This is NBC, the National Broadcasting Company.

People were getting home from their morning errands or getting home from church. Lots of people were just sitting down at their kitchen tables to have Sunday lunch. And that day, on the radio, there was a national broadcast that managed to scare the bejesus out of nearly everyone who listened to it.

Over NBC's Coast to Coast network of independent-affiliated stations, the University of Chicago Roundtable.

A roundtable conversation aird nationwide on the radio by NBC. The topic of this roundtable Was admittedly a little bit dark for a Sunday afternoon.

Today, the Roundtable discusses the facts about the hydrogen bomb. This important Roundtable series is being presented in response to the great public concern over the decision to build a hydrogen bomb.

The decision to build a hydrogen bomb. The United States and the world had just seen in 1945, the devastating effects of nuclear warfare when the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. But what they were talking about on the radio this Sunday afternoon, four and a half years after the war was over, was something new, something bigger.

There have been many statements in the press concerning this possible new instrument of destruction. How much of that discussion has been correct and how much of it has been incorrect? What does the hydrogen bomb mean? To answer these questions, one must first understand what the hydrogen bomb really is.

The discussion that day on the radio was among four scientists who knew of what they spoke. All of them had been part of the Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, which, of course, secretly developed and then built America's atomic bombs. What these Manhattan Project scientists were now trying to tell the public on the radio that Sunday afternoon was how much worse, how qualitatively different it would be for the US or anyone to use not just an atomic bomb, but a hydrogen bomb.

Well, now we have the possibility of constructing a weapon that is, say, of the order of a thousand times the destructiveness of the Hiroshima Bomb.

The Hiroshima Bomb, the atomic bomb. It had the capability to level whole portions of a city. That's how just two American bombs in two Japanese cities could kill and injure hundreds of thousands of people. But now this new bomb they were talking about on the radio, the hydrogen bomb, it had the capacity to wipe out not just whole portions of a city, but whole cities altogether.

If a bomb were exploded somewhere, then 10 miles away from it, there would be almost complete destruction. That would mean that a city as big as New York, that the biggest cities on Earth could be destroyed by one single bomb.

The conversation among the Manhattan Project scientists that day on the radio. It was largely speculative. The hydrogen bomb at this point did not exist, but it pretty clearly was coming President Truman had already issued the order for the United States to start working on it. And so on the radio that Sunday afternoon, these scientists basically were warning the public about what that might specifically mean. They debated whether America's major coastal cities could even be defended from an H-bomb attack by air. And if not, perhaps it would be wise in advance, maybe even now, to depopulate all major cities on the American East Coast, to move the whole population inland for their protection in case all those cities were going to be destroyed. This was a very, very unnerving conversation. Then, toward the end of the program, it went to another level altogether. One of the scientists on that program, the one who was the best known of all of them, he warned toward the end of the broadcast that, yes, a hydrogen bomb on its own could cause almost unimaginably catastrophic damage. But he also said it wouldn't be hard to tweak a hydrogen bomb to make its effect even worse.

He said there was a modification that could be made to the basic design of it that could turn a single hydrogen bomb into a weapon that could end it all, everything for the whole planet.

What I had in mind is this. It is very easy to rig an H-bomb on purpose so that it should produce very dangerous radioactivity.

This very famous scientist, his name was Leo Zalard. He explained calmly on the radio that Sunday afternoon that with just a tweak to the casing of the H-bomb, a change to the way it was constructed, you could probably create a single bomb that could depopulate the planet, that could kill off all life on Earth.

Here I've made a little calculation. A Assuming that we make a radioactive element that will live for five years and we just let it go into the air, forming a dust layer on the surface of the Earth, everybody would be killed.

Everybody would be killed? Everyone on Earth? Is that what the man just said? Again, this was just on the radio on a Sunday afternoon as people were sitting down to lunch. As you might expect, it set off a small scale panic all across country. These physicists, with their radio show spitballing back of the envelope calculations about what it would take to build, effectively, a doomsday weapon.

You may, of course, ask, what is the practical importance of this? Who would want to kill everybody on Earth? I do not know whether we would be willing to do it, and I do not know whether Russians would be willing to do it, but I think that we may threaten to do it, and I think that Russians might threaten to do it. Who will take the risk then not to take that threat seriously?

That very unsettling radio program aired on NBC on February 26th, 1950. The next day, newspapers all over the country were full of stories about it. Headlines like Like, H-Bomb, Death For All, Feared, or Death In A Dust Cloud, H-Bomb Could be Turned into World Suicide Weapon. This was front-page news all over the country. I mean, imagine picking up your Monday morning paper at home in Virginia, and that's the headline on the front page. H-bomb could be made to kill everyone everywhere on Earth. Now, thankfully, there were a lot of ifs here. The hydrogen bomb, importantly, did not exist yet. It was still being developed. Once it was developed and tested and built, you would still have to do more. The way that scientists described it, you would still have to basically pack into the bomb what he called a suitable element. It quickly became clear what that suitable element was. It was the relatively plentiful, not particularly exotic element, cobalt. And thus was born the absolutely insane, terrifying, apocalyptic idea of a cobalt bomb, a single bomb that could threaten all life on the planet. Public awareness and fear about a a hypothetical cobalt bomb started with that one, NBC Sunday Afternoon radio program in 1950.

But then it took off. For decades, this nightmare idea of a cobalt bomb would appear in the plot of Agatha Christie stories and James Bond movies and Tom Clancy novels and Star Trek episodes, even in video games. But when we first learned about it on the radio that Sunday afternoon, February 1950, it was just deep, deep fear.

The radioactive dust would reach California in about a day. New York in four or five days, killing most life as it traverses the continent.

Journalist Drew Pearson on his radio show, raising the prospect that a cobalt bomb not only would be built, but it would be built by Russia and then used against us.

We know she has the scientists. She has the submarine fleet to deliver the H-bomb off the California Coast, and she has the cobalt. If she hasn't put all the pieces together as of today, then I regretfully but realistically predict that she'll do so eventually. Ladies and gentlemen, it's later than you think.

Now, again, this very, very deep freak out was about something that didn't exist. It was about something that was just an idea, something between a hypothetical and maybe. No country had developed the hydrogen bomb yet, let alone this further trick. It was something that had only been imagined and described. It had never been tried. But what if it was tried? What if, while countries like the US had started working on inventing the hydrogen bomb, what if some ambitious, rogue country out there decided to invest its energies in developing the modification, in developing the cobalt bomb, the doomsday thing. Those fears did not reside only in the imagination of a freaked out public at the time, because sure enough, Soon, the American government came to believe that plans for a doomsday weapon, plans for a cobalt bomb, were being offered for sale on the international Black market by an American fugitive, someone who had worked for the US government, who had experience in the US military, someone who came from the world of the American ultra-right. This is Rachel Maddo presents Ultra.

He started discussing plans right away for obtaining a so-called cobalt bomb.

Several accomplices of the Nazis have already been arrested.

He becomes this mythical, mysterious figure for the American right. Episode 2, The mole. In the early 1950s, the US military, in fact, a whole swath of the US government, was looking rather desperately for a man named Francis Parker Yaki. Yaki.

There are hundreds of FBI documents saying, Chicago office is advised to be on the lookout for Francis Yaki.

That's author and journalist Anthony Mostrum. The FBI, in the early 1950s, was looking for Francis Yaki for the worst possible reason. They had been advised that he was offering for sale the plans for a cobalt bomb, the so-called doomsday weapon, the bomb to end all life on Earth. This is from FBI files, Information received by the informant indicates that Yaki has been in touch with Soviet authorities, and he has been exploring matters connected with the cobalt bomb. The FBI had been tracking Francis Yaki across three continents, including his contacts inside the Soviet Union. Also, his contacts with a network of escaped Nazis who had fled to Argentina after World War II and founded a controversial nuclear program there, which claimed to be doing advanced work on the hydrogen bomb. With rising concern about what he might be up to, US authorities tracked Francis Yaki's travels to the Middle East, and they tracked what he appeared to be trying to sell there.

Yaki did, in fact, meet with this rising political star in Egypt, now Nasser, and he started discussing plans right away for obtaining a so-called cobalt bomb.

Francis Yaki had flown to Egypt, where he took a meeting with Egypt's new Nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He reportedly tried selling Nasser on this amazing new weapon that he believed Egypt should use.

In Yaki and lore, it is believed that he handed the actual of this cobalt bomb over to Nasser, urging him to develop the bomb so that he could use it against Israel.

A cobalt bomb to use against Israel, which could maybe destroy all life on Earth in the process. By the time the US government was looking for Francis Yaki in conjunction with plans for the cobalt bomb, their concerns about him had grown from what you might call serious to something more like wild. By then, he had been eluding them for more than a decade. It started as early as 1942, during World War II, when the Nazis sent two submarines, two German Uboats, to drop off teams of trained saboteurs in the United States. Their mission was to launch crippling attacks on American infrastructure.

They brought with them a great store of explosives with which to blow up factories and demoralize civilian life.

It was called Operation Pastorius. Operation Pastorius is basically a very, very low level, but serious effort by the German Abwehr or military intelligence to engage in acts of sabotage. That's historian and author, Gavriel Rosenfeld. They're given weapons training, explosives training in Germany. The plan in Operation Pastorius was for these saboteurs to come ashore secretly in Florida and New York. They would slip into American society society and keep a low profile for a while, but then they would start their sabotage operations.

They had a definite plan to blow up American war factories, to blow up bridges, and to wreck the water supply system of New York City.

The Nazis wanted this to be a sustained campaign of sabotage. They wanted their saboteurs to get away with it for as long as they could. So they chose men for this operation who already had some familiarity with the US. Most mostly German-American and German nationals who have some experience living in the United States. They wanted men who could blend in and who also maybe could get some help while they were here from friends and family. It was a pretty audacious plan And the saboteurs did come ashore in the United States, in Amaganset, New York, on Long Island, and in Ponteviedra, near Jacksonville, Florida.

The country is astounded by the daring of this Berlin scheme to cripple our industry, wreck our railroads, and murder just as many Americans as possible.

But their plot didn't last very long at all before they got busted by the FBI.

Yesterday, the Chief of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that every single one of those eight German saboteurs was arrested within one week of landing. They had confessed, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had dug up their supplies of explosives on the beaches where they were buried.

Of the eight Nazi agents, two of them, it turns out, got cold feet. Two of them went to the FBI and gave themselves up. They gave up the whole plot. These saboteurs had all landed in America in the middle of June. By the end of June, they were all in federal custody. By August, a US military commission had decided their fate.

The commission had judged the men guilty and asked that six of them be given the death sentence. Accordingly, beginning at noon yesterday, six of the Nazi spies were electrocuted.

Along with the shock over the sabotage plot, there was also an uncomfortable open question of whether these guys had had accomplices, whether there were other people inside the United States who were also part of the plot, who had helped.

Several accomplices of the Nazis have already been arrested, and G-men are hunting down more Confederates of Hitler's sabotage ring.

After arresting the saboteurs themselves, FBI agents fanned out across the country, arresting Americans who might have helped them, who might have had links to the plot. One person who seemed to be getting palpably nervous about these arrests was, at that moment, a young private serving in the United States Army, Francis Yaki. Yaki was 24 years old at the time. He had grown up in the Midwest. He'd had a middle class upbringing. At the time of Operation Fistorius, this Nazi sabotage plot, Jaki had just recently enlisted. He was stationed at an army base in Michigan. But as soon as the FBI broke up Operation Pistorius, while the national press was following every twist and turn of the story, reporting on federal agents hunting for anyone connected to these saboteurs, this young army private Francis Yaki, he up and disappeared from his army base.

He just quietly went AWal.

And not for a few hours or even a few days. Francis Yaki vanished for two months. He went AWal to Mexico. Fbi files show that at the time he went AWal, Yaki was wanted for questioning in conjunction with Operation Pistorius. The FBI believed that this Army private, Yaki, had been a friend of one of the Nazi saboteurs.

There is definite evidence that both Yaki and his sister were good friends of Herbert Hanshaupt, who would eventually be executed.

Herbert Haupt was one of the Nazi saboteurs. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for that. But then the FBI also arrested his aunt and uncle, and then they arrested his mother and father, and then they arrested the mother and father of his best friend. All of them were put on trial for treason for allegedly providing him assistance. Haupt had been part of the German-American Bünd in Chicago. The FBI arrested a Bünd leader who had hosted Haupt at his property, who had done weapons training with him. When they arrested that Bünd leader, they found explosives and an arsenal of guns and ammunition on his farm. The FBI believed this army private, Francis Yaki, had also spent time at that farm. He had spoken at pro-fascist meetings there. The FBI believed that the executed saboteur, this guy, Haupt, had been friends with Yaki and with Yaki's family. When the FBI started arresting people, when they started hunting helped accomplices in the United States, his alleged Confederates in the Nazi sabotage mission, that is when Francis Yaki fled the country. After two months' AWal, Yaki did come back to the United States. He turned himself in. The army was not exactly delighted to have him back.

They sent him to a mental institution and then they quickly discharged him from the army for mental illness. Yaki was soon bragging about being discharged, saying that he'd faked all of it to get himself out of military service.

Apparently, he was faking hearing hallucinations. So he told US Army psychiatrists and whatnot that he could hear his father's voice in his head. And he laughingly told friends later that, I snowed the army into giving me an early discharge.

The army was likely glad to be rid of him. Us military intelligence documents list Francis Yaki before he was discharged as a suspected Nazi sympathizer officer inside the army. A person who met Yaki at his army base in Michigan told the FBI that Yaki was constantly stirring up Discord and that Yaki was an admirer of an American fascist leader named William Dudley Pelley.

American justice returns a verdict of guilty in the trial of William Dudley Pelley, Silver Shirts leader. He's convicted on 11 counts of criminal sedition and-Pelley was the founder of the American pro-nazi group, the Silver Shirts.

He spent most the war in prison on sedition charges. He called himself America's Hitler. One of Pelley's followers was Francis Yaki. Yaki spoke at Silver Shirt gatherings in the lead up to the war.

While still in college, he was already giving lectures to Silver Shirt meetings. He definitely was attracted to the right wing movements and cadres and parties that were stirring up a lot of trouble It's really interesting.

Before America's entry into World War II, there was a movement on the ultra-right in this country, arguing that the United States had no business joining the war, that we shouldn't be fighting the Nazis at all, that if anything, we should be fighting alongside. Beside the Nazis. They argued that American democracy was decadent and doomed, and that what we really needed in this country was an American form of fascism. Francis Yaki was very much at the center of that world. He was a follower of William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts. He was connected to the German-American Bund. When five Silver Shirts guys were arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of a Jewish department store in Chicago, a local Bund leader organized a Friends of Father Coughlin rally to support the defendants. Yaki was billed as a headline speaker.

He apparently swallowed Hitler's Jew hatred hook, line, and sinker, and it never left him. He once, in the presence of a friend, he pointed to a copy of Mein Kamp, stuck his finger down on it, and he said, Do you see that? That is what I am.

Francis Yaki was part of the movement. He was part of the American ultra-right.

He was already dipping deeply into the then-current right-wing media landscape that was going on. Father Coughlin was on the radio.

Father Charles E. Coughlin.

Call this inflammatory, if you will. It is inflammatory.

The most influential right-wing media figure in the country, and a raging anti-Semite.

And with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it.

Father Coughlin told his followers to form themselves into an armed militia, which was called the Christian Front.

The Christian front is no longer a dream.

It is a reality in America. Father Charles Coughlin had the most popular radio program in the country by a mile. He also had a magazine that was sold all over the country. It was a vehicle for his own grifty, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist message. But it also let him publish other like-minded Americans.

One of the first articles, if not the very first article, Yaki ever wrote was for Father Coughlin's magazine.

Francis Yaki wrote for Father Coughlin's magazine about how the youth of America were being indoctrinated by leftist ideas.

He's just indulging his attraction to far-right politics.

By this point, Francis Yaki has been wanted for questioning in connection with the Operation Pistorius case, which saw six Nazi saboteurs sent to the electric and another half dozen people in this country put on trial for treason. When he was being sought for questioning in that case, he went AWal from the US Army and fled to Mexico. The army had declared him a Nazi sympathizer and discharged him from the service, the FBI had linked him to multiple figures on the American ultra-right who were being arrested and imprisoned for crimes up to and including sedition against the United States. In other In other words, this guy was a walking, talking red flag. But during the course of the war, most of the authorities who did encounter him, the army, for example, they just wanted him out of their hair. We had a war to fight after all. Who had the time to deal with this thing at home? Letting him out of their grasp was maybe understandable at the time, given everything they had to contend with. But it would also prove to be consequential because it would not be long before the US military and US intelligence agencies were hunting for him all over the globe.

Along the way, American authorities would make it even worse for themselves and more dangerous by giving Yaki another job connected to the US Army, the worst job imaginable for someone like him, one that would put him in the belly of a very dangerous beast, and that would put him in contact with some of the most powerful forces in American politics and government. That's next.

This is Roy Porter in Nuremberg, Germany. 22 Nazi war criminals went on trial a few minutes after 10:00 this morning, with all but two of them in the defendants box.

After the Germans surrender in World War II, America and the Allies become an occupying force in a broken, defeated Germany. Their first order of business is to hunt for the Nazi leaders who have survived the war, who are still out there, still alive.

The creator of the once terrifying Nazi Air Force hogshead-shaped Hermann Goering, was overtaken and made prisoner by the US Seventh Army.

For senior Nazi leaders who do get captured alive, like Hermann Goering, the Allied powers have to figure out pretty quickly what to do with them. What will count as justice, not only for the war that the Nazis brought to the world, but for their industrialized slaughter of millions of civilians. What soon comes together is a plan for a trial, an international military tribunal. It will be held in the German city of Nuremberg, and it will be jointly run by the four major Allied powers.

I'm looking right into the faces of the 20 defendants. Goering is in number one position on the front bench. He looks uncommonly healthy and relatively slim.

The war crimes trial is news worldwide. The proceedings are live-translated into four languages. Hundreds of international reporters are on site in Nuremberg. They're allowed to broadcast from studios overlooking the courtroom.

Next to him sits Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Chief Dane number 2. He's pale, his face is thin and bony, and he continually fidgets nervously in his seat.

The transparency of this process, the media access to the live proceedings. It's all part of the mission of the International Military Tribunal. This is to etch the historical record in stone so the whole world will know for sure and forever what Germany did under Nazi rule. So it can never be forgotten. It can never be denied.

A public trial in which their guilt will be thoroughly documented for all to read and remember will keep us from forgetting.

But it's also to showcase that this is justice, that this isn't a show trial. This is fair. The rule of law, the rights of due process apply even to the most notorious defendants on Earth. But notoriety is in the eye of the beholder. For some, the idea that the Nazis had particular crimes to answer for wasn't a given. In Germany, there were those who wanted to rehabilitate the Nazi cause and the Nazi movement to claim that Nazi Germany did nothing worse than any other country during the war. Those forces stoked resentment against the war crimes trials.

The Wilhelm strict on the count of the indictment on which you have been convicted.

They attacked the Allies for mounting the trials. They stoked sympathy for the war crimes defendants. And there were Americans who thought along the same lines. And In that context, and for that reason, one particular American determined that he wanted to get himself to the war crimes trials. He wanted to go to Nuremberg. He wanted a job there on the inside.

It's only when the war is over and he starts reading what's going on in Germany that he gets the bright idea to campaign for a position in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials in whatever capacity he can find because Yaki obviously wanted to get close to the action.

Francis Yaki, despite all of his pre-war associations with the pro-Nazi ultra-right in America, despite the US government seeking to question him about that Nazi sabotage plot, Operation Pistorius, despite the US Army having him on file as a Nazi sympathizer. Despite all of that, Francis Yaki somehow manages to get himself hired by the US government to come to Germany. He gets himself hired as a US government lawyer at the Nazi war crimes trials.

Scores of armed guards and military police have blocked off the courtroom from the rest of the building.

In addition to the army files that described him as pro-Nazi, FBI files also show that just a few months before he applied to go work on the war crimes trials, the FBI was logging complaints from Yaki's freaked out coworkers back home about his unsolicited comments to them that the US had had no business fighting the Nazis in the first place, that, Germany should have won the war. Nevertheless, despite all of that, Francis Parker-Yaki applied for the war crimes trials job in Germany in 1946, and he got the job.

There's so many instances where he seemed to fall all through the cracks.

Whatever epic failure of vetting allowed Francis Yaki to get there in the first place. Once he was in Germany, it quickly became clear that the military had made not just an inexplicable error in hiring him. They'd made a mistake that had consequences. They had hired somebody to work at the war crimes trials who was determined to use that job, to use that access, to actively help the Nazis there.

He was one of the lawyers whose job it was to review cases that were asking for clemency.

Jaki's job at the War Crimes Unit was in reviewing cases. The building that he reported to every day was a files and message center for the War Crimes Group, meaning that all sorts of court records and important trial documents were at his disposal. They were at his fingertips.

That just gave him perfect access to get into any documents that he wanted to get into in an effort to help the defense attorneys of the very Nazis that he was hired to prosecute.

He was hired to help the prosecution, but what he did was serve as a mole inside the prosecution to instead help the Nazi war crimes defendants. He stole documents and information and secretly gave them to the defendants and their lawyers.

Yaki worked surreptitiously behind the scenes to help the Nazis It's very likely that some of his superiors were becoming aware of what he was up to.

Us government files from the time show that Yaki was found to have, quote, interceded on behalf of German war criminals. Now, as you might expect, Jaki was ultimately fired from his job on the war crimes trials. Us Army counterintelligence, in fact, launched a raid of an apartment in Germany that was linked to Jaki. They wanted to apprehend him. They wanted to question him. But when they got there, he was gone. Yaki fled Germany, a head of US Army counterintelligence investigators who had figured out what he was doing at the war crimes trials, and they had come for him. He left his wife and his two daughters behind in Germany when he fled, and then he was in the wind. What would ensue would ultimately be a years long global search for him involving law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, involving concerns that, among other things, he was trying to sell black market plans for the cobalt bomb.

He's really turning into a underground fascist James Bond.

His activities, his journey, would leave a mark back home here in America. It would see him joining forces with one of the most powerful and effective politicians the American right has ever seen.

If Lumberge Act tactics are the only tactics that crowd understands and take my word for it, those are the tactics we're going to use on them.

And his effort to help the Nazis to monkey-wrench the Nazi war crimes trials That would ultimately be taken up by other high-profile Americans as well, up to and including sitting members of Congress. A number of American congressmen start picking up on this story. It a shocking and largely forgotten effort. What it would set in motion would ultimately leave a body count inside the United States Senate.

All of that starts really a year from hell for Senator Hunt.

And for Francis Yaki himself, it would be a journey that would end in a way that might be crazier than all the rest of it combined.

An FBI agent was keeping his eye on Yaki when Yaki suddenly bolted out the door.

All of that is ahead. Rachel Maddow presents Ultra, is a production of MSNBC. This episode was written by myself, Mike Jarvis, and Jenn Mulrainy Donovan. The series is executive-produced by myself and Mike Jarvis. It's produced by Jenn Mulrainy Donovan and Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Vassilios Carsalacas. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Katherine Anderson. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Cori Nassau and Laura Conway. Our web producer is Will Femea. Ayesha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Cutler is the Senior Vice President content strategy at MSNBC. Archival radio material is from NBC News via the Library of Congress. Additional archival material is courtesy of the Drew Pearson estate, for which we are very grateful. You can find out much more about this series at our website, msnbc. Com/ultra.

52-year-old Fritz Saukel. Brutish little man, guilty on counts three and four, he spat out the name Fritz Saukel when it was asked. Then on the trap, he shouted, I die innocently. The verdict was wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Saukel died at 2:39, 13 minutes after the trap was sprung. Thank you.