Hey friends, welcome to episode 6 of our documentary series How Women One World War

Two.

In a previous episode we began a conversation about the combined efforts of the Allied science

community to beat Germany in the race to understand and build atomic weapons.

It was a team effort and you know what?

We barely scratched the surface.

So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

In 1993 a set of transcripts was released.

It was a set of transcripts about something only a select number of people even knew existed.

Historians waited with baited breath to crack open the pages, a documentation of secret

conversations among some of the world's top atomic scientists.

Secret conversations that the scientists didn't even realize anyone was recording.

But before we get to the secret conversations, we need to talk more about how atomic science

developed because without the contributions of women all I can tell you is that the world

would be a very different place than it is today.

Now I get that from our current perspective.

It seems like the world may be better off without nuclear weapons.

And I'm not going to argue with you.

But we also can't project our current beliefs onto the past as inherently true and correct

and assume that everyone else was working with the same set of facts and information, the

same beliefs and morals that we have.

...