At the height of the Cold War, the Pentagon feared the Soviet Union had created a new form of water. It began in 1961 in Kostroma, where physicist Nikolai Fedyakin condensed water vapor inside microscopic quartz capillary tubes and extracted a liquid that boiled at 150 degrees Celsius, refused to freeze until minus 40, was 10 to 20 percent denser than normal water, and flowed like syrup. Boris Derjaguin, a leading Moscow surface physicist, refined the method, published the results, and in 1966 presented his anomalous water to the Faraday Society in Nottingham, setting off a research frenzy in Britain and then America.

This episode traces the polywater gap panic, the doomsday fear inspired by the ice-nine of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that a spill could polymerize the oceans, and theories blaming it for resistance on transatlantic cables.  ...