Behind the Scenes Minis: Society for Disastrous Accidents

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and I'm Tracey B.

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Speaker 2: Wilson.

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Speaker 1: We talked about Joaquin Torres Garcia this week.

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Speaker 2: Yep.

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Speaker 1: This is one of those times where my forgetful brain takes a minute to put together what a thing is in terms of references, because I had said at the top of the episode that I was trying to work on another Latin American artist, and I kind of sputtered out because there just was not enough material that I could get my hands on that was in English. And so I was like, who are other Latin American artists? And I had done some searching online and consulting lists, and I saw his name and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. And I started reading about him, and then I started looking through my pictures that I took when we were in Barcelona in various museums, and I'm like, oh, there's his work. There's this we're gonna get. I already had him on my list, I just forgot.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, listen, the brain is what it is.

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Speaker 1: But I'm so glad that I came back to him, because I really enjoyed learning more about him, even with a Madam Bolovotsky jump Scar. She's everywhere, that woman. I told you before we started listen she had good marketing because she literally is everywhere, influencing everybody for a pretty wide period of time. It's strange but also hilarious. Yeah, I marvel I said it while we were recording Taurus. Garcia was the busiest bee in the hive.

00:01:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: He was always hustling, Like yeah, I don't mean that in a pejorati of sense, but he was always like teaching, forming new schools of art, forming new publications of art, writing his own books about our theory, painting things, finding new forms of art that he could do. But what I really marveled at was how much he and many of the artists in his circle really love to form societies and orgs. We're just like, I know, let's form another society. And I found myself sitting there imagining, like were they just sitting around at like a cafe and they were like, you know what, we need one more society. But it makes me chuckle a little bit. And again I don't mean that in a negative way. I just there's a lot of groups. It's also really interesting that like some of those, even as he was very much rejecting some of the European schools of thought, a lot of those societies were forming in very Eurocentric places where a lot of the other artists were like, I'm going to mimic the Green Masters.

00:02:59
Speaker 2: Just interesting.

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Speaker 1: I didn't mention it in the episode because I have issues with Picasso, uh huh, as many people do, for the reasons that he was not a great human being. But there was a funny story that came up several times while I was researching where when he was in Paris, when Torres Garcia was in Paris, where Picasso also was at the time in the nineteeneens, and he started talking about I might go to New York. Picasso was like, New York is a void, don't do it. It's just tickled me a little bit. Here's my other big thing from this episode. Max Ernst. He came up a million times. Listen. Max Ernst has been on my list for a very long time. I have a Max Ernst inspired tattoo. He is the artist whose work made me want to get tattoos in the first place. I love his work and Samande Bonte is one of my favorite things. I keep putting it aside for reason since I don't entirely know, possibly because I don't want to find out something horrible about him. Sure, but as I was working on this and he kept coming up in exhibitions with Torres Garcia, he kept coming up in like other social circles, et cetera. I'm just like, I see you, Max Ernst, I'm coming for you. I swear I will do that episode at some It's almost like he's haunting me. Just fine, Max Ernst, welcome to the show. At some point in the future, I'm gonna knock it out just so I will stop.

00:04:36
Speaker 2: Being, you know, inundated with it. Right.

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Speaker 1: Anyways, I think it's interesting that we don't get a lot of Torres Garcia, and I didn't. I don't remember talking about him in any of my art history learnings as a student, and he was super important, so it's kind of weird. But I'm I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about him a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. His wife founded the museum that is named for him in Uruguay, and that seems like a very cool place. Even though a lot of his stuff did get did get destroyed in that fire elsewhere, but they do a lot of other artists of course there as well. So if we're ever there, guess where I'm going. We talked about the sl one nuclear reactor incidents on the show this week. Yeah, not the most peppy story. No happy holidays everybody.

00:05:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: One of the things that I think might have been going on in some of the some of the things that were like there are giant holes in the safety plan is the fact that there really had not been an incident like this in the United States since nuclear energy had first been developed. There had been other accidents we have talked about that, we talked about them in the demon Core episode, but that was not like a nuclear reactor failing in some way, And there have been other obviously nuclear reactor accidents since then, but this was the first one. And if I recall correctly, it had been something like nineteen years that critical reactor or that nuclear reactors had existed, and so that might have led people into a false sense of security slash complacency. But still, what do we do with radioactive bodies in the event of an accident? Seems like something that should have been planned for as a possibility, ye at a site that was specifically for developing prototypes for nuclear reactors. Yeah, It's one of those things where I find myself wondering, like, was this just such an unpleasant possibility to contemplate that no one brought it up thinking they didn't want to be the guy that suggested to their superiors that their system was gonna fail, right, and thus things went horribly awful. Yeah, but I don't know.

00:07:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:29
Speaker 1: One of the things that I found alluded to in some of the things that I read for this episode, which I didn't put into the core of the episode because it was something that I felt I felt like I couldn't really substantiate, was that the Army was more permissive of the sl one's various problems, and that had the Navy been making decisions about it in this whole sort of an her play among the different branches of the military, that the Navy would have shut it down way before prior to this incident happening, Like as soon as the stickiness problem revealed itself, that the Navy would have been like, I'm out, Tracy Tren to start a fight on this behind the scenes. Yeah, we're gonna have it behind the scenes between the army folks and the Navy folks. But I'm just saying this is And I was like, is this the truth or is this like reflective of attitudes about the different branches of the military among one another. I don't actually know. I watched a number of videos as well. I was preparing for this, and the one that was an Atomic Energy Commission kind of brief on the accident that had had had the recreation of what they were doing when it happened, had the weirdest tone to me. It was definitely a product of its era, that era being the nineteen sixties, and it really felt like a video that one might find in a derelict government building in.

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Speaker 2: A fallout video game.

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Speaker 1: And I like there were other other videos that were also made by the Atomic Energy Commission that I watched that had a similar vibe to them.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: And then there was one.

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Speaker 1: As I was trying to confirm whether people said DO line or whether they spelled it out DW line, and I watched a video that was on the DO line that had been made while it was in use, that had many minutes of like cold war scare mongering before we got to the first mention of the do line, and that a little bit reminded me more of my early childhood and you know, the final stages of the Cold War and how people would talk about the Soviet Union and nuclear capabilities and all of that.

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Speaker 2: Uh.

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Speaker 1: And I got very frustrated with that one in particular, because I was like, just say do line, Just say it, say the thing I needed to know how to say. Yeah, I beg yeah. A couple of random notes that I also had. We have a history in the United States of describing areas where nuclear testing or other nuclear work was going to happen as empty or uninhabited, and that has been false and really there were indigenous people living there right Like that happened with the Manhattan Project, and it happened with various like nuclear weapons tests and has had devastating effects on those communities. There's also a whole additional side of this that we talked about in the demon Core episode about the role of indigenous people and mining radioactive materials to be used in nuclear fuel, all of this. So I went down a rabbit hole of trying to be like, was this surrounding area really empty or not right? And it was not something that I found a conclusive answer to. I found some very sort of couched in what Wikipedia editors call weasel words about like if there were sheep or cows grazing nearby, they might have been affected.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: And I'm like, well, but were there.

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Speaker 1: It was so tremendously cold that night that I think it would have been very difficult for any living thing to just be out exposed in the temperatures, but like, I don't really know. And then the last thing is that this incident, tying into how it's really seemed like there were various safety things that should have been in place earlier, is now an example that gets used in basically training about safety and like failure prevention. And I read a quote that was by Brian O'Connor, chief of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA, in a slide deck about this that was about the.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: Cold War era.

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Speaker 1: Applying today's thing that people say about knowledge workers of move fast and break things, of having almost that same mentality during Cold War technological advancements, and the quote was quote, while the temptation or pressure to implement new technology can be great, premature use can end in premature failure.

00:12:44
Speaker 2: And I just really liked that quote.

00:12:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's totally true. Premature use can end in premature failure. So, Adrian, I hope you were happy with the episode that we did. I think I think, uh, Adrian would like a multi part Netflix special or something. Also, there is a whole book about it. I just closed my outline. What is the name of the book. The book was one of the last things that I read in the uh in the research of doing all this, having already read and made tons of notes that was based off of government reports. And so the name of the book was Idaho Falls, The Untold Story of America's new first nuclear accident, and it has more of a you know, human account of it rather than the many military reports which read like military reports. Uh So, Yeah, that's probably the last nuclear accident we'll talk about for a while, because a lot of the nuclear accidents are a lot more recent.

00:14:00
Speaker 2: Let me talk about on the show. Yeah.

00:14:03
Speaker 1: Also, as a personal favor to me, something horrible happens in someone's life and there are rumors about the nature of what was going on in their lives before it happened. Please don't hound them and bug them about it for years afterwards, because that's definitely disgusting. Yeah, Hi, I know you're grieving your husband, but was one of you cheating? Is there something going on? Yeah, No, it doesn't matter. You don't need to know that information. It was an intentional decision on my part not to include the names of any of the wives. All three of the men were married, two of them had children, one's wife was pregnant, and I don't think any of the people involved are living at this point, although their children maybe, And uh, the fact that people were like they did kind of become this focus on something they really didn't have anything to do with.

00:14:55
Speaker 2: Uh.

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Speaker 1: I was like, I'm not going to name them specifically because I don't I feel like I don't want to add even though they are at this point probably deceased, add to the spectacle of people hounding them for many years. In one case, one of them had gotten married and was sort of trying to move on with her life and it kept being.

00:15:16
Speaker 2: Brought back up. Rude and rot rude again.

00:15:22
Speaker 1: Lot of documentation of this reactor having issues before any of it happened.

00:15:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So.

00:15:32
Speaker 1: If you'd like to send us a note about this, there's in some way we're a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Whatever is happening over the course of your weekend. I know a lot of people are moving into hardcore getting ready for Christmas holiday mode. Not everyone, but you know, if that's what's coming up in your world, I hope that all goes really smoothly. And if you've got travel coming that goes well. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.