"Five Minutes of Fire": The Rosenburgs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray

<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We're
<v Speaker 1>here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start the
<v Speaker 1>Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes at
<v Speaker 1>a time, which is about to link the song, so
<v Speaker 1>it works out kind of nicely. So please join us
<v Speaker 1>as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>The Rosenbergs, h Bomb, Sugar Ray. So, Jason, do you
<v Speaker 1>know who the Rosenbergs are? No? I did not. You
<v Speaker 1>genuinely don't, right, I don't tell Okay, Well, all right,
<v Speaker 1>So Julius and Ethel are the Rosenbergs. They were members
<v Speaker 1>of the Communist USA Party Young Communists, if you will.
<v Speaker 1>They actually met at a Communist convention together. But then
<v Speaker 1>you know, the war happened and Julius ended up joining
<v Speaker 1>the Army Signal Corps, who had access to all of
<v Speaker 1>information about radar and sonar and other stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>Then Ethel's brother, guy named David Greenglass, he actually worked
<v Speaker 1>on the Manhattan Project with the Oppenheimer and developing the
<v Speaker 1>atomic bomb. Well in nineteen fifty David green Glass was
<v Speaker 1>arrested for espionage, okay, because it turns out that Julius
<v Speaker 1>had recruited Ethel's brother to sell them secrets on the
<v Speaker 1>A bomb so that the Soviets could have it. Ultimately,
<v Speaker 1>they were accused and charged with espionage, including charges of
<v Speaker 1>giving many top secret pieces of information to the Soviets,
<v Speaker 1>and it's believed that probably the Soviets developed their nuclear
<v Speaker 1>weapons as fast as they did because of the secrets
<v Speaker 1>that Julius and Ethel had a hand in bringing to them.
<v Speaker 1>March of nineteen fifty one, they get charged. Later that month,
<v Speaker 1>they are convicted of espionage, and they ultimately become the
<v Speaker 1>first American civilians to be executed for espionage, and the
<v Speaker 1>first ones to be executed for espionage during peacetime as well.
<v Speaker 1>So for decades after their execution, the sons of the
<v Speaker 1>Rosenbergs maintained that they were innocent, they were victims of
<v Speaker 1>the Cold War paranoia. But ultimately later when top secret
<v Speaker 1>documents were opened, it was very clear that they had
<v Speaker 1>sold a great many documents to the Soviets. They even
<v Speaker 1>were offered at the time of their conviction, they said,
<v Speaker 1>we will spare your lives if you admit that you're
<v Speaker 1>guilty and tell us the names of the other spies
<v Speaker 1>that are involved. And they said no. So then in
<v Speaker 1>June nineteen fifty three, first one to be executed was
<v Speaker 1>Julius and he died with first shock. The second one
<v Speaker 1>was Ethel and after her first shock, the doctor said, nope,
<v Speaker 1>her heart's still beating, so they shocked her again, and
<v Speaker 1>then they shocked her again.
<v Speaker 2>Wow.
<v Speaker 1>Apparently by the last one smoke was rising from her helmet.
<v Speaker 2>Hid it again.
<v Speaker 1>So there's the atomic bomb. What can you tell me
<v Speaker 1>about the H bomb?
<v Speaker 2>Okay? So, the hydrogen bomb is a thermonuclear weapon power
<v Speaker 2>generated by nuclear fission of hydrogen isotopes. It creates a
<v Speaker 2>blast that can destroy structures within several miles, creates a
<v Speaker 2>giant white ball that can cause blindness, and of course
<v Speaker 2>the intense fireball that kills everybody in sight. Hydrogen bombs
<v Speaker 2>are thousands of times more powerful than atomic bombs. Edward
<v Speaker 2>Teller and other US scientists tested the H bomb on
<v Speaker 2>the inn wet Tack Atoll November one, nineteen fifty two.
<v Speaker 2>They actually built the bomb on this little atoll, this
<v Speaker 2>little island out in the middle of South Pacific. Then
<v Speaker 2>it was like, Okay, everybody move out, We're going to
<v Speaker 2>set this thing off. And when they did it, it
<v Speaker 2>destroyed everything.
<v Speaker 1>Was Indiana Jones there.
<v Speaker 2>Luckily there was a refrigerator or nearby. So the mushroom cloud,
<v Speaker 2>the fireball twenty five miles high. None of the structures survived,
<v Speaker 2>just a giant hole in the earth. Became a source
<v Speaker 2>of power for the United States in the fifties for sure.
<v Speaker 2>D what can you tell us about Sugar Ray.
<v Speaker 1>Well, it's not Sugary Lenar. This is, however, about Sugar
<v Speaker 1>Ray Robinson, who was the middleweight champion during this time
<v Speaker 1>in history, considered at the time pound four pound the
<v Speaker 1>best boxer that had ever existed. In June of nineteen
<v Speaker 1>forty seven, he was scheduled to defend his title for
<v Speaker 1>the first time against a guy named Jimmy Doyle. But
<v Speaker 1>then he had a dream that he killed Doyle and
<v Speaker 1>he said, I don't want to fight him, tried to
<v Speaker 1>back out of the fight. A priest and a minister
<v Speaker 1>convinced him to fight, and his dream came true. On
<v Speaker 1>June twenty fifth, nineteen forty seven, after a decisive knockout
<v Speaker 1>in the eighth round, Doyle was unconscious and later that
<v Speaker 1>night died in the hospital. Oh way, but I remember him.
<v Speaker 1>This is kind of interesting. I used to watch Car
<v Speaker 1>fifty four Where Are You? One of the only episodes
<v Speaker 1>that I can actually remember had Sugar Ray Robinson in.
<v Speaker 1>It was a barber worked there and he was like
<v Speaker 1>the nicest barber in the world, but he would go
<v Speaker 1>and box, and his wife didn't like the fact that
<v Speaker 1>he was boxing, and so she tried to make a
<v Speaker 1>trick to get him to stop boxing. So they had
<v Speaker 1>Sugar Ray Robinson dress up as this really old man
<v Speaker 1>and then whip this guy's butt. What And then it
<v Speaker 1>turns out that the boxing was the way he had
<v Speaker 1>the release, So he turned from this nice barber into
<v Speaker 1>this really mean barber because he had no release in
<v Speaker 1>boxing because he had quit because he was so upset
<v Speaker 1>that he had been beaten by this old man. And
<v Speaker 1>then it turns out, oh no, just go back to boxing.
<v Speaker 1>That was, you know, the best boxer in the world.
<v Speaker 1>He also appeared in Paper Lion Mission, An Impossible Episode,
<v Speaker 1>Mod Squad episode, Fantasy Island episode, and his last appearance
<v Speaker 1>is nineteen eighty three in The Fall Guy.
<v Speaker 2>The fall guy.
<v Speaker 1>Yep, you gotta always bring it back to the eighties.
<v Speaker 2>If you can't, that's right, that's right.
<v Speaker 1>Okay guys. That does it for today's episode. Join us
<v Speaker 1>next time for five minutes of fire