On a cold evening in Washington D.C., a decorated naval captain stands hidden in a government fire escape, holding a folder of radioactive secrets. Inside are confidential internal letters written by the absolute highest-ranking officers in the U.S. Navy, including the Chief of Naval Operations. Depending on who you ask, the words on those pages border on outright treason, declaring that the Pentagon is marching the country toward disaster and selling the public a "false bill of goods." The captain is seconds away from handing those letters to a newspaperman, knowing it will instantly incinerate his own career.

To understand how the military reached the brink of mutiny, this episode travels back to the end of World War II, when the Navy rode high as the most powerful fleet in human history. But as the peacetime demobilization ax fell, Presi ...