Radiolab - Atomic Artifacts

America represents many different things to many different people. What if you could only choose one thing, one physical object, to represent it all?

Duration: 43m
Broadcast on: 03 Jul 2026
Audio Format: other

Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical questions like: Who would count the dead and where would they build the refugee camps? But they faced a more spiritual question as well. If Washington DC were hit, every object in the the National Archives would be eviscerated in a moment. Terrified by this reality, they set out to save some of America’s most precious stuff. Today, we look back at the items our Cold War era planners sought to save and we ask the question: what objects would we preserve now?

We first released this episode back in 2020, but with our big fourth of July – 250 years! – just around the corner, we thought it was a strange but profound reflection on what this whole America thing that we’re celebrating… actually is.

Special thanks to Luke Manon, Ben Irving, Bill Pretzer, Jason Spier, and Garrett Graff for all his reporting that made this episode possible.

LATERAL CUTS -
The Cataclysm Sentence (https://radiolab.org/podcast/cataclysm-sentence)

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Simon Adler
with help from - Tad Davis
Produced by - Simon Adler
Original music and sound design contributed by - SIMON ADLER
and Edited by - Pat Walters

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RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. So a few years back, I woke up in the middle of the night to my wife saying, "Lulu, get out. Fire. Fire." And I looked through the window and in front of me was just a blaze of orange. The apartment building won over from us was on fire, and I had that moment. What do you take? I grabbed my kid, my computer, and this journal I was making of my kids' footprints and photos and stuff. And that was it. I didn't even get my wallet, I didn't even put on my shoes, and now I know. That's what I would take. Luckily in my story, nobody was hurt, but the episode we're about to play for you is about this question of what to take if something much, much more destructive were headed our way. Figuring that out was a real project that the most powerful people in our country were grappling with, but it's a project you probably have never heard about before because it was kept entirely secret. We first released this story back in 2020, but with our big 4th of July, 250 years celebration around the corner, I listened back and thought it was a strange but ultimately profound reflection on what this whole American national identity actually is. So without further ado, here we go. You're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad Habemrod. This story begins, I guess you could say, with a mystery. Hi, it's Garrett. Hey, Garrett. Simon here, how are you? I'm well, sorry. It comes from producer Simon Adler. Yeah. So this mystery all started just a couple years back when this guy. I'm Garrett Graf, I'm a historian, journalist, author, et cetera, et cetera. Was handed an ID badge. So I was working at Washingtonian magazine at the time, and one of my colleagues found a government ID badge as he was commuting in one day. Garrett says his colleague was just walking down the street when he saw on the ground this ID. And the colleague pretty immediately realized that this was not just any ID. It belonged to somebody with a pretty high security clearance. He brought it in to me, and he goes, "Hey, you cover this stuff, you can probably figure

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America represents many different things to many different people. What if you could only choose one thing, one physical object, to represent it all?