 1:14

Is this... So it is Lunar New Year right now. That's the year of the rooster. Happy Lunar New Year. So we're going to be talking about the moon in what is a semblance of a holiday-themed episode. What do you got for me? So I have on deck my favorite lunar story as it intersects with nuclear weapons is the time we thought about nuking the moon.

Seriously enough to have several multi-hundred page reports written about it.

Jeffrey 1:41

Is that just we wanted to recover the cheese?

Scott 1:43

I think so. I think it was a cheese recovery mission, mainly. Perhaps to see if the man in the moon retaliated, see how he deals with that sort of thing.

Jeffrey 1:52

Wait, when was this?

Scott 1:55

Well, it's the time that all nuclear mad science was really getting funded, and that's the late 1950s, when you could walk towards the government and just sort of shout nuclear ideas, and they'd give you a clearance and some money to explore it.

Jeffrey 2:09

It actually reminds me of one of my favorite Bloom County cartoons where I think Opus put in a strategic defense initiative proposal. And the plan was literally to ring the earth with dollar bills in orbit.

Scott 2:28

That would still probably... We should run the numbers on that. That would probably be cheaper than a lot of strategic defense initiative projects.

Jeffrey 2:35

You know, but basically he needed boxes full of money.

Scott 2:40

Well, this is not even the most expensive idea. It's a weirdly not... It's a non, it's like semi-classified. I don't actually understand its classification status. Happened in the 1950s. Carl Sagan was involved, which makes it real weird to me. But most of the reports are allegedly non-existent anymore. Not even classified, like they don't exist. Well, how do you know about this thing?

Jeffrey 3:09

What is the evidentiary basis? Is this like a tall tale, like you get a couple of drinks in Johnny Foster and he tells you about the time he tried to nuke the moon? I think that's how it was written.

Scott 3:23

I think that's the first time it was talked about publicly, but there is documentation. I'm looking at the PDF right now that people released of it, which is from the Defense Documentation Center for Scientific and Technical Information, Cameron Station, Alexandria. And it is a study of lunar research flights done by the Air Force Special Weapons Center in 1959 is this specific report.

Jeffrey 3:53

And this is the one that alleged... A lunar flight?

Scott 3:57

That's what they called it, was a lunar research flight. And the idea... So this is the 50s, so we're not quite at the point where Neil Armstrong has been decked to get ready for Apollo missions. We're still, like, really in the infancy of spaceflight. Like, this reports from 1959. The project has existed for at least one year before that.

1958 is when we launched. Like, Explorer 1 is launched then, which, incidentally, the... Anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, America's first satellite, yesterday, January 31st. So 1958 Explorer's up. Sputnik is up. Explorer one, three and Vanguard one, Sputnik one, two, three are up. There are not many orbital bodies. We're really at the beginning and they're trying to look at, you know, what are we going to do with the moon?

Because there's a bunch of rumors that the Soviets are looking at moon shots, not manned moon shots, but like, you know, drones, experimental bodies, that sort of thing. So of course we got to do that too. But

Jeffrey 5:01

But we have to put a nuclear weapon there.

Scott 5:05

We have to specifically ram a nuclear weapon into the crust of the moon and blow it up. Now, I'm down with that idea on principle alone. But there was some science that had to be done. And not even kidding, we did a smaller version of this in 2009 without the nuke. So this ends up happening decades down the line.

Because if you ram an orbital body into the moon, the same way when you hit the Earth, it causes a bunch of ejecta, a bunch of stuff's going to fly up. And if you have spectrometers and telescopes and all sorts of fancy science equipment looked at it, you can learn about the makeup of the crust. You can learn all sorts of...

Jeffrey 5:46

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So let me control my laughter here. Wait, so the desired endpoint of the nuclear explosion is the ejecta?

Scott 6:01

That is the scientific excuse, is of course you're going to get spaceflight. Like, okay, awesome. All the stuff that comes with spaceflight is going to pay dividends. But yeah, the logic is, guys, a nuclear bomb instantly throws up a crap load of debris. We can learn a lot about the moon from that. Just all sorts of stuff.

And so it'd be, you know, the equivalent of digging... It's like digging in your backyard, but you don't really have a shovel that large.

Jeffrey 6:29

No, I'm imagining like two guys in flannel shirts with no sleeves. Right. And one of it's the same logic of like that a hornet's nest. Yeah. You got a stick. I got some dynamite.

Scott 6:46

That'll do it there.

Jeffrey 6:47

Like what the hell?

Scott 6:49

So, but yeah, that's the science behind it. Now, there was a military and political objective perhaps inspiring this project.

Jeffrey 6:59

Well, wait, before you tell me, like, so this was the Air Force. This was the...

Scott 7:05

Yes. Yeah. As was, like, every real fun, crazy idea, I feel like, in the 50s. Because this is back when the... Now, I may have some of the years wrong, but it wasn't super clear how space and missile technology were being handled. Like, now military space assets are much more clearly established as the Air Force. In the 50s, you know, the Army still has rockets in the 50s, and the Army is still performing space-based experiments.

On the reg with some legitimacy. And I think the Army still has space-based experiments now, but not with the same sort of experimental, institutional non-understanding of who really gets space as a domain. So the Air Force is funding this.

Jeffrey 7:48

Listeners are figuring out how bad I am at processing information when I'm laughing to myself. So I'm making you go over and over this again. So the Air Force wants to nuke the moon so they can measure the ejecta.

Scott 8:04

Yeah, and I'm not sure who was supposed to get that scientific data. This gets into, like, I don't know what NASA's doing in 1959.

Jeffrey 8:11

But this is from this document, right, that you have.

Scott 8:16

The science portion, yes. So the document that is extant mainly discusses the scientific benefits that such a thing would generate. So it's divided into several chapters. And just like the table of contents is basically optical studies related to lunar research flights, seismic observations of the moon, high energy radiation environment of the moon. The lunar surface and the magnetic field, plasma and magnetic field effects.

This is when we're still figuring out what orbits are even like. I think the Van Allen belts were only discovered in 1958, I think, was Explorer 3.

Jeffrey 8:58

Yeah, you know, I've told you this. This is my favorite Kennedy story. So when the U.S. was doing high-altitude nuclear testing, And the famous one is Starfish Prime, which is known to many, but especially the EMP crackpots. Yep. One of the concerns, which is literally true, is if you detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude, wouldn't that damage satellites by pumping the radiation belts?

Scott 9:40

Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:41

And Kennedy gets asked this scientific question at a press conference, and he diffuses it. Wrongly, but like with the best comeback I've ever heard, because I asked him, you know, about a disturbance with the Van Allen radiation belts. And he says, well, I've talked to Professor Van Allen and he doesn't think so. But as it turns out, yes, it actually did damage satellites.

But yeah, you're right. This is still like – we're just now – you're right. In the 1950s, we don't really know how that whole environment works. That's true. Go ahead. I thought of something else.

Scott 10:25

Yeah. And that's sort of the thing is like there's a bunch of concerns in the report also about like what happens if we put foreign bodies as in terrestrial based materials on the moon. Does that contaminate the moon? Do they come back contaminated? What can we sort of figure it out from this? There's a bunch of equations talking about like luminosity.

Will you be able to see it? Because one of the things is if you could use... I haven't gone through the full report for this specific... But I think one of the issues was whether or not terrestrial sensors could be used to try and learn about the explosion. And so in 2009, we do this. We take the La Crosse satellite, which was attached at the time to a...

What was it? A Centaur upper stage came with it. They go all the way to the moon, and the La Crosse satellite sort of guides the Centaur upper stage, aims it at the Cabius crater, and just rams it into the lunar surface, causing a bunch of ejecta. And the La Crosse craft and terrestrial-based sensor units, all the network, look at that.

So we do this later just without a nuke. Right.

Jeffrey 11:36

Well, so this is the same, but this is the same era. I, you know, the reason I kind of gasped as I realized, do you know about Project Westford, also known as Project Needles?

Scott 11:50

Oh, God. Well, the one with the copper needles like everywhere in space.

Jeffrey 11:54

Right. I mean, this is that same era. They wanted to create an artificial ionosphere and they, you know, said, oh, no, no, it'll be fine. They'll they'll all come down. But then, you know, they didn't properly deploy or at least some of them didn't. And there are like still 38 clumps of them.

Scott 12:10

Yeah, it's an era where we're still sort of like throwing science at the wall and hoping it sticks. And then occasionally it does stick and we go, oh God, no, what have we done?

Jeffrey 12:19

The reason I'm just like trying to contain my laughter, like, can you imagine if you proposed nuking the moon today, the environmental impact statement? Yeah.

Scott 12:32

Oh, yeah. Like, well, and that's one of the issues brought up is if we try to do, you know, a human landing later on the moon, what is it going to be like? Will it create radiation in addition to the radiation one would normally experience on the moon? Will this make future lunar activity more difficult? But of course, the listeners have been very patient and hearing the mad science behind it.

There was a political military background to this because incidentally, you could see the explosion if the explosion was done on, you know, the part of the moon facing the Earth. It should be visible to anyone looking at it from Earth, but with the naked eye. Which means that in 1969, when we spent a bunch of money to put men on the moon, we had to bring television cameras to show that we were there.

As opposed to a nuke on the moon, which we could just wait until it's visible from Russia and just go, you see? You see what we can do?

Jeffrey 13:31

Can you imagine the conspiracy theories if we had nuked the moon? I mean, we already have to deal with the fake moon landing conspiracies.

Scott 13:41

Oh, man. Well, it at least would prove we were there. It's then just like, well, what are you doing there?

Jeffrey 13:47

Oh, no, Scott. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing will prove to these people.

Scott 13:52

See, it would have been great, though, because there's later a project called Project New Horizons. And I can't remember which of the big nuclear theorists was the one who loved this project. Project New Horizons was like, you know, it costs a lot less energy to get a rocket from the moon to the earth. What if we just pre-position a bunch of nuclear missiles on the moon and then just glide them on down?

Which was a different kind of horrifying experience. So this is all before the sort of demilitarization of the moon and space was more of a thing. So they wanted to nuke the moon to scare people. I mean, they call it a morale boost, I believe is the technical term for scaring the wits out of people by nuking a celestial body.

Jeffrey 14:40

Sorry, I have a cold, and so occasionally I'm on mute coughing. No, but it's funny because you make me laugh, but then I, like, it starts a bit of coughing. You might actually kill me.

Scott 14:50

Let's not have that. But so that's basically it. The project, I had to look it up on Wikipedia to get the name because it's got a really basic name. It's Project A119. It doesn't have a big, fancy, sexy name with it. I don't know how far they actually got in seriousness before someone was like, nope, this is a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

It would have been a lot cheaper than putting Neil Armstrong on the moon, though. It costs a lot to put a human there. They've got to come back.

Jeffrey 15:22

Well, so my favorite moon story is one that I had vaguely known about. Through declassification, but then saw a little bit more about it in Bill Perry's memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. And so it rekindled my interest, and so I'm a little bit at the beginning. But, you know, in the 1960s, the Soviets were building these very large radars Right.

Which we thought and I guess which eventually were, you know, used for missile defenses, but also, you know, just generally part of the country's air defense. And so we had a real interest in monitoring those radars.

Scott 16:15

Right.

Jeffrey 16:16

But the natural question, right, is, like, how do you do that? Because, you know, you got to actually, like, intercept the radio signal.

Scott 16:29

Right.

Jeffrey 16:30

And so the Soviets did a nuclear test in 1962. Mm-hmm. And the ionized cloud reflected the signal from one of the radars. And then it occurred... To various people. There's some actual dispute. I mean, the two documents that I've been able to find are we have a declassified summary in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence, and then we have Bill Perry's accounting.

This is partly how Bill Perry makes his bones. They realize that if the signals are being reflected... We have a giant mirror hanging in the sky. So they try to catch the signals bouncing off the moon so that they can characterize the radars.

Scott 17:39

That's awesome.

Jeffrey 17:41

It's amazing.

Scott 17:43

So good. I wonder if they still do that or if we intentionally do that or do you have to worry about shielding that now? Is the moon a national security threat for radar signatures?

Jeffrey 17:56

I think there's probably no way around it. Now, I mean this was really quite clever. So initially – and this is one of the disputes. The CIA version is that the Office of Naval Research came up with this idea and they looked around but they couldn't find anything. Okay. And Bill Perry's version is that his lab came up with the idea.

But, you know, at some level it doesn't matter. The Navy started looking with a 150-foot dish on the East Coast. But couldn't... Couldn't find it, and then I guess eventually did get a little bit of it and kind of just generally got the parameters for the radar they were interested in was the henhouse radar. Oh, okay. But this is like a West Coast story because I don't know if you've ever driven up 280 from basically San Jose to San Francisco.

No.

Scott 19:04

I have not.

Jeffrey 19:05

So there is a giant 150-foot dish in Palo Alto.

Scott 19:11

Oh, okay.

Jeffrey 19:13

And it looks the right direction, I guess, or at least it's, you know, maybe Palo Alto cited, right, so that for eastward-looking Soviet radar, you can get a bounce off of it. And so this is sort of, you know, briefly described in the Studies in Intelligence article. But then, you know, Perry talks about it a lot more because he says that, I guess, Perry was working at...

Oh, I always forget the ESL, right? Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory, which was his defense contractor that very nearly made him rich, but didn't quite because he went into government and sold all his stock. Yeah. You know, he's actually not sore about anything in his memoir, except for the giant amount of money he lost to go into the Carter administration and the giant amount of money he lost to go into the Clinton administration.

And he knows exactly how much money he lost. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Well, they made him contra current public officials when he went into the Carter administration because he was overseeing defense research. They made him divest himself. He wanted to do a blind trust, but they made him divest.

Scott 20:25

If only he had a son that was running a blind trust.

Jeffrey 20:28

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But anyway, so the they were the whoever at Stanford was using it was using it to map the moon because they were illuminating it. But they didn't use it 24 hours a day. And so the ESL team went in at night, and it was actually Lou Franklin, I guess, who was the central person on this.

I don't know if you know Lou. He's still around Stanford. Oh, Lou's great. So Lou is really into, like, modeling missiles now. Ooh.

Scott 21:04

That's someone I should know.

Jeffrey 21:05

Oh, yeah, Lou's great. Like, Lou is old and, like, still into the new technologies. But, like, Lou was, like, always hanging around Stanford, and I was always, like, you know, like... Who is this guy? Right. And, you know, the answer is he's moon bounce Elant guy, which is cool. And if I see him again at Stanford, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to ask him about I haven't seen him in a while.

But so, yeah, so they they basically use this dish and they start intercepting the signal. Which, by the way, well, the Soviets made it really easy for them. Because guess what the Soviets used as their practice target for practice tracking? They would track the moon for practice, which meant they were aiming right at the moon. And that made the job of picking it up much better.

Scott 21:59

So they were picking up then specifically like the illuminations. So it was like as it emits, they were getting the bounce off the moon. Right. So they could figure out essentially like what band that radar was working on and sort of what it can do and what it should hypothetically be able to see.

Jeffrey 22:15

Oh, they got a ton of stuff, right?

Scott 22:18

Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 22:18

Tell me about it. Well, because the way they, when they received the signal, they figured out that it had this spread spectrum mode, which I don't fully understand. But it seems that what you can do is you can broaden the signal so that you have this kind of choice of increasing either the radar's range or its resolution.

And so it had this kind of neat technical feature that they were able to figure out. And I think they had some idea that that might be the case, but then they confirmed that.

Scott 22:55

Did they know what their radar looked like at the time? Do you know if they had imagery of it?

Jeffrey 23:00

They had an overhead.

Scott 23:02

Okay, so they had a general idea of at least some of the physical aspects of it.

Jeffrey 23:06

Yeah, they had a U2 overhead image of it.

Scott 23:09

Okay, gotcha.

Jeffrey 23:11

Right. But so the second thing is they got another little technical trick out of it. So I, you know, and I'm not a radar guy. Right.

Scott 23:22

I think this is like really awesome if you're a radar person.

Jeffrey 23:26

I guess radars normally have this kind of scanning and they have a scanning mode and a tracking mode. Right. But this had a... They call it a combination mode. I actually kind of think an intermediate mode might make more sense as a, as a, as a description, but then I'm not the technical person. But it scans but dwells, right? So it scans and if it picks up a target, it dwells on the target for a little bit longer and then goes back to scanning, right?.

I think the way that it worked then allowed them to figure out it was computer controlled.

Scott 24:15

Ah, interesting. So basically because of how the way in which it was reactive to signals implied that it had something a little past what a human would be doing.

Jeffrey 24:25

Yeah, keeping in mind that I've got Perry's version and I've got the studies and intelligence version, but I haven't really spent the time to sit down and surface from someone whether I'm reading these things right. And then obviously the last thing is they figured out what its peak power was. Right.

Scott 24:41

Oh, nice. Oh, that's really helpful for ballistic missile defense then, so they can get ranges and capabilities off of that.

Jeffrey 24:48

And indeed, the conclusion of the thing is, by accurately defining the parameters of the new radar, we can now start to design the countermeasures and tactics to reduce its effectiveness, right?

Scott 25:00

I wonder. So this just brings up to end of my mind the question of after they figure this out and they sort of like got a good feel for it that they felt really comfortable. I wonder if there was anyone who just sat down and be like, do they calibrate it on the moon? Because I have an idea.

And just like feeds just small amounts of noise to throw their calibrations off over the years.

Jeffrey 25:22

Just like... You're a devil. I don't think if they did that or something like that, I don't think the countermeasures would make it into the declassified journal article.

Scott 25:31

What? They wouldn't tell us that? Sources, methods, and Siggint and Ellent are always declassified.

Jeffrey 25:38

Yeah. Well, of course, any good story, though, has a punchline, right?

Scott 25:41

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 25:42

So it wasn't all smooth sailing. Uh-oh. Okay. Remember how I said they did things at night?

Scott 25:53

Which team? The American, the ELS?

Jeffrey 25:54

Yeah, the US team. Right. Yeah. As it turns out, the frequency that the Soviet radar operated on was the same as the dispatch radios for the Palo Alto taxis.

Scott 26:13

Yeah. Now, how did they discover this?

Jeffrey 26:18

They had a lot of interference. And obviously they couldn't force all the taxis to change, right?

Scott 26:24

Right. And reveal a bunch of information.

Jeffrey 26:27

And they couldn't very well, you know, please ask people to, you know, not use the dispatch radar while we were collecting electronic intelligence off the moon from the Soviet radar. So they ended up having to design a filter to spot the signals and filter them out.

Scott 26:42

Oh, that's funny.

Jeffrey 26:44

But it's awesome because that dish is still there. So every time I drive by it, to me it's this wonderful line. Hey, do you see that dish? It's this really cool technical story. It has this funny taxi thing. But it also kind of goes centrally to the point of like why is Bill Perry a big deal? Right.

Like why? How did he end up as an undersecretary in the Carter administration? What took this, you know, guy hanging out in Silicon Valley and, you know, propelled him, you know, along his journey at the nuclear brink, as he titles his book? You know, and the answer is one of the really cool things that his lab did at the beginning was monitor Soviet missile defense radars by watching them bounce off the moon, which I think is really cool.

That's very neat.

Scott 27:32

That's a good story. And on the, on the note of radars dealing with the moons so the Soviet may have, Soviets may have used their hen houses and or used the moon to calibrate hen houses, which for, for other listeners, I think is the Dnester, Dnester. I can't, I'm not good at Russian. We had the opposite problem where we had a very brief, small scare thanks to the moon over in Greenland.

And off the pod, you pointed out that I cannot say this word because I grew up with this being Thule, the winter sports company and or the ancient name for certain parts of Scandinavia.

Jeffrey 28:11

Well, so two things to make you feel better. Even though I believe it is Thule, but I actually don't know that. That is not the indigenous word for that place. Oh, really? Yeah. So it has a word, which I think is Canuck? Canuck? It's Q-A-A-N-A-A-Q. But I say don't be ashamed when you don't know how to say things that you've only read.

I knew someone in college, and she was very smart, but she was self-taught about everything. And she only knew words from books, and so she didn't know how to pronounce any of the big words she knew. She used to say epitome instead of epitome. Oh, and it's easy. It's easy to tease. But like, you know, if you're like living in rural Illinois and like all you got are the books and you don't have anybody who knows those words, what the heck are you going to do?

Scott 29:07

Yeah. Or a mutually reinforcing friend group where you all mispronounce that word for you.

Jeffrey 29:13

You all think it's epitome. Yeah.

Scott 29:15

Well, we all thought it was Thule. Not that exactly that comes up a lot in conversation. I grew up in the South. Even though it's a winter sports company, it's not like – it's that thing that you store stuff in.

Jeffrey 29:29

I'm certain I've just mangled the indigenous name of the place. I thought – Wikipedia normally has that little thing that you can – the file thing. Where you can press it, and then you get a native speaker saying it, so you can do your terrible version of the actual word, but no such luck.

Scott 29:44

Doesn't have it? Okay, well, Thule slash Thule slash... I've also heard a professor call it Thule. That's where we used to have one of our ballistic missile early warning radars when we were sort of first filling out our missile early warning system. It was the end of the world, like, you know, Middle of nowhere like very very rough to be up there communications was sort of not the best quality with Thule so they used to I guess they used to run like the B-52s over it during Operation Chromedome to sort of visually make contact with Thule to make sure it was still there you desperately want to call it Thule it's real hard take the boy out of Tennessee but you can't take the Tennessee out of the boy Somebody's gonna write in to me like, you jackass, is Thule? And then I don't know, oh man, that's, that's, I hope so. Please send us, if anyone knows, just send me some sort of phonetic workout.. So, but when they were first, so in the late 50s again, my favorite time in the Cold War, possibly.

They were working out the ballistic missile early warning system and doing tests on the radar and everything and getting it set up. And in 1960 is when they first put it online. I think it's first make it operational, like like not in testing phases. And I think it's in like late the late part of the year that they they bring it online as a operational element.

And on October 5th, apparently they get a huge warning that the United States is very probably under massive attack from the Soviet Union, just like an enormous first strike, which, once again, that's why the B-52s are there, because... Thule was presumed to be one of the first things to go if war broke out because of its early warning.

And so the radars basically said, oh, God, it's over. We're done. Well, it's starting. It'll be over in about 15 minutes, and it's going to be real bad. Someone should probably call NORAD. And that is because the moon had risen. And much like the henhouse radars... The early warning radar was just like, oh, God, the Death Star is in the sky.

And apparently, so like a lot of newspapers made a big deal out of it because that's a terrifying story that we got an early warning from the moon. But apparently in interviews with a lot of Air Force personnel at the time, they downplay it pretty heavily and say that it was pretty obvious that it was not. A massive attack because you know had a moment of of heart palpitations they were like okay we figured this out and fixed it immediately they also talk about that in eric schlosser's command and control which is an awesome book that i recommend all listeners pick up it's really nice awesome hey this has been a lot of fun yeah it's this is like a little mini episode happy lunar you do year everybody Hey, thanks for joining me.

Jeffrey 32:43

And thank you for listening. If you like the pod, consider giving us a review on iTunes. It helps promote the pod and get the pod up the charts. If you really like the podcast, why not consider supporting us through our Patreon page? We've got a really cool Slack channel where for a mere three bucks a month, you can not only get our pods, but you can chat with us and get some of the extra stuff that doesn't fit in.

How's the Slack channel going, Scott?

Scott 33:10

It's going awesome. We've been getting a bunch more people in it. So it's getting more and more active. We got a couple of bio warfare and like biological emergency experts. So the biochem radiological channel is a lot of fun now. So that's very cool. We got a lot of neat, neat folks who are very smart, very good at conversation.

It's a good place for me to burn time that I shouldn't be burning.

Jeffrey 33:36

Well, so thanks for listening and consider coming on over and visiting us electronically.