In the 1920s and 30s, Mor­ris “Moe” Berg was a Major League Base­ball play­er. He start­ed out with the Brook­lyn Dodgers in 1923 and fin­ished in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox. Despite the length of his career, by all accounts he was noth­ing spe­cial as a base­ball play­er.

In Decem­ber 1944, Moe found him­self in the audi­to­ri­um of the Zurich Poly­tech­nic where a rebel­lious Ein­stein had once stud­ied (one of his lec­tur­ers described him as a “lazy dog” for his fail­ure to attend maths class­es). On the stage that day was Wern­er Heisen­berg, one of the cen­tral fig­ures in the Nazi atom­ic bomb pro­gram, and Moe Berg was lis­ten­ing intent­ly to what he was say­ing.

Moe was no fool. The six-foot one-inch tall base­ball play­er had shone in his first appear­ance on the radio quiz show Infor­ma­tion Please in 1938. A reg­u­lar on the show lat­er said he was the “most schol­ar­ly pro­fes­sion­al ath­lete” he’d ever met. At Prince­ton, Moe had stud­ied sev­en lan­guages, includ­ing San­skrit. But it was Ger­man he need­ed that day in Zurich.

Despite his undoubt­ed lan­guage skills, it’s unclear how much of Heisen­berg’s abstruse dis­cus­sion of S‑matrix the­o­ry Moe Berg actu­al­ly under­stood. After all, he was­n’t a physi­cist. But what is clear is that Heisen­berg did­n’t men­tion the atom bomb. For if he had, the base­ball play­er from Newark would have reached into his pock­et, tak­en out a .45 pis­tol, and shot him dead.

For Moe Berg — code­name ‘Remus’ — was an oper­a­tive of the OSS, the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices, Amer­i­ca’s first cen­tral intel­li­gence agency. His mis­sion that day was to kill Heisen­berg if he gave even the slight­est hint dur­ing his lec­ture that the Nazis were close to build­ing an atom­ic bomb. For­tu­nate­ly for the quan­tum the­o­rist, they weren’t and the .45 stayed in Moe’s pock­et.

It’s an extra­or­di­nary sto­ry — one of many moments of indi­vid­ual brav­ery now con­signed to the his­to­ry books of the atom­ic age. I came across it while read­ing the new paper­back edi­tion of Jef­frey T Richel­son’s Spy­ing on the Atom­ic Bomb, a fas­ci­nat­ing and detailed account of Amer­i­ca’s strug­gle to force the nuclear genie back into the bot­tle. Berg’s exploits take up just a few pages of Richel­son’s impres­sive study which brings the sto­ry of pro­lif­er­a­tion right up to date with the lat­est intel­li­gence assess­ment on Iran’s atom­ic ambi­tions. His book reveals the secret his­to­ry of spies and nuclear sci­ence that gov­ern­ments have in the past tried to keep hid­den from their cit­i­zens.

Of course, in the Cold War most peo­ple were well aware of the threat from atom­ic weapons. Pop cul­ture was full of ref­er­ences to the atom­ic age: fall­out, H‑bombs (as well as C‑bombs and N‑bombs), Geiger coun­ters, radioac­tiv­i­ty, megadeaths, and Dooms­day Machines — this was the vocab­u­lary of mass destruc­tion that filled the news­pa­pers and air­waves.

The A‑word fea­tured in count­less film titles, from Cana­di­an Moun­ties vs the Atom­ic Invaders (1953) to The Atom­ic Man (1956). Giant radioac­tive ants and dinosaurs ram­paged across cin­e­ma screens. And in the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), spies and mad atom­ic sci­en­tists came togeth­er in a cin­e­mat­ic for­mu­la that would prove a peren­ni­al suc­cess at the box-office.

As well as B movies about the A‑bomb, chil­dren played with their toy Geiger coun­ters and ate atom­ic fire ball can­dy. There were zap­py atom­ic ray guns and, for the seri­ous atom­ic nerds, there was the atom­ic ener­gy lab, with real sam­ples of ura­ni­um ore. (Can you imag­ine the teacher’s reac­tion today if one of her kids came up and said, “Hey, miss, Susie has stolen my ura­ni­um!”?)

But for the adults, there was always the fear nag­ging in the back of their minds about what to do if the sirens sound­ed. Would gov­ern­ment advice on how to “Pro­tect and Sur­vive” or “Duck and Cov­er” real­ly be any good? One gov­ern­ment spon­sored book On How to Sur­vive an Atom­ic Bomb, pub­lished in 1950, gave sar­to­r­i­al advice for Dooms­day: women should wear stock­ings and long-sleeved dress­es, and men should wear wide-brimmed hats.

For those who did­n’t swal­low the offi­cial pro­pa­gan­da, there were oth­er fanatasies. Such as the sur­vival­ist dream of return­ing to a fron­tier exis­tence after the bombs had fall­en and soci­ety had dis­solved into a Mad Max world. It was a warped dream that spawned atom­ic erot­i­ca and even post-nuclear porn — books like Jane Gal­lion’s Bik­er (1969) and George Smith’s The Com­ing of the Rats (1961).

Today ref­er­ences to atom­ic or nuclear imagery have large­ly dropped out of pop cul­ture. In fact, when they do appear, nukes are more like­ly to be sav­ing the plan­et than destroy­ing it, as in films like Armaged­don (1998) or Sun­shine (2007). The Cold War and the Atom­ic Age seem like ancient his­to­ry to a new gen­er­a­tion — stuff peo­ple tell you in school. Few real­ly believe any more that “This Could Hap­pen Tomor­row!”.

Per­son­al­ly, I was nev­er a great fan of the Atom­ic Ener­gy Lab. But, as books like Richel­son’s show, the nukes are still out there — in the UK and the US as well as Iran and Rus­sia. We might not be so obsessed with them, but they haven’t gone away. And as Pres­i­dent Putin gloats over the launch of a new mis­sile that can hit a tar­get 3,800 miles away with pin-point accu­ra­cy, the head­lines are once again speak­ing of a new Cold War. We may need peo­ple like Moe Berg soon­er than you think.

[also post­ed on TNB]