Category: Fact Checking

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Summary

President Joe Biden isn’t running for reelection, but his record will still be on the ballot in the fall. Here we look at how the U.S. has performed under the Democratic president:

• The economy added 15.7 million jobs. The number is now 6.3 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back and has stayed lower, longer than at any time during the previous administration.

• Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up more than 19% overall. Gasoline is up 46%.

• Average weekly earnings haven’t kept pace with prices. After adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings dropped 2.3%.

• The U.S. economy has continued to expand under Biden, growing at 2.8% in the second quarter estimate released July 25 — double the rate of growth in the first quarter.

• Violent crime has gone down. Figures from large cities show a 9.1% drop in murders from 2020 to 2023, and data from more than 200 cities show a continuing decline so far this year.

• Fewer people lack health insurance. The uninsured went down by 2.1 percentage points or 6.6 million people.

• Crude oil production increased. The daily average for the most recent 12 months is 15.3% higher than the average in 2020, and it’s higher than the pre-pandemic average.

• Apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally are up 273% for the 12 months ending in June, even as the monthly figure for June dropped significantly.

• The average number of refugees admitted per month is 117% higher than the average under his predecessor.

• Corporate profits are up 36%.

• The international trade deficit for goods and services went up 22.3%.

• The number of people receiving food stamps has decreased by more than half a million.

• The debt held by the public has grown by 28.5%

• The S&P 500 has increased 42.9%.

Analysis

Our latest quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we first published in January 2022, comes days after Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll publish one more update in October, before Election Day.

We published similar reports on “Trump’s Numbers” throughout former President Donald Trump’s time in office.

We present various statistical indicators of how the country has fared. As we’ve said before, we make no judgments as to how much credit or blame the president deserves for these metrics, and we caution that no single number can tell the whole story.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs rebounded strongly during Biden’s time, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by more than 6 million.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 15,722,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and June, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The June figure is 6,329,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

Some occupations recovered more slowly, notably teaching. In June the number of local government education workers was only 29,000 higher than at the pre-pandemic peak. And employment in the leisure industry still hasn’t recovered; in June there were 161,000 fewer hotel and restaurant workers and others in the accommodation and food services industries than before the pandemic.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has been lower for longer under Biden than under his predecessor.

It hit the lowest point in over half a century in January 2023 and again in April 2023, when it was 3.4%, the lowest since June 1969.

The rate was back up to 4.1% last month, still 2.3 percentage points below where it was when Biden took office.

June also marked the 32nd consecutive month that the rate was at or below 4.1%. The longest such stretch under Donald Trump was 27 months, just before the pandemic sent the unemployment rate soaring.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March 2022, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs was still over 8.1 million as of the last business day of May, the most recent month on record. That’s an increase of 955,000 openings — over 13% — compared with January 2021, when Biden took office.

In May, there was an average of nearly 3 jobs for every 2 people seeking work. When Biden took office there were fewer openings than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in June is set to be released July 30.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has risen slowly during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in June.

That still leaves the rate 0.7 percentage points below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate has been trending generally down for nearly a quarter of a century. It peaked at 67.3% during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will continue to slide down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — but that hasn’t yet been achieved.

As of June, the U.S. added 762,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.3% increase in the space of 41 months, according to the BLS.

But compared with the highest level during Trump’s time in office — which was in January 2019 — manufacturing jobs are up only 122,000, or just under 1%.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden. During his time in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 19.2%.

For a time it was the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending in June 2022 saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the BLS said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has moderated more recently. The CPI rose 3% in the 12 months ending in June, the most recent figure available.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline shot up even faster.

During the week ending July 22, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump was $3.47 per gallon. That’s $1.09 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 46%.

The price swung wildly during Biden’s first year and a half, hitting just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13, 2022. That’s the highest on record. The rise was propelled by worldwide supply and demand issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 17% during Biden’s first 41 months, according to figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. In June “real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, were still 2.3% below where they were when Biden took office.

That’s despite two years of recent improvement. Real earnings in June were 2.3% higher than the low point under Biden 24 months earlier.

Economic Growth

Despite concerns about high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s policy of raising interest rates to slow inflation, the U.S. economy has continued to expand under Biden. 

The real gross domestic product (which is adjusted for inflation) increased 5.8% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022 and 2.5% last year. 

In the second quarter of this year, the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in a July 25 release announcing its “advance estimate.” (The advance estimate is the BEA’s first estimate for the second quarter, which could be adjusted Aug. 29 when the second estimate is released.)

The 2.8% second quarter estimate was double the first quarter growth and was slightly higher than expectations. A day earlier, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 2.6% for the quarter. 

The BEA said the second-quarter figure “reflected increases in consumer spending, private inventory investment, and nonresidential fixed investment.” On the negative side, imports — “which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP” — increased, the BEA said.

Prior to the release of the second-quarter estimate, economists were seeing signs of a slowdown in the U.S. economy that could shrink the growth rate in the near future. 

In its monthly economic forecast issued July 11, the Conference Board – a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies – said it expected the U.S. economy “to lose momentum near-term as high prices and elevated interest rates sap domestic demand.”

Vanguard said something similar in its July economic outlook released July 18. 

“The productivity and labor supply gains that drove U.S. economic growth in 2023 lately show signs of subsiding, joining retail sales, capital expenditure, and other data that previously suggested a slowdown,” Vanguard said. 

Still, economists for both said the labor market is strong, and a recession – once thought inevitable – is unlikely. Vanguard projects that the U.S. economy will grow by 2% for the full year in 2024.

Crime

Contrary to claims by Trump and other Republicans, violent crime has gone down during Biden’s term. That’s according to crime data compiled by the FBI and other sources.

The 2022 FBI annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate of 0.5 point from 2020, the year before Biden took office, to 2022. The violent crime rate dropped by 15.4 points, to 369.8 per 100,000 population in 2022. (For these figures, see Table 1 in the CIUS Estimations download for the crime in the U.S. reports.)

Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. The number of violent crimes dropped 5.7% from 2022 to 2023, and from January to March of this year, violent crimes were down 15.2% compared with the same time period last year, according to the preliminary data (download the quarterly tables to see these figures). The FBI figures are based on voluntary reports by agencies nationwide.

The FBI’s official 2023 annual report should be released this fall.

Other reports show the same trend. Figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, with the addition of New York City’s statistics, show the number of murders has gone down by 10.4% from 2022 to 2023 in 70 large U.S. cities. Since 2020, murders in those cities have dropped by 9.1%.

The latest Major Cities Chiefs Association report, for the first quarter of 2024, indicate that murders and other violent crimes dropped again, compared with the same time period last year.

As of July 23, figures compiled by AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, show a 17.3% decrease in murders in more than 200 U.S. cities so far this year, compared with the same point in 2023.

As we’ve explained in past reports, murders and violent crime went up in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first as president. But since then, crime has been going down.

Health Insurance

The percentage of Americans lacking health insurance has declined by 2.1 percentage points under Biden, according to the National Health Interview Survey.

In 2023, 7.6% of the population was uninsured, according to the latest NHIS early release estimates. That’s down from 9.7% in 2020. In raw numbers, there were 6.6 million fewer people uninsured last year compared with the year before Biden became president.

The NHIS, a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC, measures the uninsured at the time people were interviewed.

The Census Bureau’s annual reports, which measure those who lacked insurance for the entire year, show the uninsured decreased by 0.7 percentage points or 2.4 million people from 2020 to 2022. The 2023 annual report should be released in September.

We have been noting in these reports that the uninsured figures could begin to rise, since some Medicaid provisions that were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic started to be phased out at the end of March 2023. But so far, the available figures haven’t shown that. The latest NHIS report found the number and percentage of the uninsured declined from 2022 to 2023, though not significantly.

Under Biden, enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace plans has gone up by 10 million people. The administration enacted increased subsidies for ACA plan premiums. The expanded subsidies expire at the end of 2025.

Crude Oil Production and Imports

For the most recent 12 months ending in April, the Energy Information Administration reported that average crude oil production in the U.S. increased to roughly 13 million barrels per day. That was about 15.3% more than the daily amount of crude oil produced on average in 2020. It’s also higher than the pre-pandemic average of 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019, which was the previous record.

As we noted three months ago, the EIA has said that oil production, despite declining drilling activity, has reached all-time highs during the Biden administration because new oil wells are more efficient due to advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. In fact, the U.S. is currently producing more crude oil than any nation in history, the EIA said in March, citing data from its International Energy Statistics.

The EIA projects that U.S. crude oil production will continue to break records. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the agency said it expects production to average 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024 and 13.8 million barrels a day in 2025.

Even though the country is still producing more crude oil than ever, as well as exporting more of it, U.S. imports are still up under Biden. Over the last 12 months through April, the U.S. imported an average of more than 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. That’s higher than any annual daily average during Biden’s term, and it’s about 12% above the 2020 average of approximately 5.9 million barrels daily. Notably, however, the average over the last 12 months is still below the annual average of 6.8 million barrels per day in 2019, before the start of the pandemic.

Immigration

Looking at the number of apprehensions of those trying to cross the southern border illegally over the last year under Biden, the numbers remain historically high. But there are indications that is changing, as apprehensions plummeted in June after Biden implemented some new emergency policies to deal with high levels of illegal immigration.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year before Biden took office. And for the past 12 months ending in June, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 1,894,715, according to Customs and Border Protection. That’s 273% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

But the monthly number of apprehensions dropped to 83,536 in June, a little less than half the monthly average during Biden’s term, and the lowest total for a full month under Biden. (January 2021 was lower, 75,316, but Trump was still president for most of that month.)

On June 4, Biden announced a series of executive actions designed to address “substantial levels of migration” due to “global conditions” including “failing regimes and dire economic conditions,” “violence linked to transnational criminal organizations” and “natural disasters” in some countries in Central and South America. Specifically, the proclamation directs border officials to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally between ports of entry when the daily average of encounters reaches 2,500 or more for seven straight days. The policy was immediately implemented on June 5 because levels were already well above that. (For more on the policy, see our story “Q&A on Biden’s Border Order.”)

Three weeks later, on June 26, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reported that Border Patrol encounters of migrants had decreased by over 40% after the new policy was enacted and that in those three weeks more than 24,000 migrants had been removed or returned by the Department of Homeland Security.

There is some early indication the July number may drop even lower. A White House official told us via email that the seven-day average of southwest border encounters between legal ports of entry was 1,838 as of July 11. If it stays at that level, the July number could be lower than any of Trump’s final three months. (The temporary restrictions directed by Biden will continue until 14 calendar days after the daily average of people apprehended crossing the border illegally drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days.)

Refugees

With three months left in fiscal year 2024, the Biden administration has already admitted more refugees than any administration has since 2016.

Still, the administration is likely to fall short once again of the president’s ambitious campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees a year.

On Sept. 29, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2024 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal years 2023 and 2022.

The administration admitted only 25,465 refugees in FY2022 and 60,014 in FY2023. In the first nine months of FY2024, the U.S. has admitted 68,291 refugees, according to State Department data.

In a November report to Congress, the State Department said it is making “significant progress” toward Biden’s goal for refugee admissions after “intensive efforts to restore, strengthen, and modernize the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 163,778 refugees in Biden’s first full 41 months in office, or nearly 4,000 refugees per month, the department’s data show. That’s 117% higher than the 1,845 monthly average under Trump, who drastically reduced the admission of refugees. The Trump administration admitted only 86,731 refugees in four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

Consumer Sentiment

After showing some life in the beginning of the year, consumer confidence in the economy is slipping again.

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its final Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 79 — the highest since July 2021. It remained little changed through April, historical survey data show.

But consumer sentiment dropped in May and has inched downward ever since. The preliminary index of consumer sentiment in July was 66 — continuing a trend that Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, described as “stubbornly subdued.”

“Although sentiment is more than 30% above the trough from June 2022, it remains stubbornly subdued,” Hsu said in a press release. “Nearly half of consumers still object to the impact of high prices, even as they expect inflation to continue moderating in the years ahead.”

As Hsu referenced, the preliminary July figure is 16 points higher than the low under Biden, which occurred in June 2022. But it is also 13 points lower than January 2021, when Biden took office and the index was 79, the data show.

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey also reported that consumer confidence weakened in June.

Corporate Profits

After dipping slightly in 2023, after-tax corporate profits resumed their upward trajectory.

For the year, after-tax corporate profits set records in 2021 and 2022, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates. (See line 45.) The BEA estimated that profits in 2023 were $2.97 trillion — slightly lower than $2.98 trillion in 2022. Still, it was 36% higher than in 2020, the year before Biden took office.

However, corporate profits were running at an annual rate of nearly $3.17 trillion in the first quarter of 2024, according to the BEA’s most recent estimate.

Trade

As of May, the U.S. goods and services deficit over the last 12 months was $799.3 billion, according to figures the Bureau of Economic Analysis published in early July. The trade deficit that period was roughly $145.6 billion higher, or about 22.3% more, than in 2020.

The international trade gap in the most recent 12-month period is about $14.4 billion more than the calendar year 2023 deficit of $784.9 billion, which dropped nearly 17% from the record gap of nearly $944.8 billion in 2022.

So far this year, imports of goods and services have exceeded exports by about $14.4 billion, the BEA said, contributing to the increase in the trade deficit over the last 12 months.

Food Stamps

Under Biden, fewer people are receiving benefits from the program formerly known as food stamps.

In April, the most recent figures available, there were nearly 41.6 million beneficiaries receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to preliminary statistics released July 12 by the Department of Agriculture.

At that time, SNAP enrollment had declined by 532,135, or nearly 1.3%, since Biden took office – although, April was the third consecutive month in which there was an increase in program participants. It’s been about two years since there were fewer than 41 million SNAP beneficiaries under Biden.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — The public debt, excluding money the government owes itself, increased to approximately $27.8 trillion, as of July 22. The public debt is now up almost 28.5% during Biden’s presidency.

Deficits — The Congressional Budget Office estimates that so far the budget deficit for fiscal year 2024 has declined slightly compared with the same period in the 2023 fiscal year, when the annual deficit was $1.7 trillion, according to the Department of Treasury.

Through the first nine months of the current fiscal year (October to June), the deficit was $1.3 trillion, or “$118 billion less than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year,” the CBO reported in its Monthly Budget Review for June.

However, the agency is still projecting that the overall deficit for the 2024 fiscal year will be at least $1.9 trillion, which would grow to $2 trillion if adjusted to exclude the effects of shifts in the timing of certain payments. CBO said its estimate includes “costs that have not yet been recorded,” such as potential outlays due to the cancellation of student loan debt as well as financial assistance to Israel, Ukraine and Indo-Pacific nations.

Stock Markets

The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which includes 30 large corporations, set new highs this month.

Even after a dreadful day for the market on July 24, the S&P is 42.9% higher than it was on Jan. 19, 2021, the day before Biden took office.

The Dow has seen smaller gains than the S&P 500. It has increased 28.8% under Biden — not much different from our last report.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index, which is made up of more than 2,500 companies, has experienced a strong quarter since our last report. Overall, it was up 31.4% under Biden, closing on July 24 at 17,342.41 — up more than 1,700 points since our April quarterly report.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home prices — High mortgage rates put a chill on home prices for a while, but the cost of existing single-family homes in the U.S. have started to climb to record heights once again. 

The preliminary median sales price of existing single-family homes in June was $432,700 — setting a new record and marking the fifth straight month of price increases, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Prices previously peaked under Biden at $420,900 in June 2022 – a record high at the time that was topped in May and June of this year, the NAR data show.

The preliminary June figure is a staggering 40.5% higher than the $308,000 median home price in January 2021, when Biden took office. 

Home prices began to fall in part due to rising mortgage rates. In its ongoing attempt to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate in July 2023 for the 11th time since March 2022. In its latest economic outlook, which was released July 22, the investment research firm Morningstar forecast that the Fed will begin to cut rates by the end of 2024.

In our April report, we noted that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage average nationwide, as of April 18, topped 7% for the first time this year, according to Freddie Mac. The rate is currently 6.77% – which is below the historical norm of 7.74%, which is the weekly average rate since April 1971.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have barely budged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.6% in the first quarter of 2024 — a shade below the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office.

The rate under Trump peaked in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research warns that data from the second quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021 “should be viewed with caution” because restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic “prevented normal data collection.”

“These changes in survey methods,” including the suspension of in-person surveys in the second quarter of 2020, “likely contributed to wide swings in the data,” HUD’s policy and research arm says on its website. “For example, there was a sharp increase and following decline in the homeownership rate during that time frame. The national homeownership rate, at 65.3 percent in the first quarter of 2020, was estimated to have jumped to 67.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and decline to 65.4 percent by the second quarter of 2021.”

For this reason, the Census Bureau has warned against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020.

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Gun Sales

The latest estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation suggest that gun purchases again declined during the second quarter of 2024.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF, a gun industry trade group, estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. The data “provide an additional picture of current market conditions,” the NSSF says.

The group has reported that the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the second quarter of the year was nearly 3.4 million, which is down 7.9% from almost 3.7 million from the same period last year. It’s also roughly 40% lower than the more than 5.6 million in Trump’s last full quarter in 2020.

Through the first six months of 2024, there were over 7.3 million background checks for firearm sales. That’s the lowest total in the first half of the year since there were about 6.2 million in 2019.

Carbon Emissions

In the most recent 12 months on record, there were about 4.80 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and petroleum products in the U.S., according to the EIA’s latest estimates. That’s up over 4.6% from the almost 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020, but still below the pre-pandemic total of about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

As of this month, the EIA forecast that there will be about 4.82 billion metric tons of emissions from energy consumption in 2024, which would be an increase of less than 1% from the 2023 total. The agency said the consumption of more jet fuel and diesel is expected to be “the largest driver of emissions increases” in 2024 and 2025.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed by Biden and confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2022. She replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two Supreme Court justices at the same point of his tenure.

Court of Appeals — Biden has won confirmation for 43 U.S. Court of Appeals judges. Trump had won confirmation for 53 at the same point of his term.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 157 District Court judges (our count includes confirmation for the reappointment of the chief judge of the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands). At the same point in his presidency, Trump had won confirmation for 144 District Court judges.

Five U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges have also been confirmed under Biden, while five had been confirmed at the same point of Trump’s presidency. Each man had won the confirmation for two U.S. Court of International Trade judges at this stage of their terms.

As of July 24, there were 48 federal court vacancies, with 12 nominees pending.

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Claim:

Former U.S. President Barack Obama and actor Brad Pitt are ninth cousins.

Rating:

Social media users rediscovered and circulated a claim in 2023 that former U.S. President Barack Obama and A-list actor Brad Pitt are ninth cousins.

An Instagram user posted the tidbit in April 2023, stating: “In 2012, genealogists found out that former President Barack Obama and actor Brad Pitt are ninth cousins, related through Edwin Hickman, who died in Virginia in 1769.”

(fact6t9/Instagram)

The claim gained traction on X on Dec. 25, 2023, when the statement, “Brad Pitt is related to Barack Obama. They are ninth cousins,” received nearly 46,000 views, as of this writing. Similar posts on X and Reddit followed in February and April 2024, respectively.

Obama and Pitt’s Familial Connection

Genealogists at the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) — a genealogical organization founded in 1845 — unearthed the connection between the two men in 2008, according to reports by numerous credible news outlets, such as Reuters, the BBC, NBC News and The Guardian, all of which cited researchers at NEHGS.

Additionally, Leland Meitzler, author of GenealogyBlog, published a post on Jan. 29, 2010, saying he received a news release from Tom Champoux, a marketing director at NEHGS (archived), which stated:

In 2008, NEHGS discovered that President Obama is related to seven U.S. Presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S Truman, and James Madison, as well as actor Brad Pitt.

[Emphasis in bold ours]

Snopes reached out to Meitzler and Champoux, who did not immediately return a request for comment. We also reached out to NEHGS — which has since changed its name to American Ancestors — for access to the 2008 news release, which we were unable to find; however, they were also not immediately available for comment.

But according to NEHGS’s research, Pitt and Obama shared a common ancestor, Edwin Hickman, who lived in Virginia and died in 1769. 

Genealogists identified Hickman as the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the two men, making them ninth cousins.

Snopes reached out to Pitt and Obama’s respective teams, and although they did not immediately return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Pitt appeared unaware of this familial relation to the former president.

Elsewhere, the connection between Obama and Pitt was published on family tree website Geneastar (archived), and in April 2024, a Reddit user posted a flow chart illustrating the family tree linking the two men (archived):

In 2014, genealogy platform Ancestry.com also reported on their familial ties (archived), with the website providing the following information regarding their shared ancestry:

The president shares an 18th-century Virginia ancestor with the superstar actor-producer. Edwin Hickman, who died in 1769, connects Obama and Pitt as ninth cousins.

Hickman’s connection to Obama comes through his mother, Ann Dunham, who grew up in Kansas. Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. Dunham and Obama Sr. met as university students in Hawaii, where the future president was born.

Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and raised in Missouri in a strict Baptist household. 

Genealogical research attributed to NEHGS, and subsequent media coverage, confirmed former President Obama and Hollywood actor Pitt are indeed ninth cousins, sharing a common ancestor from the 18th century. Therefore, we have rated this claim as “True.”

Snopes previously reported on unusual genealogical finds, including President Joe Biden being listed as dead in 2018, and the false claim that Jeremy Allen White and Gene Wilder are blood relatives.

On May 8, 1945, the German armed forces signed their unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. WWII, at least in Europe, was over. And now that the guns had fallen silent, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had to face a daunting conundrum: how to deal with the active members of the National Socialist Party, the SS, the Wehrmacht and other organisations who had committed some rather extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity? On top of that, how to rid the fabric of the fallen III Recih’s society from the pernicious influence of an extremist ideology so many had bought into? Afterall, in some respects with those who had bought into the ideology wholly, it would have been like going back to the 1700s American South and trying to convince a mass group of slave owners to completely, and almost immediately, rethink their ideas on slavery and those of African descent in the nation. A seemingly impossible task. And then beyond ideological shifts, Just from a practical standpoint, how to speed up economic recovery for the nation and ensure nothing like this would happen again in the country and provide a strong buffer between the Soviets and the rest of Europe.

So, how was all of this accomplished? And how did they do it so fast? And just how successful was all of this in reality?

To begin with, the very top ranking members of the Nazi Party, and nazi-adjacent organisations – 199 defendants in total – were tried at the famous Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946. Of course, hundreds, if not thousands, of other officials and officers wanted by Allied authorities were able to escape to Argentina via the numerous ‘rat lines’ through Scandinavia, Spain or even Vatican City. And countless more had no need to escape. Entities within the Allied and Soviet forces were more than happy to look the other way about anything they got up to during the war owing to the knowledge contained in their brains. More on this in a bit.

But when looking at the more wide-scale process of Denazification of the citizenry, most of these efforts consisted of special tribunals reviewing the alleged Nazi past of German and Austrian citizens. As well as just a general instillment in the mass populace that everything that had happened was their fault, and trying to get rid of various works that espoused Nazi ideology.

On that latter, over 30,000 different books were not only banned in the country after the war, but also systematically collected and destroyed. Anyone who tried to keep a copy could face legal consequences. The irony of this was not lost on anyone, given this was more or less a tactic taken out of the Nazi handbook when they came to power.

Beyond this, as alluded to, there was the general populace, who were to be made to feel responsible for what Germany had done under the Nazi regime, with the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force taking point on this. They began efforts here seeing to it that the media from radio to newspapers not only strongly emphasised the atrocities in their coverage, but also explicitly noting that it was every single German’s fault for allowing it to happen, not just the Nazis, in all heavily controlling the press to say what they wanted it to say… Another rather ironic page taken out of the Nazi handbook. Although, to be fair, in this case strongly emphasising educating the German public on all the atrocities that had actually been committed, unlike much of the things completely made up by the Nazis.

Beyond the various media outlets, posters were put up all around showing pictures from concentration camps with giant text overlaid saying things like “YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS.”

As noted by British author James Stern, in one German town a “crowd… gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage, instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading “WHO IS GUILTY?”. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming “THIS TOWN IS GUILTY! YOU ARE GUILTY!”

On top of that, in towns near concentration camps, the citizenry were often made to tour them, and even help bury the dead, help dig up mass graves, and things like this, with films also made of all this by the American War Information Unit to be shown to Germans who couldn’t see for themselves. As noted by the Chief of the film division of Psychological Warfare, Sidney Bernstein, the point of all this was “To shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that these German crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people – and not just the Nazis and SS – bore responsibility.”

This general shift in mindset to blame all Germans, and not just the Nazis began around 1944, with before this generally a distinction made by the U.S. brass and with the U.S. public, whereas after a strong push to solidify in everyone’s minds that there was little difference between a Nazi and a non-Nazi German citizen.

This also seems to have been a general mindset pushed by the military brass to their own troops, warning soldiers that “the majority of Germans supported the Nazis try to make friends with us – to get information, to get favors, to create sympathy for the ‘poor down-trodden’ German people, to make us disagree among ourselves, or just to get a good chance to slip a knife into Allied soldiers.”

Speaking of the soldiers and going back to taking pages out of the Nazi handbook, it is also noted that during the denazification process, not just on the Soviet side, but on the U.S. side as well, frequent random beatings and rape of German civilians out and about was a thing. As one German professor noted, “These assaults have become notorious among the civilian population of Marburg; nobody risks going out in the evenings, and people feel as if they were exposed to acts of indiscriminate brutality with no means of protection.”

But in all, to help change the mindset of the German populace who had bought into Nazi ideology, the general push was to show the atrocities that had been committed, and try to make every German citizen feel responsible.

Going back to the tribunals to try to punish those more directly involved and rid society of them in any prominent position, very briefly, the objectives of this process were codified as early as July of 1945, and while the tribunals’ sentences dragged into 1957, the vast majority of the millions of card-carrying Nazi Party members had already been reviewed and sanctioned by April 1948.

But that’s all at a high level. How was this actually accomplished, and so quickly?

To begin with, the process of removing National Socialism ideology from the social fabric of Germany was conceived long before the end of the war in Europe. In fact, the term “denazification” itself was coined in 1943 by the Pentagon as they began thinking about what post-war Germany legal system would look like. And as early as August 1944, this had all gotten expanded with US President Franklin Roosevelt writing in his memos that the Allies should ‘drive home’ to the Germans that they had participated in a ‘Lawless conspiracy’.

The same sentiment was expressed more formally when Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. On that occasion, the so-called ‘Three Greats’ clarified that denazification was to be considered a strategic war aim. More precisely, the removal of ‘All Nazi and militarist influences from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German people.’

The III Reich surrendered on May 8, 1945 and the drive for denazification was restated in the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. By that month, the western Allies had compiled a list of 178,000 nazis to be put under arrest, while the Soviets had already proceeded to the internment of 67,000 Reich officials.

Such a huge endeavour could not be conducted willy-nilly of course. Allied occupation forces had to clearly state the denazification objectives and parameters, as well as the categories and related sanctions for nazi offenders.

According to a US Department of State memo of July 1945, the objectives of the denazification program included:

1. The arrest of Nazi leaders, supporters and any other persons ‘dangerous to the Allied occupation or its objectives’
   
2. Exclusion of members of the Nazi Party, who had been more than nominal participants, from both public office and positions of responsibility in private enterprises
   
3. Eradication of Nazi laws and decrees

4. The dissolution of the Nazi Party and all its affiliated organisations, as well the prevention of their revival. This went hand in hand with:
   
5. Elimination of all paraphernalia, so central to Nazi propaganda: symbols, flags and anthems. And finally
   
6. Complete removal of nazi ideology from German information services, schooling system, and religion.

Having clarified what denazification was about, Allied forces had to define how it would be carried out. The Allied Control Council reached an agreement only in January 1946, issuing Directive 24 which contained guidelines for a coordinated approach – as we shall see later, this would be anything but coordinated!

In each of the four occupation zones of Germany, the Allies set up ad-hoc denazification commissions and tribunals, which involved the participation of local, vetted individuals, such as union leaders, judges and opponents to Nazism. The rulings of these bodies were made on the basis of an extensive, 131-point questionnaire drafted by the Public Safety Branch of the Allied Military Government.

This was known as the ‘Fragebogen’ which, translated from German, simply means ‘Questionnaire’

Respondents had to provide accurate and detailed answers about their education, their professional training, employment and military service. Going even deeper, those filling in ‘The Questionnaire’ had to provide details on the source of their income and assets since January 1931, as well as their writings and speeches published since 1923.

But most of all, they had to provide a full account of their membership and role within the National Socialist Party or any other affiliated organisation.

In the American occupation sector, filled in and signed questionnaires would be evaluated by a denazification tribunal in collaboration with the US Counter Intelligence Corps and a Special Branch Section of the Military Government’s Public Safety Division. These bodies would then cross-check all the answers against police files, civil service records and the very archives of the Nazi Party.

The purpose of this screening was not to identify all German citizens who had joined the Party or an adjacent organisation at any point, as there would have been very few exceptions. The Allied Military Government in fact agreed to safeguard from sanctions the ‘Purely nominal member of the Nazi Party who was forced to join in order to retain his position of livelihood or escape the concentration camp.’

The point was to ascertain if the individuals under scrutiny had been involved in more than just a nominal capacity in supporting the Nazi regime; if they had contributed to perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity; or if they posed a threat to the Allies and the restoration of democracy.

Based on these factors, respondents would be classified as follows:

‘Major offenders’ were to be sentenced to life imprisonment, or even to death.

Then you had the ‘offenders’: activists, militarists and those who had profited from Germany’s war of aggression, who could face up to ten years of prison.

Next, you had the somewhat murkier category of ‘lesser offenders’, subjected to a probationary period of up to three years.

The rank-and-file followers or supporters of Hitler’s regime, with no specific active responsibilities might encounter a fine, and be subjected to surveillance.

And finally ‘exonerated individuals’ would not receive any sanction.

Based on this categorisation, anybody from ‘lesser offender’ and up were deemed to have had more than a nominal participation in the Nazi Party’s activities. As such, in addition to the sanctions described, they would face mandatory removal from their post, be them military officers or public officials.

OK, so we have covered how the denazification of Germany should have worked. But how did it actually turn out?

Well, especially in the US-controlled occupation zone, military authorities started with a bang, preemptively detaining 400,000 Germans in internment camps, before they had even started filling in their 131-point questionnaires. But when the tribunals and commissions started applying due process, it became apparent that discerning rank-and-file party members from lesser or more serious offenders was no easy task …

The US military had access to excellent records – one thing the Nazis were unquestionably good at was record keeping. Occupation troops in Munich, in fact, discovered the party’s entire registry with the names of 12 million card-carrying members. But, according to Earl F. Ziemke, writing for the US Army Centre of Military History, ‘It was on the gray fringes of denazification that the question of who and what were Nazis vexed military government,’

The military occupation authorities still had to sift all those 12 million individuals, trying to identify the worst that humanity had to offer. And it turns out that many of those 12 million Nazis ‘had training, experience, energy, affability, and not a bad political record.’

As reported by Ziemke, American troops found those under scrutiny to be, on the whole, surprisingly pleasant chaps, which made their denazification efforts all the more difficult. A US high-ranking officer commented that if ‘All the Nazis had been exceedingly unpleasant and rude, denazification would have been easy.’

On the other hand, many among those Germans who were not formal members of the party could fall into two categories: those ballsy enough not to fall for Nazi ideology and propaganda; and those who had applied for membership but had been rejected! Interestingly, the former were equally not keen to cooperate with the Allies. And the latter likely did not make for ideal members of society.

And that was the problem: denazification was all well and good, but the Allies were also seeking to rebuild German society from its ruins, and as fast as possible. If they made a clean sweep of anybody even loosely associated with National Socialism, in Ziemke’s words: ‘They were going to have to run the country with old men until the next generation grew up. The number of political acceptables between the ages of twenty and fifty who were also trained and competent was exceedingly small.’

So, that was the first snag.

The second one was that the whole program required a huge bureaucratic apparatus which the Allies simply could not manage. In the US controlled zone alone, the commissions and tribunals had to review a whopping 10 million questionnaires. Sure, they had enrolled local personnel to run the tribunals, but even so trained man-power was scarce. And even those Germans who were willing to participate were reluctant to dish out harsh sanctions to their fellow citizens.

The third snag was that defendants in these tribunals had found a convenient way out: they could easily obtain signed, sworn affidavits from priests or even just friends and neighbours, attesting that the defendant was a mere rank-and-file follower, or that he or she could be altogether exonerated. Naturally, a cottage industry emerged, putting these affidavits on sale. They later became colloquially known as ‘Persilscheine’ after the popular Persil brand of detergent. In other words, they would leave a defendant’s reputation squeaky clean!

Eventually, US authorities could not cope with the red tape associated with denazification in their controlled areas, and with tensions between the Soviets and the U.S. rising, also somewhat shifted their focus. In particular, they were now much more concerned with Germany’s rapid economic recovery than trying to make sure everyone paid for their crimes and weren’t allowed in prominent positions. A similar thing happened over in Japan with the now termed “Reverse Course” policies. But back in Germany, with this shift, on March 5, 1946, they formally transferred all such duties to reconstituted German authorities, something that the British had done a few months earlier as well.

On that note, with the British and French occupation zones, local military governments took an even more pragmatic approach. Both prioritised the efficiency of local administration and economy, to quickly cope with housing and food shortages. Thus, they were even less scrupulous when it came to allowing former high-ranking officials to hold or resume important positions. French authorities were most lax of all, even allowing nazis residing in other zones to move and resume work in their occupied areas with no hinderance. As another example, given the Nazis had placed individuals whose beliefs aligned with their ideologies in prominent teaching positions, around 3/4 of teachers in the country were immediately fired after the war… only for the vast majority in the French zone to be quickly rehired and given their positions back. This was reflected in most industries in the French zone. In the end, in total, the French only labelled 13 total individuals in their region “major offenders”.

Finally, moving to the Soviet occupation zone, the removal of Nazi personnel and ideology appeared to be more resolute than in the zones governed by the Western Allies. In fact, denazification proceeded hand-in-hand with the ‘Sovietization’ of Eastern Germany, that is extensive land reforms and nationalisation of industry. Moreover, while Western Allies strove to replace Nazi officials with political representatives from a broad spectrum, Moscow had a preference for the KPD, or Communist Party of Germany, later the Socialist Unity Party or SED.

However, according to historian Timothy R. Vogt, the denazification in the Soviet-held area was not as thorough as it initially appeared. Thanks to the cooperation of the KPD, Soviet authorities were able to delegate most denazification processes to the Germans themselves, in the form of local anti-Nazi committees and newly formed provincial governments. These bodies enacted their measures inconsistently, and were prone to caving in when meeting local resistance and objections.

Moreover, they appeared to follow the general principle that if former Nazis were willing to rebrand themselves as Communists, they would not be removed from public life.

As you might have guessed from all this, as early as 1948, it had become apparent that the denazification of Germany had not resulted in the intended restructure of society. In December of that year, international relations scholar John H. Herz, a member of the US delegation at the Nuremberg trials, published an article with the self-explanatory title of ‘The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany’

Herz focused on the American occupation zone, reporting how trials conducted there were frequently hindered by intimidation on the part of nazi sympathisers. Even without intimidation, prosecutors based their indictments of the answers provided in the questionnaires, without verifying their veracity. Thus, most defendants were categorised as mere ‘followers’.

Moreover, after denazification efforts had been handed over to German authorities in March 1946, they had issued two amnesties, one in August, one in December, exonerating members of the Hitler Youth, persons of low income and disabled citizens. Herz pointed out how such amnesties allowed even war criminals to escape prosecution.

The scholar also unearthed a major procedural flaw.

Until October 1947, denazification processes had vetted some 50,000 individuals a month. Quite a good number! But the tribunals had given precedence to those who had been classified as ‘followers’ on the basis of their questionnaires. By the time tribunals finally worked their stash of paperwork to those classified as ‘offenders’, a legislative amendment allowed prosecutors to re-categorise them as ‘followers’, too – with the exception of members of the SS.

Such re-categorisation still required approval from the Allied Military Government. But in January 1948 this procedural step was removed by the enactment of an expediting procedure. Now all ‘offenders’ could be rubber stamped as ‘followers’ wholesale!

A further relaxation of standards took place in March 1948, with the almost total removal of the exception clause for members of the SS and other criminal organisations affiliated to the Nazi Party. Now, only those belonging to the category of the ‘Major offenders’ could expect major sanctions. Everybody else was deemed a ‘follower’ and was free to go after paying a fine.

As for the numbers on all this, some 12,753,000 Germans were expected to undergo the denazification procedures. More than 9 million were found ‘not chargeable’. The remaining 3,209,000 were processed by the end of April 1948. And of these, more than 2.3 million were amnestied without trial.

This left 836,000 to be tried – a mere 6.5%. More than one third of these were exonerated, and more than half classified as ‘followers’.

Of the remainder, 10.7% were categorised as ‘lesser offenders’; 2.1% were Class II ‘offenders’; and only 0.1% were found to be ‘major offenders’. That’s 836 individuals from the original nearly 13 million person pool.

And even those who were sentenced as ‘offenders’ in any degree of severity, most received lenient sanctions, such as community work, payment of fines, or shortened prison sentences.

Herz proceeded to compile several examples of such lenient treatments, of which we shall report only a few:

• An active propagandist and publisher of anti-Semitic writings was ranked as ‘follower’ and fined a mere 50 marks.
• A Dean at Bonn University, active member of the SS and their intelligence services, the SD, was fully exonerated.
• A high-ranking member of the Gestapo was found to be only a ‘follower’ and received a minor fine. Another Gestapo-man, head of station in the town of Fulda: also a ‘follower’.
• And the former deputy chief of police in Nuremberg, and one of the men responsible for the infamous Kristallnacht? Also a follower, fined a mere 800 marks!
• One physician, responsible for carrying out the sterilisation law against ‘undesirables’ … you guessed it: follower! Please pay your 500 marks and leave!
• Finally, an aeronautical engineer and industrialist who made a fortune of 36 million marks thanks to slave labour … Well, you get the gist by now. He was ultimately fined 2,000 marks.

Moving on toward the end of the 1940s, across all areas of occupation leniency gave way to amnesty and a strategy of integration. The chief proponent of this approach was the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, Konrad Adenauer. After his election in September 1949, Adenauer advocated for West Germany to forge strong bonds with Western Europe against the Communist Bloc. This strategy also included for old Nazi cadres to be integrated into the new republic, in order to move forward.

Towards that end in all this, in May 1951, Adenauer’s government passed the first amnesty law, which reintegrated into their position some 150,000 officials and civil servants, previously removed by the Allied denazification efforts. The following year, the Chancellor reported to the parliament that two thirds of German diplomats were, in fact, former Nazis. The armed forces, security services and even the private sector were similarly replete with former Reich personnel.

Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, British HIgh Commissioner in Germany, commented: ‘Whenever I travelled, I ran into ghosts of Hitler’s Reich, men who had occupied positions in administration, in industry, or the society of the day. They were either living in retirement or were taking jobs in banks, commerce or industry.’

Despite the amnesty, Adenauer’s regime also took steps the other way. For example, in August of 1952, his cabinet banned the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party. And in September he agreed to pay the state of Israel a reparation of 3 billion German marks, equivalent to $8.3 billion in today’s value.

But Adenauer’s intention was to leave the past behind nonetheless, and in 1954 his government issued the second amnesty law, which this time benefited around 400,000 German citizens.

A similar denazification process, culminating in widespread amnesty, was followed in Austria. This country is often excluded from English-speaking accounts of denazification, but we should not forget that Austria was annexed to the III Reich before the start of WWII. Nor that Austrian citizens actively joined the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Nazi Party, and therefore the country was occupied by the Allies at the end of the conflict.

The Austrian denazification process was led by the four occupying powers, UK, France, US and USSR in collaboration with three local parties: the Social Democratic Party, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Communist Party.

According to historian Dieter Stiefel, the Austrian denazification can be divided into five phases:

During the ‘Military Security Phase’, from April 1945 to June 1945, the four allied occupation powers worked in coordination to intern an initial batch of prominent SS and Nazi Party members. Such potentially dangerous individuals were hunted down and detained, on the basis of ‘black lists’ compiled by the allied high commissioners.

The next phase, from June 1945 to February 1946, is labelled as ‘Autonomous Denazification’: now the four Allies, plus the Austrian government, carried out denazification efforts independently from each other, which resulted in contradictory measures and decisions.

For example, the US occupation used a seven-page questionnaire similar to the fragebogen. The British and French used it, too, but only in part, while the Soviets ditched it completely! In Fact, the Soviets acted relatively chill in their zone of occupation, delegating the denazification process to local authorities. They intervened directly only when they identified someone guilty of war crimes committed on Soviet soil, or when they selected a promising scientist for, let’s say, relocation under pressure. More on this later!

In February 1946 the Allies devolved all denazification activities to the Austrian government, ushering in the third ‘Autochthonous’ phase. Local authorities followed three laws promulgated to this purpose, the Prohibition Act, Economic Cleansing Act, and War Crimes Act.

In order to enforce these laws, the government created ad hoc ‘People’s Courts’, consisting of two professional judges, and three lay judges nominated amongst the general public. These tribunals were set up to take very direct action, as no appeal was allowed against their verdicts. Nonetheless, allied authorities took note that the Austrian judiciary introduced at a very slow pace, and pressured for a quicker uptake.

In February 1947 the Government issued a new National Socialist law regulating the removal of the old Reich’s vestiges, thus kicking off a fourth phase …

… which lasted less than one year. The fifth and final phase, from 1948 to 1957, is known as the ‘time of amnesties’. The first of these involved the so-called ‘Minderbelastete’, which can be translated as ‘less incriminated’ or ‘lesser offenders’. This amnesty was applied to 90% of all registered members of the Austrian National Socialist Party.

The ‘Minderbelastete Amnesty’ effectively put an end to all major attempts at denazifying Austrian society. Which is not unsurprising: much like in a divided Germany, after the onset of the Cold War each allied power sought to consolidate local authorities under their sphere of influence.

The Austrian People’s Courts, however, continued to operate until December 1955. Up to that point, these tribunals had issued 13,607 guilty verdicts. But following the withdrawal of occupation forces from the country, a new constitutional law abolished the People’s Courts transferring their duties to standard jury trials.

Denazification trials continued for another couple of years, but to a much lesser degree of intensity: in the 1956-57 period, Austrian courts issued a total of 39 verdicts, of which only 18 were guilty sentences. As the denazification efforts and fervour whittled down, the Austrian parliament voted in favour of a final amnesty in 1957.

Besides widespread amnesties, it is no secret that hundreds of former Nazi officials entirely escaped any form of sanctions thanks to their military, scientific or technical expertise. They were simply deemed too useful to the Allies! In allied countries this seems to be something history paints as completely acceptable, though when other countries, like Argentina, essentially did the same, it’s more vilified for various reasons. See our video Why Did So Many Nazis Choose Argentina to Flee to After WWII?.

But as for the United States, according to the US Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, as early as May 10, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised the commander of US forces in Europe, General Eisenhower, to make some exceptions when it came to arresting war criminals:

‘In your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.’

Throughout the summer or 1945, the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC, and the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, did employ former German military and intelligence officers as informants – but this was a necessity to identify more dangerous Nazi criminals, or suppress anti-Allied resistance. But as friction mounted across the Iron Curtain, American and other Western allied services took to using German military personnel as a source of intelligence about Soviet military strategy, equipment and tactics.

Towards this end, the CIC collaborated closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the ‘Foreign Armies East’, founded in 1938 and responsible for collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union. But the Corps also recruited personnel whose resume erred on the criminal side, such as SS officer Klaus Barbie, charmingly known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’.

Barbie the Butcher and other war criminals were eventually protected from prosecution and smuggled out of Europe with the complicity of the CIC, OSS and other Allied services. Many, many more former Nazi and SS officials would escape via ‘rat lines’ set up by Argentinian intelligence and even the Vatican.

The US Joint Chief of Staffs, however, were not interested in simply knowing more about the Soviets. They were interested in gaining a technological edge over them. As early as July 1945, they explicitly authorised a program to exploit ‘Chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.’

Those rare minds were 350 German and Austrian scientists and technicians, to be brought immediately to America under Operation OVERCAST.

By 1946, the Department of Defence’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency sought to expand OVERCAST to recruit further 1,000 former enemy brains, and even grant them American citizenship. This was a complicated endeavour, as some of these chosen 1,000 were high ranking members of the Nazi Party. At least one of them, ‘rocket scientist’ Werner von Braun, had been an SS officer.

The plan required Presidential blessing, which President Truman granted in September 1946, insisting that only so-called ‘nominal’ Nazis be allowed in the program. The term indicated German and Austrian citizens who had joined the party out of convenience or coercion, but had not actively supported the Reich.

The new, expanded program took the name of Operation Paperclip. In early 1947 a panel constituted by the Departments of Justice and State began combing dossiers of prospective scientists for relocation to the US, which were based on CIC investigations. The panel initially rejected several applications, as the individuals in question had been identified as potential threats on the basis of their Nazi past.

This did not sit well with the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. According to the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, they ordered American intelligence in Europe to revise the scientists’ dossiers, so that they could make it through the Paperclip panel.

Thus, from 1945 to 1955, Operations Overcast and Paperclip helped relocate 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians to the States. The Interagency Working Group estimates that as many as 80% of them were former Nazi Party members.

Now, Operation Paperclip is a well-known episode of the Cold War. What is less well-known is that the Soviet Union had their own version of this project, known as Operation Osoaviakhim, or the forced relocation of more than 2,500 German scientists to the USSR.

However, an interesting thing about the name is it actually is something of a misnomer. The term ‘Osoaviakhim’ is an acronym which stands for ‘Union of Societies for Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR’. This was a paramilitary and sporting organisation founded in 1927. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet equivalent of Paperclip, but apparently a German radio incorrectly used this word to refer to the ‘brain drain’ in 1946, and US intelligence services adopted the term.

The plan was initiated in April 1946, when the Soviet Minister of Aeronautical Industry, Mikhail Khrunichev, Minister of Aeronautical Industry, issued an order for the relocation of the German aeronautical and engine industry. This was followed by a May 13, 1946 resolution, decreed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, which ordered the transfer of 2,000 ‘German specialists’ by the end of the year.

And not just specialists of any kind. The Soviet zone of occupation included facilities which were replete with scientists and technicians involved in aviation and rocket engineering projects. Initially, the Soviets founded institutions such as the Nordhausen Institute or the Berlin Institute, to resume work initiated by the Reich’s best and brightest. For example, the Nordhausen was put under the direction of Helmut Gröttrup, a former collaborator of Werner von Braun on the V-2 program.

But the agreements signed amongst the Allies at the Potsdam Conference prohibited the development of weapons on German soil, and so Moscow planned the relocation of these programs elsewhere.

Following the MVD’s resolution of May 1946, the Soviet forces started to gather hundreds of experts in atomic research, electronics, navigation equipment, rockets, jet engines and even colour video.

On October 22, 1946, Operation Osoaviakhim was effectively initiated, under the leadership of Ivan Serov, later a chairman of the KGB. By day, Serov had organised 92 freight trains, transporting the necessary equipment to the USSR. And by night, the Army and MVD police swooped in to arrest the German scientists and their families, for a total of 6,500 individuals.

After being made to see that their lives would be much better doing what the Soviet regime wanted… and it would be a shame if anything *happened* to themselves or their families, they were all offered a regular contract and paid salaries which were higher than that of their Soviet counterparts as extra incentive. As you might imagine, only a fraction of the German scientific contingent refused to cooperate with Moscow, and for that refusal these were thus interned at the Sharashka GuLag camp.

The Osoaviakhim scientists were gradually allowed to return to Germany after 1950, with the vast majority leaving after Stalin’s death in March of 1953.

But in the end, at the start of this video we asked the question: how did Germany and Austria denazify so quickly after WWII? Especially given the ideology behind their former regime was so embedded into every facet of society.

To sum up, on one hand, we can very simplistically state that both societies needed to move on quickly, to both rebuild their economies and to face the political challenges posed by the Cold War. And so everyone was incentivized to do so, and so did. And on top of this the extreme atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war helped convince those who had bought into what the Nazis were selling, that maybe they should rethink their decision making paradigm.

On the other hand, we can cynically acknowledge that the process was quick because it failed overall on a huge percentage of what it was meant to accomplish. Wiping the slate clean in such a pervasive regime was a logistically daunting task, one which the Allies and the local institutions were ill-prepared and little motivated to accomplish at a certain point. The Nazi party was finished. The Soviets were the new threat. West Germany, much like Japan, needed to be strong to help counter this. And to help facilitate this, former prominent Nazis and many prominent individuals in Japan would better serve these goals in their positions they were experts in, rather than sitting in prison or executed.

And for more on the Japanese side of this, do see our documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust.

Expand for References

In Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 historical revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, recruits the titular Basterds – a squad of Jewish soldiers – to wreak havoc behind Nazi lines during World War II. In the process, they cross paths with a parallel British mission and a revenge plot by a French Jewish woman and succeed in gunning down Adolf Hitler and most of the Nazi high command in a burning French theatre. Ridiculous Hollywood nonsense, right? Well, not as much as you might think for not only did Allied Intelligence actually concoct a plan – dubbed Operation Foxley – to assassinate Hitler, but they also recruited a large number of Jewish refugees to conduct secret operations behind enemy lines. And by far the most successful of these, carried out in the dying days of the war, succeeded in saving thousands of lives and a key Austrian city from unnecessary destruction. This is the story of Operation Greenup, the real-life Inglourious Basterds.

The real-life ‘Basterds’ in this story comprised three men. The first was Frederick Mayer, born on October 28, 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany to Berthilda Dreyfuss and Heinrich Mayer. Heinrich served in the Imperial German Army during the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class for gallantry during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the family hoped that their patriarch’s wartime service would shield them from antisemitic prosecution, but they were bitterly disappointed. The younger Mayer, who was employed as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Company, often had to fight off antisemitic street gangs on his way to and from work. By 1938 it became clear that Germany was no place for Jews, so Mayer and his wife emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn. They soon discovered that antisemitism was nearly as rife in America as in Germany, though Mayerwas not one to let this slide. On one occasion, he responded to an employer’s antisemitic joke by punching him out cold.

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mayer enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he quickly displayed a winning combination of daring, initiative, and lateral thinking. During one training exercise in Arizona, he snuck behind enemy lines and captured a number of officers including a Brigadier General, who protested:

“You can’t do that! You’re breaking the rules!”

To which Mayer responded:

“War is not fair. The rules of war are to win.”

At this, the General admitted defeat and raised his hands in surrender. Like. A. Boss.

These qualities, as well as Mayer’s fluency in German, French, Spanish, brought Mayer to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS – the precursor to today’s CIA – who immediately recruited him as an agent and trained him in demolition, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. In a 2013 documentary, Mayer explained his motivations in a statement that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Tarantino’s film:

“It felt like I had my chance to do what I set out to do — kill Nazis. That’s why all the Jewish boys joined.”

Whether his goals included collecting 100 Nazi scalps is not recorded.

The second key figure in Operation Greenup was Hans Wijnberg, a Dutch Jew born on November 29, 1922 in Amsterdam. On the eve of the Second World War in 1939, Winberg’s parents sent him and his twin brother Louis to live with his father’s business partner in Brooklyn. In 1943, four years into the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Wijnberg’s parents were rounded up and deported to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp. Distraught and vowing revenge, the now 21-year-old Wijnberg enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was soon approached by an OSS recruiter, who had sought him out for his fluency in German, Dutch, and English. Wijnberg volunteered on the spot, and was trained as a radio operator.

The third and final member of the team was Franz Weber, born in 1920 in Oberperfuss near Innsbruck, Austria. As an officer in the German Wehrmacht, he served on several fronts, including the savage anti-partisan campaigns in occupied Yugoslavia. An avowed and conscientious Catholic, Weber soon grew disgusted by the brutal reprisals inflicted against the local population, and became convinced that the Nazi regime was evil and unsustainable. After transferring to the Italian front in the summer of 1944, he defected to U.S. Forces near Viareggio. Recognizing his willingness to oppose the Nazis and his intimate knowledge of the Tyrol region, the OSS quickly recruited Weber and assigned him to the Operation Greenup team.

Mayer, Wijnberg, and Weber’s mission was, simply put, to determine how the war in Europe would end. For years, rumours abounded that the Nazi high command was building an Alpenfestung or “Alpine Redoubt”: a large, heavily-fortified area in the Alps where the last, fanatical Nazi holdouts would make their last stand – potentially extending the war by months and costing thousands more lives. Operation Greenup called for the trio to be parachuted into the Tyrol near Innsbruck, where they would report on the movement of troops and equipment through the Brenner pass between Austria and Italy and determine whether the Alpenfestung actually existed. Meanwhile, they were to cause as much chaos as possible behind enemy lines. The OSS had already sent 30 teams into the area, but all had either been captured or failed to gather any useful intelligence. However, Operation Greenup had an ace up its sleeve: Franz Weber, who not only knew the area intimately but whose family in Oberperfuss had bravely volunteered to shelter the agents and run messages for them.

On February 26, 1945, the team made their jump over a frozen mountain lake 10,000 feet up in the air – the only viable drop zone in the area not crawling with German troops. While mercifully the lake was frozen solid and no-one was injured or drowned, unfortunately all but one supply canister were lost – including the one holding the team’s skis. They were thus forced to hike for miles through waist-deep snow until they reached Franz Weber’s house. There, they set up camp and began preparing for their mission. Brooklynites through and through, the team created a system of codenames to disguise their operations by laying a map of their home borough over a map of the Tyrol and renaming each location after its corresponding New York street name or intersection.

As soon as the team was organized, Mayer descended into Innsbruck and posed as a Wehrmacht officer, even sleeping for a while in the Officer’s Barracks. There he gathered a windfall of intelligence from his unsuspecting fellow officers and kept an eye on troop and supply movements through the city. He even organized an underground resistance movement among local Army and Gestapo personnel who had grown disillusioned with the Nazis and wished to bring a swift end to the war. Franz Weber’s sisters bravely volunteered as couriers, carrying information gathered by Mayer back to Wijnberg, who, using a radio hidden the the Webers’ attic, transmitted it to the OSS listening post in Bari, Italy. This intelligence allowed the U.S. Army Air Force to bomb dozens of trains, blocking the Brenner Pass for weeks on end and severely disrupting German supply lines.

Three weeks into the operation, Mayer learned of a secret underground munitions plant in the area, and decided to pose as a French electrician fleeing the Russians in order to infiltrate it. Unfortunately, Mayer’s luck suddenly took a turn for the worse when one of his local contacts, a black marketeer, was captured by the Gestapo and promptly ratted out the rest of his resistance network. Mayer was immediately captured and brutally tortured, being stripped naked and thrashed with a bullwhip for hours. Still, he maintained his story – that is, until the informant was brought into the torture chamber. His cover blown, Mayer admitted he was an American agent, but, in a bid to save his team, maintained that he worked alone. At this point Mayer should have been dragged outside and executed as a spy, but once again fate intervened.

At the same time, the Gestapo was interrogating another American OSS agent, Hermann Matull, whom they showed a picture of Mayer for identification. Thinking quickly, Matull claimed that Mayer was a high-ranking intelligence officer, and that American forces would execute anyone caught harming him. The ruse worked, and instead of being executed, Mayer was brought before the highest official in the area: Franz Hofer, the Gauleiter or regional governor of Tyrol. Convinced that the Third Reich’s defeat was inevitable and not wanting to be tried as a war criminal, Hofer treated Mayer humanely and allowed him to contact his OSS handlers via neutral Switzerland. The message they relayed was a masterclass in hard-boiled understatement, reading:

“Fred Mayer reports he is in Gestapo hands but cabled ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m not really bad off.’”

With Hofer’s help, Mayer organized the peaceful surrender of Innsbruck, preventing the city from unnecessary destruction. On the morning of May 3, 1945, as the US 103rd Infantry Division was preparing to advance on the city, Mayer drove out in a car flying a a white flag improvised from a bedsheet and informed the American forces that the German garrison in Innsbruck was prepared to surrender without resistance. Though only a sergeant, Mayer claimed to be a Lieutenant in the hopes he would be taken more seriously by both German and American officers. It worked, and Innsbruck was captured without a shot being fired. Thus ended Operation Greenup.

In addition to trying up German logistics, Greenup’s greatest achievement was deflating the myth of the Alpenfestung once and for all. Though the plan for an Alpine Redoubt had seriously been proposed and provisionally approved by both Adolf Hitler and Gauleiter Hofer, due to a lack of resources no serious attempt was ever made to implement it. Nonetheless, in 1945 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels created a special unit to spread false intelligence about the hypothetical redoubt, going so far as to draft fake blueprints and troop movement orders and leak rumours to neutral countries. This deception operation was enormously successful, forcing the Allies to expend considerable resources trying to establish the scale and readiness of Alpenfestung. It was not until Allied troops actually crossed into Austria that they finally learned that the dreaded Alpine Redoubt was nothing but a mirage.

After the war, Mayer moved back to Brooklyn, where he worked at a power plant until his retirement in 1977. He then moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, where he volunteered as a driver for Meals on Wheels for 38 years. In 2013, Senator Jay Rockefeller presented Mayer with 10 decorations for his wartime service, including the Prisoner of War Medal, Good Conduct Medal; American Campaign Medal; European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three Bronze Stars; World War II Victory Medal; World War II Honorable Service Lapel Button; and the Parachutist Badge. During the awards ceremony, Rockefeller opined on Mayer’s wartime contributions, stating:

“Mr. Mayer is a remarkable but incredibly humble man whose bravery in World War II is only now getting the attention it deserves. I am truly honored to be here today, and to share his story.”

Frederick Mayer died on April 15, 2016 at the age of 94.

Hans Wijnberg, Operation Greenup’s radio operator, left the Army in 1946 and studied chemistry, obtaining his bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1949 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. He served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota, Grinnell University, the University of Tulain, the University of Leiden, and the Rijksuniversitet Groningen before retiring and founding a successful chemical company. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.

Finally, Franz Weber remained in his hometown of Innsbruck, where he became Chief of Police. He later headed the Tyrol Farmers’ Union before going into politics and serving in both the Tyrolean and national Austrian legislatures. He died in 2001 at the age of 81.

While Operation Greenup was the most successful operation of the war conducted by Jewish operatives, it was far from the only one. At the outbreak of war, Jews who had fled Germany and occupied Czechoslovakia for Britain and her colonies were rounded up and interned as enemy aliens. In 1942, however, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, desperate for any means of striking back against the Germans, approved the formation of a special Commando Unit, code-named No.3 Troop or X-Troop, whose members were to be recruited from among the interned Jewish refugees. Numbering some 130 men and commanded by Captain Bryan Hilton-Jones, X-Troop participated in a number of daring operations. For example, during the disastrous Dieppe Raid on August 19, 1942, five members of the unit, all former Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, infiltrated a German headquarters to capture an Enigma cipher machine. Later, in the lead-up to the Operation Overlord landings in Normandy, X-Troop operative and German-born Jew Stefan Rosenberg – code-named Stephen Rigby or “Nimrod” – took part in the vast deception operation designed to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place in the Pas-de-Calais region – and to learn more about this, please check out our previous video The Bizarre Story of the Massive Fake Army That Defeated the Nazis and Helped End WWII. Rosenberg’s mission involved sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as a German intelligence officer disguised as a member of the French Resistance (take that, Robert Downey Jr.) and briefing his “superiors” on the alleged Allied invasion plans. In the end, he succeeded in securing an audience not only with Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, commander of German defences in Normandy, but Adolf Hitler himself before escaping back to British lines. How Rosenberg restrained himself from killing the hated Fuhrer then and there remains a mystery for the ages. Over the course of the war, X-troop lost 21 men killed and 22 wounded – but that, dear viewers, is a story for another day.

Expand for References

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on July 17. His symptoms remained mild and have since resolved, according to his treating physician. But fueled by days without a public sighting and Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, social media posts have baselessly claimed that Biden was gravely ill or had a medical emergency.

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Full Story

On July 21, President Joe Biden announced he was no longer running for president in the 2024 election. Just four days before, while campaigning in Las Vegas, he tested positive for COVID-19, leading him to fly to Delaware that evening to isolate. He remained in isolation at his beach house and was not seen in public again until July 23, when his symptoms had “resolved” and he tested negative for COVID-19, according to his physician.

Daily letters from Biden’s doctor show that the president never got seriously ill and he continued to perform his duties. But since his COVID-19 diagnosis — and particularly after his announcement that he would no longer seek the presidency — online posts have trafficked in unfounded rumors and speculation about Biden’s health.

“A verified source has informed the Global Press team that Joe Biden is currently in hospice care and is unlikely to survive the night,” proclaimed a July 22 X post later shared on Facebook. The “Global Press” account on X that made the original claim appeared to subsequently delete its account.

Some declared Biden to be terminally ill or even spread rumors that the president was dead.

Others, including conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, pointed to purported reports from local police in Las Vegas to suggest or claim that Biden had or might have had a medical emergency. 

According to an unnamed source, Kirk said, “US Secret Service informed LV Metro that there was an emergency situation involving Joe Biden and to close necessary streets so that POTUS could be transported immediately to University Medical, which they began to do in earnest.” 

“Then, mysteriously, there was a stand down order and the USSS informed local Vegas PD that they were going to ‘medivac’ POTUS to Johns Hopkins, which they presumed meant fly him back east ASAP,” Kirk’s post continued. “Apparently the rumor mill in the police department was that Joe Biden was dying or possibly already dead.”

Kirk’s speculations were later amplified in a Tucker Carlson video on Instagram. Citing an unnamed, non-medical source, another person online claimed Biden might have had a transient ischemic attack, or a mini stroke. 

Former President Donald Trump also chimed in on July 21, baselessly saying on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Biden “never had Covid.”

It’s true, according to local media and a statement from the police department, that a hospital in Las Vegas was on standby to potentially receive the president after he tested positive for COVID-19, and that police proactively shut down roads to ensure safe passage. But this doesn’t mean Biden had a medical emergency. The president never went to the hospital, and according to a letter posted by his treating physician, he only ever experienced mild COVID-19 symptoms. In an email to FactCheck.org, the White House denied that Biden had any kind of medical emergency.

In the afternoon of July 23, Biden appeared on a tarmac and told reporters he was “feeling well” before ascending the stairs to Air Force One to fly back to the White House. This put to rest the most extreme claims about his health, although conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer continued to insist he was dying. Biden is scheduled to address the nation this evening to discuss his decision to exit the 2024 presidential race.

No Evidence of a Medical Emergency

While suspicion has focused on road closures and preparation for a hospital in Las Vegas to possibly receive the president, there’s no evidence that Biden experienced a medical emergency. Instead, the posts appear to have spun contingency plans following Biden’s positive COVID-19 test into conspiracy theories.

“President Joe Biden did not visit UMC last week,” Scott Kerbs, a public relations director for University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, said in a statement to FactCheck.org. “On July 17 at approximately 2:15 p.m., UMC received notification to prepare for a potential medical visit from the president. As Nevada’s only Level I Trauma Center and the hospital tasked with caring for the Commander-in-Chief during official visits to the area, UMC was fully prepared to provide the state’s highest level of care for the president.”

In a local news report on July 17, the hospital’s CEO, Mason Van Houweling, indicated that the hospital prepared for a “medical” issue, rather than a trauma or accident, but did not elaborate further. He praised his hospital’s response, but referred to it as a “non-event.”

Van Houweling echoed that sentiment in another article about the hospital’s preparations, published on July 19 in Becker’s Hospital Review, which noted that the hospital “adjusted its preparation to arrange an appropriate facility and team for medical care based on the specific potential needs identified — in this case, diagnostic requirements.”

Kerbs told us in an email that this was describing “the fact that UMC, as a Level I Trauma Center, adjusted its default preparations from trauma care to general medical care, which involves diagnostics.”

Local police similarly confirmed that they prepared for Biden to travel to the hospital, but explained that it was precautionary. 

“The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was notified that President Joe Biden was sick on July 17th during his visit to Las Vegas. We did not know the nature of his illness,” the department told us in an email. “As a precaution, LVMPD proactively began to shut down roads leading to UMC Hospital. The Secret Service then advised LVMPD the President was going directly to Harry Reid International Airport and would be leaving Las Vegas.”

“It has been standard practice for many years, across administrations, for hospitals to be among the wide range of resources that are always put on standby when any president travels,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told us in an email.

Bates denied that the president experienced a medical emergency, including a mini stroke. “The only medical situation was his covid diagnosis, which was publicly announced,” he said. 

A reporter who accompanied the president on the flight back to Delaware did not make note of any kind of medical emergency. Instead, he reported that the flight was “quite bumpy,” and that his request for an informal press briefing was denied. Upon landing, while not looking in the best of health — as might be expected for someone sick with COVID-19 — Biden was still able to walk and speak.

COVID-19 can be dangerous, particularly for older adults and those who have not been infected or vaccinated previously, but all available evidence points to the 81-year-old president’s case as being mild. 

Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, Biden’s physician, provided daily updates on the president’s condition. In his last letter, on July 23, he reported that Biden had tested negative for the coronavirus and his symptoms, which had included a runny nose, cough and general malaise, had “resolved.”

“Over the course of his infection, he never manifested a fever, and his vital signs remained normal, to include pulse oximetry. His lungs remained clear,” O’Connor said of Biden, adding that the president “continues to perform all of his presidential duties.”

Although Biden did not make a public appearance until July 23, he called into his former campaign’s headquarters — now Vice President Kamala Harris’s HQ — on July 22. While in isolation, he also received briefings, spoke to a variety of politicians and supporters following the termination of his candidacy, and made a call to the head of the European Commission, according to White House officials.

As with his first bout of COVID-19 in 2022, Biden took the antiviral Paxlovid to treat his illness.

It’s not the first time that social media claims about Biden’s health have gone viral. Earlier this month, popular posts falsely claimed Biden had a “medical emergency” aboard Air Force One, the AP reported.

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Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

Sources

“Statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.” Press release. White House. 17 Jul 2024.

Letters from Kevin C. O’Connor, Physician to the President. Available from WhiteHouse.gov. 18 Jul to 23 Jul 2024.

Drummond, Cristen. “Las Vegas hospital on standby to treat President Biden during COVID-19 diagnosis.” KSNV. 17 Jul 2024.

Madhani, Aamer. “Biden will address the nation Wednesday on his decision to drop his 2024 Democratic reelection bid.” AP. 23 Jul 2024.

President Biden (@POTUS). “Tomorrow evening at 8 PM ET, I will address the nation from the Oval Office on what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people.” X. 23 Jul 2024.

Kerbs, Scott. Brand and Public Relations Director, University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. Emails to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Gooch, Kelly. “A Las Vegas hospital’s playbook for presidential care.” Becker’s Hospital Review. 18 Jul 2024.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Office of Public Information. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Bates, Andrew. White House spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Jul 2024.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan. “Travel Pool Report #8 Dover landing.” White House pool report. 17 Jul 2024.

“Biden lands in Delaware after testing positive for COVID.” AP video. 18 Jul 2024.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan. “From Buoyant to Frail: Two Days in Las Vegas as Biden Tests Positive.” New York Times. 18 Jul 2024.

“The Changing Threat of COVID-19.” CDC. 23 Feb 2024.

“Remarks by President Biden and Vice President Harris at a Campaign Event | Wilmington, DE.” White House. 22 Jul 2024.

Miller, Zeke and Chris Megerian. “Biden tests positive for COVID.” AP. 21 Jul 2022.Goldin, Melissa. “FACT FOCUS: Online reports falsely claim Biden suffered a ‘medical emergency’ on Air Force One.” AP. 6 Jul 2024.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

Oklahoma’s state superintendent ordered public schools to incorporate the Bible as “an instructional support into the curriculum.” But social media posts have shared the inaccurate claim that “Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Louisiana and Texas haven’t issued such an order.

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Full Story

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, issued a directive on June 27 that all the state’s public schools “incorporate the Bible … as an instructional support into the curriculum,” the New York Times reported.

Walters said the Bible is “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” the Times reported. “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Walters said.

Walters’ directive and other recent efforts by conservative-led states to introduce religion into public schools — which are facing legal challenges — have generated attention on social media. But some posts mischaracterize what changes have been made to public school curricula and where these changes have taken place.

A July 11 Threads post misleadingly claimed, “States of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana all ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools.” Similar posts have been shared on Facebook, including a post that shows a group of students praying in a classroom.

Conservative leaders in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas have all sought to expand the role of religion in public education, but only Oklahoma’s education department has ordered that the Bible be taught in classrooms.

Ten Commandments in Louisiana

Two weeks before Walters’ order in Oklahoma, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a requirement that classrooms in every public school and state-funded university display the text of the Ten Commandments by Jan. 1, 2025.

The law requires that the posters be at least 11 inches by 14 inches and that “the text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster.” The posters will also include a lengthy statement intended to provide context for the display, stating, “The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” The posters will be purchased with donations, and public schools are not required to spend money on the displays.

A suit challenging the law has been filed by some Louisiana parents represented by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of church and state.

They argue that the law violates U.S. Supreme Court precedent. A Kentucky statute similar to the one passed in Louisiana was the subject of the 1980 Supreme Court case, Stone v. Graham. The superintendent of Kentucky schools, James Graham, was sued by parents for an order that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. The high court decided against Graham, ruling that the poster violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution — which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — and that displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms were “plainly religious in nature.”

In an interview with NewsNation at the Republican National Convention on July 18, Landry said, “I think this is one of the cases where the court has it wrong. And so here is the question: If the Supreme Court has something wrong, why would you not want that to be corrected?”

Landry also said, “I would submit that maybe if the Ten Commandments were hanging on [would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’] wall in the school that he was in, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a shot” at former President Donald Trump.

While Landry wants to display the Ten Commandments in Louisiana’s classrooms, the state of Louisiana has not “ordered that the Bible be taught in public schools,” as the social media posts claim.

Proposed Curriculum in Texas

In May, the Texas Education Agency introduced elementary school materials that include biblical and other religious references for public review and comment. The proposed materials include lessons on biblical stories and discussions about how early American political figures were shaped by their religious beliefs. The materials contain references to several religions, though Judeo-Christian religious material appears most frequently. The Texas Tribune reported that “districts will have the option of whether to use the materials, but will be incentivized to do so with up to $60 per student in additional funding.”

The 2024 platform of the Texas Republican Party, adopted days before the new educational materials were unveiled, includes a call for the state board of education to mandate teaching of the Bible. But no such guidelines have been put in place in Texas, contrary to the claim in the social media posts.

The state education board will vote on the proposed elementary school materials in November. If approved, the changes would be implemented in August 2025.

Last year, the Texas State Senate approved legislation that would place copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms — similar to the order in Louisiana — but the measure didn’t receive a final vote before the end of the legislative session.

Challenges to the Oklahoma Directive

Before the Oklahoma superintendent’s recent directive ordering that public schools incorporate the Bible into curricula, Walters was a proponent of state funding for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which supporters hoped would be the first religious charter school in the U.S.

However, the state Supreme Court ruled that the state’s charter school contract with the online Catholic school violated “Oklahoma statutes, the Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause.” Justice James Winchester wrote that public schools must be nonsectarian, but “St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State,” which violates the Establishment Clause.

The Establishment Clause has been at the center of many of the most significant Supreme Court decisions regulating the role of religion in schools. The 1962 case Engel v. Vitale banned school prayer for violating the Establishment Clause, even if the prayer was optional and nondenominational. In 1963, the court upheld Engel in Abington School District v. Schempp, when it decided that mandatory Bible readings in public schools are unconstitutional. 

Michael Klarman, a professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School, told us in an email, “It’s pretty clear to me that these states are presenting the current [Supreme Court], dominated by conservative Catholics, with an opportunity to reconsider” the Engel and Schempp decisions.

Walters’ recent order for schools to incorporate the Bible calls for “immediate and strict compliance.” But a spokesperson for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office said that the superintendent does not have the power to issue a memo mandating that content must be included in the curriculum, NBC News reported.

Under current law, “public schools can include the Bible in discussions of secular subjects like history or literature,” but the Bible cannot be used “as a form of religious instruction” in the classroom, Rachel F. Moran, a law professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, told us in an email.

According to Oklahoma law, individual school districts can determine what instructional material is used in the classroom. “School districts shall exclusively determine the instruction, curriculum, reading lists and instructional materials and textbooks, subject to any applicable provisions or requirements as set forth in law, to be used in meeting the subject matter standards,” the law states.

Andrew Spiropoulos, a professor of constitutional law at Oklahoma City University School of Law, told us in an email, “Some public school districts will likely allege that the state department of education does not possess sufficient statutory authority over school curricula to issue these particular directives.”

As of July 19, none of Oklahoma’s schools had agreed to follow the state superintendent’s directive, saying instead that they would follow “the current regulations for academic standards which include not having a Bible in every class,” Oklahoma City news station KFOR reported.

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Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

ACLU. “Clergy, Public-School Parents Sue to Block Louisiana Law Requiring Public Schools to Display the Ten Commandments.” Press release. 24 Jun 2024.

Bolden, Bonnie and Shannon Heckt. “Louisiana governor: 10 Commandments in schools could have stopped Trump rally shooting.” BRProud. 18 Jul 2024.

Brown, Dylan. “No school districts have announced following Bible mandate, OSDE responds.” KFOR. 19 Jul 2024.

CBS News. “Lawsuit challenges Louisiana law requiring classrooms to display Ten Commandments.” 24 Jun 2024.

Constitution Annotated. First Amendment. Congress.gov.

Downen, Robert. “Bill requiring Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms fails in House after missing crucial deadline.” Texas Tribune. 24 May 2023.

Epstein, Lee and Eric Posner. “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait.” Supreme Court Review. 2022.

Evans, Murray. “3 Large OKC-area school districts among those that won’t follow Ryan Walters’ order to teach Bible.” The Oklahoman. 19 Jul 2024.

Jacobson, Linda. “Exclusive: Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program.” The 74 Million. 29 May 2024.

Kingkade, Tyler and Marissa Parra. “Oklahoma schools head Ryan Walters: Teachers who won’t teach Bible could lose license.” NBC News. 28 Jun 2024.

Klarman, Michael. Professor of American legal history, Harvard Law School. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah. “Oklahoma Supreme Court Says No to State Funding for a Religious Charter School.” New York Times. 25 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Elizabeth Dias. “Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible.” New York Times. 27 Jun 2024.

Mervosh, Sarah and Ruth Graham. “The Bible in Public Schools? Oklahoma Pushes Limits of Long Tradition.” New York Times. 28 Jun 2024.

Moran, Rachel. Professor of law, Texas A&M University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Oklahoma State Department of Public Education. State Superintendent Ryan Walters.

Perez Jr., Juan. “Oklahoma high court rejects religious charter school contract.” Politico. 25 Jun 2024.

Republican Party of Texas. “Report of the 2024 Permanent Platform and Resolutions Committee of the Republican Party of Texas.” 23 May 2024.

Salhotra, Pooja and Robert Downen. “Texas education leaders unveil Bible-infused elementary school curriculum.” Texas Tribune. 30 May 2024.

Spiropoulos, Andrew. Professor of constitutional law, Oklahoma City University School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Jul 2024.

Sy, Stephanie, et al. “Oklahoma education head discusses why he’s mandating public schools teach the Bible.” PBS. 1 Jul 2024.

Yoshonis, Scott. “Jeff Landry says benefit of defending La. Ten Commandments law ‘outweighs’ any cost.” KLFY. 18 Jul 2024.

Claim:

Russian revolutionary and politician Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”?

Rating:

Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and founding leader of the USSR, has long been rumored to have said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

The quote has been the subject of numerous posts on social media sites including X, LinkedIn, Medium and Goodreads. On Reddit, it has made frequent appearances on quote-focused subreddits including r/quotes and r/QuotesPorn. It has also appeared in a range of print publications including Billy Idol’s memoir “Dancing with Myself” and an editorial published in a 2013 issue of the Journal of Hepatology.

However, there is no evidence that Lenin ever spoke or wrote these words. 

As the blog Quote Investigator pointed out in a 2020 article, the quote appears to have been first attributed to Lenin in 2001, 77 years after the Russian revolutionary’s death, in a Guardian op-ed by British politician George Galloway.  

Quote Investigator speculated that the misattribution may have come about due to confusion with a similar — but much wordier and less aphoristic — sentiment expressed in a 1918 pamphlet titled “The Chief Task of Our Day,” which is securely attributable to Lenin. In the translation printed in “V. I. Lenin: Collected Works,” a multivolume work published by Moscow’s Progress Publishers in 1965, that quote reads, 

In the space of a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal of monarchies. In the space of a few months we passed through a number of stages of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and of shaking off petty-bourgeois illusions, for which other countries have required decades.

But where did the version that circulates today come from? The earliest appearance of a very similar version of the quote that Quote Investigator was able to find was a 1991 Christian Science Monitor article about Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, who is quoted as saying, 

There are centuries in which nothing happens and years in which centuries pass.

That quote is a direct translation from the Spanish of two lines of Aridjis’ poem “Sefarad, 1492,” which was written in 1990 and included in Aridjis’ 1991 poetry collection “Obra Poética: 1960–1990.” In the original Spanish, the lines read:

Hay siglos en los que no pasa nada / y años en los que pásan siglos

Aridjis was not the first to use this turn of phrase or a close variant, however. By searching variations on phrases used in the quote (for example, “in which nothing happens” instead of “where nothing happens”), Snopes was able to track down earlier versions not included among Quote Investigator’s findings.

In 1982, for example, fantasy author David Eddings included a close variant in his novel “Pawn of Prophecy.” That version reads:

Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such importance take place that the world is never the same again.

An even earlier version — and one that more closely resembles the version in the claim —  was published in 1908, during Lenin’s lifetime, although there is still no evidence to link it to Lenin himself. This version was published in “The Devil,” a novel by Dutch-American author Adriaan Schade van Westrum:

There are years, centuries, in which nothing happens, and there are days, like yesterday, into which a whole lifetime is compressed.

Van Westrum’s novel was based on the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár’s 1907 play of the same name (in the original Hungarian, “Az Ördög”). However, we’ve been unable to locate any variation on the phrase in Molnár’s original Hungarian text, so it seems likely that its inclusion in the 1908 novel adaptation was a bit of artistic license on van Westrum’s part.

Regardless of whether van Westrum invented the quote or read it elsewhere, there is no evidence that Lenin originated the version that has widely circulated under his name since 2001. For this reason, we rate this claim as “Misattributed.” 

Sources

Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Nazi-ing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, and the U.S. government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which we’ll get to in the Bonus Facts later.

Moving on to cancer, typically when physicians are looking to find potential paths to cure people of various types of cancer, they’ll use tried and true methods proven to help in the aggregate towards this end. Other times, they’ll use new and experimental procedures that may help, or may do nothing, but generally trying to avoid doing harm. In all cases in most of the developed world, they’ll explain what they are going to do, and then ask for consent from their patient or their guardian or the like before administering any treatment regardless of what it is. But this is a relatively modern idea and in the wild west days of medicine that are just barely in our rearview mirror, few things were off the table, whether a given patient consented to something or not. This is the story of the eventual head of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Chester Southam, and his quest to see what would happen if he injected people, from healthy to terminal, with cancer. Along the way we’ll also be looking at whether it’s possible to catch cancer from another human, the cancers in certain animals that are spread directly via contact, even in one odd case to a human, and give yet another reason why mosquitoes should be eradicated from the Earth.

But before all that, our story today begins in 1963 at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Enter the aforementioned Dr. Chester Southam, who, at the time, was working at the Sloan‐Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. While there, for about a decade, Dr. Southam had been experimenting with injecting people with cancer without their informed consent… He had gotten away with it up to this point. But that was about to end thanks to what happened at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital.

Rewinding a little bit, starting around 1954, Dr. Southam began wondering what would happen if he injected people with the famed HeLa cancer cells, which more or less revolutionized medicine, more on these cells in the Bonus Facts later. He particularly wanted to study the immune system’s response to such.

In his first experiments, he decided to focus on people who already had what was likely terminal cancer, injecting the cancer cells into their skin and then waiting to see what would happen. In this round, the general course of things was for cancerous nodules to form at the injection sites. For most, eventually their immune system would successfully get rid of the nodules on their own, but not for everyone. Southam wrote in his paper on the matter that he had to remove the cancer manually on some, and that for 4 of the patients, the nodules came back multiple times after removal. Unfortunately, in one patient, the HeLa cancer cells managed to spread to her lymph nodes and beyond to join her other cancer in helping her to cease having to deal with the troubles associated with life.

The problem with this experiment, he thought, was that it was on people who already had widespread cancer and compromised immune systems. But what would happen, or how would things be different, if experimenting on healthy individuals? To answer this question, he targeted the staple subjects for all individuals doing questionably ethical research- people who are incarcerated.

In this case, in 1956, he selected about 150 inmates in the Ohio Prison system. Now, it is noted that these individuals allegedly consented to all of this knowing fully what he was doing, although there are conflicting reports on this, and seemingly no hard records backing it up. Whatever the case there, as for what happened when he put HeLa cancer cells all up in their goodies, unlike the previous terminal cancer patients he’d experimented on, all of these healthy individuals’ immune systems were able to get rid of the cancer and, fascinatingly, the more he injected in a given subject vs another, the faster their bodies were able to get rid of it.

In total in all his experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s, around 600 people were injected with HeLa cells. But it wouldn’t be until 1963 he would get in trouble for this and, not coincidentally, experimenting on individuals without informed consent at a Jewish hospital post-WWII was a huge reason why. Whoopsadoodle. Read the room Dr. Southam.

Up to this point, Southam had run the experiment on countless individuals from terminal cancer patients to healthy. But now he wanted to know what would happen if people who were terminally ill from other diseases unrelated to cancer were injected with the HeLa cancer cells.

Thus, he partnered with one Dr. Emanuel Mandel at the Jewish hospital to begin injecting various patients with cancer cells. In this case, it would seem that the otherwise terminal patients were simply told they were being injected with something to test their immune systems, which was technically true. And that they allegedly all gave oral consent to that, at least according to Mandel and Southam.

The problem in this instance, however, was that some of the other physicians at the institution took issue with their already very sick patients being used in such an experiment and without informed consent, including eventual whistleblowers Drs David Leichter, Perry Ferkso, and Avir Kagan- all of whom resigned their positions over it as well. Noteworthy, the three doctors in question were Jewish, and, as alluded to, with WWII barely in the rear view mirror and the establishment of the Nuremberg Code for Permissible Human Experiments, let’s just say they were pissed.

If you’re wondering about the Nuremberg Code, it was a rather revolutionary concept for physicians at the time, and outlines in part, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision…”

Dr. Southam seemingly disagreed, arguing that “It is not necessary to present [the subject] with what you feel are inconsequential data and [it is] unethical to ram down his throat information which is detrimental to his condition.”

In other words, the fact that he was injecting them with cancer was inconsequential in his opinion because he didn’t expect any negative long term result, and if he told them, it would only stress them out, thereby being a negative in their current condition and even potentially changing the results of his experiment slightly in that he was specifically targeting studying the immune system’s response to foreign cancer cells.

Ultimately the three physicians who protested reported it to the NYS Board of Regents, as well as a lawyer, one William Hyman, a board member at the hospital.

Hyman would later state of Drs Mandel and Southam and their work here, “I don’t want Nazi practices of using human beings as experimental guinea pigs.”

Then Attorney General of New York Louis Lefkowitz soon after called for the suspending of Dr. Southams’ medical license, writing, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body. These patients then had a right to know the contents of the syringe: and if this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.”

Other hospital administrators, however, defended the research. Initially claiming that the patients had given oral consent, though this was later refuted owing to never being told about the cancer element. But even still, executive director of the hospital, Solomon Siegel, stated he felt it didn’t matter, “It was not necessary to tell them that the substances were cancer cells because they are harmless. As expected, they were rejected by the patients’ bodies. It was the rate of rejection that was sought.”

Of course, this glosses over the fact that previous immunocompromised individuals Southam experimented on like these terminal patients hadn’t always rejected the cancer so readily, and in one it had successfully spread in her body to join her other cancer as cancer besties. And, of course, the greater issue wasn’t just the cancer aspect or safety or not of it. It was an experiment being done on patients without their giving informed consent to have it done on them.

In the end here, Dr. Southam was found guilty of unprofessional conduct, fraud, and deceit by the NYS Board of Regents. His punishment was to have his medical license revoked for just one year, after which, a mere two years later, he was elected as the President of the American Cancer Society… Yep.

This all brings us to the question of whether or not it’s possible to catch cancer from someone else.

It turns out, contrary to popular belief, yes. Although exceptionally rare, in humans at least.

For example, consider the case of an unnamed 53 year old surgeon which occurred sometime in the 1990s. The paper covering the case notes said surgeon operated on a likewise unnamed 32 year old patient to removed an abdominal tumor. While doing this, the surgeon accidentally cut his own hand. For reasons having nothing to do with potentially getting cancer, the cut was immediately disinfected. Nonetheless, five months later, the surgeon had a lovely tumor on his hand in the very spot he’d been injured during that operation. When said tumor was removed and analyzed, it was found to have been made up of cells from the now deceased former patient of the surgeon’s. A part of him had temporarily lived on in another host. And more importantly as we’ll get into later, had successfully masked itself from the surgeon’s immune system.

In a similar type event, this one in 1986, a lab technician was injecting colon cancer cells into mice and accidentally poked herself in the hand with one of the needles. A tumor developed on the site a couple weeks later and was removed without incident.

Moving on from there, while it is rare thanks to the placenta’s extreme ability to prevent various potentially harmful things access to a growing baby, it turns out certain kinds of cancer, in particular leukemia/lymphomas and melanoma have been found to be able to make the leap from mother to baby. And another exceptionally rare one is twin to twin spreading of cancer in the womb in the case of leukemia. In yet another case, cancer of the placenta, choriocarcinoma, can spread to both the mother and baby.

Moving on from there, in 2007 four rather unlucky people got some organs from an elderly woman who’d died of a stroke. When her liver, lungs, and kidneys found their way into people in need of them, all four of the patients got cancer not long after, with three of them dying of it. Later analysis showed the cancer cells came from the organ donor, who had unknowingly had breast cancer when she died of a stroke.

Up next, in perhaps the most bizarre case, this one occurring in 2014, a Colombian man was having some rather curious health issues and went to the hospital to see what was wrong. Upon investigation, tumors were found in his lungs, liver, and adrenal glands. The problem was, as stated by one of the physicians analyzing the tumor cells, Dr. Atis Muehlenbachs, “It looked like cancer, but the tumors were composed of cells that were not human.”

Eventually they tracked down that the DNA was from a tapeworm- meaning a tapeworm’s cancer had successfully spread throughout its host. Unfortunately for the man, at that point it was too late. You see, he also had HIV, which while fully treatable, with people infected with HIV nowadays living rather normal lifespans if they keep up on their medication, the combination of HIV and some bizarre form of cancer doctors couldn’t identify resulted in him giving up hope of living and refusing all treatment in the weeks leading up to the source of the cancer finally being discovered.

Speaking of non-humans and transmittable cancers, in the early 1990s a rather odd disease popped up among Tasmanian devils, manifesting in tumor growths on their faces and mouths. This aptly named Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease quickly spread from devil to devil and today over 95% of the entire species will ultimately find themselves infected at some point in their lives.

What makes this particular disease so interesting is that once it was studied in detail, it turned out it was not caused by some more common pathogen like a microbe or virus that then in turn induces cancer in the host. Rather, the cancerous cells themselves were being transplanted and growing in and on the new host. If that didn’t make the Tasmanian devils unlucky enough, bizarrely, in 2014 a second, distinct strain of the cancer developed and is now also being transmitted.

As for the means of transmission, this is via the Tasmanian devils fighting and mating with one another, with the cancer cells transmitting through biting in the process of these two activities.

Once in the other devil’s body, the cells continue to replicate and ultimately usually kill the host within 6 months. This occurs via the devil either dying from the spread of the cancer and failure of organs, or ceasing to be able to eat due to the size of the growths around their mouths and face, even sometimes with the tumors pushing out their teeth or resulting in fractures in their jaw bones.

That said, some devils are more resistant to the tumor than others, with some infected relatively recently found to now be able to live up to 2 years. Because those more resistant then have more time to breed, this has resulted in more Tasmanian devils resistant to the cancer being born- a bit of rapid evolution in action, taking only about ten generations of the devils to manifest. In fact, not only have the devil population’s decline started to stabilize in the last few years, but there have even been a couple dozen cases where a given devil has been observed to make a full recovery after their bodies successfully fought off the disease.

Moving over to our canine friends, the oldest known single-cell lineage still replicating away are the cells that cause a disease known as Canine transmissible venereal tumors. The first of these tumorous cells replicated some 11,000 years ago, and actually diverged from canids somewhere around 6,000 years ago- meaning today the cell line has more or less evolved into something of a unicellular organism in its own right, with only 57-64 chromosomes instead of the normal 78 found in dogs.

As to the transmission, this is almost always transmitted sexually, with the tumor cells infecting the male dog’s Mr. Happy and the female dog’s outer Mrs. Happy covering. That said, given dogs’ propensity to lick and sniff these areas before and after putting on some Marvin Gaye and shampooing the wookie, it has been observed to infect their noses and mouths as well.

Now, at this point you might be wondering- if this is technically possible, even in humans, why isn’t this something seemingly ever discussed as a risk-factor when around someone with cancer?

To begin with, in order for cancer to transmit from one person to another, you’re going to need to get the offending cells from the one person’s body into the other in a way in which the cell can survive the initial transplantation and then have what it needs to keep replicating.

Let’s say that did happen and the cells get into the other person’s body by some miracle, perhaps when taking a cancerous bald-headed gnome for a stroll in the misty forest, or in cases like the aforementioned surgeon who cut his hand. The problem for the cancer here is that in virtually all cases, as happened in almost all of Dr. Southam’s experiments, the new host’s immune system is going to recognize the foreign invader and kill it off promptly.

Also as seen to an extent in Dr. Southam’s experiments and some of the aforementioned examples, exceptions occur in instances where the person’s immune system was extremely compromised, such as from AIDS or individuals taking immunosuppressant drugs. Demonstrating this, this is how one of the four aforementioned organ transplant patients survived the breast cancer he got from the original organ owner. Unlike the other three who died as a result, in his case, removal of the donated organ was not immediately life threatening. Thus, the doctors simply removed the cancerous kidney and then he was able to stop taking the immunosuppressant drugs, making it extremely likely his immune system would eradicate the cancer cells. Just in case, they also treated him for the cancer directly. One or both of the methods worked swimmingly and he was cancer free not long after and ready for a new transplant that wasn’t so troublesome.

Of course, the more concerning potential exceptions here are cancerous cells in which the cell has mutated in a way that makes its foreign body nature difficult or impossible for your immune system to detect. This did not happen with the HeLa cancer cells Dr. Southam used, but fully possible with other cells, or even a mutated version of the HeLa cells as can happen.

This is seemingly what happened with the aforementioned surgeon with the tumor on his hand. You see, in order to find out why his body had not simply gotten rid of the foreign tumor naturally, he was examined to see if he had any immune deficiencies. The results of the tests didn’t find any such issue, meaning the tumor cells themselves seem to have successfully masked their presence from his immune system somehow. Thus, they were fully capable of successfully spreading from human to human if given a pathway.

This is also what is happening, for example, in the cases of the canine sexually transmitted tumors, as well as with the Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. In the latter, normally their immune systems would use the Major Histocompatibility Complex- a group of proteins on the surface of most cells- to see that the cells are foreign bodies. But in the case of these particular tumor cells, they don’t have an MHC, leading researchers to conclude this is probably why they aren’t being detected and eradicated in the vast majority of cases up until more recent times where this is starting to happen as noted.

All that said, fear not. This sort of thing is not generally considered a concern for humans, even though there have been known cancerous cells that can infect and successfully establish themselves in a new host. This is primarily because, first, unlike Tasmanian devils, we aren’t going around biting one another randomly, or when mating… or at least most of us aren’t. We aren’t here to judge. You do you, so long as informed consent is given.

Thus, the extremely low odds of the cancerous cells being transmitted successfully from one host to another, combined with the also extremely low odds of your immune system being unable to eradicate the problem if it by some miracle actually happens, have to date resulted in it never being a problem for humans in general. And even in the future with cases of a potential STD version, similar to what’s been going around in dogs for thousands of years, humans have things like condoms and widespread semi-monogamous or fully monogamous relationships that would limit the initial spread to some extent, requiring a bit of a perfect storm of unlikely events to see such a cancer establish itself widely.

That said, it is always possible, and perhaps more concerning is the case of Syrian hamsters, where such a strain of cancerous cells is actually capable of being transmitted from hamster to hamster via arguably the most hated and already deadly creature of all- mosquitoes.

Going back to humans, mosquitoes transmit a host of other diseases as well, all giving rise to the Mosquito Cocktail Hypothesis for cancer. Noteworthy on this one, there are five viruses, one microbe, three parasites and one additional virus in HIV that all have been definitively shown to have a causal relationship with cancer, in the case of HIV via suppressing your immune system. But countless other viruses, microbes, and parasites have been loosely linked in various ways to cancer. For example, versions of the human papillomavirus (HPV) occasionally result in cancer in the host, killing literally hundreds of thousands of people annually. H. pylori, which causes ulcers, can cause chronic inflammation which in some cases may lead to cancer, with many other viruses, microbes, and parasites likewise also being able to do a similar thing, some 27 of which to date have been found in mosquitoes. As researchers at the Experimental Dermatology Unit at the Karolinska Institute note in their paper “Does the mosquito have more of a role in certain cancers than is currently appreciated?”

“There are over 3000 species of mosquito and very few have been fully analysed, so the six remaining infectious agents may be present in some unexamined species. This hypothesis proposes that more cancers than are presently appreciated may arise from the long-term outcome of a mosquito bite, which by releasing a complex cocktail of up to 60 infectious agents directly into the blood stream, often results in contemporaneous immuno-suppression and a multiplicity of co-infections. These co-infections may act synergistically in whole, or in part, and in complex ways. Whether and if so which type of cancer ensues will depend on the constituent ingredients in the cocktail, determined by multiple factors such as the mosquito’s drinking and feeding patterns, number of previous blood-meals and the variety of intermediate hosts from which these meals are taken. Only a few mosquito species carry malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and the other recognised serious human ailments. This hypothesis suggests that the number of species carrying the cancer cocktail will be few in number but collectively have a worldwide presence.”

While it is just a hypothesis at this stage, I think we can all agree on the strength of the already known 1 million or so humans every year killed by mosquitoes and their disease spreading abilities, it’s time to make the mosquito come to fear our extinctive powers. Seriously people. We focus on eradicating countless diseases with vaccines and other herculean efforts to save sometimes massively fewer lives per year, and we shut the world down to save a not too dissimilar number of lives per year during COVID. Mass murder of our little itchy friends would be a drop in the bucket, but save a million people per year at least. Further, it would only be necessary to wipe out about 1/30th of the species of mosquitoes, leaving the rest to happily continue being pollinators and food sources for other animals. Humans are remarkably adept at wiping out species from the earth when we aren’t even trying. It’s time to combine these two things and eradicate the troublesome species of mosquito from our little spaceship called Earth.

Bonus Facts:

Going back to the HeLa cancer cells, by the mid-1960s dozens of immortal cell lines had joined HeLa in the arsenal of medical research, bearing donor-derived names such as A-Fi and Di-Re. These lines had opened an unprecedented window into carcinogenesis, allowing researchers to pinpoint the exact moment a cell changed from normal to cancerous, a process dubbed spontaneous transformation. Researchers in Russia even claimed to have discovered a virus that caused cancer, bringing the possibility of a universal cure tantalizingly within reach. Then, in September 1966, molecular biologist Stanley Gartler of the American Type Culture Collection Committee stood before the Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture in Bedford Pennsylvania and dropped a massive bombshell. While conducting an audit of immortal cell lines, Gartler discovered that despite being of supposedly separate origins, all 18 lines he examined contained the same mutation of a gene called G6PD found almost exclusively in people of African-American descent. To his shock, Gartler realized these weren’t new cell lines at all; they were all HeLa. Alarmed, Gartler tested more and more cell lines, but in every case he found only HeLa. The conclusion was disturbing but inescapable: there were no other immortal cell lines. There was only HeLa. So vigorous were Henrietta Lacks’s cells that if even one made its way into a cell culture it would out-divide and replace the original cells overnight. Like a virus HeLa had hopped from laboratory to laboratory and culture to culture, invading and conquering until there was nothing else left.

Every jaw in the conference hall must have dropped at once, for at a stroke Gartler had shattered over a decade of scientific progress – and with it countless hopes, dreams, and careers. All other commercial human cell lines were now worthless. There was no spontaneous transformation or cancer virus; the cultures had simply been contaminated with HeLa. Hopes of understanding carcinogenesis and developing a universal cure quickly faded away. Eventually new authentic human cell lines would be discovered, including A549 in 1972 and HEK 293 in 1973, but never again at the same feverish pace as the “golden years” of 1951-1966.

70 years on Henrietta’s remarkable cells are still one of the most popular human cell lines in medical research, with an estimated 50 million tons stored in laboratory freezers around the world. If laid end-to-end, they would circle the globe three times. And so long as they are kept properly fed and incubated they will continue to divide and thrive for decades to come, outliving their original host by a century or more.

Going back to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, this was a program that ran for about four decades in Macon County, Alabama during the mid-20th century.

In this one, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) approached the Tuskegee Institute (located in Macon County which had the highest rate of syphilis among African-American males) about forming a research group in order to study the effects of untreated syphilis on a black male population for a duration of six to nine months and then follow-up with a treatment plan. The Institute agreed, along with the head of the University’s hospital Dr. Eugene Dibble, and was complacent through the first year, thinking treatment was the ultimate goal. Later, they would claim they were deceived themselves and just as much victimized as the men in the study.

The study, during the first year, was led by Dr. Taliafero Clark. The PHS enrolled six hundred Macon County men, 399 with syphilis and 201 who weren’t infected, to be part of the study. None of the men actually knew what the study was for. They were lured in with the promise of “free health care,” something that none of them had, and treatment of “bad blood,” a general localized term that encompassed several different afflictions, including anemia, fatigue, and other venereal diseases.

The men were told that they were going to get free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. It was said that the reason for the deception was that it would be the only way the men would stay in the study and the researchers wanted to closely observe the course of the disease over a large sample-size to see the effects as the disease progressed, even to death. But not to worry, as long as the ones that died allowed autopsies to be performed, their funeral expenses were covered…

Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr was the on-site director of the study. He actually supported partial treatment for the men for the sole purpose of making sure they remained in the study (as in, stayed alive). He was the one who gained “consent” of the men for painful spinal taps by framing them as a “special free treatment.” In letters he sent to the men with the header from the Macon County Health Department, it read,

“You will now be given a last chance for a second examination. This examination is a very special one and after it is finished you will be given a special treatment if it is believed you are in condition to stand it.”

The study, originally only intended to go nine months, went beyond a year and then, due to breakthroughs, extended. In 1934, two years after the study began, the first major medical paper was published detailing health effects on untreated syphilis. By 1936, according to the CDC, a medical paper was published criticizing the treatment plan for the men. 1940, once again according to the CDC, brought efforts “to hinder the men (in the study) from getting treatment ordered under the military draft effort.” You see, about 250 of them had registered for the draft and been found to have syphilis and ordered to be treated with penicillin.

Despite this, the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment were never administered nor offered penicillin as treatment. The study administrators wanted to watch the progression of the disease as the men got sick and, in many cases, died during the forty years the study went on even though for much of it a relatively effective treatment was available. All total it’s estimated that 128 of the men died either directly from syphilis or complications related to it, 40 infected their wives (and in some cases possibly others), and there were 19 of the men’s children born with congenital syphilis.

Finally, on July 25, 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the story that uncovered the truth about the study. A government panel ruled that the study was “ethically unjustified” and it ended. In the summer of 1973, attorney Fred Grey filed a class-action suit on behalf of the men against the PHS and it ended with nine million dollars (about fifty million dollars today) being handed out to the surviving participants and families as settlement.

In a similar study, this time to test penicillin’s effectiveness in treating syphilis and other STDs, researchers led by Dr. John Charles Cutler from the United States (funded by the Public Health Services, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health) headed to Guatemala in 1946 and found prostitutes who had syphilis, getting them to then give it to unsuspecting Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and prisoners. They also directly infected certain individuals by, to quote, “…direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded … or in a few cases through spinal punctures.” It isn’t known how many people died as a result of this as the results from the study were never published.

Dr. John Cutler was also involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He faced no consequences for the numerous people that died in his experiments, and he even led an illustrious and celebrated career including at one point becoming an assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General. As ever, the past was the worst.

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Bulletproof vests are one of Hollywood’s favourite action movie plot devices. Easily concealable and seemingly impervious to all weapons, they provide writers with a handy eleventh-hour means of saving their characters from certain death. But how can such a relatively thin and flimsy piece of fabric stop a speeding bullet, and are real-life bulletproof vests really as impenetrable as in the movies? Well, lock and load as we dive into the fascinating – and dangerous – history of ballistic body armour and the incredible modern day seemingly otherwise fabric suits that are made to stop bullets.

The widespread adoption of practical firearms in the 15th century led to the rapid decline in the use of traditional plate armour. While a medieval suit of armour could protect its wearer against swords, pikes, maces and other kinds of melée weapons – as well as certain kinds of arrows – all but the heaviest and most expensive suits were mostly useless against musketball. Armies thus began to abandon armour in favour of more lightly-equipped, mobile troops, with certain pieces such as breastplates and helmets being retained by officers as specialized troops like heavy cavalry. For example, during the English Civil War of 1642-1651, the Ironside cavalry of Parliamentarian or “Roundhead” leader Oliver Cromwell wore musket-proof breastplates or cuirasses composed of two layers of armour: an inner layer that absorbed most of the bullet’s energy, and an inner layer that prevented it from penetrating. This two-layer design would later be used in many soft ballistic armour systems. By the 18th Century, however, firearms had become powerful enough to penetrate even these defences, and plate armour was largely relegated to a ceremonial role. For example, the gorget, a piece of armour which originally protected the throat, was shrunk down to a non-functional size and worn on the chest by officers and military policemen as a badge of rank. Ornamental breastplates – often highly polished and decorated – were also worn by officers, aristocrats, and members of elite military units like Cuirassiers. Incredibly, this tradition persisted into the 20th Century, with French Cuirassiers wearing their Napoleonic-era breastplates and helmets into battle during the first weeks of the First World War.

But for the most part, plate armour largely disappeared from the battlefield for more than 200 years. The thickness – and consequently the weight – of steel plates needed to stop modern firearms projectiles was simply too great to be practical. However, several inventors discovered an unexpected material that proved unusually resistant to gunfire: silk. In Japan, for example, where firearms had been introduced in 1543 by Portuguese traders, armour makers discovered that multiple layers of tightly-woven silk quilted together was enough to dissipate the energy of a musket ball and stop it from penetrating. Combined with steel plates, this material was used to construct a new type of armour called tosei-gusoku or “bullet tested.” However, these suits were expensive to produce, and reserved only for the wealthiest samurai.

Following the 1866 French military expedition to Korea – a failed punitive response to the execution of seven French missionaries, Huengson Daewongun, regent of the Great Joseon State, ordered the development of flexible bulletproof armour. The result was the Myeonje Baegab, a vest composed of 30 folds of heavy cotton fabric. These vests were used successfully during the 1871 United States expedition to Korea, triggered by Korean fortresses opening fire on American ships.

The surprising protective power of silk was rediscovered by ex-naval surgeon George E. Goodfellow, who made his name treating the gunshot wounds of gunslingers like Wyatt Earp in the Old West town of Tombstone, Arizona. In 1881, trader Luke Short and gambler Charlie Storms got into an argument and shot each other with pistols at point-blank range. One. 45 calibre revolver bullet penetrated Storms’s heart, and he quickly died of his wounds. During the autopsy, Goodfellow extracted the bullet, which was wrapped in a handkerchief which had been in Storms’s breast pocket. Incredibly, the projectile had not penetrated the silk. After witnessing several similar cases, in 1887 Goodfellow published an article in the Southern California Practitioner titled Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets. He later experimented with an early form of soft body armour resembling the Korean Myeonje Baegab and constructed of 30 folds of silk. However, nothing much came of his invention.

But Goodfellow’s article would directly inspire the man now recognized as the father of the modern ballistic vest: one Casimir Zeglen. Unusually given his most famous creation, Zeglen was not a soldier, police officer, or even an engineer or inventor, but rather a Catholic priest. That’s right: the inventor of soft body armour was literally a man of the cloth…. Born in 1869 in Poland – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – at age 18 Zeglen joined the Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ – better known as the Resurrectionists – and in 1890 moved to the United States, settling in Chicago. On October 28, 1893, the recently-reelected mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, Sr, was assassinated by newspaper distributor Patrick Eugene Prendergast. Having suffered a severe head injury at age four, throughout his life Prendergast became increasingly disturbed and erratic in his thoughts and behaviour. In 1893, he fanatically supported Carter Harrison’s re-election campaign in the deluded hope that he would be rewarded with a political appointment. When said appointment failed to materialize, Prendergast visited Harrison at his home and shot him three times with a .38 calibre revolver. One of the shots penetrated Harrison’s heart, killing him instantly. Arrested soon after, Prendergast was found guilty and sentenced to death, being executed by hanging on July 13, 1894.

Casimir Zeglen was deeply affected by Harrison’s assassination, and set about developing a means of protecting future politicians and other individuals from such senseless acts of violence. Drawing directly from George Goodfellow’s 1881 article, Zeglen developed a special method for laminating together silk sheets, creating a lightweight protective vest only 1 centimetre thick. On March 16, 1897, Zeglen arranged a live demonstration of his invention before a large crowd including the Mayor and Chief of Police of Chicago. Apparently having just as much faith in his sewing abilities as he had in the Almighty, Zeglen donned the vest himself and hired a marksman to shoot him at point blank range. The crowd gasped as Zeglen crumpled to the ground, but a moment later he raised his hands and got to his feet, completely unharmed. The crowd then erupted into wild applause.

Yet despite this stunning and well-publicized success, Zeglen struggled to find American investors for his invention. Part of the problem was the extreme precision needed to make the vest work; poorly-sewn copycat versions tended to get their wearers killed, and Zeglen lacked the technical knowledge to mass-produce vests to the required level of quality. Undeterred, in December 1897 Zeglen returned to Poland and joined forces with famed inventor Jan Szczepanik [“Yan Sheh-che-pah-nick”]. Known as the “Polish Edison” or the “Leonardo da Vinci of Galicia”, Szczepanik had many impressive innovations to his name, including a photoelectrically-controlled weaving machine that could cheaply mass-produce coloured tapestries, and an early form of television known as the Teltroscope. In only a few months, Szczepanik succeeded in perfecting Zeglen’s design and creating an automatic line to mass-produce bulletproof vests. There was only one problem: at $800 apiece – more than $25,000 today – the vests could only be afforded by the extremely wealthy. It was at this point a disillusioned Zeglen broke off the partnership and returned to America. And while Szczepanik offered to buy his patent for a generous price, Zeglen refused. Nonetheless, Szczepanik, a skilled and well-connected businessmen, succeeded in selling the vests to many of the wealthiest and powerful figures in Europe, including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. The vests were also enthusiastically adopted by gangsters in America – especially Zeglen’s adopted hometown of Chicago. The ultimate validation of Zeglen’s design came on May 31, 1906 during Alfonso’s wedding in Madrid, when he and his new bride, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, were attacked by Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral. As the wedding procession was returning from the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo to the Royal Palace, Morral threw a bomb at the newlyweds’ carriage, which killed 30 bystanders and wounded 100 more. However, the fragments failed to penetrate Alfonso’s protective silk vest, saving his life.

There is a persistent rumour that Szczepanik also sold a vest to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of Austria Hungary. As the story goes, when Franz and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 – the event that ultimately triggered the outbreak of the First World War – his assassin, Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip, suspected that the Archduke was wearing protective armour and opted to aim for his head. However, no concrete evidence has been found to support this claim. It should also be noted here that nobody, not even Emperor Franz Josef himself, cared about the assassination. In fact, the Emperor expressed relief over the killing because it rid him of an heir whom he deeply disliked. More on this and what REALLY started WWI in the Bonus Facts in a bit.

But in any event, back in America, in March 1901 Casimir Zeglen offered one of his vests to George B. Cortelyou, personal secretary to President William McKinley. For unknown reasons, Cortelyou declined the offer. Six months later, McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Given the relatively low power of the .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver used by Czolgosz, had McKinley been wearing one of Zeglen and Szczepanik’s vest, he almost certainly would have survived.

Sadly, from this point on Casimir Zeglen all but vanishes from the historical record. Abandoning his bulletproof vest venture, he founded the Zeglen Tire Company and the American Rubber and Fabric Company, which produced tubeless, puncture-resistant tires for bicycles and automobiles. Given that the fate of these companies – and Zeglen’s eventual date of death – have been lost to history, it is safe to assume he was unsuccessful in his endeavours. Meanwhile, Jan Szczepanik continued to promote Zeglen’s bulletproof vest with a series of death-defying live demonstrations – all the while claiming to be the vest’s sole inventor. Indeed, so successful was this marketing campaign that in Europe it is typically Szczepanik – not Zeglen – who is credited as the father of the bulletproof vest. However, Szczepanik’s success was not to last. Zeglen’s design was only effective against relatively low-velocity black-powder pistol rounds; with the widespread adoption of more powerful smokeless-powder ammunition, within 10 years the vest became useless against all but the weakest handguns.

The outbreak of the First World War saw the sudden and unexpected return of plate armour to the battlefield. With the exception of a few special units like the aforementioned French Cuirassiers, troops marched into battle in 1914 without any kind of protective equipment – not even helmets. The famous spiked pickelhaube worn by German troops were made of boiled leather and designed to deflect sword blows; they offered no protection against bullets or shell fragments. But as the war bogged down into brutal trench warfare and both sides began mercilessly bombarding each other with artillery shells, the rate of severe head wounds began to soar. In response, all sides introduced not only protective headgear like the French Casque Adrian, the British Brodie Helmet , and the German Stahlhelm, but an exotic assortment of metal plate armour, including pieces to protect a soldier’s neck, shoulders, and chest. However, most of these devices proved too heavy and bulky to be practical on the battlefield. Those that were adopted, like the German sappenpanzer or “Lobster armour”, were mainly issued to static or specialized troops like machine gunners, sentries, or sappers AKA military engineers. Still, such armour was largely designed to protect against shell fragments, and could not block anything more powerful than a pistol round. One notable exception was the American Brewster Body Shield, a breastplate and face protector made of chrome nickel steel which was capable of stopping full-powered rifle bullets at a few hundred yards. At 18 kilograms, however, it was unwieldy to wear and very few were issued. Interestingly, just prior to the war the U.S. Army considered adopting a silk ballistic vest similar to Casimir Zeglen’s design. However, this idea was abandoned due to the prohibitive cost of silk and the limited usefulness of such soft armour against rifle rounds.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American gangsters began wearing cheaper ballistic vests made of thick layers of heavy cotton, which were capable of stopping most common pistol rounds with velocities up to 300 metres per second such as .22 short, .22 long rifle, .25 ACO, .32 ACP. .380 ACP. .38 Special, and .45 ACP. In response, police forces were forced to upgrade to more powerful cartridges such as .38 Super and .357 Magnum. This remained the state of the art for soft body armour until 1938 when DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers discovered the synthetic polymer Nylon which, while not as strong as silk, was stretchier and much cheaper to manufacture. Initially used in toothbrushes and women’s stockings, following the outbreak of the Second World War Nylon was pressed into service to make parachutes and flak jackets, among the first pieces of soft body armour to be widely issued in combat.

Flak jackets were the brainchild of Colonel Malcolm C. Grow, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Grow noticed that the vast majority of wounds suffered by bomber crews operating over occupied Europe were caused by fragments from exploding German antiaircraft shells AKA ‘Flak’ (and if you’re wondering where that word came from, it is an abbreviation for Flieger Abwehr Kannone, German for “Anti-Aircraft Gun”). Convinced that many of these injuries could be prevented by some kind of light protective armour, Grow worked with the British Wilkinson Sword Company to develop a protective vest which in 1943 was officially adopted by the U.S. Army Air Force as the Flyer’s Vest, M1. Weighing in at a whopping 10 kilos, early vests were made of cotton canvas lined with manganese steel plates while later versions incorporated increasing amounts of lighter ballistic nylon. Several different versions of the flak jacket were also developed throughout the war for different kinds of aircrew, including the Flyer’s Apron, M3 for waist gunners, the Flyer’s Apron, M4 for ball turret gunners, and Groin Armor, M5 for seated crewmen like pilots, copilots, navigators, and bombardiers. M1 infantry helmets modified to fit over flying helmets and headphones were also widely issued to protect against head injuries.

While developed in the UK, flak jackets were rarely used by the Royal Air Force as they were too bulky to wear in cramped British bombers like the Avro Lancaster. However, over 300,000 M1 and 100,000 improved M2 vests were issued to USAAF crews throughout the war. They were also widely worn by U.S. Navy personnel aboard aircraft carriers, whose open decks provided little protection against shell and aerial bomb bursts. And while useless against machine gun bullets and cannon shells, flak jackets were effective against shell fragments and helped reduce the number of fatalities from chest and abdominal wounds among USAAF crews by nearly 40%.

Meanwhile, much experimentation was done on body armour for use by regular ground forces. In 1940, the British Medical Research Council or MRC developed an outfit comprising three plates of 1mm manganese steel – the same as used in British helmets: one covering the chest, another the lower abdomen and groin, and a third the lower back – all held in canvas webbing pouches that could be strapped on over or under a soldier’s uniform. Around 5,000 were produced, being mainly issued to British, Polish, and Canadian paratroopers and field medics starting in 1944. However, despite weighing only 1.5 kilos, troops found MRC armour uncomfortable to wear and it was quickly discarded.

Meanwhile, in 1942 the Soviet Red Army introduced an armoured vest known as the SN-42 Stalnoi Nagrudnik or “Steel Breastplate”, which comprised two plates of 2mm pressed steel covering the torso and groin. Weighing 3.5 kilos, the SN-42 was issued mainly to assault engineers and tank riders, and was capable of deflecting a 9mm pistol or submachine gun bullet at point-blank range.

And in 1944, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps developed an innovative protective vest called the M12, based on a fibre-reinforced resin material called Doron. This material was moulded into plates 3mm thick and 130 millimetres square, which were inserted into pockets in a ballistic-nylon vest. Far lighter than earlier metal-based armour, the vests were issued in limited numbers during the Okinawa campaign from April-June 1945 and found to be effective against shell and bomb fragments and pistol bullets up the .45 ACP.

After the war, the US Army continued to improve on the M12 design, producing the M1951 vest widely used during the Korean War and the M1955 used in Vietnam. However, as before, these vests were only effective against shell fragments and pistol rounds, while armour capable of stopping more powerful weapons was too heavy for regular combat and was only issued to specialized personnel. For example, in 1967 Natick Laboratories in Massachusetts developed the T65-2 plate carrier vest, designed to hold armour plates made of hard ceramic like boron or silicon carbide or aluminium oxide. Capable of stopping more powerful small arms projectiles like the 7.62×39 round fired by AK-style rifles, the 8-kiloT65-2 was issued to pilots of low-flying helicopters during the latter half of the Vietnam War.

As in the 1930s, the development of lighter and stronger body armour awaited a breakthrough in materials science. That breakthrough came in 1965 with the development of poly-para-phenylene terephthalamide – better known as Kevlar. Discovered by DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek, Kevlar was originally developed as a replacement for steel in belted automobile tires. With a tensile strength of 3,620 Megapascals, it is pound-for-pound 10 times stronger than steel while maintaining excellent flexibility and cut and puncture resistance – making it ideal for making ballistic vests.

In 1971, Lester Shubin, Director of Science and Technology for the National Institute for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, initiated a research program to evaluate the ballistic performance of Kevlar. And if you happen to be an animal lover, you may want to skip this part. These tests involved strapping different thicknesses of Kevlar cloth to anaesthetized goats and shooting them with various calibre firearms, all while monitoring blood oxygen levels and other indicators of lung and heart injuries. The program revealed that Kevlar was capable of protecting against most common handgun rounds like .38 special and 9x19mm at short ranges, preventing the bullet from penetrating and reducing blunt force injuries to less-than-lethal levels. Indeed, Kevlar ballistic vests were found to increase the wearer’s probability of survival by a whopping 95%.

The National Institute of Justice published its findings in 1976. However, by this time Kevlar ballistic vests had already been commercially available for several years, developed by companies such as Smith & Wesson and American Body Armor. Such vests soon became standard equipment for police forces around the world, and according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 officers annually since 1987.

Like earlier forms of soft body armour, Kevlar ballistic vests work in two stages. The outer Kevlar layers absorb the energy from the bullet, causing it to slow down, deform, and spread its energy over a wider area. The inner layers then prevent the bullet from penetrating and help further spread the force of impact. Indeed, most ballistic vests also incorporate additional pads called trauma pads to further reduce blunt-force injuries. However, while a ballistic vest can stop a bullet and save its wearer’s life, they may still suffer severe bruising or even broken ribs, depending on the type of bullet and the range at which they were shot.

Since by design the outer Kevlar layers are damaged by bullet impacts, ballistic vests become less and less effective the more hits they absorb and can be defeated by multiple hits to the same area. Kevlar also loses some of its strength when exposed to ultraviolet light, bleach, water, and salt from human sweat, meaning the ballistic layers must be encased in a water and light-proof covering of ordinary nylon. Vests are also typically retired and replaced every five years or so to ensure maximum performance.

But while soft body armour can protect against most common handgun rounds, they are still largely useless against rifle bullets, which are significantly more powerful. For example, a typical 9x19mm handgun has a muzzle velocity of 360 metres per second and a muzzle energy of 481 Joules. By contrast, the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge used in many modern assault rifles has a muzzle velocity of 993 metres per second and a muzzle energy of 1,755 Joules – nearly three times higher .

On that note, given that the bulletproof vest Doc Brown wears at the end of Back to the Future appears to be a soft Kevlar type and that the Libyan terrorists were using AK-style rifles, we’re going to have to call Hollywood bullshit on this iconic scene. Sorry to ruin your childhood, but Doc Brown is very, very dead.

Indeed, the only way to stop full-power rifle bullets is with solid ballistic plates like the Small Arms Protective Insert or SAPI used by the United States Armed Forces. Modern ballistic plates are typically made of hard ceramic like aluminium oxide or boron or silicon carbide, often laminated together with polymers like ultra high molecular weight polyethylene or Kraton to form a tough, impact resistant composite material. These plates are in turn coated with a tough polymer layer to protect the wearer from spalling – the back of the plate flaking off into deadly, high-velocity fragments when the front is struck by a projectile – and backed with soft trauma plates to help spread the force of impact. These are then inserted into pockets on a special vest called a plate carrier, which is typically made of ballistic Kevlar fabric for additional protection.

There are two levels of solid armour commonly manufactured today: Level III, designed to stop intermediate rounds like 7.62×39 and 5.56×45 and the full-power 7.62×51 NATO cartridge; and Level IV, designed to stop more powerful rounds like 30.06 [“thirty-aught-six”] armour piercing. However these specifications tend to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and come with a number of caveats. For example, as with soft armour, solid plates can be defeated by multiple rounds hitting the same area. Also, most plates are designed for use against regular lead-cored bullets, which are easily deformed by the hard ceramic. Bullets with cores made of tungsten, tungsten carbide, or other harder metals are much more likely to penetrate. Finally, plate armour is 5-8 times heavier than soft armour on a protected area basis, making it significantly less comfortable and convenient to wear. As in every aspect of life, there are no ideal solutions – only tradeoffs.

Speaking of tradeoffs, this all finally brings us around to how many bullets a piece of body armor can absorb before it is rendered useless. Well, as you might imagine given how many different types of body armor we’ve been describing exist, this depends. As for some general examples, we’ll start with soft armor. The moment these are hit by a bullet, the fibers around the area of impact are compromised and lose some of their ability to absorb and dissipate the energy of a bullet. Thus, if another shot were to hit reasonably close to where the first hit, the bullet has a good chance of penetrating, even if the vest would have normally been able to handle it fine. Thus, while it is possible they can take multiple hits in some cases, and even be rated for such, depending on the caliber of bullet, way the armor was made, etc. it’s generally deemed unsafe to rely on this.

Moving on to ceramic plate armor, in most cases these plates are designed to shatter when hit by a bullet, dissipating the force of the impact via breaking up the bullet so that the smaller pieces can be absorbed by some backing material like Kevlar or some form of polymer or sometimes both. However, a side effect of this is that a large portion of the plate is then completely useless against a second shot similar to our previous example with soft armor. That said, there are types of ceramic armor that are designed to take multiple rounds, just, again, relying on this is generally considered unwise in most cases.

This brings us to polyethylene armor plating. In this case the impact of the bullet actually melts the plate which then re-hardens, trapping the bullet within it. Due to this, polyethylene armor can survive being shot numerous times without losing its ballistic integrity and we found examples of manufacturers that claimed their polyethylene armor could take hundreds of rounds before failing. Polyethylene plates also have the advantage of being roughly half the weight of ceramic for the same level of protection.

Hybrid body armor is also quite common at the higher levels, meaning your mileage may vary from a given piece of body armor to another, with the NIJ’s ratings giving a decent overview of what it’s capable of and often the manufacturer’s testing giving even more insight into how many rounds of a given type of bullet the vest can take before failure.

All this said, again, while a given piece of body armor may pass the tests and even be claimed by the manufacturer to protect against much more, most manufacturers recommend replacing body armor even after a single shot. And, beyond that, even in some cases if you just drop your armor on the floor. This is because although body armor is designed to stop bullets, some types are surprisingly fragile. For example, ceramic plates can easily crack if dropped, sometimes in ways that aren’t visible to the naked eye.

Moving on to soft body armor, stretching or deforming the fibers in some way, again in ways that are sometimes not obvious to the naked eye, also can compromise their integrity. Some manufacturers even advise replacing Kevlar-based body armor if you just get it wet as, as previously alluded to, this potentially weakens the fibers. On that note, because daily, otherwise innocuous, activities can sometimes compromise body armor, the standard in the body armor industry (set by the NIJ) is also to replace a given vest a maximum of every 5 years, even if it’s never been hit by a bullet.

Finally, for the fashionably minded individual who might need some protection from getting shot, it turns out bulletproof suits are not just a thing in the movies, but a real product that makes military and police body armor look like something made from an era when hitching up your covered wagon to go to the market was a thing. Perhaps the most famous manufacturer of these is the Colombian company Miguel Caballero, founded in 1992 by, you guessed it, a guy named Miguel Caballero. What exact materials he uses to make his line of bullet proof clothing isn’t clear, though he states it’s a “hybrid between nylon and polyester”. The advantage of his material is it is significantly lighter and thinner than Kevlar at equivalent protection levels. And, indeed, if you go check out their website, their undershirt body armor looks pretty much like any other undershirt unless you look really closely. As for the price tag, this isn’t listed on the website, but it would appear a basic suit top made by the company will run you upwards of about $20,000-$30,000, though you can get other product, such as an undershirt for less, apparently starting at around $4,000. Funny enough, one of Caballero’s favorite ways to advertise is in fact to put the clothing on someone and then personally shoot them, leading to the company’s slogan, “I was shot by Miguel Caballero” with apparently a few hundred people shot by the man himself to date. They even have a youtube channel where you can go and see him shoot his wife in the stomach. Not just stopping bullets, some of Caballero’s product are also rated to stop knives, be fireproof, waterproof, etc. Essentially, think the type of snazzy and robust clothing seen in most spy movies and that’s pretty accurate in this case.

And that, dear viewers, is the long and fascinating story of the bulletproof vest. While certainly capable of saving the wearer’s life under many circumstances, these devices are hardly the magical plot armour Hollywood would have us believe. So the next time you take a shortcut through the shady part of town – or try to buy plutonium from Libyan terrorists – remember: the best way to survive a bullet is not to get shot in the first place. A genius like Doc Brown should have known that.

Bonus Facts:

As alluded to, the commonly held notion that WWI was started out of outrage over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at the hands of Serbian nationalist secret society known as the “Black Hand” isn’t entirely correct. In fact, again as noted, Emperor Franz Josef himself expressed relief over the assassination because it rid him of an heir whom he deeply disliked. The Emperor commented that “God will not be mocked. A higher power had put back the order I couldn’t maintain.”

Indeed, it wasn’t just the Emperor who was relieved; it was reported by an Austrian newspaper that the general consensus among the various political circles was that the assassination, though a tragedy, was for the best. As far as the Austrian people were concerned, it was noted “The event almost failed to make any impression whatever. On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine as if nothing had happened.” Indeed, it took the government itself a full three weeks to react.

So why go to war over an assassination, if nobody cared? Because, while nobody seemed to much care about the assassination itself, Austria-Hungary had been looking for an excuse to wage a “preventative war” against Serbia as a state in order to weaken or destroy them so as to take back territory in the Balkans, which had been taken during the Balkan Wars. They had not taken it back up to this point because they lacked Germany’s support; without that support, they feared Russia too much, because of the treaty Russia had with Serbia.

With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28th, 1914, Austria-Hungary was able to secure the promise from Germany that it would aid in a war with Serbia and possibly Russia, if Russia chose to enter the fray due to their treaty with Serbia. It should be noted here that Austria-Hungary did not really expect Russia to enter the fray as they expected this to be a very small war that would be over quickly, before Russia would be obligated to respond. Now with Germany’s support if Russia did enter the fray, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia with remarkably severe terms that Serbia would be sure to reject, thus giving Austria-Hungary an excuse to go launch a limited war on Serbia to reclaim territory in the Balkans.

Surprisingly, Serbia responded relatively well to the ultimatum, but they did dispute a few minor clauses, which gave Austria-Hungary the excuse they needed to go to war. At this point, the following general series of events happened due to a variety of existing treaties between various nations, which escalated this minor clash into the first “Great War”.

• Russia bound by their treaty with Serbia decides to come to Serbia’s aid.
• Germany, with the recent treaty with Austria-Germany, declares war on Russia.
• France, bound by an existing treaty with Russia, now is at war with Germany by association. Germany then invades Belgium to have easy access to France.
• Britain, allied to France with an existing treaty, declares war against Germany. This was unexpected by Germany as they expected Britain to stay out of the war, due to the fact that the treaty with France was loosely worded and not entirely binding. However, Britain also had a 75 year old treaty with Belgium. So because of both of these treaties, they decided to declare war on Germany.
• With Britain now warring with Germany, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa enter the war as they were colonies of Britain.
• Japan honors an existing treaty with Britain and declares war on Germany.
• Austria-Hungary declare war on Japan for declaring war on Germany.
• The U.S. tries to stay out of the war but in 1917 decides to enter due to Germany’s submarines hindering the United States’ commercial shipping because the U.S. was shipping a lot of supplies to the Allies.

So in the end, a small quick war over a minor land dispute got turned into a lengthy war that was joined by powers all over the globe due to a variety of existing treaties dating back as much as 75 years before the war started and as a result, over 20 million people died and 25 or so more million injured and endless numbers more having their lives irrevocably altered, not to mention it set the world on the path to the even greater conflict in WWII. All because one tiny country wanted a tiny bit more land.

Expand for References

Claim:

JD Vance wrote in his 2016 memoir about having sex with “an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.”

Rating:

On July 15, 2024, X user @rickrudescalves posted (archived) that Republican U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio wrote in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” about thrusting his penis into “an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.” The user created the post on the same day former U.S. President Donald Trump announced Vance as his 2024 vice-presidential running mate.

The user’s post read, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to f***ing an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

This rumor was false. Vance’s memoir contained no such passage. Further, as KnowYourMeme.com reported, @rickrudescalves — who later protected his account so only followers could see his posts — “signaled that he was joking when he followed up the tweet with the Go on the Internet and Tell Lies meme.”

‘Why Is This Rumor So Believable?’

Even though the rumor about Vance and couch cushions was false, some users still shared the claim as if it were true.

For example, one X user posted (archived) on July 17, “On pages 179-81 Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance talks about f***ing an inside out latex glove between two couch cushions. I’m so glad that this is coming from the guy who claims he’s all about family values.”

Another X user posted (archived), “Wait a minute…. JD Vance f***ed his couch? And then wrote about it?!”

A third X user posted (archived), “Did JD Vance f*** a couch? And why is this rumor so believable?”

Vance-Couch Rumor Leads to Numerous Memes

As KnowYourMeme.com noted, the false rumor about Vance having sex with a latex glove and couch cushions also spawned numerous jokes, memes and videos.

For example, one X user posted (archived) a video supposedly showing Vance fantasizing about the gap between numerous couch cushions. The sound for the video featured Barry White’s song “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up.”

Another X user joked (archived), “People are acting like JD Vance is the only one who ever shoved a plastic glove between the couch cushions, f***ed it, and then wrote about the experience before.”

A different X user posted (archived) an altered cover of Vance’s memoir, adding a picture of a couch alongside the changed title: “Pushin’ Cushion: A Memoir of a Love that Fit the Creases.”

In another post, an X user said (archived), “Whatever you do, don’t tell JD Vance about this couch,” including a picture of a couch intended to be suggestive.

Other memes featured South Carolina U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a variation of the Distracted Boyfriend meme and Beavis from the cartoon series “Beavis and Butt-Head,” just to name a few.

Sources

In about 48 hours, Vice President Kamala Harris went from No. 2 on the Democratic presidential ticket to the presumptive presidential nominee, after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her. Here, we fact-check some of Harris’ recent speeches — before and after Biden dropped out:

• Harris repeated the claim that former President Donald Trump “intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” even though he did not attempt to cut either retirement program when he was president, and he has said that he will not cut them in a second term.

• She referred to Project 2025 — a conservative plan for deeply cutting and overhauling the federal government — as Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Trump has disavowed the project, which he described as “seriously extreme.”

• The vice president repeated one of her favorite talking points when she claimed “Donald Trump openly vowed, if reelected, that he will be a dictator on Day 1.” He said he was joking when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

• Harris left the misleading impression that Trump was to blame for the loss of “tens of thousands” of manufacturing jobs. The U.S. added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump — until the economic effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic reversed all those job gains.

A former U.S. senator from California who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris seemingly overnight became the Democratic Party’s last chance to stop Trump from regaining the White House.

Biden, who never recovered from a disastrous debate performance in late June, announced on July 21 that he would not seek reelection, saying it was in the “best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President.” Shortly after, Biden gave Harris his “full support and endorsement” for president.

The party quickly coalesced around Harris, who announced at a campaign event in Milwaukee on July 23: “I’m told as of this morning that we have earned the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.”

Harris needs 1,968 delegates to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, and the Associated Press reported that she has the support of more than 3,000 delegates.

Project 2025, Social Security and Medicare

Since Biden dropped out and endorsed her, Harris has delivered two speeches and both times she referred to Project 2025 — a conservative plan for remaking the federal government — as Trump’s plan, even though the former president has disavowed it.

And in both speeches, she cited Project 2025 as evidence that Trump wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, even though the former president has offered no plans to do so.

Harris, Wilmington, Delaware, July 22: He and his extreme Project 2025 will weaken the middle class and bring us backward — please do note that — back to the failed trickle-down policies that gave huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and made working families pay the cost; back to policies that put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block; back to policies that treat health care as only a privilege for the wealthy, instead of what we all know it should be, which is a right for every American.

Harris, Milwaukee, July 23: But Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages. But here’s the thing. When you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.

As we have said before, Trump says he has no plans to cut Social Security or Medicare.

In his four years as president, Trump did not propose cutting Social Security’s retirement benefits, and his budgets included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. (For more, see our February 2020 article “Competing Claims on Trump’s Budget and Seniors,” which details how Trump as president proposed cuts to the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, but not to retirement benefits.)

After leaving office, Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security, most recently on July 20 in his first joint campaign appearance with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. “We will not cut one penny from Social Security and Medicare,” Trump said in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In January 2023, when House Republicans were discussing ways to cut government spending, Trump said in a video: “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree.”

As for Project 2025, Trump described it at his Michigan rally as “seriously extreme.” He added, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Project 2025 lays out “four goals and principles” for Medicare “reform,” but there is nothing in the 900-plus page document that calls for cutting Social Security, which the authors of the project call a “myth.”

Harris and the Democrats link the project and its agenda to Trump because, as CNN has reported, there are more than 100 people involved in the project who have worked in the Trump administration. Prominent figures such as Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, a top aide who was involved in setting major immigration policy, are associated with conservative groups that advised the project.

Project 2025, which mentions Trump hundreds of times, includes concepts that Trump supports, including — as Harris alluded to — cutting business taxes and rewriting the nation’s health care laws. But it also proposes things that Trump did not do when he was president, such as setting just two individual tax brackets of 15% and 30% (down from seven) and eliminating or transforming entire government agencies.

There is no telling what parts of Project 2025 Trump would implement, if elected. But Project 2025 is not his “agenda” or “plan,” as Harris said.

Trump’s Dictator Remarks

In recent speeches this month, including in Philadelphia on July 13, Harris repeated a popular talking point that “Donald Trump openly vowed, if reelected, that he will be a dictator on Day 1.”

Harris was referring to a comment that Trump made at a Fox News town hall in December. At the event, Sean Hannity gave Trump the chance to respond to critics who warned that Trump would be a dictator if elected to a second term. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Hannity said. Trump responded, “Except for Day 1.”

Trump went on to say, “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Trump later claimed he was joking with Hannity. In a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

Trump repeated his intention to close the border and drill for oil. “That’s all. And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator,” Trump told Bartiromo, claiming his “dictator” comment was “said in jest.”

Manufacturing Jobs

In a July 18 speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris left the misleading impression that Trump was to blame for the loss of “tens of thousands” of manufacturing jobs.

“So, Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing,” Harris said. “The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.”

The fact is, those jobs were lost during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As of February 2020, the U.S. had added 414,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But then the economic effects of the pandemic took hold. In April 2020 alone, the U.S. lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs.

Most of those jobs came back. But at the end of Trump’s four years, the U.S. had lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2017, when he took office.

Under Biden, the rest of the manufacturing jobs returned and then some. Since January 2021, the U.S. has added 762,000 manufacturing jobs.

Clarification, July 25: We have updated this story to clarify that while Trump did not propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits as president, he did propose cutting the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Election law experts say House Speaker Mike Johnson is wrong when he says it is “unlawful” for Democrats to “simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the … democratic process.”

Although President Joe Biden was chosen by the vast majority of primary and caucus voters, and amassed more than 99% of the pledged delegates who will meet at the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, he has not been formally nominated. And since he has voluntarily dropped out of the race, delegates pledged to him are no longer obligated to vote for him and can vote for someone else, experts told us.

The Associated Press reported that a survey of delegates found Vice President Kamala Harris is already closing in on the number of delegates she needs to win the nomination.

On July 21, Biden announced via X, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” In a message to Democrats a half hour later, Biden said, “I have decided not to accept the nomination,” and he offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.”

The same day Biden made his announcement, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison released a statement saying, “In the coming days, the Party will undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November. This process will be governed by established rules and procedures of the Party. Our delegates are prepared to take seriously their responsibility in swiftly delivering a candidate to the American people.”

Prominent Democrats have quickly coalesced around Harris as the nominee — including some who may have harbored their own presidential aspirations, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

On two political talk shows hours before Biden made his announcement, Johnson raised the issue of the legality of “switching” the Democratic nominee to someone other than Biden, and suggested Republicans would file legal challenges if the DNC attempted such a thing.

Johnson, ABC News’ “This Week,” July 21: Well, these elections are handled at the state level. Every state has its own system and in some of these, it’s not possible to simply just switch out a candidate who has been chosen through the democratic, small D, democratic process over such a long period of time.

Fourteen million Democrats voted to make Joe Biden the nominee. So, it would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the back room and switch it out because they’re — they don’t like the candidate any longer. That’s not how this is supposed to work. So, I think they would run into some legal impediments in at least a few of these jurisdictions and I think there’ll be a compelling case to be made that that shouldn’t happen, and so I think they got legal trouble if that’s their — if that’s their intention and that’s their plan. So, we’ll how it plays out. We don’t know.

Johnson, CNN’s “State of the Union,” July 21: Look, I’m a former litigator, a constitutional law attorney. I just made note in some comments over the last week that they have real problems. I mean, every state has their own election system. That’s our constitutional system. That’s the way it’s done. And in some of these states, it’s a real hurdle. They have a real problem of replacing the nominee at the top of the ticket.

Remember, [host] Jake [Tapper], I mean, Joe Biden was chosen after a long small-D democratic process by 14 million people emerging through that primary. It will be very interesting to see if the so-called party of democracy, the Democrats, go into a back room somewhere and switch it out and put someone else at the top of the ticket. I mean, I think they have got legal hurdles in some of these states, and it’ll be litigated, I would expect, on the ground there and they will have to sort through that. They have got a real problem.

Election law experts said Johnson is incorrect.

“First of all, the Democratic Party is not ‘replacing or switch[ing] out’ its nominee,” Edward B. Foley, the director of the election law program at Ohio State University, told us via email. “Biden was never the official nominee, only the presumptive nominee. The nominee is chosen by the delegates to the convention, either at the convention or in a virtual roll call beforehand, neither of which has occurred yet.

“Moreover, political parties have the constitutional right to determine the procedure by which they select their nominees, as repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court,” Foley said, citing the Supreme Court cases Democratic Party of United States v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette and California Democratic Party v. Jones.

“The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law.”

Foley said there “would be no basis whatsoever for Republicans (or anyone else) to challenge the Democratic Party’s decision to follow its own rules in nominating someone other than Biden.”

According to the Democratic Party’s rules, Foley said, “the presidential preference primaries determined who the convention delegates are; the primary voters did not directly choose the party’s nominee. Biden’s now having voluntarily withdrawn from the race before the delegates nominated him based on his status as presumptive nominee as a result of the primaries, the delegates are free pursuant to the party’s own rules to choose a different person as their nominee. There has been no disenfranchisement of primary voters as a part of the process of the party following its own nomination rules.”

Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law, echoed that point via an email to us, saying, “Speaker Johnson’s claims are absolutely false.”

“Biden was not the official nominee,” Douglas said. “The nominee is not determined until the Convention when the delegates nominate someone. The claims that there is some kind of legal reason Biden must be on the ballot are simply wrong. Every state puts on the ballot the person who the parties nominate at their convention. Trump was not the official nominee until last week when the RNC formally nominated him. There is no basis whatsoever for states not to put whoever the Democrats nominate on the ballot.”

Nonetheless, the conservative Heritage Foundation told Newsweek it might spend millions to launch court challenges.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, told Newsweek some state laws may make it more difficult than others for Democrats to replace their candidate. For example, “Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal for any reason besides death,” a Heritage Foundation memo states.

That’s referring to language in the Wisconsin state candidate ballot access procedures, which states, “Any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot cannot withdraw their name from the ballot after filing. The name of that person shall appear upon the ballot except in case of death of the person.”

But whether Biden can remove his name from ballots is irrelevant, Foley told us.

“That section of Wisconsin law is inapplicable to the current context,” Foley said. “Biden has NOT been placed on the general election ballot in Wisconsin (or anywhere else). The relevant provision of Wisconsin law is this: ‘Each recognized political party must certify to the general accountability board no later than the first Tuesday in September preceding a presidential election the names of the candidates for president and vice-president.’”

There is a separate issue, Foley said, of state deadlines for getting the names of the party’s nominees on the ballot.

“The earliest deadline is Tuesday, August 20 (as far as I’m aware), now that Ohio has pushed its deadline back to September 1,” Foley said. “As long as the Democrats officially choose their nominees by that August 20 deadline, which is in Washington State, there is [no] basis for any argument to keep the party’s nominees off the ballot for timing reasons.”

In order to alleviate any of those concerns, the DNC had signaled that it intended to hold a virtual call of delegates to nominate a candidate before the convention. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago starts on Aug. 19 and ends Aug. 22.

“There is the implication [in Johnson’s comments] that states have different rules and the open convention will run afoul of those rules,” John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told us via email. “This concern is not relevant at the convention stage. But it would be relevant if President Biden had dropped out later, after the convention and as states were beginning to print their ballots. States have deadlines by which they need to know the names that will go on the ballot, and they have procedures for potentially changing a name on a ballot. But all of this would only apply after the convention when state deadlines for getting on the ballot would apply.”

Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias posted confidently on Threads, “Before the media gets rolling, let me be clear: The Democratic nominee for president will be on all 50 state ballots. There is no basis for any legal challenge. Period.”

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Ah, the Bikini! What event more definitively announces that summer has arrived than the appearance of this classic swimsuit at beaches and poolsides across the world? An icon of women’s fashion, the bikini has permeated pop culture like few articles of clothing, giving us such lexical gems as bikini season, bikini bottom, and bikini wax. But while ubiquitous today, when first introduced in the summer of 1946, this skimpy swimsuit caused an outright scandal, and was banned in many places for decades. But this reaction was exactly what the bikini’s designer intended, for he named his creation after one of the most destructive and controversial events in human history. This is the explosive story of that event and how it resulted in the bikini we all know and love today.

If one defines “bikini” as a two-piece swimsuit that exposes the navel, then such garments have existed in one form or another since the dawn of human civilization, with the earliest known depiction – from the Çatalhöyük archaeological site in modern-day Turkey- dating all the way back to 5,600 B.C.E. Similarly, a mosaic in the fourth-century C.E. Villa Romana del Casale on Sicily depicts Roman women exercising in garments that look remarkably like modern bikinis, with bandeau tops and brief bottoms. However, the rise of Christianity brought with it stricter standards for women’s modesty, and such revealing swimsuits – and recreational swimming for women – all but disappeared from Western Europe for nearly 1500 years. It was not until the late 18th century, when “taking the waters” – whether in a lake, spring, or the ocean – became a popular cure for all manner of ailments, that female bathing finally became acceptable. And we do mean bathing as opposed to swimming, for the cumbersome bathing costumes of the day, made of heavy wool and featuring full-length sleeves, a knee-length skirt, and baggy bloomers, would quickly swamp and drown the wearer in anything but the calmest waters. Later, such costumes evolved into less cumbersome – and dangerous – flannel gowns fastened at the neck, but this in turn required stricter measures to preserve the bather’s modesty. Men and women’s beaches were usually segregated, while female bathers made use of elaborate contraptions known as bathing machines: wheeled huts that could be pulled from the beach into the surf by horses or men. After changing into her bathing costume, the bather would descend a staircase at the back of the machine into the water, where she could bathe shielded from view by a cloth awning known as a “modesty hood.” Meanwhile, a group of male attendants known as “dippers” stood on guard to ward off any lingering onlookers.

Over the following century, women’s bathing suits became simpler and restrictive, though they still featured full or half-length sleeves and pant legs and even short skirts. But this evolution took place in the face of stiff resistance, as Australian competitive swimmer Annette Kellermann discovered in 1907 when she was arrested at a beach in Boston. Her crime? Wearing a form-fitting but sleeveless one-piece swimsuit. Within a decade, however, such swimsuits had become the norm around the world, spurred in part by the introduction of women’s swimming at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. A few years later, Danish-American designer Carl Jantzen, part owner of Portland Knitting Mills in Oregon, developed an elasticized rib-knit wool fabric perfect for making lightweight and form-fitting athletic singlets and swimsuits. The company, later renamed Jantzen Knitting Mills, would later adopt the slogan “The suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Meanwhile, the emerging 1920s fad for sunbathing and the development of synthetic fabrics like rayon drove the introduction of increasingly revealing two-piece swimsuits. The rise of Hollywood further promoted the fashion, with two-piece swimsuits appearing prominently in such films as 1932’s Three on a Match and 1933’s Flying Down to Rio and Footlight Parade. While at first glance these suits were remarkably similar to modern bikinis, they were nowhere near as controversial for one simple reason: they kept the wearer’s navel covered. That’s right: while in the thirties cleavage and a bare midriff were A-Ok, the belly button was strictly verboten. Indeed, the 1934 Motion Picture Production

Code – better known as the Hays Code – included a strict prohibition on showing navels onscreen.

However, as is the case with so much social change, it was the demands of wartime that truly cemented the two-piece swimsuit as a fashion staple. Just as a shortage of steel during the First World War led women to abandon corsets for brassieres, the rationing of silk, rubber, and other strategic materials during the Second World War led the U.S. War Production Board to issue Regulation L-85, mandating a 10% reduction in the amount of fabric used in women’s beachwear. As a result, designers eliminated decorative elements like skirts and increased production of more economical two-piece swimsuits. Thus, when the war finally ended and Europeans were able to flock to the beach once more, the stage was set for an even greater revolution in swimsuit design – and for more on the impact of war on fashion, please check out our previous video How World War I Got Women to Wear Bras.

This revolutionary new swimsuit was developed simultaneously in 1946 by two French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Réard, who were both trying to work around postwar fabric shortages. But while Heim’s design, which he dubbed l’Atome or “The Atom,” was skimpier than its 1930s and 40s predecessors, it still covered the wearer’s navel. Réard’s design, by contrast, truly pushed the boundaries of decency, comprising two triangles of newsprint fabric connected by strings to cover the breasts and another two covering the mons pubis and the buttocks. Recognizing that “like the [atom] bomb, [my design] is small and devastating,” Réard bestowed upon his creation a name that was just then dominating the headlines: Bikini.

Until 1946, very few people had ever heard of Bikini Atoll. Located in the Marshall Islands chain 3,000 kilometres southwest of Hawaii, the atoll consists of 23 coral islands surrounding a central lagoon 30 kilometres wide. For thousands of years Bikini was home to a few hundred Marshallese islanders, who sustained themselves by fishing and cultivating coconuts. In 1885 the atoll was annexed by the German Empire, who used it as a production hub for coconut oil. Then, in 1914, the Empire of Japan – at that time part of the Entente Powers – captured the Marshall Islands from the Germans and in 1920 was awarded the chain by the League of Nations as part of their South Seas Mandate. In 1941, following the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific, Japanese troops occupied Bikini in order to protect the nearby – and strategically vital – Kwajalein Atoll. Bikini remained in Japanese hands until February 1944 when, after fierce fighting, American forces recaptured Kwajalein. By this time, the garrison on Bikini consisted of only five men, who all chose to commit suicide by hand grenade rather than surrender.

And there the story might have ended, with Bikini remaining just another coral speck among hundreds in the gruelling American island-hopping campaign. But in December 1945, less than four months after the Japanese surrender, a decision was made that would catapult this once-obscure ring of islands into the global spotlight. While it was clear to all that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 had forever changed modern warfare, what was less clear was how exactly it had changed. As the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, military strategists began to wonder how best to use this awesome new weapon. Could it be deployed tactically on the battlefield, or was it only good for destroying civilian centres? And what kinds of targets was it most effective against? Particularly concerned about its role in the nascent atomic age was the U.S. Navy, which resented the Army Air Force’s monopoly on the delivery of nuclear weapons. The Air Force, meanwhile, argued that naval ships were extremely vulnerable to nuclear attack, and that the advent of such weapons had effectively made navies obsolete. Into this bitter dispute waded one Lewis Strauss, aide to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, future Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, – and, yes, the same guy played by Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer. Strauss suggested staging a series of tests to evaluate the effects of nuclear weapons on naval vessels. “If such a test is not made,” Strauss argued:

“…there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned.”

Such a test had already been suggested several months before – though to a completely different end. In August 1945, Senator Brien McMahon, who would later write the Atomic Energy Act and chair the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, publicly proposed using captured Imperial Japanese Navy ships to demonstrate the vulnerability of navies to – rather than their survivability against – nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, McMahon’s proposal was backed by United States Army Air Forces General Henry “Hap” Arnold, who was keen to prove that only the Air Force could be trusted with nuclear weapons. Both services thus pressed forward with their respective plans, with the Navy’s project being publicly announced on October 27, 1945 by Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet. As Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Peterson later observed:

“To the public, the test looms as one in which the future of the Navy is at stake … if the Navy withstands [the tests] better than the public imagines it will, in the public mind the Navy will have ‘won.’”

To direct the tests, the Army initially recommended Major General Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project which had developed the first atomic bombs. However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that since the Navy would be contributing the majority of the men and resources, the tests should be run by a naval officer. They thus appointed Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, then Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Special Weapons, to head the joint Army/Navy task force. Also on Blandy’s staff were Rear Admiral William S. Parson; Army Major Generals William E. Kepner and Anthony C. McAuliffe, and Technical Director Dr. R.A. Sawyer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Yet suspicion lingered in both military and civilian circles that the Navy would try to rig the tests to its own advantage, with Senator McMahon arguing that they should “[not be] solely responsible for conducting operations which might well indeed determine its very existence.” Faced with such accusations, Vice Admiral Blandy agreed to pack more target ships closer together than initially planned, and to the creation of a civilian committee to evaluate the final results. However, he rejected the Army’s demand that the ships be packed with fuel and ammunition, arguing that internal explosions could cause too many vessels to sink, preventing them from being studied after the tests.In January 1946, the plan, dubbed Operation Crossroads, was officially approved and announced by U.S. President Harry S. Truman. The operation had been named by Vice Admiral Blandy himself, who explained that:

“It was apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, had been brought to a turning point by this revolutionary weapon.” 

And the site chosen to host the first nuclear explosions since Nagasaki was Bikini Atoll.

Almost immediately, Operation Crossroads drew severe criticism from all sides. Manhattan Project scientists, including scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, argued that such testing was unnecessary, and that the desired results could be more easily – and safely – obtained in the laboratory. Furthermore, they warned that detonating a nuclear weapon underwater would create a radioactive “witch’s brew” that could devastate the local environment. As a result, Oppenheimer declined an invitation to witness the tests, while the majority of his colleagues at Los Alamos stayed well clear of the Crossroads site. Others debated what the outcome of the tests would be, and whether atomic bombs were really viable as naval weapons. As an article in the March 16, 1946 edition of the Operation Crossroads Newsletter recounted:

“Armies and navies have been declared obsolete by laymen and scientists, and commentators, looking into the future, have pictured push-button wars, with man destroying himself in a matter of hours. On the other side, the Bomb has been declared over-rated. Dr. Phillip Morrison, Los Alamos scientist, said that the Bomb, if exploded in the air, would do little damage to the ships at Bikini, and Maj. Alexander P. Seversky, aviation expert, told the Senate Naval Affair Committee that he “wouldn’t mind being below deck” on the ship nearest the explosion.”

On the diplomatic front, politicians like Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace feared that Crossroads would anger the Soviets and scuttle the recently-proposed Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, which sought to place nuclear weapons under international control as a safeguard against future conflict. Indeed, many saw it as strangely hypocritical for the United States to pursue nuclear testing while simultaneously pushing for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the words of ABC radio commentator Gram Swing:

“At Bikini, the Navy is preparing itself for the failure of the UN Atomic Energy Commission. On the one hand, we’re striving to rid the world of a weapon which may set back civilization for centuries…and on the other hand, we’re training ourselves in the use of this very weapon. So we strive to save civilization, and we learn how to wreck it, all on the same weekend.”

Hoping for more time to conclude negotiations, Byrnes urged President Truman to delay the tests by at least six weeks or – better yet – cancel them altogether. Truman agreed to the former, moving the date of the first test from May 15 to July 1. Officially, however, the delay was to allow more members of Congress to attend the tests during the summer recess.

Further objections came from animal rights groups – who protested the use of animals as radiological test subjects – as well as Congress, who questioned the wisdom of destroying $450 million worth of target ships. On the latter point, Vice Admiral Blandy countered that, being largely obsolete types, these ships were actually worth only around $3.7 million in scrap value.

Despite all this, Operation Crossroads went ahead as planned, and in February 1946 the survey ship USS Sumner arrived at Bikini and began blasting channels into the lagoon for the coming task force. Bikini Atoll had been chosen for a number of reasons, including its isolation, favourable weather, suitability as a sheltered anchorage, proximity to the Army Air Force base at Kwajalein, and its small population. As USS Sumner carried out its preparatory work, Commodore Benjamin Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands, gathered the Bikini Islanders after their Sunday church service and asked them and their monarch, King Juda Kessibuki:

“Would you be willing to sacrifice your island for the welfare of all men?”

After a brief – if confused – discussion with his people, King Juda agreed, stating:

“If the United States government and the scientists of the world want to use our island and atoll for furthering development, which with God’s blessing will result in kindness and benefit to all mankind, my people will be pleased to go elsewhere. We will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”

On March 7, the U.S. Navy evacuated all 167 Bikini Islanders to Rongerik Atoll, 216 kilometres away. Though they believed their relocation was temporary and that they would soon return home, history would have other plans. Meanwhile, Bikini was invaded by a massive armada comprising 242 ships, 156 aircraft, and more than 42,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. In stark contrast to the intense secrecy surrounding the Trinity Test – the world’s first nuclear explosion conducted on July 16, 1945 – Operation Crossroads soon became the global media event of the year, acquiring an almost carnival-like atmosphere. Hundreds of civilian scientists from fifteen universities and several private companies were in attendance, as well as dozens of journalists from news outlets around the world. The majority of these were headquartered aboard the command ship USS Appalachian, which soon became known as the “press ship.” Initially, however, foreign observers were not invited, leading commentators like The Washington Post to object that “[the tests will] fortify the world’s fear that we think of the atom as our peculiar property and mean to brandish it as a weapon for our peculiar interests”. It was therefore decided at the last minute to invite two observers from each member of the UN Atomic Energy Commission: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Among these observers were physicists Simon Alexandrov and Chung-Yao Chao, who would go on to play key roles in the Soviet and Chinese nuclear programs, respectively.

As originally envisioned, Operation Crossroads comprised three different tests, codenamed Able, Baker, and Charlie after the Joint Army/Navy Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet in use at the time. All three tests would use a version the same 23-kiloton Mark III “Fat Man” plutonium implosion device dropped on Nagasaki, with the Able device being airdropped on the target fleet by a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Baker device detonated underwater in the atoll lagoon, and the Charlie device detonated in deeper water outside the lagoon. Two of the bombs were given nicknames by Navy personnel: the Able device being dubbed Gilda after the Rita Hayworth that came out that same year, and the Baker device Helen of Bikini.

Meanwhile, the target fleet comprised 95 vessels, making it the sixth-largest navy in the world at the time. The majority of these were obsolete or surplus U.S. Navy vessels, among which were the battleships Arkansas, New York, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, the cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City, the aircraft carriers Saratoga and Independence, as well as 16 destroyers, 8 submarines, and various other amphibious assault and auxiliary craft. Intriguingly, two of the battleships – Nevada and Pennsylvania – were survivors of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor which had drawn the United States into the Second World War. Having witnessed firsthand the revolutionary power of naval aviation, these old warhorses would now end their careers facing off against yet another game-changing weapon. Rounding out the target fleet were three vessels captured from the Axis powers: the Japanese battleship Nagato and light cruiser Sakawa and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The symbolism of publicly annihilating these tokens of two defeated enemies was not lost on those in attendance; Operation Crossroads was many things, but subtle was not one of them.

The target ships were anchored in a roughly circular array 2 kilometres in diameter, 6 kilometres southeast of the main island of Bikini. At the centre of the array was USS Nevada, painted bright orange to serve as the aiming point for the bombardier. The ships were loaded with sample complements of fuel and ammunition, while some 25,000 scientific instruments including radiation detectors, pressure gauges, and both still and motion picture cameras, were arranged inside and outside the hulls, on the support ships anchored 35 kilometres away, and aboard instrumented aircraft circling overhead. Indeed, more than 9 million still images and 1.5 million feet of motion picture film would be shot over the course of the operation, accounting for nearly half the world’s supply of photographic material at the time. To gauge the biological effects of flash and radiation, 5,664 including 200 pigs, 200 mice, 60 guinea pigs, 204 goats, and 5,000 rats were penned above and belowdecks on 22 target ships. Some animals their fur shaved to simulate the effects on human skin, while others were dressed in standard Navy anti-flash clothing or smeared in anti-flash cream. In the wake of the detonations, remotely-operated drone aircraft including Grumman F6F Hellcats from the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-la and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses from Eniwetok Atoll would be flown through the mushroom cloud to collect radiation samples. It was, in other words, to be the largest and most well-documented scientific experiment in history.

Able day finally arrived on July 1, 1946. The B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream of the 509th Bombardment Group took off from Kwajalein and, at 9:00 AM local time, dropped Gilda onto the target fleet. The bomber, originally named Big Stink, had been the photographic aircraft on the Nagasaki mission but was renamed in honour of Dave Semple, a bombardier who was killed during a practice mission on March 7, 1946 – and for more on that often forgotten mission, please check our video Target Nagasaki: the Forgotten Story of Charles Sweeney and Bockscar on our sister channel Higher Learning.

Accompanied by a live radio countdown by Dr. Ernest Titterton, a British Manhattan Project physicist to later headed the British atomic bomb project, Gilda detonated at an altitude of 158 metres. After the blinding flash subsided, a giant orange brown mushroom cloud rose over the lagoon:

“For minutes the cloud stood solid and impressive, like some gigantic monument, over Bikini. Then finally the shearing of the winds at different altitudes began to tear it up into a weird zigzag pattern.”

As the smoke began to clear, all eyes turned to the target fleet. Yet despite the months of build-up and the apocalyptic images painted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the results of the Able test were decidedly anticlimactic. As Soviet observer Simon Alexandrov recalled:

“The only visible results from the air were two ships sunk and one on its side, plus four more ships burning….Everyone had the feeling that something had gone wrong.”

In fact, Gilda had missed its aiming point by nearly 650 metres. As a result, only five ships were sunk. Two attack transports, the USS Gillam and Carlisle, sank immediately; two destroyers, USS Anderson and Lamson, within hours; and the Japanese cruiser Sakawa the following day. The rest of the target fleet suffered only minor damage and were minimally contaminated by radiation, allowing them to be re-boarded within hours. Meanwhile, only around 10% of the test animals died immediately, while around 25% ultimately perished from the effects of radiation. The overall effect of the test was to rob the atomic bomb of much of the awe and mystique it had acquired in the public consciousness. As The Economist later observed:

“Dressed in all the trappings of an exaggerated and somewhat frivolous publicity, the first Bikini atom bomb experiment has left rather the impression of a fireworks display which slightly misfired.”

Time Magazine concurred, noting that:

“…[the bomb] had grown a little less awful as a result of Bikini. Its apparently infinite power was finite after all.”

Meanwhile, the Navy was delighted with the test, with Admiral Forrestal declaring that:

“…the American Navy will continue to be the most efficient, the most modern and the most powerful in the world”.

Unsurprisingly, the Navy was accused of rigging the test in its favour. However, a thorough investigation failed to determine the exact cause of the overshoot, with the most commonly accepted theory being that one of the bomb’s box fins collapsed as it fell towards the target.

But while the Able detonation made the atomic bomb look like something of a damp squib, Baker would reveal the weapon’s true destructive potential and yield some of the most iconic and enduring images of the nuclear age. For this test, Helen of Bikini, identical to Gilda in design and yield, was suspended 27 metres beneath the target fleet from the amphibious assault ship LSM-60. Detonated at 8:35 AM on July 25, the Baker shot produced a unique, awesome spectacle unlike anything seen before or since. As New York Times correspondent William Laurence wrote:

“For a time it looked as though a giant mountain had risen from the sea, as though we were watching the formation of a continent…and then it took the shape of a giant chain of mountains, covered with snow, glistening in the sun”.

Major General Nichols of Vice Admiral Blandy’s staff also described the awesome spectacle:

“Niagara Falls in reverse shot up over an area fully 2,200 feet in diameter, millions of tons of water rose about 5,000 feet and finally vapour and steam came out on top. As the tons of water came tumbling back into the lagoon, what appeared like a tremendous breaking wave broke out of the mass of water and advanced towards the next circle of target ships.”

Still and moving images of the test reveal the sheer scale of the explosion, with even battleships like Nagato and Nevada looking like toy boats next to the gargantuan, cauliflower-shaped water column thrown up by the bomb. The underwater blast proved far more effective than the Able airburst, completely vaporizing LSM-60, displacing 2 million tons of water, and creating a tsunami that immediately sank the battleship USS Arkansas, the submarines USS Pilotfish, Apogon, and Skipjack, and the concrete yard oiler YO-160. Contrary to popular belief, Arkansas was not lifted vertically by the blast; the dark, vertical object seen in many pictures of the Baker water column is merely a gap produced by Arkansas’s superstructure. Instead, the shock wave and tsunami completely sheared off said superstructure and rolled Arkansas onto its back, whereupon the battleship immediately flooded and sank to the bottom of the lagoon.

But while the remaining target ships were not immediately sunk, many were severely damaged, suffering massive leaks that threatened to sink them within hours. But when Navy crews re-boarded the ships to assess and repair the damage, they discovered a far more serious problem: the hulls were dangerously radioactive. As the Manhattan Project scientists had predicted, the underwater detonation had contaminated the water with a witch’s brew of fission products and unconsumed plutonium, which washed over the ships as a 270-metre tall “base surge” when the water column fell back to earth. So extensive was the contamination that many ships could not be safely approached, and several, including the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and the Japanese battleship Nagato, sank before their hulls could be repaired. In all, 14 ships sank as a direct result of the blast.

Meanwhile, the other ships proved nearly impossible to decontaminate – either by scrubbing with soap and water or sandblasting paint off metal surfaces. And while decontamination crews were limited to shifts of no more than a few minutes, few were issued any kind of protective equipment, and many suffered from acute radiation sickness and long-term health issues like cancer. The vast majority of the test animals -mainly pigs and rats – also died within a few days of the test. And while Vice Admiral Blandy reassured the public that the animals died painlessly, he almost certainly knew that this was a lie – and for more on this horrifying subject, please check out our previous video Tickling the Dragon’s Tail: the Horrible Heart of a Nuclear Bomb.

Within two months of the Baker shot, the radiation had sufficiently decayed for some of the larger ships to be towed away for further study. USS Pennsylvania and the German cruiser Prinz Eugen were taken to Kwajalein, USS Nevada and New York to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and USS Independence to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Fransisco. Due to severe contamination, a minor leak aboard Prinz Eugen went undetected, and on December 22, 1946 she capsized in shallow water where she remains to this day. Efforts to decontaminate the remaining ships proved unsatisfactory, and by 1951 all were decommissioned and scuttled in deep water.

The extent of the contamination wrought by Crossroads Baker caught the U.S. Navy completely by surprise, revealing that the greatest threat posed by nuclear weapons was not blast or tsunamis but radiation, which would instantly render any ship uninhabitable. But the contamination was not limited to the target fleet or even the Bikini lagoon; the base surge rendered the main island of Bikini uninhabitable for a week, while radioactive vapour drifted east over Rongelap and Rongerik Atolls, where the Bikini Islanders had been relocated. It was an ominous sign of things to come. The test also produced serious fallout of the political kind. As Secretary of State James Byrnes had feared, the Soviets ultimately rejected an updated version of Acheson-Lilienthal Plan known as the Baruch Plan, and dream of achieving international control of nuclear weapons fell apart. Three years later the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, ending the United States’ nuclear monopoly and pushing the Cold War into a dangerous new phase.

Shortly after the Baker shot, it was decided to cancel the third planned deep-water test, codenamed Charlie. While this decision largely stemmed from the Navy’s inability to decontaminate the remaining target ships, the Army also argued that using up the nation’s tiny nuclear stockpile in testing was impeding efforts to develop smaller, more efficient nuclear weapons. The scientific objectives of shot Charlie would eventually be achieved on May 14, 1955 during Operation Wigwam, conducted 800 kilometres southwest of San Diego. A 30-kiloton Mark 90 “Betty” nuclear depth charge was detonated at a depth of 610 metres, with instrumented miniature submarine hulls known as Squaws being used to gauge the effects.

With Operation Crossroads officially over, on November 7, 1946 a reception was held in honour of Vice Admiral Blandy, during which he and his wife were photographed cutting into a cake shaped like a mushroom cloud. The photograph sparked outrage, with Reverend A. Powell Davis of Washington, D.C. declaring in a fiery sermon:

“If I had the authority of a priest of the Middle Ages, I would call down the wrath of God upon such an obscenity. I would damn to hell these people of callous conscience, these traitors to humanity.”

Indeed, Blandy and his staff were faced with a difficult public relations situation. Though originally intended to allay public fears about nuclear weapons and demonstrate the invulnerability of the U.S. Navy, Operation Crossroads had achieved just the opposite, stoking nuclear malaise to an all-time high. Indeed, a 1947 report on the tests in Life Magazine informed viewers that:

“If all the ships at Bikini had been fully manned, the Baker Day bomb would have killed 35,000 crewmen. If such a bomb were dropped below New York’s Battery in a stiff south wind, 2 million people would die.”

In an attempt to save face, Vice Admiral Blandy declared that any target ship which sank more than 10 days after the Baker shot would not be considered to have been sunk by the bomb. Thus, even though all but 9 of the 97 target ships were either sunk or rendered too radioactive to even be sold for scrap, the official Navy report listed only 19 ships sunk between two tests. But they needn’t have bothered with this fudging, for despite postwar fears the Navy was not rendered obsolete and received a significant portion of the U.S. defence budget throughout the cold war period.

After the conclusion of Operation Crossroads, the US military temporarily abandoned Bikini as a nuclear testing site, largely due to the inability to build on the atoll. However, in March 1954, the atoll was chosen for Operation Castle, the first test of a practical thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Like the Crossroads Baker shot, the Castle Bravo detonation of March 1, 1954 created far more fallout than anticipated, contaminating large swathes of the South Pacific and triggering an international incident – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Who Invented the Hydrogen Bomb. In total, the United States would conduct 23 nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958.

Meanwhile, the relocation of the 167 Bikini Islanders had to Rongerik Atoll had failed due to the island’s inferior climate and productivity. Thus, after several months of starvation and hardship, the islanders were moved to Kwajalein Atoll. In 1970, Bikini Atoll was finally declared safe for human habitation and the islanders allowed to return. However, less than a decade later it was found that levels of Caesium-137 and in the islanders’ bodies had increased by 75%, the isotope having become concentrated in coconut palms and other common food plants. As a result, in 1978 the Bikini Islanders were evacuated once again – this time to Kili Island. Their descendants remain there to this day, waiting for the day when they can finally return to their traditional home.

It was against this explosive background that Louis Réard launched his bold new swimsuit design he named the “bikini”. The first modern bikini was introduced on July 5, 1946 – just 4 days after the Crossroads Able test – at a popular Paris pool called Piscine Molitor. So revealing was Réard’s creation that no model in Paris would agree to wear it. Réard was thus forced to hire 18-year old Micheline Bernadini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris. Like the Crossroads Baker detonation, the bikini made an enormous splash, with American fashion writer Diana Vreeland declaring it “the atom bomb of fashion” and Bernardini receiving more than 50,000 fan letters. Yet despite some initial shock, the French public largely took the bikini in stride, with the newspaper Le Figaro explaining that:

“People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life.”

Others, however, were less forward-thinking. In 1950, American swimsuit designer Fred Cole decried the bikini as:

“…a two-piece bathing suit which reveals everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name.”

While in 1957 Modern Girl Magazine declared:

“It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing”.

The bikini was condemned by Pope Pius XII and American National Legion of Decency, while wearing the swimsuit in public was banned on the French Atlantic coast as well as in Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Australia, and many other countries. In response to this moral outrage, Réard’s rival Jacques Heim emphasized the more conservative cut of his atome swimsuit. Réard, by contrast, leaned into the controversy, declaring that a swimsuit couldn’t be called a bikini unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.

But as with the transition from one to two-piece swimsuits, it was Hollywood which truly turned the bikini into a fashion staple. Throughout the 1950s, popular actresses and sex symbols like Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marylin Monroe, Esther Williams, and Betty Grable took advantage of the controversy surrounding the bikini to sell millions of risqué swimsuit pinup shots. Feature films such as 1952’s Manina, the Girl in the Bikini, 1962’s Dr. No, 1963’s Beach Party, and 1966’s One Million Years B.C., which featuring bikini-clad leading ladies Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Annette Funicello, and Raquel Welch, further served to legitimize the style in the popular imagination – as did songs like the 1960 Brian Hyland hit “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which made its debut in 1964. By 1965, the once scandalous bikini had become fully mainstream. Today, the bikini is so ubiquitous that the original apocalyptic connotations of the name have been all but forgotten. Once synonymous with the anxieties of the nuclear age, today the word largely evokes images of another kind of bombshell…

Expand for References

Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu. If you have ever served in the armed forces or worked in the aviation industry, these words are most likely permanently seared into your brain. And even if you haven’t, you have probably heard them used in countless war movies and other places. This is the NATO phonetic spelling alphabet, a series of 26 words mapped acrophonically onto the letters of the Roman alphabet. Officially adopted by NATO in 1956, this alphabet has since become the de facto standard for militaries and civilian organizations around the world. But what is this alphabet even for? And how was this collection of seemingly-random words chosen? Well, Lima Echo Tango Sierra Foxtrot India November Delta Oscar Uniform Tango as we dive into the long and fascinating history of phonetic spelling alphabets.

Ratiotelephonic or phonetic spelling alphabets – not to be confused with phonetic alphabets, which indicate how words are meant to be pronounced – were developed in response to the limitations of early voice communications technologies like telephones and radio. Due to static, distortion, and the tendency of these devices to cut off certain frequencies or the start of words, many sounds can become indistinguishable to the listener. For example, C, D, E, V, P, and Z [NOTE: “zee” in the American style] are often mistaken for one another, as are M and N; F and S; H and 8; and 5 and 9. The lack of visual cues when speaking over the telephone or radio only adds to the potential confusion. When transmitting vital information such as military orders or instructions between aircraft and air traffic control, even minor misunderstandings can have serious consequences, so pending significant improvements in telecommunications technology, some sort of interim solution was needed.

Early on, radio and telephone operators hit upon the method of assigning a distinct codeword to each letter of the alphabet, such that the receiver could recognize the letter being transmitted even if parts of the codeword were distorted or cut off. Even with recent advances in transmission quality, this practice persists to this day, with people often coming up with their own phonetic spelling alphabets on the fly; after all, who among us, while dealing with customer service over a particularly unreliable telephone connection, hasn’t resorted in frustration to spelling out or names or addresses by shouting “D as in David! A as in Angel! V as in Valentine!” and so on? Among the first formalized phonetic alphabets was developed in 1898 by the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals. This was a partial alphabet, with codewords assigned only to those letters most likely to be confused: Ack for A, Beer for B, Emma for M, Pip for P, Esses for S, Toc for T, and Vic for V. The remaining letters remained unchanged, though regulations dictated standard pronunciations like a rolling R and long O. This early system had a significant impact on British culture, spawning enduring British slang terms like Ack-Ack for “antiaircraft fire”, Emma Gee for “Machine Gun Corps” , Pip-Emma for “Prime Minister”, and Toc-H for “Talbot House”, a veteran’s organization and Christian movement founded after the First World War.

Interestingly, many of the earliest spelling alphabets were intended not for communication not with voice but rather Morse Code, though the basic principle remained the same. Like spoken messages, Morse transmissions could become garbled due to electronic interference or poor signalling technique; thus, when sending important information, it was preferable to send entire codewords instead of individual letters so that at least part of each word would be recognized and the accompanying letters more easily worked out. The longer the words, the greater the chances of them being understood, leading to some truly unwieldy alphabets like this one used in Tasmania in 1908:

Authority, Bills, Capture, Destroy, Englishmen, Fractious, Galloping, High, Invariably, Juggling, Knights, Loose, Managing, Never, Owners, Play, Queen, Remarks, Support, The, Unless, Vindictive, When, Xpeditiously, Your, Zigzag

While this may seem like a truly odd and random collection of words, they were designed to be arranged in a particular order as a memorization aid for telegraphers:

Englishmen Invariably Support High Authority Unless Vindictive. The Managing Owners Never Destroy Bills. Remarks When Loose Play Jangling. Fractious Galloping Zigzag Knights Xpeditely Capture Your Queen.

Another telecommunications alphabet in use at this time was the Against Barbarian system, developed during the U.S. Civil War and consisting of the words:

Against, Barbarian, Continental, Dahlia, Egg, Furiously, Gallantly, Humility, Ivy, Jurisdiction, Kangaroo, Legislator, Mountain, Noble, Offensive, Photographer, Queen Katherine, Rebecca, Several, Tea, Uniform, Very Varied, Waterloo, Exhibition, Youthful and fair, 2-long 2-short

Unlike the Authority Bills system, however, these words were not intended to be transmitted; rather, the syllables in each word were meant to help telegraphers remember the Morse Code sequence for each letter. For example, Ag-ainst, with one short and one long syllable, corresponds to Morse Code letter A: Dot-Dash. Similarly, Bar-ba-ri-an corresponds to B or Dash Dot Dot Dot; Cont-in-ent-al to C or Dash Dot Dash Dot – and so on. But while certainly clever, the system was far from perfect. Not only could its creators not be bothered to come up with an actual word for Z, opting instead for the lazily literal “two long two short”, but the ambiguity of which letters belong in which syllable could potentially lead to confusion. For example, spelling out Continental as Con-tin-en-tal rather than Cont-in-ent-al would yield Dash Dash Dot Dash – that is, Q rather than the intended C. Still, Authority Bills remains a fascinating if flawed attempt at demystifying Morse Code for new telegraphers.

Coming back to radiotelegraphic spelling alphabets, the partial Ack-Beer system was still the Royal Corps of Signals’ standard alphabet when Britain entered the First World War in 1914. By war’s end in 1918, however, it had been replaced by a complete 26-letter alphabet, which introduced several words that have persisted all the way to the present day:

Apple, Brother, Charlie, Dover, Eastern, Father, George, Harry, India, Jack, King, London, Mother, November, October, Peter, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Thomas, Uncle, Victoria, Wednesday, Xmas, Yellow, Zebra

But while Apple Brother – also known as Signalese – became the standard system for the British Army and Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Navy, always a bit contrarian, adopted its own unique alphabet retaining several elements of the old Ack-Beer system:

Ack, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, X-Ray, Yorker, Zebra

This system also had a lasting impact on British culture, with “F for Freddie” and “S for Sugar” in particular remaining part of many Britons’ informal phonetic alphabets to this day. F for Freddie was also the name of several aircraft during the Second World War, including a Vickers Wellington bomber featured in the 1941 British documentary film Target for Tonight and a De Havilland Mosquito bomber flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force. The latter is significant for having survivdc 213 operations over enemy territory – more than any other Allied bomber of the war. However, in a tragic irony, F for Freddie’s luck ran out on May 9, 1945 – just one day after the end of the war in Europe – when she crashed into the control tower at Calgary Municipal Airport in Alberta, Canada, killing her pilots Flying Officer John Baker and Lieutenant Maurice Briggs.

After the war, elements of the Army’s Apple Brother and Navy’s Ack Beer systems were combined to create the Royal Air Force Radiotelephony or Apple Beer spelling alphabet, which comprised the words:

Apple, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddie, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey, Nuts, Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yorker, Zebra

In 1921, Apple Beer was adopted as standard by all three branches of the British Armed Forces as well as the civilian aviation industry – and would remain so until well into the Second World War.

Meanwhile, the American Expeditionary Force, which joined the First World War in 1917, had its own standard phonetic spelling alphabet, comprising the words:

Able, Buy, Cast, Dock, Easy, Fox, George, Have, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nap, Opal, Pup, Quack, Rush, Sail, Tape, Unit, Vice, Watch, X-ray, Yoke, Zed

Many of these words would remain in the various iterations of the U.S. military phonetic alphabet until the adoption of the NATO standard in the 1950s.

Up until this point, most phonetic spelling alphabets had been developed for military use. The first internationally-recognized standard alphabet for civilian use was introduced in 1927 by the International Telecommunications Union or ITU, and used the names of cities from around the world:

Amsterdam, Baltimore, Casablanca, Denmark, Edison, Florida, Gallipoli, Havana, Italia, Jerusalem, Kilogramme, Liverpool, Madagascar, New York, Oslo, Paris, Quebec, Roma, Santiago, Tripoli, Uppsala, Valencia, Washington, Xanthippe, Yokohama, Zurich

Over the following decade, this alphabet was officially adopted by dozens of organizations around the world, including the International Commission for Air Navigation, the International Radio Consultative Committee, the International Maritime Organization, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the International Amateur Radio Union, and the American Radio Relay League.

Finally, in 1941, the United States Military developed one of the most famous and widely-used phonetic alphabets until the adoption of the NATO standard. Officially called the Joint Army/Navy Radiotelephony Alphabet, this system comprised the words:

Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra

Officially adopted by the Royal Air Force in 1943, the Able Baker alphabet soon became standard across all the Allied nations, and was used in all sorts of applications. For example, fans of the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers will recognize Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and Easy as names of infantry companies of the American 506th Infantry Regiment. The Army/Navy alphabet was used to name several American nuclear tests throughout the 1940s and 50s, such as shots Able and Baker of Operation Crossroads in 1946 and shots George and Item of Operation Greenhouse – while the first animals successfully recovered from outer space by United States in 1959 were a pair of monkeys named Miss Able and Miss Baker.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the conflict, the Germans had their own phonetic alphabet, developed during the 1920s and composed of the names:

Anton, Berta/Bruno, Caesar, David, Emil, Friedrich/Fritz, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Jakob, Konrad/Kurfust, Ludwig, Martha, Nathan, Otto, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Samuel, Theordor/Toni, Ulrich, Viktor, Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon/Ypern, and Zacharias

… along with Ärger, Ödipus, and Übel for umlauted As, Os, and Us. However, after the Nazi Party came to power, all Jewish-sounding names were replaced by more ‘Aryan’-sounding ones; specifically, David was replaced with Dora; Jakob with Julius or Jot; Nathan with Nordpol, Samuel with Siegfried, and Zacharias with Zeppelin. And you thought the Nazis’ fanatical obsession with antisemitism couldn’t get any more absurd…

Though the American Able Baker alphabet remained in use after the Second World War, it soon became clear that it had many shortcomings. Indeed, during the War itself, one Major F.D. Handy of the U.S. Army Air Force Directorate of Communications partnered with Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory to scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of the Army/Navy phonetic alphabet under actual combat conditions. These experiments revealed that few of the Able Baker codewords were actually all that intelligible, and in his final report Major Handy included a list of 250 possible replacement words. Despite this, after the War the Able Baker alphabet was officially approved and adopted by the United States Government for use in civil aviation.

In 1947, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU criticized the Able-Baker alphabet for being too Anglocentric and containing many sounds unfamiliar to speakers of other languages. For example, certain Spanish pronunciations of the letter “P” might sound more like a “B” to an English speaker. In response, the organization created its own alphabet, whose words were chosen to be accessible to speakers of English, French, and Spanish. This included a unique numbering system in which the names of numbers in both English and various romance languages were combined – specifically: Nadazero, Unanone, Bissotwo, Terrathree, Kartefour, Pantafice, Soxsix, Setteseven, Oktoeight, and Novenine. The following year, the International Civil Aviation Organization or ICAO began developing its own universal phonetic alphabet. This effort was spearheaded by Jean-Paul Vinay, a professor of linguistics at the University of Montreal, who laid out five major guidelines for word selection:

1. A word must be “live” – that is, still currently in use – in English, French and Spanish

2. It must be easily pronounced and recognized by speakers of all three languages

3. It must have good transmission and readability characteristics

4. It must have similar spelling in English, French, and Spanish, and the initial letter must be that which the word identifies

5. And it must be free of objectionable connotations or double meanings

In 1949, ICAO presented its finalized alphabet, which comprised the words:

Alfa, Beta, Coca, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Julietta, Kilo, Lima, Metro, Nectar, Oscar, Polka, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Union, Victor, Whiskey, eXtra, Yankee, Zulu

The timing of this announcement couldn’t have been better, for the formation of NATO that same year increased the urgency of finding a new phonetic alphabet usable by all member nations. But while the 1949 ICAO alphabet was very close to the current NATO standard, it still had some issues. For example, several of the words such as Delta and Extra, Nectar and Victor, and Kilo and Metro sounded very similar to one another, while eXtra broke one of Jean-Paul Vinay’s selection rules by not starting with the letter it was meant to represent. Nonetheless, the alphabet was officially adopted by the ICAO and the International Air Transport Association or AITA in November 1951 and entered civil aviation use in April 1952. Still, believing that the alphabet needed further refinement, in late 1952 the ICAO conducted an extensive series of tests using speakers from 31 nations to find superior replacements for the most troublesome codewords. As a result of these tests, Beta was replaced with Bravo, Coca with Charlie, Metro with Mike, Polka with Papa, Union with Uniform, and eXtra with X-ray. This new ICAO alphabet was evaluated by NATO in 1955, with the final report concluding that:

“It is known that [the spelling alphabet] has been prepared only after the most exhaustive tests on a scientific basis by several nations. One of the firmest conclusions reached was that it was not practical to make an isolated change to clear confusion between one pair of letters. To change one word involves reconsideration of the whole alphabet to ensure that the change proposed to clear one confusion does not itself introduce others.”

Consequently, the alphabet was officially adopted by NATO on March 1, 1956 and internationally for civil aviation use soon after. Aside from one change – the replacement of Nectar with November – in 1961, the alphabet has remained unchanged to this day.

In its current form, the NATO phonetic alphabet features many small details intended to maximize comprehension for all users. For example, Alfa is intentionally spelled with an F instead of a PH as the latter is not pronounced as an F in all languages. Similarly, Juliett is intentionally spelled with two Ts since in French a single T at the end of a word is usually silent.

The selection of some words required a measure of compromise and nuance. For example, while football was found to be more comprehensible in isolation, foxtrot was ultimately selected as superior for long-term communication.

There are also specific regulations for how numbers must be pronounced. For example, three is pronounced tree, four as foe-er, five as fife to prevent confusion with “fire”, and nine as niner to prevent confusion with five or the German word for “no”. Furthermore, numbers under one thousand are spelled out digit by digit – for example five seven instead of fifty seven or one six zero instead of one hundred sixty. The only exceptions are ten, eleven, and twelve for indicating clock positions as in “twelve o’clock high”.

While the NATO phonetic alphabet is meant to be universal, minor regional changes are often necessary. For example, in Malaysia, London is used in place of Lima as the latter means five in the Malay language. And at Atlanta International Airport, Dixie is used in place of Delta because the airport is home to Delta Airlines.

Finally, certain languages use additional codewords to indicate letters not found in the English language. For example, German uses Alfa-Echo, Oscar-Echo, Uniform-Echo, and Sierra-Sierra to indicate umlauted As, Os, and Us, and the eszett; while Spanish uses ñoño to indicate an N with a tilde.

And that is the story of the NATO phonetic alphabet, which, like many of its predecessors, has had a significant cultural impact far beyond the military sphere. For instance, during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie became one of the most infamous diplomatic hotspots in Berlin, while today expressions like Zulu Time for Greenwich Mean Time, Bravo Zulu for “well done,” and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot for – well, you know – have become pop culture staples. But perhaps the most famous expression derived from the NATO phonetic alphabet originated during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. North Vietnamese guerrilla troops operating in the South were known as the Viet Cong or VC. This was then translated via the NATO phonetic alphabet to “Victor Charlie” – or “Charlie” for short.

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