Nuclear War and Imagining the Unimaginable

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The U.S. is spending $2 trillion to overhaul its nuclear weapons. China is building ICBM silos in the desert. Russia has spent the last ten years talking about its fancy new nukes. After decades of drawdown, the world’s great powers are reversing course and rebuilding their nuclear arsenals. We have forgotten the power and terror of these weapons.

W.J. Hennigan of The New York Times wants the world to remember.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Hennigan discusses the Time’s new series: At the Brink. He’s spent the last year interviewing experts about the threat of nuclear war. His reporting asks its reader to imagine the unimaginable.

Nuclear War Is Called Unimaginable. In Fact, It’s Not Imagined Enough.

How America Made Nuclear War the President's Decision

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature
0:05.1	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Kille, can you introduce yourself and tell us about the work that you're here to talk to,
0:21.6	talk to us about today?
0:23.0	Sure. My name is Bill Hennigan. I am a national security writer for the New York Times opinion section.
0:29.0	So we met in New Mexico last year and I was reading this piece, we reading it this
0:38.5	morning over breakfast and I was wondering we were
0:45.0	were just wondering what you were thinking when we were there when we were
0:51.0	at that place where the first nuke was tested.
0:57.0	Yeah, yeah. So, you know, for me, that was almost like a kind of a like a religious pilgrimage type of thing you know because
1:09.9	there is just so much, you know, in that place because you know, you read up, you read through history, you know, of course you got the Oppenheimer film and all the rest of that, but there's just, you
1:26.2	think about everything, all the dominoes that were ticked off after that moment in 1945 with the birth of the bomb.
1:37.0	And so, you know, I just tried to kind of you know think about that and I tried to envision you
1:48.2	know because it's it's a you know it's a starkly beautiful place, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's, we were there in the in the summer months, so it was hot, but, you know, you can see the rolling hills in the distance and you can kind of you know envision
2:05.8	the the the shadow or or the sound the resonating off of off of that so I don't know I try to soak that in as much as I could
2:15.5	and just kind of think about you know all the things that have that happened in
2:22.0	Hiroshima nagasaki and and all the geopolitics
2:27.1	at play ever since that moment. Yeah. So you've written this thing, which is part of a series, how many for the New York Times,
2:36.5	just kind of like, I don't want to say it's nuclear war 101, but it's almost like a refreshing of the topic,
2:47.0	kind of updating it for modern audiences, and really using some excellent reporting to kind of put it in the place and time we are now.
2:58.0	How many can you kind of walk us through this first piece?
3:01.0	It's time to protest nuclear war again,
3:03.2	and then I'm wondering how many more of these
	...

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