Podcasts

How Did Nuclear Weapons Get on My Reservation?

This podcast is Part 1 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 2 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

Air Force Member (tape): Yeah, unfortunately, right now we can’t have anybody on the access road because they’ll just, like, come out and monitor. I’m sorry.

 

Ella Weber (tape): Gotcha.

Ryo Morimoto (tape): No, no, that’s okay.

[CLIP: Music]

Ella Weber: You’re listening to my first encounter with the Air Force at a nuclear missile facility.

My name is Ella Weber. I am a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, which is located in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota. 

In this podcast, I’m going to tell you about myself, my community and our relationship with nuclear weapons. I’m 20 years old and a junior at Princeton University.

You’re listening to Scientific American’s The Missiles on Our Rez, a new miniseries from Science, Quickly. This is Episode 1: “Becoming Nuclear.”

 

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: I’m part of an undergraduate-directed project called Nuclear Princeton. We’re driving on the Fort Berthold reservation to look for nuclear missile silos. 

The people you’re about to hear are my friends Lillian Fitzgerald, a member of the Klamath Tribes, and Blue Carlsson, a member of the Cherokee Nation. Joshua Worth, who’s Native Hawaiian, is kind of observing from the back seat. 

We’re also there with Ryo Morimoto, a Japanese anthropologist and assistant professor at Princeton. There are five of us documenting the experiences of people living near missiles. 

Weber (tape): Are we turning here?

Morimoto (tape): Yep because this 87.

Weber (tape): Oh wait, It’s not on 87. It’s, like, right off this road. It’s … we have to pass it. 

Carlsson (tape): Oh, okay.

Fitzgerald (tape): We haven’t passed it, or…?

Carlsson (tape): So, we’re going ….

Weber (tape): We have to pass it. 

Carlsson (tape): So, we’re going through and straight. 

Weber (tape): Yeah….it’s right there. 

Fitzgerald (tape): It’s this?

 

Weber (tape): Yeah…yeah, it should be that! That little mound right there? That’s it!

Carlsson (tape): Oh….

Fitzgerald (tape): With the porta potties by it? What if I need to pee?

Weber (tape): No, that’s the missile silo. 

Carlsson (tape): H-09.

Fitzgerald (tape): Oh yeah, wow!

Morimoto (tape): [Laughs] 

Weber: Our team had surveyed at least three nuclear missile silos. Because they’re underground, we usually could only see a barbed wire fence with a long pole sticking out of the ground. 

We arrive in front of what looks like a nondescript tan house. It sits atop miles and miles of empty prairie, blanketed in snow. An eagle even swoops overhead. It’s very cinematic. 

 

I and other members of the project’s research team are at Hotel-01. It’s this missile alert facility  of the 91st Missile Wing, located between New Town and Parshall, North Dakota. 

Fitzgerald (tape): Air force!

Carlsson (tape): Yeah, he has a U.S. government plate… [expletive].

[CLIP: Car sounds]

Weber: Before members of the Air Force came outside, I didn’t actually know what a missile alert facility was. So I turned to Wikipedia to try to understand where we were.

Weber (tape): Oh, it used to be known as the launch control facility. It is a soft, or not able to withstand nuclear explosions. 

Carlsson (tape): Oh, God, this guy’s coming out.

Weber (tape): It consists of a security control office, dining room, kitchen, sleeping areas for security forces stationed there and occasional maintenance troop garages for various vehicles and other facilities. 

 

Weber: I’m so distracted that I’m not paying attention to what’s happening outside of the car. 

Weber (tape): That’s what a missile …

Carlsson (tape): Ella, look up.

Weber (tape): Well, that’s fun.

Carlsson (tape): Yeah, there’s two guys—one of them has a really big gun. They both have really big guns.

Weber: Ryo decides to talk to the two Air Force guards. 

Fitzgerald (tape): You guys, take a picture.

Carlsson (tape): I don’t want to take a picture. I’m scared. Ugh….

Research team (tape): Hi….

Weber: We get out of the car, too. 

[CLIP: Car doors shutting; everyone shuffling outside]

Worth (tape): These people are nice. 

 

Weber (tape): Of course. This is North Dakota, guys. Woo….

Morimoto (tape): You guys stationed here? 

Air Force Member (tape): Yeah.

Carlsson (tape): Must be fun….

Air Force Member (tape): Where are you guys from?

Research Team (tape): Princeton University.

Air Force Member: Oh, wow. It’s pretty nice in Princeton.

Morimoto: We’re trying to think where to go to get food [laughs].

Air Force Member: So, I mean, there’s a place in Parshall that you can get food, but that’s probably the only place for, like, 50 miles.

Morimoto: Well, thank you so much.

Weber (tape): Sorry to disrupt your day. Have a good one.

[CLIP: Footsteps receding]

 

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: Over the past 60 years, three generations of my people have lived with nuclear missiles on our ancestral lands. The missiles came in 1962, when my grandmothers, Debra Malnourie and Carol Schulz, were in boarding school.

Debra Malnourie: Where was I in 1962? I think I was at Wahpeton Indian school.

Weber: In case you don’t know, such boarding schools were founded to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with  mainstream American culture.

Carol Schulz: There were rows upon rows of beds where everybody slept in the first night. You could hear everybody cry.

 

Weber: Just a decade prior to missiles being installed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flooded more than a quarter of the reservation. That quarter consisted of nearly all of the agricultural land and 80 percent of the Fort Berthold population. 

Because of this, hundreds of families were forced to relocate as the water slowly crept up the valley. Homes, schools, graveyards, and churches were all flooded. With nearly all the resources gone, many families were forced to send their kids to boarding schools. 

Schulz: Some of the kids spoke nothing but their native tongue. And I remember the first time I’ve seen this woman just haul off and hit this little girl. And I’m looking at her. I thought, “What did she do?” And you could see everybody around us, and I’m looking at my sister, and she’s looking at me, and you know—and the next one, same thing, same language. And she got hit, too. 

That’s when I realized when they said you cannot speak your language, you must speak English, you have to fit in, you have to change. And I remember thinking, “What am I going to change into?” You know, you don’t know.

 

Weber: And just barely a decade after, when families were still readjusting to this new way of life, the U.S. military installed the nuclear missile silos.

Sixty years later some things have changed, but others have not.

I am at Princeton, with plans to major in public policy and international affairs. Meanwhile the silos are still on the reservation, and the U.S. Air Force plans to refurbish all of them and upload new nuclear missiles, with plans to keep them operational for the next 60 years.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t actually know there were missiles on the reservation until about a year ago, when Ryo sent me an e-mail.

Basically, he told me Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security was working on a computer model to see what communities would be impacted by fallout in a potential nuclear war. One of the identified areas was my home region.

 

I was intrigued, so I asked for a meeting to be set up with these researchers. The first one I spoke to was Sébastien Philippe, a French scientist and research scholar at Princeton.

[CLIP: Music]

Sébastien Philippe: For the past few years, I’ve been researching the radiological consequences of nuclear weapon use and nuclear war.

Weber: Sébastien had been modeling the consequences of a concerted nuclear attack on U.S. missile silos and mapping areas that are most at risk.

Philippe: My goal is to understand the implications of nuclear weapon policy choices, and identify communities that will be most impacted by these choices.

Weber: What was unusual was that Sébastien had served as a nuclear weapon system safety engineer for the French government, so he knew the risks involved. And to my surprise, when he showed me his maps, the places I grew up knowing as home in Crookston, Minnesota, and in North Dakota were in an area that was completely lit up.

 

When I pointed where I was from this is what Sebastien told me. 

Philippe: So that dark area that shows the places where people could receive several times the radiation dose that result in near certain death.

Weber: Oh, wow. 

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: U.S. nuclear weapons can be launched from land-, sea- or air-based platforms. The U.S. military calls this the nuclear triad.

I grew up 220 miles away from Minot, North Dakota, the only Air Force base to have two of the three legs in the nuclear triad. There are strategic bombers and nuclear missile silos. We just don’t have the submarine-based missiles—probably because Lake Sakakawea isn’t deep enough. (For legal reasons, I’ll point out that that is a joke.)

 

Anyways, historically, they were placed there because by going over the North Pole, this was the shortest distance from the former Soviet Union. It was also chosen because the population density was much lower than, let’s say, the East Coast, and should the nuclear weapons and bases be targeted, fewer people would die as a result. But—it also happened to be right on the North East Segment of my tribe’s reservation.

Philippe: When you’re planning for nuclear war, silos are a prime military target, destroying them requires detonating one or two nuclear weapons at close proximity. 

Weber: Basically, that means U.S. adversaries are probably targeting the 150 silos armed with nuclear missiles that are located in North Dakota.

As I looked closer to the maps, I noticed the dark plumes in central North Dakota near where the reservation is. When we zoomed in, we realized that the targets were within the Fort Berthold reservation boundaries. There were 15 nuclear missile silos within those boundaries.

This changed everything for me.

Weber: So that…makes us a target?

 

Philippe: Yeah, that makes you a target.

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: I had minimal knowledge of nuclear weapons before I came to Princeton, so what Sebastien told me that day was, quite honestly, a lot to take in. There were nuclear missile silos on our land, and in the event of a nuclear war, my entire family would likely be dead within a month. That revelation hit me like a ton of bricks.

You might also think you know how a nuclear explosion works. But let me ask Sébastien to break it down for you a little bit more.

Philippe: When a nuclear weapon is detonated…

[CLIP: Archival tape of announcer counting down to an atomic bomb test] 

 

Philippe: … inside of it, it starts a fission chain reaction that burns through the plutonium that is in the weapon. And also, that energy is used to light up the secondary part, or the fusion part of the weapon.

So the nuclear explosion generates a gigantic fireball, and that fireball, if it interacts with the ground, it can suck up the dirt and tiny soil particles then fix the radioactivity generated by the explosion. So all of this radioactive dust lifts up in the air. That generates the big mushroom clouds we see in the movies. 

And those mushroom clouds, eventually, they are pushed by the high altitude winds and the particles start falling back to the ground as soon as the mushroom cloud is created, but because some of those particles are lifted up so high in the atmosphere they can take days, or even sometimes weeks, but it can take days for them to come back. And in that timeframe, they can travel hundreds of miles away. 

 

So really, it’s like in 24 hours or 48 hours, you can have fallout that crosses the entire United States, or well into Canada, or even possibly get to Mexico across the border.

Weber: Basically, that’s what nuclear fallout is. But Sebastien wanted to tell me more about its risks. 

Philippe: When the particles you know, fall to the ground, and people are living in those areas, they get exposed to radiation from what is emitted, from those radioactive particles. Radiation can destroy cells, destroy your DNA. And when you get exposed to very high doses of radiation, you start seeing symptoms like people vomiting, losing their hair, internally bleeding and so on. It’s just really awful.

Weber: I knew nuclear weapons existed, but I never really thought deeply about where they might be located or what the implications could be. But why would I? My mind was mostly preoccupied with the day-to-day stuff that college kids have to go through. I never really considered the possibility of a war with nuclear weapons.

 

I was shocked, to say the least. Why were there nuclear missiles on tribal land? Did my family know about this? Did they know that the Air Force was planning to put new missiles on the reservation and keep them there for the next 60 years? I had so many questions circling in my head that day.

I decided to go to the reservation, bring other Princeton folks with me, and meet with Grandma Debra to ask her what she knew about the silos.

Malnourie: Like, if you’re going out of town here, there’s one just before you hit that last hill going into Parshall. There’s one on the right hand side. I think there might be another one out here. I’m not sure.

Weber (tape): We have a map of all of them…. It’s all public knowledge, where they are.

Malnourie: So where are they?

Weber (tape): Do we have the map on there?

Malnourie: Because I know in—I know south of Parshall had some down that way, too. But I don’t know if they’re still running or not.

 

Weber:  While I had come for answers, it was I who broke the news to Debra that there were 15 silos on the reservation.

Malnourie: Wow, I didn’t know that. I need to take notes [laughs].

Weber: Even though she was alive when the silos arrived, she only learned about them when she came back from boarding school.

Malnourie: I really didn’t know anything about this stuff until I came back.

I think I was maybe 18, 19. I had no clue. I know there was some sites, but I didn’t know what was in the sites. I still don’t know what’s in the sites, you know. But I don’t think this is something that—I think more people ought to know about this and get more reaction from them. You know, this, I’m shocked about this.

[CLIP: Music] 

 

Weber: What Debra didn’t know was that an Air Force general had come to Fort Berthold and presented a plan to modernize the missile silos. She also knew very little about what was behind the fence and under the ground and what she could do about it.

So I decided I would figure this out for her, for me and for my community. And I started digging. This five-episode podcast is the result of what I found. I have to warn you: it’s not a pretty story. And it begins by tackling the big question: How on earth did nuclear missiles arrive on our land?

If you are Native American, the answer won’t probably surprise you. Others, well, you should buckle up. Tune in for our next episode: “After the Flood Came the Missiles.”

[CLIP: Music] 

 

This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton and Columbia Journalism School. Music by Epidemic Sound.

I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton and Columbia Journalism School.

[CLIP: Music] 

 

Just One U.S. Reservation Hosts Nuclear Weapons. This Is The Story of How That Came to Be

This podcast is Part 2 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

Edmund Baker: Is it, is it true that out of all of these, though, we are the only reservation?

 

Sébastien Philippe: Yeah. 

Baker: Oh…we are….

Philippe: You’re the only reservation in the United States who hosts nuclear weapons.

Baker: Okay, guys, that’s a new perspective.

[CLIP: Music]

Ella Weber: In American history, certain stories remain untold, buried beneath the weight of oppression, neglect and exclusion.

How nuclear missiles ended up being deployed on the Fort Berthold reservation of the MHA Nation in North Dakota — also called the Three Affiliated Tribes — is one such story—a tale that epitomizes the troubled relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. government. 

That, by the way, is Edmund Baker, environmental director of MHA Nation. He’s responsible for enforcing the Three Affiliated Tribes’ environmental protection code. He wasn’t exactly aware of the U.S. Air Force’s plan to modernize all of its existing nuclear missile silos, including the 15 on our reservation. But more on that in the next episode. 

 

You are listening to Scientific American’s podcast series The Missiles on Our Rez. I’m Ella Weber, a member of the MHA Nation, a Princeton University student and a  journalist. This is Episode 2: “After the Flood Came the Missiles.”

In the first episode, I explained how I came to learn that my tribe was hosting 15 nuclear missiles deployed in underground concrete silos across our reservation in North Dakota. 

Today I want to dig deeper into this history. This is important because it’ll give you more context when we talk about the U.S. Air Force’s plans to refurbish these silos and deploy new nuclear missiles in them for the next 60 years.

[CLIP: Powwow sounds]

Weber: The silos are just a couple of miles away from my grandma Debra’s house and from the powwow grounds in Parshall, North Dakota. How on earth did these weapons of mass destruction end up on the reservation?

Weber: The silos are just a couple of miles away from my grandma Debra’s house and from the powwow grounds in Parshall, North Dakota. How on earth did these missiles end up on the reservation?

Debra Malnourie: I think I was at Wahpeton Indian School, because I really didn’t know anything about this stuff until I came back. I was maybe 18, 19. I had no clue. I know there was, there was, there was some sites, but I didn’t know what was in the sites.

 

Weber: The silos on the reservation were built between 1961 and 1963. Back then many of the residents of the Fort Berthold reservation were children. When I asked my grandma if she remembered the time when the silos arrived, she couldn’t.

Malnourie: I still don’t know what’s in the sites, you know.

Weber: When MY Grandma came back from boarding school, the concrete was already poured, and the missiles were underground, out of sight. So I turned to historians and scholars to shed some light on this troubled story.

[CLIP: Cold war newsreel: “But after the Korean conflict, the Cold War went right on. All along, it had been only too obvious that ever since World War II, the Soviets had been building their military strength. Their threat of world domination was real, and it was increasing all the time.]

Weber: The late 1950s and early 1960s marked a period of intense cold war tensions. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 triggered the U.S. to build land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958. The U.S. Air Force prepared to deploy 1,000 nuclear missiles, each carrying a high-yield nuclear warhead, in six bases across the Northern Plains, including 150 in Minot, North Dakota, next to our reservation.

 

David Stumpf: One of the criteria at the very beginning was: it needed to be located by a Strategic Air Command base. And so Minot and Grand Forks were already Strategic Air Command bases. Then for the initial deployment of Minuteman 1A, there was a range issue. 

They also had to have the right soil. All of these sites were thoroughly surveyed for water table and ease and ease of excavation.  But they also had to have enough space to put 150 silos. And that’s a lot of room. As noted in my book, that’s tens of thousands of acres and hours between the furthest-away sites and the base.

Weber: That’s David Stumpf, author of Minuteman: A Technical History of the Missile That Defined American Nuclear Warfare, published in 2020.

Basically, each missile silo field covers this really large area because each silo had to be several miles away from the next one. That’s because in case there was a Soviet nuclear weapon attack, the extra space would have prevented more than one silo from being destroyed. 

 

By the way, the 150 silos at Minot cover an area of about 8,000 square miles.

That was all really important to know. But I specifically wanted to understand how some of the silos ended up on tribal land.

Weber (tape): Did you ever come across like, any, like, documents talking about that while doing your research?

Stumpf: Talking about what, being on a reservation? 

Weber (tape): Mmm-hmm. 

Stumpf: No, I never came across anything like that, which is an interesting question. But don’t forget, this is back in [the] 1960–1965 timeframe. So the sensitivity to some of this was possibly not as great as it is now. Doesn’t make it right—I’m just saying that that was more of a government … there was an urgency to get these things built that may have overridden any concern about reservation property.

 

Weber (tape): I see….

Weber: For me, this resonated deeply. It was a familiar pattern of subjecting my tribe to land grabs and mistreatment.

From the 1850s to 1910, our tribe’s ancestral lands were diminished through a series of treaties, agreements, congressional acts and executive orders.

By 1886 my tribe had lost most of its land, which it never recovered. In 1910 the current North East segment of the reservation was deemed unused by the tribe and was opened to white settlers’ ownership. This is where the missile silos were eventually built. 

But that’s not the whole story.

[CLIP: Music]

Keith Richotte: The federal government was going to break up tribal, communally held lands into individual plots of land and try to essentially turn Native peoples into individual farmers or landholders, and to disrupt tribal, communal, community practices.

 

And because there was more land than there were individual natives who can make claims to land, the federal government felt that it could kill two birds with one stone, as it were, and sell off individual plots of land that were not claimed by Native peoples to non-Native peoples.

Weber: That’s Keith Richotte, an associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also happens to be an expert on American federal Indian law and policy and tribal law and a member of the Turtle Mountain Tribe of North Dakota. 

I wanted to understand the Dawes Act and the Act of June 1, 1910—which opened up tribal lands to homesteading—and also understand what happened.

Richotte: Well, to put it succinctly, it meant a lot of land loss.

Richotte: It was part of a larger policy movement in the United States at the time, which is often referred to as the allotment era of federal policy. And the basic premise of the allotment era, the federal policy, was to destroy tribes and tribalism. The idea was that the only way to “save” Native peoples from the disastrous forces of civilization was to raise them up to a certain level of civilization.

 

Weber: But this changed.

When the missiles were deployed in the 1960s, the North East Segment of the Fort Berthold reservation wasn’t considered part of the tribe’s land. But through a court case in 1972, The City of New Town, North Dakota v. the U.S., it was deemed that the land had always been part of the reservation—per the Act Of March 3, 1891.

The only thing was that when our tribe recovered lands that had been taken from us, we also inherited missile silos that we never agreed to having in the first place.

I asked Keith what the missiles on the reservation today meant for the tribe legally.

Richotte: The tribe doesn’t really have much recourse other than perhaps making some claim of nuisance or that it disrupts the tribe’s ability to use its land in the way that it wants. But my guess is you’re going to have a real hard time in American courts making the argument that these missile silos are such a nuisance that the tribe should be able to exclude them, considering what they ostensibly mean for national security.

 

Weber (tape): Well, that’s kind of, like, doom-and-gloom. Um, but….

Richotte: Well, that’s Indian law.

Weber: Before we continue, I want to pause and give you a sense of the geography of the Fort Berthold reservation. The rez is divided into six segments: North, North East, East, South, West and Four Bears (the tribal government center). The missiles were built on the North East Segment. This is the part that was unlawfully opened to outside settlers in 1910 and recovered by my tribe in 1972, 10 years after the missile silos were built.

But there’s another part of this story that we haven’t really talked about yet. In 1944 the Army Corps of Engineers began to build a series of dams on the Missouri River for the conservation, control and use of water resources. One of these is the Garrison Dam, which was completed just downriver from our reservation in 1953. 

 

At that time, the dam flooded one quarter of the reservation. The flood destroyed 95 percent of the Tribes’ farmlands, homes, towns and graves; displaced our people in and out of the reservation; and reshaped the landscape for decades.

Angela Parker: I think it was kind of a classic example of environmental racism.

Weber: That’s Angela Parker, an assistant professor of history at the University of Denver and, like me, an enrolled member of the MHA Nation. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation—soon to be a book — on the construction of the dam.

Parker: The tribe did propose an alternate dam site, but that would have flooded out much less tribal land and would have impacted the non-Native farmers above Fort Berthold much more, and so that was just sort of dismissed without much thought, right, by the, by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Weber (tape): So what happened after people moved? Like, after, like, it, the flood, started coming in, the water slowly started, like, coming in—what, what were people doing?

 

Parker: Yeah, it was so chaotic. And the communities were just in chaos. There was no infrastructure, sometimes there was no roads, you know. They had to, like, go out and dig wells. They had to move houses down from the bottom lead out to the allotments. There was no electricity for a lot of the reservation, and there were no schools. So a lot of kids who were born during that time period got sent out to boarding schools because we were already struggling economically.

So, like, my mom got sent out to Wahpeton when she was eight years old, and that was very common for a lot of people, you know, at Fort Berthold just because their parents were doing anything they could to make sure that they had access to an education.

Weber: For me, this was the final connection between the flooding of the reservation, the sending of my grandmothers to Indian boarding schools, the land grab and the missile silos.

Parker: At the time, right, when the U.S. government is coming in and sort of appropriating this land for these silos, right, people had already been through the wringer. 

 

You know, our society structures had held us together for so long, but when the dam came in, it was like chaos. It was like untying a string, and, like, all of a sudden, everything’s falling all over the place. But I think what saved us, you know, after smallpox, was that we could band together still; we’re living close to each other.

That was not as possible once people got pushed off to allotments after the Garrison Dam. After the Garrison Dam, that was probably the perfect time for the military to come in and decide, like, “Yeah, we’ll just take this.”

Weber: It was only eight years later, as the Three Affiliated Tribes were recovering from losing their homes and adapting to life after the Garrison Dam, that the U.S. government decided to build nuclear missile silos on the lands that it had grabbed in 1910—lands that many in the tribe had now relocated to.

Gwen Hostler: I was like two, three years old when the dam went through. And I’m, I was pretty young, but I remember that they were told, you know, they had to right away “get your stuff together.” 

 

So it was a quick, quick move because the water was coming in. I don’t know any more than that, just from what, you know, I was told by my grandmother in them. So that—it sounded like they weren’t given much time to move up.

Weber: That’s Gwen Hostler, a cousin of my Grandma Debra. She lives in the South segment of the reservation. There isn’t any direct road access to this place from any other parts of the reservation because of the flooding. So, we went off rez and drove three hours to meet her.

Hostler: The lake just tore a lot of families apart, you know.

Weber: I went to the Garrison Dam myself. It’s not exactly what I expected it to look like. I thought you’d be able to see the water flowing, like, rushing down. But it doesn’t look like much.

The Army Corps of Engineers sees this as a great feat of human capability and engineering capability. But the Three Affiliated Tribes see it as the end of the old ways of life. 

 

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: In response to this reporting, the Army Corps of Engineers sent two pamphlets and a statement that these publications, quote, “have been available for years” and that they, quote, “include information on the displacement of tribes and communities as a result of the construction of Garrison Dam and the subsequent flooding that formed Lake Sakakawea.”

These pamphlets, however, never mention the MHA Nation by name, nor do they specifically mention the flooding of the Garrison Dam. They only say that, quote, “tribal and state lands were taken, uprooting whole communities.” When Princeton University’s Sébastien Philippe and I visited the Garrison Dam on June 23, 2023, we and looked through 20 pamphlets, and neither of us saw these two particular publications or any others that recognized the MHA Nation or mentioned the flooding of the Fort Berthold reservation.

 

We did, however, observe interpretive panels that called the Garrison Dam, quote, “the world’s largest rolled earth dam of its time,” during our visit on  June 23. 

As it turned out, it was also the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that was both in charge of acquiring the land to build the nuclear missile silos and responsible for their construction. And to do that, it contracted the same company out of Omaha, Nebraska, that had built the Garrison Dam. History always repeats itself.

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: In the next episode we will dive into the U.S. Air Force’s plans to refurbish the silos, load them with a new nuclear missile and keep them operational for the next 60 years. We will look, in particular, at how this plan and its potential environmental impact were presented to the tribe in the summer of 2022.

This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert.  Music by Epidemic Sound.

I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton, and Columbia Journalism School.

 

If You Had a Nuclear Weapon in Your Neighborhood, Would You Want to Know about It?

This podcast is Part 3 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

[CLIP: Audio from Association of Air Force Missileers video: “After over 50 years of incredible service, the Minuteman III will be replaced and modernized with a new generation ICBM. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent Systems Directorate team will deploy 400 new missiles, update 450 silos and modernize more than 600 facilities across almost 40,000 square miles of U.S. territory. This undertaking is a true megaproject that will require radical teamwork, disciplined execution and historic resolve.”]

 

[CLIP: Music] 

Ella Weber: This true megaproject is now called the Sentinel missile program. It’s the Air Force’s most ambitious military construction and weapons project in decades.

Weber: The new weapon is one part of a plan that was started under former President Barack Obama. It was accelerated by the Trump administration to replace and upgrade the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal — at a projected cost of upward of $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years. 

It’s a project that will perpetuate, until at least 2075, the little-known role that my tribe—the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota—plays in U.S. National Security policy: to be a nuclear target.

 

You’re listening to Scientific American’s podcast series The Missiles on Our Rez. I’m Ella Weber, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, a Princeton student, and a journalist. 

This is Episode 3: “The Air Force’s New Nuclear Missile.” 

In this episode, we’ll be talking about how the Air Force came to our reservation to present its new missile project to the tribe, and how this fits into the broader patterns that have characterized our historical relationship with the U.S. government.

[CLIP: Air Force environmental impact statement video: “The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is a federal law that requires federal agencies to integrate environmental values into their decision-making process. NEPA review is required when a federal action is proposed that may have impacts on the human or natural environment. NEPA includes requirements for involvement of the public and government entities and, in the case of this project, 62 Native American Tribes.”] 

Weber: Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the U.S. Air Force is required to produce an environmental impact statement. In this case, it’s to “analyze the potential effects on the human and natural environments from deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile system.” Also, it’s to “provide the public and other stakeholders an opportunity to comment on the action and associated analyses, and to consider all alternatives.”

[CLIP: MHA Nation honor song]

Weber: The Fort Berthold reservation was the first place picked by the Air Force to present this report at a public hearing and collect public comments on the record. This was an opportunity for the Air Force to connect with the MHA Nation and to explain the military branch’s plans and what they meant for the reservation. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t exactly what happened.

Logan Davis: That public hearing? Meaningless. You know why it’s meaningless? Because nobody was really informed, nobody was able to give the testimony they wanted to do, and nobody had a clear picture because nobody was prepared. I certainly wasn’t prepared.

 

Weber: Logan Davis is a freelance journalist, an army veteran and an elder of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of North Dakota. He’s been reporting on the MHA Nation for a long time and happened to be on the reservation that day. He learned about the EIS meeting by chance.

[CLIP: Music] 

Davis: I was eating, talking, visiting, and I saw this policeman that’s a friend of mine. He’s like, “Hey Logan, you going to that environmental impact study meeting?” I was like, “What?” I’m a journalist, and nobody told me. I didn’t know about it until this cop called me. 

So nobody knew about it. So I was calling people, “Hey, you gotta get over here; you gotta testify,” you know?

Weber: Davis’s struggle to find where the meeting was taking place was confusing. The Air Force had advertised for weeks in local newspapers and on the radio that the meeting would take place at the New Town Powwow grounds. But for some reason, the location of the meeting was changed last minute—to the Four Bears Casino.

 

Davis: The cop was there. I sat with him. And I said, “Are you going to testify?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he goes. “If somebody else does.” And I just looked around, and there is just very few people from this community. It was mostly Air Force people. Nobody told any of the journalists or any news person. It was so highly secretive. And that bothers me.

So they did this whole video thing [on] how great it’s going to be, blah, blah, blah, jobs, and it was just like, okay, you guys are not telling the truth.

Weber: In case you’re wondering, the video that’s being talked about is the one that we played at the beginning of this episode. It’s about the environmental impact statement of the Sentinel Program.

Davis: They never talked about war. They didn’t talk about jobs. They talked about how it’s going to benefit the community, for the most part. 

My forte is journalism—and I started asking questions and they took the general out of the meeting, out of the building, out of the area of testimony. They left! And then we’re, they said we’re going to have an intermission. 

 

When we come back, they were starting the public testimony. But where the hell is the chairman, where the hell is the major general? They should be here listening to the public testimony. 

Weber: As it turned out, Davis was the only one who had filled the sign-in sheet at the meeting entrance. And he was called up first.

Davis: I’ve always felt nervous about being in North Dakota because there’s so many nuclear missiles here.

I testified that I know there’s always a chance for incidents and accidents and nuclear accidents. They’re not all going to be like Chernobyl, but it could be. And when you’re messing with warheads, you know, you have to be, you know, so precise, and, you know, there’s a process and procedure and safety.

Weber: So Logan’s a reporter. But he was also stationed in Germany in the 1970s, when the country had short-range nuclear missiles, so he has some prior knowledge in this area.

 

Davis: I’m not the most smartest, the most knowledgeable, about nuclear missiles. I do know enough that it’s a dangerous occupation. I mean, any kind of amount of radiation exposure can kill you or hurt you—lessen your health.

Weber: Someone else spoke up, too.

Jerry Ruth Birds Bill Ford: Jerry Ruth Birds Bill Ford. My mother is a Cherokee from Oklahoma, from Claremore, Oklahoma. And my dad is Lawrence Birds Bill, from here. He’s Mandan and Hidatsa.

Weber: Jerry was one of the two women that testified that day after Logan spoke up. She’s married to a retired Air Force colonel. Her daughter’s in the Air Force, too. I asked what  brought her to testify that day.

Birds Bill Ford: Well, they asked me if there was a close working relationship between the tribe and the, and the United States Air Force. And I tell them no, there wasn’t one at all, that everyone here knew that there were silos on the reservation, but there was just, like, little-to-no communication between the Air Force and the tribe. 

 

Weber: If you listened to the previous episode, you’ll know that there are 15 nuclear missile silos on the reservation itself. But Jerry didn’t know there were that many.

Birds Bill Ford: There are 15? I couldn’t remember. All on the reservation? Or…okay…wow. I didn’t know that. 

Weber: During her testimony, Jerry suggested that the Air Force develop a permanent partnership with the Tribal Council itself and the representatives of a higher level.

Despite the fact that the Air Force changed the location of the actual meeting with the tribe so close to the event that the chairman and veterans went to the wrong location, Major General Michael Lutton, commander of the 20th Air Force, came on the reservation to talk about how grateful he was to the tribe for showing up. 

[CLIP: Major General Michael Lutton speaking at visit to the MHA Nation: “And when you combine knowledge and time, you have wisdom. And we’re so thankful for your time and the time of the people here, and we look forward to cooperation as we share a common goal to defend our nation and our land. Thank you so much.”]

 

Weber: In an e-mailed statement in response to this reporting, the Air Force said, “The National Weather Service issued a severe weather storm wind advisory alert for Northwest and North Central North Dakota for July 18, and 19, 2022. MHA Leadership, Veterans Groups, Tribal Law Enforcement, security and facility security directors consulted with each other.  

The decision was made for the protection of human health, safety and cultural resources that the hearing be moved to the planned back up, indoor venue, 4 Bears Casino and Lodge.” 

Though there was one severe weather alert for those dates, on the day of the hearing on July 19, 2022, it was sunny by 4:15 P.M. local time, prior to the meeting’s start at 5:30 P.M. 

I asked Logan if, during its 30-minute PowerPoint presentation, the Air Force had discussed the role of the silos in U.S. nuclear strategy, the rationale behind the modernization program and the risks that are involved for the tribe, if nuclear war or accidents were to occur.

 

Davis: The only thing they talked about is that they were going to make sure everything was safe. We have to take it for granted and, and rely on that word of the military and the politicians.

Weber: During Major General Lutton’s visit to the tribe, he exchanged gifts with the MHA Nation’s chairman, Mark Fox. 

Six months later, Fox signed a programmatic agreement with the Air Force. The agreement streamlines the exchange of historically and culturally relevant information of sites that could be impacted by the missile modernization program, which will include deploying Sentinel and quote “decommissioning and disposing of the Minuteman III ICBM system.” 

In its e-mailed statement, the Air Force said that, quote, “the radiological effects of a strategic nuclear attack on the continental United States are beyond the scope of this Environmental Impact Statement.” 

Mark Fox, the MHA Nation’s chairman, did not reply to several requests for comment. 

 

MHA was one of two tribal nations to sign this agreement out of 63.

Davis: Did we really need that Minuteman change? Do they really? I mean, it’s not going to really deter any more than they already have.

Nothing will change because nothing is really—we don’t know if it’s going to affect us except if there’s an accident.

[CLIP: Music] 

We’re supposed to be protective of the land. You see, the system has changed us—changed the last couple generations to not respect the land like we’re supposed to. Our ancestral teachings as Native Americans teach us to respect, honor Mother Earth, not to put toxics, crap in her.

Weber: This was a lot to take in. I asked Logan what made him speak up so freely today, especially considering the fact that he’s been worried about retribution in the past.

 

Davis: I’m trying to protect the environment and my grandchildren’s future. And my little granddaughter, she’s born today. I want to come into a world that’s safe and secure and doesn’t have to have the dreams and nightmares I did when I was a little boy worried about nuclear war. 

Weber: To better understand who in the tribal government had been consulted about the environmental impact statement, I met Edmund Baker, environmental director of the reservation, who is responsible for enforcing the Three Affiliated Tribes’ environmental protection code. You might recognize him from the previous episode. I told him about the EIS hearing.

Weber (tape): I guess they said, like, it was like a town hall, community-type meeting. But …

Edmund Baker: Really?

Weber (tape): Yeah.

Baker: Well, you understand that [on] the reservation, there’s sort of the official release of information, either in a newspaper or maybe on the radio. But even so I haven’t heard the guys in the office mentioning anything like this.

 

I’m a little surprised that—I don’t know what they think of this office. Maybe in the scheme of things, with all the projects going on—and this is a busy council—that if you’re going to deal with such things as government-to-government relations and a re-signing or an extension or an agreement to keep nuclear warheads within or near your tribal nation’s homeland, that somehow [the] Environmental Division might be somewhat relevant.

Weber: Edmund wasn’t exactly thrilled.

Baker: I’m  just trying to imagine how they see us. Maybe they see us as “This is not important to them. They handle the oil field” or—I don’t know what they’re thinking, actually. But what surprises me most is [that] this has not been an issue.

Weber: Given his experiences with environmental impact studies and other permitting issues, I asked Edmund whether it was important for members of the tribe to know what would be the potential nuclear risks associated with living with the silos.

Baker: You know, just technically speaking, I don’t—if you’re going into another person’s house, we’ll say—well, we’ll make this candid. 

 

[CLIP: Music]

Let’s say you come into my house. You want to build something in there. You think it’ll be good for me. And you’re going to tell me, “Oh, this is what it does. I’m not going to harm anything.” And I ask you, “Okay, well, what are the risks?” 

And you tell me. At that point, I have the ability—now, this is small scale, but these concepts are in there—I have the ability to say, “No. That ain’t gonna fly here. Thank you. Have a good time. I’ll see you later. No. Door closed.” 

In a lot of sense, that’s, that’s what the EIS sort of functions as, right? 

[CLIP: Music]

 

Weber: In the next episode, I will interview nuclear weapons experts to better understand what was not discussed during the EIS public hearing: the real risks for the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation from living with nuclear silos on our lands.

This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert.  Music by Epidemic Sound.

I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton, and Columbia Journalism School.

 

What Would It Mean to ‘Absorb’ a Nuclear Attack?

This podcast is Part 4 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

[CLIP: Music]

 

[CLIP: Association of Air Force Missileers video: “Minuteman III consists of a three-stage solid propellant booster, which is almost 60 feet tall and five and one-half feet in diameter at its widest point. The fully outfitted missile weighs almost 80,000 pounds and can eventually reach a speed of about 13,000 miles per hour, or approximately 3.6 miles per second…”]

Ella Weber: Members of my tribe live with nuclear missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The weapons sit in underground concrete silos that are surrounded by antennas in small, fenced-off areas. The missiles are armed and ready to launch in 60 seconds. This is one reason they are called Minutemen missiles.

[CLIP: Air Force video: “The final page of history is in our hands. You can’t live your life within inches of a nuclear weapon and not feel the weight of the world. Our mission is to carry that weight. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Sticks don’t get much bigger than this.”]

[CLIP: Minuteman missile launch]

 

Weber: You are listening to Scientific American’s podcast series The Missiles on Our Rez. I’m Ella Weber, a journalist and an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, or MHA Nation, a Princeton student and a journalist. This is Episode 4: “Catastrophic Risks.”

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: After learning that the Air Force had not explained to my tribe what the new nuclear missiles were for–which the Air Force intended to deploy for another 60 years on our reservation–I decided to dig deeper.

I wanted to know what role the missiles and their silos play today in U.S. nuclear strategy and what the risks for the tribe were in hosting them—something that the tribe never agreed to in the first place.

[CLIP: General Jim Mattis speaking at confirmation hearing: “When looking at each leg of it, with the ICBM force, it’s clear that they are so buried out in the central U.S. that any enemy that wants to take us on is going to have to commit two, three, four weapons to make certain they take each one out. In other words, the ICBM force provides a cost-imposing strategy on an adversary.”]

Weber: That was General Jim Mattis, former secretary of defense in the Trump administration. During his confirmation hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017, he was explaining the role of the silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, referred to as ICBMs in military jargon.

I wasn’t really clear on what Secretary Jim Mattis meant by the ICBM force providing a “cost-imposing strategy,” so I talked to Leonor Tomero to get some clarity. She used to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration in 2021.

Leonor Tomero: In terms of the ICBMs, it’s sort of strength in numbers because you’ve got so many, and they’re so spread out, that an adversary would have to commit a lot of nuclear weapons if they were to pursue a large-scale attack on the United States.

 

Weber: Leonor explained to me that should the U.S. face a potential nuclear attack, the president would have two choices with regards to the ICBMs: launch them preventively before the missiles possibly got destroyed, or decide to absorb the attack and retaliate later.

Weber (tape): What do you mean by absorbing an attack?

Tomero: I think, you know, it’s, you know, they’re considered a sponge.

Weber (tape): So it’s kind of like making these ICBMs, like, a target ….

Tomero: Yes…

Weber (tape): …. rather than, like, these other major cities or other places…

Tomero: Right.

Weber: In case you don’t know — the role  of the ICBM is to force an adversary to use many nuclear weapons if they decided to attack the U.S. The silos are basically meant to divert and absorb the incoming nuclear missiles from important and critical areas in the country, like cities.

 

But what would that mean for the Fort Berthold reservation?

Frank Von Hippel: I’m Frank von Hippel. I’ve worked at Princeton [University] since 1974, and I’ve been working on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation—and also, among other things, the consequences of nuclear war.

Weber: Frank served as assistant director of national security at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. This was during the Clinton administration.

He was also one of the first scientists to be involved with research on the consequences of nuclear strikes on U.S. nuclear weapons—including the Minutemen silos—which he described in detail in Scientific American in 1976.

There’s a particular hearing from around that time that he references.

 

Von Hippel: Basically the secretary of defense had come in and testified to Congress. When one of the senators asked how many people would such an attack kill, he estimated 15,000 to 25,000. And he said, ‘Well, that would be terrible, but it would be not what you would expect from a major nuclear attack.’ 

That seemed low to, actually, the senator from New Jersey [Clifford Case]. And he asked for a peer review of the Defense Department calculations, and, and I was then asked to be an unpaid consultant to look into that. And, in fact, I went over to the Pentagon to talk to the people who have done the calculations.

Weber: Frank found something unexpectedly horrifying.

Von Hippel: The Defense Department had assumed that explosions of the warheads over the ICBM silos would be so high that they would not cause fallout. They pointed out they would also not damage the silos.

Weber: Basically, the Department of Defense hadn’t calculated properly. The DOD had made incorrect assumptions about the altitude of nuclear explosions aimed at destroying the silos. Initially, it had thought the nuclear explosions would need to be at an altitude. But–they actually needed to be at ground level.

 

Von Hippel: The DoD was forced to go back and do new calculations reflecting these points, and they came out about 1,000 times higher: 20 million—on the order of 20 million people killed.

Weber (tape): Wow.

Von Hippel: And I wrote an article in Scientific American about that…. And we published another article in Scientific American in the mid-1980s. And the numbers went up a little bit, but, but we were in the same area.

Weber: Then someone from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—one of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons laboratories—called Frank.

Von Hippel: He said, “We wish we had your resources.” We were less than $1 million dollars a year. And, and I wondered why he said that, and, and I realized then that they had not been given permission to do these kinds of calculations until after they were asked to check our calculations.

 

Weber: I wondered if this time the government had actually done calculations as part of its modernization plans to deploy the new Sentinel missiles. 

I asked Frank what would be the consequences for my tribe should the 15 silos be attacked with nuclear weapons.

Von Hippel: Well, you know, the, I don’t know who coined this term about the silos being a nuclear sponge, but the local….I think there would be annihilation of the local population around the silos. Wouldn’t just be the fallout—would also be the, the blast effects, and so on. So they would be the worst affected.

Weber (tape): My grandma only lives two and a half miles away from an ICBM silo. What would happen to her and her place?

Von Hippel: I think she would be within the blast radius … and the fire radius…. I don’t know how flammable… her house would be presumably burned after being knocked flat. And then there would be the fallout. These explosions would have to be low enough to hit the set of silos with sufficient overpressure to destroy the missiles inside. It would have to be low enough for, for the dirt to be and debris to be sucked up into the cloud. And then that would bring down some of the radioactivity in a very intense patch around the silo. So … multiple ways in which she might die. I’m sorry.

 

Weber (tape): I mean, she didn’t make the decision to have them there. So …

Von Hippel: Yeah, I know.

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: Being treated as expendable isn’t new to Indigenous communities. As far as I could tell, members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation don’t see themselves as living in a sacrifice zone. 

This designation treats certain areas and people as acceptable losses; they bear the brunt of the risks and consequences associated with nuclear weapons and decisions made by others. Maybe if members of the tribe had a better understanding of what the risks were, they could challenge the deployment of these silos on our land.

[CLIP: Music]

 

I went back to talk to Edmund Baker, environmental director of the MHA Nation. We also talked to him in the last episode, where he told me he felt that members of the tribe should be aware of the risks.

This time, I visited him with Sébastien Philippe of Princeton University.  

In case you don’t remember, Sébastien is a nuclear scientist and principal investigator of the same missiles research project we talked about in Episode 1. He had just finished computing the consequences from a concerted nuclear attack on the ICBM silos. In some sense, he had updated the work that Frank and others had done back in the 1970s and 80s.

Sébastien Philippe: Now I’m going to put the whole image of the entire areas that can be impacted by the fallout, and I can walk you through the color coding, but that’s basically the worst case possible for every single person on the map.

 

Edmund Baker: Okay. Holy crap. Even Disneyland’s not immune. Disney World’s out. New York—there’s no safe place.

So that batch there, North Dakota, the white sort of color…?

Philippe: Yeah.

Baker: That’s 100 percent fatality in that zone?

Philippe: Times 10. Yeah, ten times what you would need to die—and that’s just from the radioactivity.

Baker: Okay, so that’s not in the EIS, I figure, or is it?

Philippe: Uh, no.

Baker: [Laughs] We’re saying that’s sort of bolstered, downplayed here and there, but they have to mention certain things. Holy cow, yeah…that’s….

Weber: By the way, Edmund’s talking about an environmental impact statement, or EIS—a two-volume report released by the U.S. Air Force that is meant to analyze, “the potential effects on the human and natural environments from the deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile system.” 

 

This was the report that the Air Force had presented to my reservation—in a different place than it had initially advertised. And in the entire 3,000 pages of the report and its appendices— which cost $33 million to write, by the way —  Sébastien had found that the consequences of a nuclear war that could impact my tribe were kind of glossed over. 

The EIS mentioned the “casualties” and “grave implications” of such a war but they didn’t really go beyond that. 

Here’s Frank again, speaking about the military’s attitudes toward the consequences of war in general.

Von Hippel: They talk about people like your grandmother as being collateral damage. I mean…, they try to desensitize themselves to what the consequences are, what they’re talking about—and, in fact, I remember when I first went over to the Pentagon to talk to people, I learned—the first time I heard this word called “collateral damage,” that is—“We, you know, we didn’t intend to kill your grandmother…. She’s, unfortunately, collateral damage.”

[CLIP: Music]

 

Weber: Somehow I’m not surprised. But Frank goes on to talk about something else. There’s another word that the U.S. government uses for the scenario in which silos that are close together are targeted by multiple warheads.

Von Hippel: You had to time the two explosions so that the first explosion wouldn’t destroy the other warhead. For that they use the term “fratricide.”

The one warhead destroying another was “fratricide,” and then a warhead destroying people was “collateral damage.”

Weber: Maybe that’s why no one in the Air Force told my people about these risks. But wasn’t it their responsibility to explain and justify their choices in terms of what weapons we need for our national security — and how these choices affect those who need to live with these weapons?

Von Hippel: It is a terrible subject. And we’re lucky that, so far, we have survived this. My grandfather was involved in the Manhattan Project. He would have been surprised as well. So, I hope we can surprise them again by getting rid of these things.

 

Weber: Maybe there’s something the tribe could do about the silos on its land.

Weber (tape): So, theoretically, could we get rid of the 15 silos that are on the reservation? 

Tomero: In terms of ‘can you just remove those 15?’ I think [that] depends on where they are, how they’re wired into the system, and the devil is in the detail. 

Weber: That’s Leonor again. As I mentioned earlier, she previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration. I had also asked her if getting rid of 15 silos on the reservation would make the U.S. less secure.

Tomero: So, again, you have to look at the total amount of silos. There’s 400 total silos, in terms of silos that are on alert, the total amount is 450 silos. And so when look at those 15, of course, you’re looking at 15 out of 400 and 450, so of course that means you’re not losing that leg of the triad–so it’s a relatively small number. 

 

Weber: But there was something else that bothered me: the Air Force’s plan to maintain silos until the 2070s. We had advanced so much technologically in the past 50 years—from the floppy disk to the Internet to the smartphone. Would the silos still hold up?

Tomero: I think, you know, in my thinking about nuclear deterrence, I don’t think we should be reinvesting in fixed ICBMs. They’re not survivable systems.

Weber: Leonor means that our nuclear architecture is pretty old.

Tomero: I think when you’re looking at this, and you think these are going to last into the 2070s, at that point, we’re going to have 100-year-old nuclear architecture, right?  

We’re reinvesting and making sort of—incrementally are modernizing, but it’s an incremental change on an architecture that we decided to deploy in the 1960s. And does that really make sense in terms of keeping nuclear forces into the 2060s, 2070s, where technology has evolved? 

 

And so we need to, I think, be looking at new concepts for deterrence and be a lot more focused on “How do you introduce stability in nuclear deterrence?” And for me, that means prioritizing resilience and survivability.

[CLIP: Music]

Weber: If anyone could advise the U.S. on resilience and survivability, it would be us: the MHA Nation. And I have a feeling that keeping ICBM silos operating across our land may not be part of our preferred strategy.

In the next and final episode, I go back to the rez and report what I found to my family and members of the tribe. We sit down and discuss: What happens now?

This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert. Music by Epidemic Sound. 

I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton, and Columbia Journalism School. 

[CLIP: Music]

 

Climate Adaptation Can Backfire If We Aren’t Careful

Andrea Thompson: Humans have been adapting to our environment as long as we’ve been around—it’s how we’ve settled everywhere from the bitter cold Arctic to the scorching desert heat. But with the heat waves, storms and other extreme events fueled by our rapidly changing climate, we’re having to adapt on a scale we’ve never experienced before.

And the choices we make in how we adapt can sometimes come back to bite us—as in the case of embankments built in Bangladesh that were supposed to stop floods but have made them worse. Or they can lull us into a false sense of safety—as in the case of sea walls in Japan that were no match for the 2011 tsunami.

 

This is Science, Quickly. I’m Andrea Thompson, Scientific American‘s news editor for earth and environment.

Even our best intentions have unintended consequences, and when looking at past mistakes—as journalist Stephen Robert Miller does in his new book, Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought and the Delusion of Controlling Nature—it’s clear that the more we try to hold nature in our grip, the more damage we ultimately do.

Miller joins us to talk about what he learned in his reporting about these maladaptations and what they can tell us about the potential pitfalls of adapting to climate change.

[CLIP: Show music]

Hi, Stephen, thank you for speaking with us.

Stephen Robert Miller: Thanks for having me on, I appreciate it. 

 

Thompson: To start, can you briefly tell us about one or two of the maladaptations that you write about in your book and how they may have yielded some short-term success but came with long-term consequences?

Miller: Sure I’ll kind of book it I think with—I have three case studies—I’ll talk about the first and the last. The first one takes place in Japan. And it has to do with the tsunami that hit in 2011 that killed something like 20,000 people.

The coast of Japan had been protected by sea walls for years already. It’s just that none of the walls and breakers and everything that was in place to protect the people along the coast at the time, was up to what came that day. And that’s largely because nobody at the time expected that that kind of wave could come. There had been warnings, there had actually been warnings, but they hadn’t really been listened to. And so the walls that were there were totally inadequate for this wave that came, which was just enormous.

And it might seem kind of cut and dry. But one of the bits of research that I came across early in my reporting for this book, talked about the impact the walls had had on the people who live behind them. And what it found was that in towns along the coast, where there had been a recent investment in this infrastructure—sea walls and levees—and where people did not have a close memory of, a recent memory, of a tsunami, which at this time was a lot most people, the walls had actually, they cause there to be a higher death toll. And they attribute it largely to the kind of false sense of security that the walls provided. They also found that evacuation times behind the walls were slightly longer than in towns that did not have these walls. And again, they attributed it to a false sense of security.

And so what really struck me, of course, was just this issue of the false sense of security this infrastructure could provide and how you might kind of parlay that into climate change about all the sea walls. We’re building in Miami, in New York City and along the coast in Oregon and California, and how this infrastructure maybe might make us feel like we’re safer than we actually are.

So flash forward to the last section of the book, is all about Arizona, where I grew up. And there the issue, obviously, is not too much water, there’s too little water. 

 

I talk about the Central Arizona Project, which is a canal that brings Colorado River water hundreds of miles across the desert into Phoenix and Tucson. Most of the book focuses on the farmers there who because they’re the ones who are feeling the impacts of the water shortages in the Colorado River. They’re finding themselves–some of these cases, some of my sources and characters in the book, are people who are being cut off from their water supplies. One of them’s a young farmer, he’s in his 30s, he just had his first kid, he’s a fifth-generation grower, and he’s now realizing that he doesn’t, he’s not going to have any water, at least not the way he thought he was going to. And this is all after years of depending on at the time, it was a largest piece of infrastructure that the country had built – the Central Arizona Project canal. And so I can make this connection there that I think what’s happening in Arizona, the reason so many people are moving to this place that’s struggling with basics like water, is because there’s a false sense of security that’s been provided for by this infrastructure that we built there.

Thompson: So one thing I was curious about that that struck me that you also mentioned in the book is that maladaptation isn’t necessarily just the physical infrastructure rebuild like sea walls or the pipeline bringing water but can include things like laws – and I know that that was particularly a part of the situation in Arizona.

And so can you talk a little bit about, given what you’ve learned in your reporting, what some of the pitfalls that you’re worried about as we try to adapt to climate change are particularly outside of the physical infrastructure?

Miller: Especially when it comes to laws and policies and things, I think one of the biggest pitfalls is our kind of need to write things in stone. Maybe this, you know, this is an aspect of our legal system? Where lawyers want to have everything battened down, you want to make sure that there’s no confusion about who has rights to what, or you know, who’s responsible for what, and so we write laws and policies that are, they are as hard as concrete.

 

And that is a really bad strategy, when you don’t know what’s going to come down the pipeline. What we need are adaptive, malleable, reactive policies, and laws and things – things that can change on a whim, not things that are going to be stuck in time. The policy I’ve talked to most about in Arizona is the Colorado River Compact, right, which just had its 100-year anniversary last year. And that kind of sets up the whole story there, because that law determined how much water there was in the river, right? But it used bad information to do that, which was part of the problem to begin with. But it also committed the seven states, and eventually Mexico, to using, to having access to, and therefore using a certain amount of water.

Regardless of how much water was actually in the river, whether it would change over time, you know, this was a thinking that really came out of the east part of U.S. where there’s ample water, and they just hadn’t thought enough about the fact that this river would probably run dry at times and other times were flooded. And so by locking us into this idea that there was this much water and everyone had this much right to it, they committed the future of these states and cities to just try to use up all the water they had the rights to, regardless of whether that was necessarily a good idea.

And now I’ve talked to people, you know, one of them is a Navajo Nation member who’s also a water policy expert. And he mentioned to me how he felt like he would, he was more likely to to imagine an apocalypse before the change of the Colorado River Compact. Like, this thing is so set in stone that it’s just seems totally immutable.

 

And then beyond even just the law is also, you know, insurance is another often maladaptive reaction. I’ve written about the crop insurance in particular, which kind of encourages farmers to plant crops, repeatedly plant crops that don’t produce well, whether, because in Arizona, it’s because they’re planting things like cotton and hay that require a lot of water, and that are drying up. But this insurance causes them, so they can still make money off of that. So they just keep doing it. And it keeps them from adapting has been plenty, plenty of studies that show prove that the existence of crop insurance keeps farmers from investing in other forms of adaptation that might be more sustainable down the road.

Thompson: Right, and that you alluded to this a little earlier, but I noticed in each of the cases in your book, there was a person or people or some sort of research that sort of, at least hinted at, if not, you know, outright, very clearly showed the folly of whatever the adaptation was and how, you know, it could lead to the problems that then did happen. How could listening to those voices actually, help us avoid having maladaptations?

Miller: That’s a big reason why I wrote this book. It’s not the most uplifting book and I get that. And I think these days solutions are popular, everybody is getting kind of tired of the doom and gloom and wants a way out. I understand that. But I really wanted to arm people with the information to recognize when maladaptations are happening at home, when their towns or cities are considering risky decisions that are going to lock them in the future generations into making even worse decisions down the road.

 

I wanted them to be aware of when this is happening, and to be able to speak up and say, “Well, in my experience living in this place, here’s how I think we should handle this.” Because so often the decisions are made by outsiders, outside experts who come in with what they think is the right idea of how to manage these situations, these hazards.

The section the book focuses on Bangladesh, and the Ganges River Delta became, in a way, a story about colonialism. And this resistance, like the, the struggle between locals who knew their environment, and outsiders who are coming in to just, you know, extract the resources of that environment. And what gives me hope about that one, at least in the end is that there are people there who are recognizing and giving space for these ideas that might be called indigenous knowledge, although some of the stuff that doesn’t necessarily date back as long as we think about that we’re here. 

But still, what it is, is methods of dealing with, with the Ganges River Delta, that don’t involve trying to control it involved trying to just contain its rivers, but actually giving those rivers room to flood and move.

 

Thompson: You’ve referenced future generations. And, you know, I know you’re a new parent, I also have a young child, a toddler, and I find that you know, since becoming a parent, it has definitely made me more aware of the long legacy of the actions we take, or that we don’t take now. You know, it’s it’s our children and their children and their children’s children that are going to be living with the decisions we make today. So I’m just kind of wondering, how becoming a parent has influenced your thinking on all of this?

Miller: The big thing for me is the idea that we need to leave our kids with more options, not fewer, right? Because the the challenges that our children will face will be even greater than challenges that we’re facing. It’ll be less water, it’ll be higher temperatures, more storms, and things that we’re not even aware of right now.

So the last thing we want to do is rob them of what tools already exist. And that’s a tricky thing about maladaptation is this technological lock-in right? Where you do one thing once you build a dam or now suddenly because you have this hard infrastructure, this dam you have your system now depends on this dam. And everything you do, every decision you make downstream of that time, ultimately comes back to the existence of that dam. How you manage the water, how you decide who gets it, when you release flows, whether you’re building canals to like collect some of that water whether your energy is dependent on that dam.

 

These types of infrastructure have these long legacies that affect all these other decisions we don’t even often think about. And so, we need to be making decisions now with the idea in mind that the situation in the future is going to be very different. And we need to be coming up with malleable adaptations, reactionary adaptations that can change on a dime, depending on the different scenarios, you know, different changing environments, and also changing priorities. In Japan, when the sea walls were initially built, people looked at concrete like it was a sign of modernity and it was proof that their country had emerged from World War II with some vitality.

Now, modern generations, the latest newer generation doesn’t like the concrete and doesn’t want to see sea walls they would like to see more like nature-based solutions they want they want forest buffers instead of big concrete walls. And so we need to we need to be thinking about that and think about like what are our kids really gonna, what kind of lifestyle are our kids gonna want to live and they’re the ones who have to live behind with this infrastructure.

[Clip: Show music]

 

Thompson: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper, and Carin Leong. Our show was edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. 

Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts.  

For Science, Quickly, I’m Andrea Thompson.

 

Why Childhood Vaccination Rates Are Falling

Tanya Lewis: Hi, this is Your Health, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series!

Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: discoveries that affect your body and your mind.  

 

Lewis: And we break down the medical research to help you stay healthy. 

I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman: I’m Josh Fischman.

Lewis: We’re Scientific American’s senior health editors. 

Fischman: On today’s show, we’re going to talk about the alarming decline in vaccination rates for childhood illnesses like measles and polio, and what we should do about it—before there’s an outbreak.

[Clip: Music]

Lewis: COVID gave a huge boost to the antivax movement. But vaccination rates for many childhood diseases were starting to erode long before that.

Fischman: That’s right—it started with people like Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spreading false information about the effects of vaccines and autism and got amplified from there. It’s really become an organized movement now.

 

Lewis: Absolutely. So it may not surprise you that during the pandemic, the number of kids getting routine vaccinations fell even more, leaving them more vulnerable to these diseases.

Fischman: That’s definitely not good. The last thing we need is another measles or whooping cough outbreak.

Lewis: Exactly. And some of these diseases can cause serious disability or even death—remember polio?

Fischman: My parents remember it vividly. Kids on crutches, horror stories of iron lungs, people fearing summer because that’s when cases peaked. And Jonas Salk became a huge hero because of his polio vaccine in the 1950s. 

Lewis: Right! It was a scary time. Thanks to vaccines, polio was nearly eradicated worldwide, except for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In August 2022, there was a case of polio in Rockland County, New York—the first U.S. polio case since 2013. The virus was also found circulating in wastewater.

Vaccination rates for polio in the Americas have dropped to about 80 percent—much lower than the 95 percent threshold public health officials say is needed.

Fischman: And it’s not just polio, right?

Lewis: Right—it’s also diseases like measles, mumps and rubella, or tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just came out with a report saying that between 2019 and 2022, vaccination rates for many childhood diseases dropped from 95 percent to around 93 percent nationwide. Idaho had the lowest vaccination rate, at just over 81 percent. 

Fischman: A change from 95 to 93 percent doesn’t sound like a huge drop. But for diseases like measles, which are extremely contagious, its a big deal. Anything less than 95 percent could lead to an outbreak.

 

Lewis: Exactly. And we saw such outbreaks even before the pandemic. In 2019, there were more than 1,200 cases of measles across 31 states—the highest number since 1992. And most of the cases were in unvaccinated kids.

These trends only got worse during the pandemic. Measles cases increased by an estimated 18 percent worldwide, and deaths increased by 43 percent in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a recent report.

To find out why childhood vaccinations have declined, I talked to Jennifer Nuzzo.

Jennifer Nuzzo: I’m Jennifer Nuzzo. I’m the director of the pandemic center and professor of epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Lewis: I asked her about the nationwide drop.

Nuzzo: Seeing it slip below 95 is deeply troubling. But the problem is actually probably greater than even that 93 percent statistic would suggest, because that’s sort of a nationwide average. You can still have pockets of the population where the coverage is actually quite low. And we have seen in the past, you know, where a state maybe has generally good vaccination coverage, but within a county, for instance, the coverage may be quite low and we’ve seen outbreaks occur in those circumstances. 

 

Fischman: So, what’s driving this drop in vaccination rates? Is it antivaxxers? Or is something more complex going on?

Nuzzo: I think we probably have a few things going on. And I think more work is definitely needed to figure out which among these things is driving this decline in coverage the most. But first of all, there were gaps in sort of preventative care that occurred during the pandemic and the coverage declines for MMR we don’t see across all age groups, and it suggests that perhaps some kids are still getting caught up.

Fischman: So basically, kids got behind on their shots because they weren’t going to the doctor as much, or didn’t have access to medical care?

Lewis: Right, that’s definitely part of it.

Nuzzo: I’m also mindful of the fact that we do see a difference in coverage according to insurance status, and according to different patient demographics, which may suggest that there are just gaps in provider coverage or not sufficient abilities to access vaccines in certain places.

 

Lewis: Nuzzo pointed out that it’s still a challenge for parents to get their kids vaccinated in general.

Nuzzo: It just still feels too hard. I mean, it seems unacceptable for me that parents have to take off of work in order to make sure they can get to an appointment that’s, you know, frustratingly scheduled in the middle of the day, etc. That’s just not necessarily things that all parents can just easily do. So we need to make it easier for parents to get their kids vaccinated.

Lewis: But vaccine hesitancy and misinformation have clearly also played a role.

Nuzzo: I do think that there has been an unfortunate attack on vaccines, and perhaps a growing share of the American public questioning the value and safety of vaccines now as a result of the pandemic, and a lot of the mis- and disinformation that circulated around. 

 

Lewis: Every U.S. state has a mandate requiring kids be vaccinated in order to attend school.

Fischman: There are exceptions, though. Sometimes for medical reasons. But in recent years, more parents have gotten vaccine exemptions for their kids on religious or philosophical grounds.

Lewis: Yes—the exemption rate increased to 3 percent nationwide in 2022, and in 10 states it was over 5 percent.

Nuzzo: And just to be clear, I mean, the surveys show that still the vast majority of Americans support school based vaccine mandates. So there still is broad public support for vaccine mandates. That said, we are seeing a rise in exemptions. And we need to understand why that is.

Lewis: Surveys suggest that Americans’ trust in science declined during the pandemic. The news isn’t all bad, though: a recent Pew study found that most Americans still have positive views of childhood vaccines overall. But about half of parents of children four and younger say they worry that not all childhood vaccines are necessary.

 

Fischman: I’ve heard parents talk about this. In some ways, vaccines are a victim of their own success. We don’t see a lot of childhood diseases that vaccines prevent, so people have stopped worrying about getting them.

Lewis: Right. Plus, during the pandemic, COVID vaccines became politicized, and that spilled over to other vaccines as well. But Nuzzo, a parent herself, points out that health care providers haven’t done a great job addressing parents’ genuine concerns.

Nuzzo: You know, I think that there have been a lot of questions that we’ve not appropriately or sufficiently answered, that have left lingering doubts in parents minds, or have contributed to growing doubts in parents minds. And this is really something that I think we have to get ahead of, because if just left to its own can continue to grow and grow.

Lewis: Basically, Nuzzo says this is a wake-up call that we should be paying attention to parents’ concerns about vaccines, and addressing them before an outbreak happens.

 

Nuzzo: We need to take this as an important signal and start building the infrastructure and the trust that is necessary to bring people back to the side where they’re incredibly grateful for the advantages that vaccines offer.

[CLIP: Show music]

Fischman: Your Health, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Carin Leong, and by us. It’s edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.

Lewis: Our show is a part of Scientific American’s podcast, Science, Quickly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, give us a rating or review!

And if you have a topic you want us to cover, you can email us at Yourhealthquickly@sciam.com. That’s your health quickly at S-C-I-A-M dot com.

 

For Your Health, Quickly, I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman:  And I’m Josh Fischman.

Lewis: See you next time.

 

How Misinformation Spreads through Conflict

[CLIP: MSNBC NEWS: “Disinformation and Propaganda.”]

[INTRO MUSIC]

 

[CLIP: CNN NEWS: “Viral videos about this war that are having huge impact. But they’re completely fake. But they’re having dire consequences.”]

[CLIP: NBC NEWS: “Dozens of accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, spreading rather what’s believed to be coordinated posts with disinformation about the war.”]

Sophie Bushwick: When any major news event happens, a lot of us have the same impulse …

Tulika Bose: We go to social media to follow the latest updates.

Bushwick: But that can sometimes backfire.

Tulika Bose: Right now we’re seeing viral misinformation everywhere—especially during the current Israel-Hamas conflict. 

[CLIP: MSNBC NEWS: “Spreading fast, influencing opinion and making it difficult for anyone who uses social media to decipher what’s really happening on the ground, in the Middle East.”]

 

Bose: So we asked the experts why this is happening and what you can do to avoid being taken in.

Bushwick: I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.

Bose: I’m Tulika Bose, senior multimedia editor. And this is Science, Quickly.

[CLIP: Intro music]

Bushwick: On social media platforms, some footage and photos that have been attributed to the Israel-Hamas conflict are actually fake, or mislabeled or both.

Bose: Think video game footage passed off as a real missile attack from Israel or parachute jumpers in Egypt mischaracterized as a Hamas attack.

[CLIP: Sound from R3 video]

Bushwick: Fake content like this has been viewed millions of times. 

Bose: Propaganda during wartime isn’t new. But online misinformation, spread by social media influencers, seems particularly bad around this conflict. 

[Read more about the satellite tech revealing Gaza’s destruction]

Shayan Sardarizadeh: In terms of what I’m seeing, it’s definitely comparable and similar to what I was seeing in the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine, after Russia invaded invaded Ukraine. And by that, I mean most of the misinformation … has been [from] ordinary people, regular users on the Internet, who are trying to do what is known as engagement farming.

 

Bose: That’s Shayan Sardarizadeh, who works on the BBC Verify team. His job is to take viral photos and videos about the conflict and investigate them. He’s found something really disturbing about all of this.

Sardarizadeh: It’s probably one of the worst examples of misinformation that you use the pain and suffering of people, genuine people, civilians on the ground while being impacted by this conflict, to basically farm engagement and build up your influence online. In some cases, I’ve seen TikTokers who are, you know, claiming to be, to be sharing live streams on the ground from either Israel or Gaza and, you know, the live stream has got two, three million viewers.

Bushwick: That’s because people are more likely to share something that makes them emotionally engaged …

Bose: Even if those emotions are negative.

Sardarizadeh: And also, most of the time you’re posting stuff that is a bit shocking, a bit, sort of controversial, that it will get engagement. And then you will be able to build up your influence. You, you’ll gain followers and, you know—if you’re operating on [a] platform that basically pays your money for, for high engagement like YouTube, like TikTok, right, Twitter or X, as it’s known these days. 

 

Bushwick: These incentives Shayan talks about are baked into social media. Platforms are designed to keep people on the site as long as possible. And as part of that, they reward individual accounts for earning engagement from other users. So that creates a motivation for unscrupulous influencers to post whatever will get them the most attention.

Bose: Sometimes those attention-getting posts make false accusations that real people are the ones making things up. In one example Shayan found, a far-right Indian influencer claimed that Palestinian refugees in a bombed refugee camp were actually so-called crisis actors.

Bushwick: He falsely stated they were staging their grief for the cameras.

Bose: Yeah. Shayan personally verified that the video in question featured a man who had lost three of his children.

Bushwick: Accusing people of being so-called crisis actors can also happen with mislabeled footage. For instance, Snopes debunked a video on TikTok that claimed to show an Israeli crisis actor pretending to be a recent victim of Hamas. The video does show an actor being positioned on the ground as if he’s injured, it’s completely unrelated to the current conflict—it’s from an April 2022 film shoot.

 

Bose: Shayan pointed out that a lot of these attention-grabbing accounts are falsely passing themselves off as journalists or open-source intelligence …

Bushwick: Aka OSINT experts …

Bose: Which distracts from the true citizen journalists and data analysts.

[CLIP: “Hello, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza. More than 50,000 people to 60,000 people are evacuating to Al-Shifa Hospital and still evacuating every day. People are eating, sleeping, living here.”]

Sardarizadeh: Tons and tons of videos that, that news outlets have shared … has come from people on the ground, either in Israel or Gaza, using their smartphones to record and document what’s going on.

[CLIP: Plestia: “They bombed really close to my house, that’s my window right now, that’s the view… (gasps)”]

Sardarizadeh: And then somebody or the other major newsroom, you know, somebody like me or my colleagues in my team … has sat down, looked at that content, verified it and decided, okay, that’s good. We can use it as genuine content from Israel-Gaza…. And, you know, my work would have been, would have been impossible without that.

 

Bose: But here’s the thing: the combination of a lack of moderation on platforms, the rapid spread of misinformation during a conflict and the incentive of people to get more likes and views is creating this perfect storm. So, Sophie, you cover so much of this, especially in the tech space. What are your thoughts?

Bushwick: There’s this oft-misquoted phrase about truth and lies. I’ll give you the Terry Pratchett version: “Lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on.”

Bose: Oh wow. That’s prescient.

Bushwick: It’s very easy for anyone to post an unverified photo or story and have it go viral. But if you’re, if you care about the truth, if you’re updating that information with a fact-check, it takes you much longer because you have to actually verify the truth and then chase down all the runaway versions of the lie, and that might have spread beyond social media by the time you show up to debunk it.

 

Bose: And social platforms aren’t policing this, right?

Bushwick: Right. A lot of platforms did establish really strong moderation policies after the 2016 election, but more recently, a lot of them have laid off or reduced the trust and safety teams in charge of this, and that makes them much slower to respond to misinformation. This enables the most extreme information out there to take off—even when it’s not true.

Bose: Yes. And I think one of the things we’ve really seen too, like one of the biggest issues, is like when we know that viral misinformation, like if it starts on social or if it starts somewhere else, also makes its way up to news outlets.

Bushwick: Absolutely, and that sometimes happens when outlets report on a narrative without mentioning that the source of their information could be biased. For instance, publications like the New York Times,, CNN  and even the BBC. have reported stories that were based on claims from sources that hadtheir own biases and agendas. And then the outlets have had to walk back their reporting when a fuller picture emerged from additional sources of information.

 

Bose: Right that need to be first, right? 

Bushwick: Right, yes, instead of trying to get a more fuller picture before they publish. 

Bose: Exactly. I mean I know one journalist that’s been really active on X, formerly Twitter, in asking outlets and reporters to stop sharing viral misinfo is you know, Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek.

Adam Elmahrek: I don’t think in the history of, at least in my career—I have not seen misinformation spread so wildly about this war…. Unfortunately, the real problem, from my vantage point as a reporter of the mainstream media, is that stuff percolates up to the mainstream media.

Bushwick: For what it’s worth, I’m incredibly indebted to our own in-house fact-checkers — 

 

Bose: — Thank you, thank you!

Bushwick: — Who help catch mistakes before we embarrass ourselves.

Bose: We love them. Copy editors are heroes, especially in times like this. But what are some examples of media sharing misinformation?

Bushwick: One case is an explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Shayan and other investigators — they’re actually still examining the visual evidence to figure out who was responsible.

Sardarizadeh: Everyday my work has been since that, that night, going through all the social media for the CCTV footage, images of the blast site, the crater, the damage to, to the hospital building, the car, park, the surroundings, you know, the people who were injured, you know, going through all of those videos and talking to experts and talking to, talking to people, our reporters on the ground, you know. We were lucky enough to have a couple of reporters. Not many news organizations currently have reporters on the ground in Gaza. We do and that is a huge help to our work. 

 

Bose: Multiple outlets, such as like the New York Times, reported that this strike came from Israel before they had evidence of that, and they later had to issue retractions. Reporters are still trying to figure out the true story of what happened.

Bose: In addition to the contested strike at Aal-Ahli Arab Hospital, Israel’s government has targeted Al-Shifa Hospital, and has claimed that it was a command center for Hamas. Under the laws of war, hospitals lose special protection if they are used for “harmful” acts. 

Bushwick: This raid, which killed a number of civilians, was roundly criticized by Doctors without Borders, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. 

Bose: Earlier this month the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, released a video in which an IDF spokesperson claimed to show evidence that Hamas had held hostages in the basement of the al-Rantisi pediatric hospital. In it, the spokesperson described a document written in Arabic as a, as a quote — 

 

[CLIP] “A guarding list where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” 

Bose: Soon after CNN broadcast a report in which he made the same claim. 

[CLIP: Daniel Hagari speaking in CNN video: “This is a guarding list. Every terrorist has his own shift.” In this room, he says, a guard list, that begins October 7th, and ends November 3rd, not long before the hospital was evacuated.”]

Bushwick: It turned out to be a calendar with the days of the week since October 7 under the title “Al-Aqsa Flood Battle,” Hamas’s name for its surprise attack on Israel on that date. 

Bose: But there weren’t any names at all.

Bushwick: Which is what both the IDF video and the CNN broadcast had claimed. 

 

Bose: And critics online were quick to point that out — especially because the calendar in Arabic was clearly visible.

Bushwick:  Israel’s government has since called this a “translation error,” and the claims have been walked back. 

Bose: And — HuffPost reported that CNN quietly took out the clip about the calendar in subsequent broadcasts and material posted online. But — this whole had situation had another effect.

Bushwick: It has undermined public trust and fed into people’s existing confirmation biases. 

Bose: — if Hamas was holding hostages at this hospital, the misinformation, (even if unintentional), became a really big part of the story instead. 

Bushwick: That’s what people focused on. 

Bushwick: Another example of a story that was widely reported before there was confirmation was pretty disturbing—so I’m going to recommend that sensitive listeners skip ahead by about five minutes. 

 

Bose: Here’s a clip from the White House on October 11, 2023 

[CLIP: Biden remarks from October 11: “I never really thought that I would see, and have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children. I never thought I’d ever… anyway.”]

Bose: It turns out that this wasn’t true—and Adam had actually been trying to warn people about this.

Elmahrek:When I tweeted that, that skepticism thread, or maybe the day before, when I tweeted about the beheaded babies claim and said, “Wait, let’s figure out what’s really going on here. Let’s vet this a little bit more, more before we spread it.” President Biden went live on air and said that he had, he had seen and confirmed photos of beheaded—that Hamas terrorists were beheading babies. He had to walk that back; he had to retract that. And all, as all of this is happening in real time, I kept trying to warn my colleagues vet this stuff, don’t take it at face value—question them on it, pressing for the evidence, you know, don’t just rebroadcast this claim without any skepticism, without, without saying that this has been vetted because this is going to have real dire consequences…. Unfortunately, a lot of media did not heed that warning and had to walk back claims, walk back to beheaded babies claim.

 

[CLIP PRESS CONFERENCE:] Just wondering if you could explain to us how the President came to say yesterday that he’d seen pictures of militants beheading children. Obviously it’s important to make sure that disinformation doesn’t get out there. How did he end up saying that? He was referring to images that many of you may have seen, many of your colleagues have reported on – and obviously Israeli officials have spoken to. [media clamor.] But has the President actually seen the photos? 

Bose: NBC reported that, quote, “beheaded babies,” unquote, had 44 million impressions on X alone within a day of the claim being made. 

Bushwick: And it’s a big problem when misinformation is being shared by trusted news outlets, or government officials.

Bose: By the way, Biden drew criticism just recently for repeating this claim about beheaded babies.

Bushwick: Yes, and having official sources like Biden share misinformation like this helps lies run around the world even faster. Plus, it increases distrust among readers and listeners—people can end up discounting real news. That’s why it’s so important for journalists to fact-check their sources, especially if those sources have been known to share misleading information in the past. 

 

Bose: It’s better to get things right the first time, rather than making a mistake and then issuing a correction later.

Bushwick: Because even when there’s a correction, people never pay as much attention to it as they do to the original post. One of the experts we interviewed, Emily Bell, talked about this.

Emily Bell: My name is Emily Bell. I’m the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York [City]. And I have been writing about and studying the Internet since the early ’1990s, so that’s a very long time. Different stories and narratives get created and spread…. It’s really hard to do anything about them … once they’re out there because, you know, you’re just sort of left as, like, one or two voices going, “But that’s not true.” And people [are] like, “Doesn’t matter whether it’s true—it’s, like, broadly true.”

 

Bose: Adam also talked about something called atrocity propaganda. It’s misinfo that’s more likely to be spread during the first days of a war or conflict—generally to inflame people’s emotions—and it turns out it has a long history.

Elmahrek: During the Gulf War, a girl testified in Congress and said that Iraqi soldiers had been taking babies from their incubators… scores of babies, removing them and leaving them out to die. This was as the U.S. was trying to drum up support for the war that—the first one, or the Gulf War in Iraq—that claim, that testimony later turned out to be a fabrication, and the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. So, you know, this stuff has a long and documented history.

Bushwick: But the history of atrocity propaganda is way older than the Gulf War. Adam also brought us an example from the Middle Ages—one that specifically targeted Jewish people.

 

Elmahrek: In the context of Jewish people, we call it a blood libel. Because, you know, one of the old—one of the oldest claims that goes back to the Middle Ages is that Jews are secretly drinking the blood of Gentile children. So this is another form of atrocity propaganda in order to demonize a certain community and motivate people to take violent action against them.

Bose: When we hear something terrible, like atrocity propaganda, we often share it without waiting to check whether it’s true.

Bushwick: The thing is, terrible things have happened! Israelis experienced horrible terror and violence on October 7. Palestinians hae been dying in airstrikes and being displaced from their homes. It’s understandable that all of our emotions are high.

Bose: Absolutely. And misinformation is being used to further manipulate those emotions, in order to gain attention and profit, to serve political ends, or even to stoke more violence. 

Bushwick: Since the initial Hamas attack on October 7, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee says it has received hundreds of hate incident reports against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans. Hearing aboutSome of these incidents is heartbreaking.

 

[CLIP: A 71-year-old man who had been accused of fatally stabbing a six-year-old boy — and seriousy injuring his mother — because of their Islamic faith, and the Israel-Hamas war, has been charged with a hate crime.]

Bose: Antisemitic attacks are also on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, says there has been a steep increase in antisemitic incidents. Between October 7 and 23, the ADL says, there were nearly 200 incidents that were specifically linked to the current Israel-Hamas conflict. And these incidents aren’t limited to the U.S. On October 18 there was also a firebomb attack on a Jewish synagogue in Berlin.

Bushwick: That’s really awful.

Bose: Absolutely. And historically, misinformation can even be an inspiration for war. Think back to when the U.S. went to war in Iraq in 2003, saying we had to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction that we never actually found.

 

Bushwick: Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of that conflict.

Bose: So yeah. The stakes are high.

Bushwick: But there are a few steps you can take to make sure you minimize the spread of misinformation.

Bell: There are two ways to approach receiving information, one of which the researchers would [call] “prebunking,” which is informing yourself about the situation whether or not there might be a disinformation campaign around it.

Bushwick: So, for instance, when you’re consuming news about this conflict, you should start from the perspective that there is a strong motivation for folks to spread misinformation, whether that’s propaganda from one group or another or people who only care about engagement farming. That way, you’ll be mentally prepared for any misinformation you encounter…

 

Bell: And in studies that they did at the Institute for the Study of Propaganda [Institute for Propaganda Analysis] at Columbia University back in, like, 1942—proved that actually, the most effective one was just … telling people, like explaining why people are seeing things and why they have been … described in a certain way…. There’s somebody who did a great study on teenagers and smoking and, like, saying to them, “It’s gonna kill you.” No effect, you know, [of] saying, “Don’t do that.” No effect. Saying, “So, you know, how tobacco companies advertise to you…,” that has a much bigger effect in discouraging teenagers from smoking; [it] is actually explaining to them what [the] marketing apparatus of Big Tobacco is.

Bose: And while you’re reading news, you can remember an acronym called SIFT, which was developed by Mike Caulfield, an expert on digital literacy at the University of Washington. It’s short for …

Bushwick: S: Stop—wait for your initial emotional reaction to calm down before you do anything.

Bose: I: Investigate the source—try to figure out if the person or outlet reporting this news is legit.

Bushwick: F: Find better coverage—research who else is covering the same event and if they have a different take on the situation.

Bose: And T: Trace claims, quotes, and media back to their original context. Who provided the quotes or images included in the story, and do they have biases that might skew their perspective?

Bushwick: You can also investigate some content yourself.

Bose: Specifically for something like photos. Shayan had great advice for debunking false images.

Sardarizadeh: So for images, I encourage everybody and—I recommend people start using reverse image search and get themselves accustomed to it because it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s simple. You will see how much misinformation you can check for yourself. There’s a, there’s a new tool that’s been developed by Google called Google Lens. It’s a really good tool by the way. At no cost to you, completely free, will check that image for you … and will give you an idea of other examples of that image being posted online and what the context behind it is…. It, it takes minutes. Or you can just do it and go to images.google.com and either copy the URL of that image on, on whichever social media platform you’re on or take a screen grab of it yourself. You could just do it, and go to images.google.com and just put the screen grab in there, and run reverse image search for yourself. 

Bose: I’m going to note that the average citizen can check images. But for video, it’s quite a bit harder.

Sardarizadeh: When it comes to video, I have to say [it] can get a bit more complex. You know, I have been involved in projects with my colleagues at BBC Verify where, you know, we’ve spent days, sometimes weeks, investigating videos…. But sometimes, particularly in the war zone, there are no quick and easy answers. And there’s quite a lot of nuance. It takes, you know, a team of professional journalists, experienced journalists, and not just on their own—also other experts, people who know about blasts, explosions, weapons…. You will need the opinions of a lot of people, need to consult quite a lot of people to find out what a very, very complex piece of video necessarily shows, so — 

Bushwick: It’s really important to make a habit of verifying information before you reshare it. But there’s one really faint silver lining to the current misinformation environment.

Bose: Are you talking about generative AI, by chance?

Bushwick: You got it. When the conflict started, I worried that people were gonna use AI to make up fake images or write fake posts, but it doesn’t seem to be playing a huge role at the moment. On the one hand that’s good, on the other hand that’s because there are plenty of other sources of misleading content.

Sardarizadeh: I am starting to see some AI-generated images. I think that’s still not, at any level, close to like misleading old videos, unrelated videos from past conflicts, from video games…, from events that have nothing to do with the war. Those are still the main sources of misinformation that I’m seeing…. But I’ve started to see AI generated images that well. Thankfully the ones I’m seeing are not that realistic. But we had two deepfakes in the middle of the Ukraine war. In this case I have yet to find one. And we’ll continue to monitor it obviously. The sort of nature of misinformation might actually change as we go through the coming days and weeks.

Bushwick: That’s actually lucky for us, because existing tech tools for identifying whether a photo is a deepfake are not very accurate.

Bose: That’s not great. But AI technology is actually causing a related problem: people have dismissed real photos and videos because they claim that they’re actually deepfakes.

Bushwick: Yes, exactly. In some cases, it’s like a new high-tech version of crisis actor accusations. Instead of claiming that people in photos or videos are actors, you claim they don’t exist at all.

[CLIP: Closing music]

Bose: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show is edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Bushwick: Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!

Bose: For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Tulika Bose.

Bushwick: And I’m Sophie Bushwick.

 

Is Too Little Play Hurting Our Kids?

Peter Gray: It’s not just moderate evidence. It’s overwhelming evidence that if you take away children’s opportunities for independent activity, they’re not going to learn how to be independent, and that’s going to lead them to be anxious and depressed, fearful about the future and all the things that we’re seeing now.

Joseph Polidoro: It’s been declared a national emergency. Mental health among children and adolescents decreased steadily between 2010 and 2020. By 2019 death by suicide had become the second-leading cause of death for those between age 10 and 24. 

 

But this mental health decline may have been decades in the making. And according to a team of researchers, it’s partly because we’re not giving kids the independence they need.

For Science, Quickly, I’m Joseph Polidoro. 

[CLIP: Music] 

Gray: I’m Peter Gray. I’m a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. 

Polidoro: In the September issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, Gray and his co-authors observed a continuous increase in depression, anxiety and suicide rates among children and adolescents since at least 1960. And they link it to a decline in unsupervised play and other independent activities. 

Gray: Play is how children pursue what’s fun for them. That’s an immediate source of mental health—part of mental health really means “I’m happy” or “I’m most satisfied with my life right now.”

 

Polidoro: Gray says that play and other independent activities also have far-reaching long-term effects on children’s mental health and resilience. 

Gray: I think that the real crisis is that young people are losing a sense of, “I can solve problems, I can deal with bumps in the road of life.” And the way the children learn to do these things is through play where they are responsible to solve their own problems. They negotiate with their peers. They figure out how to solve quarrels among themselves. If somebody gets hurt, they figure out what to do about being hurt.

Polidoro: When kids are allowed to make decisions and solve problems, they exercise what’s called their internal locus of control. They begin to feel they have control over experiences and their lives, rather than experiences controlling them. 

Gray and his team cite work by psychologist Jean Twenge. She observed a dramatic increase in anxiety and depression from the 1960s through the 1990s. During the same timeframe, say Gray and his team, Twenge also reported a steep decline in internal locus of control. Gray says this correlation likely suggests that the decline in internal locus of control helps explain the mental health decline. 

Gray: There’s evidence for people of all ages that having a weak internal locus control is predictive of future anxiety and depression. If you believe that anything can happen at any time and you can’t do anything about it, that’s a pretty anxiety-provoking view of life.

Polidoro: Control is also central to another set of established research, called self-determination theory. This research shows that children and adults have three basic psychological needs. If they’re not fulfilled, we’re not happy. 

 

Gray: The first of those needs is autonomy. The sense that we have some freedom to choose what we’re going to do, that we’re in charge of our own life.

The second of these needs is competence. Not only am I free to choose what I want to do, but I can do it.

And the third is relatedness. It’s also important that I have other people on my side on this. Connection with peers by this theory  is an extremely important contributor to the sense of well-being.

Polidoro: These ideas are borne out in indigenous cultures, where very young children are close to their mothers until about the age of four. From that point on…

Gray: They are free to run and roam with other kids. They may be sent on errands. In every one of these cultures as far as have been studied, children have an enormous amount of freedom and also an enormous amount of responsibility. There’s higher expectations of what children can do.

 

Polidoro: These anthropological findings suggest that from an evolutionary perspective, independent activity, personal responsibility, and self-initiated exploration and learning ideally begin at an early age.

It’s a very convincing case, especially for anyone who remembers adolescents with paper routes, grade-school kids walking to school unsupervised, and kids of all ages playing together outside. But is the data there? 

As Gray and his co-authors make very clear, they’re presenting correlational evidence, albeit from many, many sources. And relying on correlations makes some scientists uneasy.

Cory Keyes: My name is Corey Keyes. I’m a professor of sociology, and I spent my career at Emory University.

Polidoro: Keyes does believe there’s a case for play as a developmentally rich activity for kids. 

Keyes: I think that’s unequivocal in the research literature. 

 

Polidoro: But… 

Keyes: There’s so many other things that have changed that would make me suspect that decline in play isn’t just another sign of the mental health problem rather than a cause of it.

Polidoro: Stephan Collishaw also likes the argument but hesitates at its conclusions.

Stephan Collishaw: I’m a professor in developmental psychopathology at Cardiff University and also the co-director of the Wolfson Center for Young Peoples’ Mental Health.

We need to be cautious about drawing a causal connection between those trends. And it’s particularly, in my view, unclear how far we can kind of correlate broad social trends in aspects such as independent play and mental health. 

 

Polidoro: Collishaw sees many changes over time that could be involved—school pressures, highly structured schedules, the mental health of parents and the rise of digital technology. 

Collishaw: It’s hard to disentangle those and make a strong case that one has a causal effect on the other.

Polidoro: Still others who’ve looked closely at the data believe we can point to a reason more kids are more anxious and depressed than at any time in history.

Twenge: I’ve been doing work on generational differences for 30 years, and I got used to seeing changes that were big, but they would roll out slowly. And these changes in mental health were like nothing I’d ever seen. They were very, very sudden and very, very large.

My name is Jean Twenge. I am the author of the book Generations, the book Igen, and I’m a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

 

Polidoro: Twenge sees another story in the data—a leveling off in mental health declines starting in the 1990s, and a huge increase 15 years later. And that rise coincided with—the smartphone. 

Twenge: So we see these increases in depression starting in the early 2010s. That happens to be the same time when the majority of Americans first owned a smartphone. It’s when social media use among teens moved from something that was optional, that about half of teens did every day, to something almost all of them—75 percent, 80 percent—did every day.

Polidoro: Social media also became more visual around this time, Twenge says, as smartphones with front-facing cameras were introduced. Teens spent less time together and less time sleeping. 

Twenge: So if you put these three things together—more time online, less time with friends face-to-face, less time sleeping—that’s a very bad recipe for mental health. 

 

Polidoro: Looking at the data, Twenge saw more than a time sequence lining up, but a huge and fundamental change to how teens spent their day-to-day lives—on-screen—just as teen depression started rising again. She could also rule out other possibilities.

Twenge: Economics are actually improving over that time. The unemployment rate was going down, the U.S. economy was finally starting to improve after the Great Recession. 

We also know from several recent studies that these increases in anxiety and loneliness among teens are worldwide. That helps us rule out a lot of U.S.-based explanations around politics or school shootings or any of these other things because we see very, very similar patterns in other countries around the world. 

Polidoro: Gray and his co-authors argue that there is little evidence that digital technology, including social media, can be linked to mental health declines—and that simply walling off social media, for instance, is just removing another opportunity for independence. 

 

Twenge disagrees.  

Twenge: That’s just not correct. Social media is not just an individual issue. Social media is social. It has an impact at the level of the group. 

Take a kid who doesn’t have social media. Are they going to be able to live like it’s 1988 and go out with their friends? No. Who are they going to go out with—because everybody else is on TikTok or Instagram at home. The whole social norm changed. These are group-level effects.

Polidoro: In fact, says Twenge, the case against social media—at least for teenage girls—may be stronger than the case against lead paint. 

Twenge: In one of the best data sets that we’ve got, the correlation between hours of social media use a day and symptoms of depression among teen girls is 0.2. The correlation between childhood lead exposure and adult IQ is 0.11—about half the size. So again, I think that really makes that case that there are not small effects.

 

Polidoro: Still, Twenge thinks the data probably already exists for the kind of strong case for independent activity made in this paper.

Twenge: You have to take a broader view, or a more comprehensive view of the literature that’s out there. You’d have to frame the argument differently for it to line up with the time sequence and acknowledge some of the tradeoffs involved. 

Most public health experts would say that it’s good that not as many high school students are drinking alcohol and having sex. Those independent activities trends are not all bad. There’s trade-offs involved in them–they’re not all good either. 

Polidoro: So what should we make of all this? 

Since there seem to be several factors in this mental health decline, as all of these researchers agree, there may be a number of necessary interventions.

 

Collishaw points to a few factors where there is solid causal evidence—and that could likely improve young peoples’ mental health if addressed. 

Collishaw: We know that parents’ own mental health is important. We know that poverty is important. We also know that there’s a lack of support for young people who are experiencing mental health difficulties. And then I think we also know a lot about groups of children and young people who are most vulnerable. So there’s a very well established evidence base that all these factors are important. 

Polidoro: Twenge would directly address the strong link between social media use and depression among younger children.

Twenge: Raise the age to have a social media account to 16 and actually enforce age. That’s one of the clearest, most straightforward things that we can do. And it could potentially have a big impact.

 

Polidoro: Is that practical?

Twenge: We enforce age limits for driving. We enforce age limits for voting. We enforce age limits for alcohol. Why not do it for social media?

Polidoro: We also might change the way we think about mental health, says Keyes.

Keyes: This idea that the absence of mental illness is sufficient to describe somebody as “mentally healthy” is completely wrong. Mental health is more than the absence of mental illness. It’s just that we are such a reactive society. We tend to think there’s nothing wrong until somebody breaks down in terms of a medical category and that’s simply not true.

Right now, I can tell you even among U.S. college students, it’s an appalling rate of 30 percent to 40 percent of college students who aren’t mentally ill, but they’re not flourishing. They’re in that middle category “languishing.” And that’s our college students.

 

Polidoro: Keyes would focus on improving the conditions for creating secure attachments in childhood. 

Keyes: That meta-analysis about secure attachment showed that the greatest decline and the reason for the rise in insecurity is negative views of other people. The loss of trust and the inability to count on or depend on others to give you warm, trusting connection—and I think that’s happening not because parents don’t care, it’s that they don’t have enough time and encouragement and support and spending that kind of quality time to make those connections.

Polidoro: Gray agrees that the answer is more than just increased play. It’s about giving children under 18 all the opportunities we can for independence, choice, interaction with peers, and individual growth. 

 

Gray: It’s not just play. It’s an overall change in our view of young people’s role in society and of young people’s capacities. We’re increasingly believing that young people are incompetent and can’t be trusted to do things responsibly, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we don’t allow them those opportunities, they don’t develop those opportunities.

[CLIP: Music]

Polidoro: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeffery DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And for more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com.

For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Joseph Polidoro.

These Researchers Put Sperm Through a Kind of ‘Hunger Games’

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Karen Hopkin.

Swimming against a current can be tough. But imagine having to do it in a fluid with the consistency of corn syrup. That’s more or less the challenge faced by mammalian sperm as they race to reach an egg.

 

Reza Nosrati: That’s such a hard race for sperm. It’s like a very tough marathon.

Hopkin: Reza Nosrati is a mechanical engineer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He says that sperm are not deterred by tide or averted by viscosity.

In fact, Reza and his team have found that having to navigate the physiological slalom of the female reproductive tract actually helps sperm swim with optimal efficiency and may guide them to their desired destination. The results appear in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Nosrati: When you look at the female reproductive tract, I think it’s been known for such a long time that it’s a very complicated environment.

Hopkin: As sperm swim upstream, they make their way through secretions that vary in thickness and flow rate. One of the first hurdles comes at the cervix, the gateway to the uterus.

 

Nosrati: Right at the port of entry to the cervix, there is a very strong flow because of mucous secretions by the cells within the cervix.

Hopkin: That current helps to flush out any harmful, disease-causing bacteria, which are not known to be strong swimmers.

Nosrati: It’s kind of like a barrier and a filter to keep the environment essentially favorable for fertilization.

Hopkin: And once sperm get to the fallopian tube, where fertilization typically takes place, they face not only fluids that are gooier but a course whose undulating curves lead to blind alleys…

Nosrati: …and to the increasing level of geometrical confinement that the sperm need to leverage to find their way forward.

Hopkin: But rather than hampering the swimmers’ progress, maybe these changes serve as cues—or clues—that give the cleverest cells a leg (or in this case a flagellum) up.

Nosrati: Would that be a mechanism that enables sperm of better quality, or smarter cells, to adjust their swimming behavior in order to gain some competitive advantage over millions of other sperm cells that are swimming in the reproductive tract?

Hopkin: To find out, Reza and the gang put bull sperm to the test.

Nosrati: We use bull sperm because it’s—in terms of its morphology and shape and beating behavior is quite similar to human sperm.

Hopkin: But they didn’t want to look at sperm by the handful.

 

Nosrati: We wanted to study these behaviors at the single-cell level—looking at the same cell while we’re replacing the flow, while we’re changing the viscosity.

Hopkin: And they wanted to focus on the flagellum because it’s that whiplike tail that propels a sperm forward.

Nosrati: Now, how that flagellum beating and how the movement of that structure changes in response to changing flow conditions was completely ignored.

Hopkin: So the researchers built a sperm-sized testing arena. Or in engineer speak…

Farin Yazdan Parast: We designed a microfluidic channel.

Hopkin: Farin Yazdan Parast is a research fellow in mechanical engineering at Monash University. She says each microfluidic channel… 

Yazdan Parast:: …had three different inlets for different viscosities so we can expose sperm to different viscosities, and also we have different flow rates to also mimic the fluid condition in the female reproductive tract.

 

Hopkin: To make sure the sperm didn’t swim out of her microscopic field of view, Farin tethered their heads to the chamber floor, which was also key to keeping an eye on things once the researchers cranked open the faucet.

Nosrati: The flow could push the cells out of our observation window.

Hopkin: But with the sperm heads stuck to the surface, the researchers were free to fiddle with the fluid dynamics….

Nosrati: And then I’m looking at the cell while it can’t go anywhere. Then we could see in real time how that cell respond[s] to that change in the environment.

Hopkin: So after all this setup, what did they find?

Yazdan Parast: What we observed was that the viscosity had a more dominant role than the shear rate in influencing the sperm flagellar waveform and the overall sperm behavior.

Nosrati: And I think it was a little bit surprising. Like, when we started the study, I was expecting to see a more dominant effect from shear rate than viscosity. But we actually realized it’s the other way around: the viscosity plays a more crucial role.

 

Hopkin: When the sperm are swimming through fluid that’s more syrupy …

Nosrati: … they reduce their flagellar beat amplitude; then they beat with a smaller wave. Those cells who can demonstrate this type of behavior actually swim in a way that is more energy-efficient.

Hopkin: That behavior could give them a biological boost.

Nosrati: Maybe there’s another cell, which is trying much harder. But they’re not doing it the right way, and they can’t propel forward.

Hopkin: So a sperm that’s able to change gears and breeze effortlessly along…

Nosrati: That will be the sperm that can reach the site of fertilization quicker and get to the egg.

Hopkin: Reza says the findings could advance fertility treatments in which a clinician chooses which sperm to present to an egg.

 

Nosrati: Maybe when it comes to treatment strategies, we need to move towards media that are more viscous and more closely mimics those properties of in vivo fluids because that can potentially lead to selecting better cells and a strategy which is better informed by that natural swimming behavior.

Hopkin: In other words, make the sperm work for it.

Nosrati: I think if you have a sample, which has cells, relatively motile cells, then making the race a little bit tougher increases your chance of getting the best cells.

Hopkin: Whether or not a viscosity challenge could lead to better outcomes for treatments such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF…

Nosrati: We need to do animal studies to make sure what we are essentially hypothesizing makes sense.

Hopkin: While they wait for those results, Reza and Farin will continue to talk about their work—or try to.

Yazdan Parast: Um … it’s a bit weird to start a conversation about sperm and [these] kinds of things.

 

Nosrati: I think it’s starting—talking about it is always difficult….

Yazdan Parast: Yeah.

Nosrati: But when you start, especially at parties or stuff like that, people will follow up. And they remember it [laughs].

Hopkin: Even without the party, I suspect I may have tethered bull sperm stuck in my head for some time to come.

Science, Quickly is produced by Jeffery DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and visit ScientificAmerican.com for updated and in-depth science news.

[CLIP: Show theme music]

For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Karen Hopkin.

 

AI Can Now Read Your Cat’s Pain

Sophie Bushwick: Can you tell what a cat is thinking, just from looking at it? 

Tulika Bose: Probably not! Cats evolved to be solitary hunters stalking their prey, not social animals like us humans.

 

Bushwick: And that poker face might be handy while you’re out stalking prey, but it’s a real problem if humans are trying to figure out whether their pets are  in pain. So that’s why researchers are trying to read more into feline feelings

Bose: — [sings] using artificial intelligence!

Bushwick: —[sings] using artificial intelligence! As they love to do. I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American. 

Bose: I’m Tulika Bose, multimedia editor.

Bushwick: And you’re listening to Tech Quickly, the version of Scientific American’s Science Quickly podcast that just wants to boop AI on the nose.

Bose: Cute. 

[INTRO MUSIC]

Bushwick: Right now, if you want to see whether a cat’s in pain, you have to take a quiz called the Glasgow Feline Composite Measure Pain Scale. 

Bose: Interesting. 

Bushwick: It’s also just called Glasgow scale. 

 

Bose: Ok, hmmm. 

Bushwick: But The question is, what’s on the scale?

Bose: Yeah, what is on the scale?

Bushwick: Well, I just happen to have printed out a couple copies for us to peruse! 

Bose: You did not. 

Bushwick: I did indeed. 

Bose: Wow

Bushwick: Take a look, take a look at this.

Bose: This looks like a Buzzfeed quiz for cat pain, but uh — 

Bushwick: Yeah, the least favorite kind of Buzzfeed quiz. 

Bose: Yeah, the least favorite. Ok, wow. So I see some little cartoon cats here.

Bushwick: Uh huh.

Bose: And I see their little ears squashed, or upright — 

Bushwick: — And then you have to say which one is your cat. 

Bose: Yeah! And then, I see uh, a second little set of cartoon cats here, and their little mouths look to be squished in different ways too. 

Bushwick: Yeah, so you choose the picture that best matches the cat. And you also answer questions about its behavior — 

 

Bose: — The cat —

Bushwick: How it responds to being pet —

Bose: Ok, ok.

Bushwick: And then each one of those questions gets a little number associated with it. Higher or lower, depending on how much pain it indicates. And then you add it all up at the end to get your pain score. 

Bose: [Flips page.] This looks kind of hard actually. 

Bushwick: It’s tricky! I mean can you tell the difference between a cat that is tense / crouched — 

Bose: No!

Bushwick: And one that is rigid / hunched? 

Bose: No that would be like the same thing to me! 

 

Bushwick: It sounds exactly the same. 

Bose: Yeah, exactly! 

Bushwick: So it’s pretty subjective, you have to make some judgment calls… 

Bose: mmhmmm 

Bushwick: And if you’re not a veterinarian, who sees cats and uses this scale all the time, it could be an issue. 

Bose: Absolutely. More subjective right? 

Bushwick: Mmhmm exactly.  

Bose: So the idea is that AI might be able to do better?

Bushwick: Or at the very least, it could do it faster and way more easily than an untrained human could.  

Bose: So I know freelance science writer Leila Okahata wrote about a study that put AI to the pain-detection test. 

 

Bushwick: That’s right. Researchers started with photos of 84 cats that were being admitted to a veterinary/animal hospital in Germany — 

Bose: Interesting — 

Bushwick: — and then they gave these cats a pain score based on the Glasgow scale that we talked about — 

Bose: Right — 

Bushwick: And also on the amount of pain you’d expect a cat to be in for whatever ailment or injury brought them in, you know like a bone fracture. That’s gonna be pretty painful. 

Bose: Yowch.

Bushwick: You mean “meow-ch”?

Bose: Uh, no, no I don’t.

Bushwick: [Laughs] 

Bose: Ok. diabolical laugh. Diabolical laugh. 

Bushwick: I’m not laughing at the cat’s pain. I’m laughing at the cat’s pun. 

 

Bose: Uh, wow. Did you just make another pun? 

Bushwick: I can’t help myself.

Bose: Oh my gosh, ok, ok. 

Bushwick: [Continues laughing.]

Bose: Ok, ok. 

Bushwick: I’m just littering the script with them! [Continues laughing.]

Bose: Yes you are! 

Bushwick: [Continues laughing.] Littering? Litterbox? 

Bose: Oh my God. You did it again. 

Bushwick: Yeah. Anyway, the photos are labeled with the pain scores, and the researchers fed them into two different machine learning algorithms. 

Bose: Interesting. 

Bushwick: One broke down each photo in great detail, by examining four dozen specific sites on the cats’ faces. These are called called landmarks. 

 

Bose: Got it. 

Bushwick: The second AI program was a deep learning model that just looked at each photo as a whole.

Bose: Got it. Moment of truth though — could the AI read the cats’ faces?

Bushwick: It did pretty well! 

Bose: Huh! 

Bushwick: The landmark-based model was 77 percent accurate —

Bose: Interesting —

Bushwick: — and the deep learning one was a little less good. That was 65 percent accurate. But they think the deep learning one could improve if it has more photos to train on—this particular kind of model is really data hungry.

Bose: It needs more pictures of cats. 

 

Bushwick: Exactly. Everyone needs more pictures of cats. 

Bose: We all do. 

Bushwick: Including AI. 

Bose: Right! So can we learn anything from the AI about reading our cats’ faces?

Bushwick: Yeah, that’s one of the cool things about this study! So it  turns out that the eyes are not the windows to your cat’s soul. When it comes to accurate pain recognition, you need to look at your cat’s mouth.

Bose: It’s meowth. 

Bushwick: Aaaaah! You did it! 

Bose: I did it.  Can we go beyond pain here? Like, is there an AI that can tell me if a cat is happy, or sad, or about to knock a glass of water on my laptop? 

 

Bushwick: That’s the eventual goal! A researcher who’s not involved in this AI study recently published a paper showing that cats can produce almost three hundred facial expressions. 

Bose: Yeah like I knew this cat that had this expression when it was going to take a bite of MY sandwich— 

Bushwick: [laughs] That’s very specific. 

Bose: Yeah. But I feel like that was its sandwich-eating, sandwich-stealing — 

Bushwick: Sandwich-eating sandwich steal-ing face. The classic expression. 

Bose: Yeah! It’s like I’m going to swipe your food, stupid human. 

Bushwick: [laughs] I mean I feel like all cats have that expression at all times. 

Bose: Yeah! Just like, hello, dumb human. Feed me. Give me your stuff. 

Bushwick: [laughs]

Bose: I’m taking your bed. 

Bushwick: [laughs] — and your laptop. 

 

Bose: — everything that you own. 

Bushwick: — Everything that you own is mine now. 

Bose: It’s mine. 

[CLIP] Cat meow

Bushwick: So yeah, once you know that you can recognize these different expressions, 

Bose: Right. 

Bushwick: This researcher wants to join forces with the AI researchers to create a model that can detect more specific cat emotions based on whatever face it’s making. The goal is to be able to look at an image of the cat and have the AI detect whatever emotion that cat is feeling. 

Bose: Got it, got it. Ok — But like  I’ve heard that emotion recognition AI is really flawed though. 

 

Bushwick: Oh, for sure. For instance, what do you think I’m feeling now? [makes face]

Bose: Hmmm. [pause] Sad. You look sad. 

Bushwick: Yeah, Wrong! I’m feeling smug!

Bose: Oh! 

Bushwick: — and sneaky, because I just tricked you into thinking I’m feeling an emotion that I’m not. 

Bose: [laughs.] Wow, a politician. 

Bushwick: I mean think about it! If I just smile I could be like I’m being a politician, I could be saying ‘oh I feel happy’ or I could be saying ‘Im just being polite’ — 

Bose: Ohhh. 

Bushwick: Or it could mean, I’m holding in a fart right now! 

Bose: [Laughs.]

 

Bushwick: And the AI — it can’t tell that we’re a bunch of lying liars who lie like that. 

Bose: Interesting! So the idea is that cats don’t lie about their emotions the way we humans do?

Bushwick: Well, it’s more that with cats and with other pets we have no way to ask them how they feel

Bose: Right.

Bushwick: So even an imperfect tool, like an emotion recognition AI — it’s valuable because it can help us cross that communication barrier. 

Bose: Got it. 

Bushwick: The researchers also want to expand their work to study emotions in other animals. 

Bose: Right. 

Bushwick: We’ve also talked on this podcast about using AI to decipher wild animal communication. 

 

Bose: Interesting! 

Bushwick: So we might just be a few datasets away from letting our pets practically “talk” to us. 

Bose: Ok that would be so cool! 

Bushwick: Yes. I want my pet to talk to me. 

Bose: Same! 

Bushwick: With its furry little face. 

Bose: Um — I would love to know when my sandwich was about to be stolen —

Bushwick: [laughs]

Bose: Because this has happened numerous times, Angela! 

Bushwick: I do worry that when I think my cat — my dog is gazing lovingly into my eyes, it’s really just like [give me a treat!]

Bose: Give me food! Do we really want to know? Do we really want to know. 

 

Bushwick: Yeah. I mean once we open up that Pandora’s catbox — 

Bose: Oh my God, litterbox, catbox. 

Bushwick: Schrödinger’s box? Let’s not mention Schrödinger. That guy was a jerk.

Bose: Yeah, no. Furry. Furry little box. 

Bushwick: [laughs]

Bose: [laughs]

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Bushwick: Science Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our show is edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Bose:  Don’t forget to subscribe to Science Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!

 

Bushwick: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Sophie Bushwick. 

Bose: I’m Tulika Bose. See you next time! 

[The above has been a transcript of this podcast.]