emotional and intriguing part of the reykjavik story. >> host: in the last few minutes we have a wanted you to just reflect on this extraordinary inflation should between reagan and gorbachev in the cover of your book with this photo that has become iconic. there are so many photos from the summit in the last two years in the cold war that sound so familiar and you can see in the photographs there was a chemistry between these two men. what was said and how do you explain it and how much of it was forged in that weekend in reykjavik? >> guest: it wasn't entirely, there wasn't a great deal of friendship between the two of them. there was a mutual admiration and it was kind of a mutual need for each other because reagan had gone through the iran-contra episode at the time which people

thought was kind of ridiculous. gorbachev was going to a tremendous problem in the soviet union so anytime they turned to domestic affairs it was a nightmare. their only salvation was on the international stage and the only thing going on the international stage with each other. they understood that and they respected each other. there was a wonderful story that i ran into that i think i put in the book when years later gorbachev was in london and attending a conference at oxford and cambridge and some british academic typical snobby to tell you the truce as everyone knows ronald reagan is just a lightweight and didn't know anything. a typical academic, typical british snobby remarks. gorbachev and giraffes and then he says professor that's wrong.

ronald reagan is the man of judgment and they make -- a man of integrity. don't say that. you don't know if talking about. i said whoa that is something. he didn't have to say anything. so there was this respect on that. there was a need for each other and there was a common bond of views that they both thought there were way too many nuclear weapons and they were way too dangerously deployed and they were right and they have the responsibility to do something about it. plus they had a kinship that both of them were born and raised in the hinterlands. the chances of them coming to power were infinitesimal. reagan was born of an alcoholic father. gorbachev's family was a real poor family in the middle of nowhere. the chances of the two of them coming together as leaders of the world you know. they both realize that.

something special happened to mean something special happened to him and something brought us together. when i think about the book and i think about reykjavik one thing i should have added in the book was maybe people are right. maybe they house was haunted and what happened there was so extraordinary and in a way so mysterious and so extra worldly that maybe they are right. maybe it is a ghost house. maybe it is a hunted house. >> it's an extraordinary story and extraordinarily well told in this book and thank you for your time. this was a lot of fun. >> guest: thank you. >> prospect bill was founded by

isaac ross ross who was a revolutionary war veteran from south carolina and when he realized he was going to die and the slaves would end up being sold or which has become common slaves he wrote in his will at the time that his daughters death the plantation will be sold in the money used to pave the way for the slaves to immigrate to liberia where the freed slave colony had been established by the american colonization society. they called it a repatriation. they talk about them going back to africa but you have to understand these people most of them were americans. they have been here for three, four or five generations so wasn't like they were just going home. they were going back to the continent that their ancestors originally inhabited. it was quite a risk so they took their culture, but they knew here to there.

some of them took the bad aspects to. slavery was all they had ever known and they built houses like this one because after all they were the ones who built this house. there were a lot of basically greek revival house is that the freed slaves built in africa and across the river was louisiana and liberia. there was a georgiana virginia and a kentucky and maryland county and all of those people came from those states in the u.s..

>> in "the age of radiance" craig nelson talks about the development of nuclear power nuclear weapons. he recently talked about his book at the new york public library. this is just over an hour. >> i remember going to library when i was around 11 years old and checking out a big beautiful eco-strata book printed in 1956. it was entitled our friend the atom by german science author

heinz haber. the preface was a parable about a man that brought forth a genie genie. the cheney stood for atomic and energy. he could either be a tireless uncomplaining servant for the most fearful and terrible master the man had ever known. the man didn't want this responsibility but the genie told them that now that he had been freed his discoverer could not put him back in the bottle. he had to decide how best to use him. tonight's presentation of the age of gradients relates to the tale of the man and a genie in much richer more detailed form. the book tells among its many interwoven stories of scientists whose interest in the atom sometimes kill them, of how hitler's bigotry and persecution drove from germany for very

scientists whose discovery could have given him mastery of the world and of the twin paths of apocalyptic war and peaceful energy sources taken by nuclear research. in this story is told by the speaker tonight, the firemen who battled the disaster at chernobyl as large as the curious ernst & young. the power of the atom is like most human discoveries made here human discoveries neither in on al lloyd good or evil in and of itself in very much a product of how carefully we humans use what we have discovered. craig nelson has written books on many and varied topics. rocket man told the story of the apollo missions. thomas paine profile that philosopher. the first heroes was was about the doolittle raid on japan in the early part of world war ii and let's get lost features the author's travels to unusual parts of the world and the odd experiences that accompany them. other things that he has written have appeared in "vanity fair,"

"the wall street journal" and so on. he lives not too far for me in greenwich village. please welcome the author of "the age of radiance," greg nelson. [applause] >> thank you. thank you so kindly. it's such a thrill to be invited to the public library since i've been a patron ever since the minute i moved here in 1979 and is storing its a major part of my work and my own personal library by branch library on mulberry street. one of the first books i remember reading as a child was a doctor seuss book called in to think that i saw it on mulberry street. my libraries and -- and there's nothing in this dr. seuss book as good as seeing david bowie and imam on mulberry street.

history folds in on itself and that some of the things where going to be talking about. five years ago if you ask me what radiation was i would have said of code it's scary, it's dangerous, it's infectious and its cancer-causing. it evolved and probably this is what many of you can do. i still think many of those things but they are tempered with a lot of other ideas and the first thing i learned about was radiation is made up by atoms that are fat adams and they're really sort of a durable. they are too fat for their own good. they are so fat that they break the bonds of nature that create the material world and spit out pieces of themselves. that is what radioactivity as these fat atoms spitting out subatomic particles or gamma rays. you can think of them as being the hollywood starlets of the periodic table. they are unstable and bulimic.

there they are. that's a uranium atom being all skinny and to think about it while they are skinny like hollywood starlets while they are doing this bidding they create this term about them. when marie curie gives to go to her lab first thing in the morning when the sun came up she would lay out her radium so it would be glowing like these aquatic fireflies on the walls. someone noticed after she put the radium away the walls were still blowing. one person noticed that when he picked up the silver patania h him -- plutonium it was warm like a puppy and it was strange to pick up this medal that was warm like a puppy. the solution for holding that puppy too long was called by invitation. it's sort of a scary puppy we are talking about here.

really the entire subatomic world has this disturbing quality and we talk about radiation over time as a half-life. we think about this inert object sending off these rays that are dangerous to us and how disturbing that is what really the entire subatomic world is like that. i want to give you one example. let's say you are flying in your plane in the look out the window and you see a bunch of specs. because you were world-class businesses to take out your slide rule and start to create them mathematical portrait of the way those specs appear and disappear the speed of the specs and after a while you have created something of an idea of mathematics of the specs. then you take out your binoculars and you notice you have been flying over water and the specs are whitecaps. you know that they are powered by waves and being a world-class physicist you know that there is music of nature nature and there isn't much melody to the music but there's a lot of rhythm and

arisen -- rhythm is the pulse of the ways preview taken on a set of calculations based on the waves and this is how the subatomic world we can use two different instruments are eyes and her binoculars in this example to noticed particles the whitecaps are waves empowering the porsches underneath. this is a something in the subatomic world can be both a particle like a photon and a wave. so all of it is creepy and disturbing but before we get too much into science i want to back up a little bit. one of the things that is sad about history the way we learned it in school is that we learn things like the dates of this and that when this great man was born and when he died, the date of this battle and the date of that battle but the guy who started history had a different idea altogether. he said history is about one thing and one thing only and that is, have i got a story for you. once upon a time there was a little girl who was the youngest of five children in a family

that once been prosperous but had fallen on hard times and when she was 17 or older sister said let's make a deal. you go work and support me for two years while i go to the university and i will turn around and do the same thing for you. this was an especially bizarre idea of the time because at that moment in that time and place it was illegal for women over the age of 12 to get an education. they were getting around that by attending something called the floating university which floated so the authorities could not track down who is running it and throw them in a labor camp. this floating university did a fantastic job. she got into medical school at the university of paris and off she went and off they went to be a nanny to support her. the first couple of jobs she is very unhappy and then she starts working for the saronski's.

they are fantastic family. they have run a sugar beat factory 60 kilometers out of warsaw and they loved manya and their six kids are just adorable. then the older saronski son comes home from school. he and she fall had been -- head over heels in love. he said i'm going to tell my parents that we are going to get married and he does that. all the kids know about it and they think it's just great. everybody loved manya but impact of parents say no way you are not marrying this pathetic nobody. they refuse to let them get married. he says please wait for me and i'm going to talk them into main menu. they see each other secretly for six months and the parents find out in a fire her. she goes back to warsaw living in her father's house and she's heartbroken. she is 19 and a letter comes great i have finished school.

i'm engaged to be i'm engaged in the marriage analogy return. come to paris but she's on love she can't do it. she just can't give up the first love of her life. finally the letter arrives from kashmir. forget it, my parents are never going to let me marry you. just forget it. decades later as mayor would become a famous mathematician that were signed he would be frequently seen in the main square of the city staring up at the enormous statue of the national hero of poland marie curie which is who manya grew up to be because she did not marry him. i love the story so much because it really shows you first evolved don't always follow your heart especially if you are 19. it really shows you what would have happened if she would have stayed with him and never let -- left poland hoar future would it be changed. as bury kerry she would discover

the fundamental forces of radioactivity and polonium and she would realize it's an atomic force that came from within. they would discover because it has such an effect on fast-growing cells you can use it to treat cancer. i know all of you heard the wonderful story of what a fantastic couple they were but let's forget about that for a minute. let's talk about something else. after peter died paris had an incredible affair with paul launch event. here's niels bohr and here's einstein. these are the greatest minds of science in 1927 and they were snappy dressers i think. marie has an affair with paul launch of an who is so important

sitting next to einstein in this picture. she and paul have a fantastic relationship. they rent a house and they get together and their letters back and forth are so passionate. she comes back to life after being widowed by the sudden and early death. he was run over by a cart probably affected with nuclear materials. they are madly in love and it's like she is a whole second life except there's a problem and of course paul is married and even though his wife doesn't mind that he has a mistress she minds that his mistress is the most famous woman in france. the wife has a brother and brother the brother runs a newspaper and they start talking about how marie curie is this homewrecker and his polish immigrant and she's almost to the only person the book was not jewish. anyway she's a homewrecker in a horrible person and become such a scandal that when she gets ready to go off to sweden to get

her second nobel prize they go maybe you should wait and come get this price next year. she calls a einstein and says what should i do? >> cisco get the price. as all of you women and an audience of guest paul goes back to his wife but before it the relationship ends and breaks morey's's heart all over again paul says i have this real go-getter named fred and you should hire him to work in your lap. she does hire fred and after a year you will never guess what happens. fred says marie i want to marry your daughter irene. marine has a heart attack and says no you are not going to marry a irene. and in fact she makes in science one of the first prenups in history that if anything happens in that marriage that carries are going to keep all the radium. marie was wrong. fred and irene have a fantastic marriage. in fact they are more important to us today than marie curie.

they discovered radiation a fundamental amend of nuclear medicine and is as important medicine today is the microscope. the respect told me this long giant story is because the end of the story is that marie curie was the first woman to win a nobel prize and her daughter was the second. isn't that fantastic? good going irene. after fred and the rand discover artificial radiation everybody around the world starts irradiating everything. one group that especially becomes good at it is a villainous chemist. a villainous chemist in germany by the name of auto on and his partner lisa meitner. none of you have heard of her even though she is the center of our modern times. lisa was the first woman

professor university professor and he history of germany. she was a the second woman to receive an advanced degree in the 500 year history of vienna. she was running the physics institute for 12 years at the most important research institution about when she was kicked out for having jewish ancestry. she ends up in sweden. niels bohr it decorated her to sweden and there she is at the age of 60 all washed out. her boss is jealous of her and hates her. she has no equipment. she is no help. she is in being paid anything and she feels completely washed up in a bomb that she can't believe this has happened to her. her nephew otto comes on christmas and they have something called, the eat something called with two fists. for those of you who have not eaten at me go to a 7-eleven mbyte beef jerky except it's made out of fish and it has the

consistency of jell-o. it's the worst thing i've ever put in my mouth and i put tarantula legs in my mouth. then they are going for a walk and all she can talk about is your villainous chemist ex-partner and his mysterious -- what otto is doing is pointing a stream of neutrons that uranium and he's getting bizarre results that no one understands. and maybe their instruments are wrong. maybe the chemistry is wrong. they don't know what's going on and finally lisa sits down on a log in the middle of the snowfall christmas day in sweden and she takes a pencil and piece a piece of paper. she takes the uranium out and takes the stuff that they are getting out of and how much it weighs atomically and then she applies einstein's equal it -- e. = c. two in the mix and she is discovered fission.

when otto comes back from working with niels bohr he asked his neighbor biologist what if they call it when -- and that is where fission is discovered. what this triggers is an incredible sensation among the émigres who are fleeing hitler because in the united states especially all the sort of anglo-american scientists are working on radar. they don't care about fission. they think this idea of making adams is just wacky but everyone who is fleeing hitler's thinking to themselves what is adolf hitler gets the atomic bond and we don't have the? normally americans have told the story of the making of the atomic bomb is being an einstein oppenheimer wrote some calculations on the board improve but in fact it took three of the most terrifying experience in the history of science to make these bombs. the first one happened in the middle of the city of chicago.

in rico mermaid who was supposed to create the first atomic reactor in the argonne was outside of chicago that the people building the facility had a strike and so the university of chicago president said you know we don't have football here anymore so nobody's using our football stadium. so you could use that and he found the squash court inside the football stadium in the middle of the stadium in chicago and this is where he created the first nuclear reactor. i call it the third most dangerous experiment in history. what if something would have gone wrong but nothing went wrong. it was the most perfect experiment anyone had ever seen and to this day in rico fare may has the patent on nuclear reactors. one thing funny happened. the soviet spies who were sending word of this back to moscow there is a translation

issue. instead of squash court which is where he was for almost three decades the soviet union thought the first nuclear reactor was birthed in a pumpkin patch. [laughter] i know that some of you came here because you heard there was going to be a reading and i know that some of you are angry that i haven't read anything. i'm going to read a little bit at this time so you are disappointed and furious. in 1921 the young woman named catherine was told that she was not long for this are then she would soon die. catherine decided to spend the last for days to live out west on a page family ranch which landed desert of deer between the sanger to christos mountains named for their sunsets. the following year a pale nurse

was such a serious cost his doctor suspected tuberculosis but not as chain-smoking showed up to stay at their ranch and she taught them how to ride a horse through the canyons across the mesa and every kind of weather. a few seasons later bob returned to mexico with his brother frank and this time catherine paige's death would not come for decades and whose husband would never come west took them 9500 feet to a cabin with a fireplace made from klay surrounded by 154 acres of alpine meadow fields of clover and heart-stopping the use of pecos river. hotdog robert said. no kellyanne today catherine said. the two boys convince their debt to rent the place and a robber was continuous in a vault until he could buy it for $10,000 in 1947. he and frank there went there every chance they could living the great guy dreams of the

american west riding horseback thousands of miles to colorado living on vienna sausages chocolate covered raisins cheese and whiskey trade ladies here we have a lesson history can teach us. if you have a man who is the object of your interest and you are not paying him enough attention history teaches us you should try chocolate covered raisins cheese and whiskey. during one of the these days out west oppenheimer wrote back to a friend my two great loves are physics and new mexico. pity they can't be combined. one of the areas was through a volcanic crater and a canyon with a stream along with cottonwood. the canyon was named for the trees los alamos. i grew up in a jungle town filled with swamp people. i thought it was just beautiful so i certainly get this part of the story. now two kinds of bombs were made

at los alamos. the first one was made from uranium and it was so simple and engineering that they never tested it before dropping it on hiroshima. the only time it was tested was when it was detonated and basically this bomb is a gun inside. a shot of uranium is thrown into a bullet ring and the one problem they had was they didn't know how much uranium they needed in each end of this device. otto robert fish fresh went into the canyons and created the second most dangerous experiment in american history where he created a guillotine like device. the setup washers where he could change the size of the plug and another's setup washers we could change the side of the ball and of the bowl and chop the guillotine and they would pass up the ball for a couple of seconds and create a very split-second of super criticality. one american said we are trying

to come as close as we could to an atomic explosion without actually blowing ourselves up and that was how they created that bomb. i wanted to carefully notice what this looks like and here comes the plutonium bomb which looks like that. now there is quite a difference here between those two and that is because when the physicist at los alamos first theoretically put together the idea for the plutonium bomb they have the concept that plutonium coming out a pampered washington would be extremely pure and it wasn't that pure. what they needed to do what they need to figure out how to compress it from the size of an orange to the size of a marble and that would make it work. the only way to do that was too perfectly imploded on all sides so all these wires you see her little detonation charges that are all firing and perfect

synchronicity to compress the plutonium and the guy who came up with this was my favorite hungarian scientist john avon doormen. johnny thunder man created the fundamentals of modern computi computing. he called this computer maniac and he was such a good mathematician that his wife said johnny can count everything except calories.

>> >> is this really stop to nuclear power dead with 20 percent of electricity from nuclear then they and that is what we get now. along time ago we were told dropping the atomic bomb in did did world war ii to keep us from 1.5 million troops

to invade the island with the terrible tragedy and car day each that way trying to get the japanese to surrender but we don't think that is true anymore the soviets said they would come1r in on our side to negotiate a settlement in did did not matter that much a and the idea to drop the bomb was to terrifies dahlin. so today they were not the end of world war i and now we believe the end of that cold war was caused by a chernobyl. when it exploded its broker the citizens be leaf to be

trustworthy. they both believe this is what ended the soviet union.