Sometimes it’s good to back up and ask the basic questions: How do we know Iran was even developing nuclear weapons?

On this episode of the show, the Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis walks us through the history of the Iranian nuclear (weapons and energy) program. It’s got it all: diplomacy, assassinations, cowardly politicians, and uranium fever.

Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute, member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and former member of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. He knows the tale well and he’s here to tell it straight.

• Damning the strikes with faint praise.
• “The hard part of a nuclear weapon is not the explodey part.”
• Making a nuclear weapon is a solved problem.
• The Iran-Iraq war and the origins of Iran’s nuclear weapons program
• The ladders of Natanz, how they cascade down
• Energy programs are always bigger than weapons programs.
• Unmasking the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Israel’s war on the program
• How to enrich uranium
• The “torturous” process behind the Iran deal
• Congressional cowards
• “A new generation of suckers”
• The French movie goodbye

The Deal

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Pauline Shanks Kaurin PhD. was, until recently, the Stockdale Chair for Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College. She’d been there since 2018, teaching philosophy and ethics to U.S. military officers and the occasional civilian. Then came Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and marching orders she said stifled academic freedom.

So she resigned.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Pauline talks us through her decision and tells us what she saw from the inside of one of the U.S. military’s most lauded academic institutions as the new administration seeks to restrict what’s taught in the classroom.

• Disclosures and caveats
• “A moral dilemma I couldn’t resolve”
• On Obedience
• Admiral James Stockdale
• “We’re all in vacation mode.”
• “The snitch line”
• Purging books, telling professors what not to talk about
• “I don’t want to be on Fox News”
• It happened fast
• Suggestions of pulling manuscripts at the editor
• What happens to a military that isn’t taught honor and ethics?
• Compliance versus deference
• Avoiding discomfort as a policy position
• Disagreements as combat
• A heavy metal argument
• The cost of taking a moral stand
• “Everyday is ethics day”

A Military-Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest

Disgraceful Pardons: Dishonoring Our Honorable

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You can’t win a war with airpower alone, despite what the U.S. Air Force will tell you. For more than 100 years, the masters of the air have promised that military and political objectives can be achieved if you just let them drop enough bombs.

It’s a theory that’s been tested, and fallen short, many times. Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration’s use of 14 GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iranian nuclear sites, is just the latest test. The promise is that this has set back Iran’s nuclear program (it probably has) but Israel is hoping for much more—regime change in the Islamic Republic.

Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it.

On this episode of Angry Planet we zoom out and talk about the strategy behind airpower in the 21st century. Robert Farley, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kentucky, is on the show today to give us his thoughts on the Iran strikes, airpower in general, and the lessons to be learned from watching the war in Ukraine.

• Should we abolish the independent Air Force?
• Was Israel’s war on Iran a success?
• Has airpower ever forced regime change?
• Curtis LeMay mentioned
• Bombing doesn’t create revolutionary fervor
• Airpower as theater
• “Israel-splaining”
• What’s a Golden Dome for anyway?
• Are FPV drones part of the air force arsenal or infantry weapons?

Strikes on Iran Show the Force, and Limits, of Airpower

Robert on PBS in Kentucky

Buy Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

The Five-Ring Circus: How Airpower Enthusiasts Forgot About Interdiction

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The ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. Thousands of miles from any coast, power belongs to those who seize it.

On this episode of Angry Planet, journalist Ian Urbina stops by to discuss the Outlaw Ocean Project and the second season of its incredible podcast. Urbina and his team of investigative journalists are telling stories about human rights, labor, and the environment on the vast swaths of the planet covered in water.

• The hidden cost of the seafood supply chain
• Why the ocean is such a lawless place
• “Crimes at the intersection of environment and human rights.”
• Libya is “hell on earth” for migrants
• Aliou’s journey to Libya
• How Europe enables Libyan militias to police its borders
• The migration to slavery pipeline
• A team of journalists at gunpoint
• Life on a Chinese squid fishing vessel
• Low tech and high tech reporting gets the job done
• “That is what life is like in that niche of hell.”

Listen to the Outlaw Ocean Podcast

Inside a migrant detention center in Libya

China: The Superpower of Seafood

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The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?

On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.

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• Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
• “Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
• Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
• The Face on Mars and large language models
• Elizas all the way down
• The false binaries of the tech bro future
• Silicon Valley’s lost boys
• “Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
• Stasis for me but not for thee
• “Mars sucks”

Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama

More Everything Forever on Bookshop

More Everything Forever on Amazon

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America loves the Western. Stories about frontier towns, outlaws and lawmen, and—most of all—killing. How did the myth and legend of the gunfighter come to permeate the U.S.? Were there rules to gunfights? How did you become famous by killing people? Did Texas, yes Texas, make all this possible?

We’ll answer those questions in this episode of the show as we discuss the new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s the work of returning guest (and Texan) Bryan Burrough.

• Texas is both the West and the South
• What made Texas so violent
• What, exactly, is a gunfighter?
• The rules of the duel
• “Boys, I’m killed”
• How to win friends while killin’ people
• “What is more equalizing than a man alone with a gun?”
• Olive, Isom Prentice
• Historiography of the gunfighter
• Modern bank robbers are boring
• The cattle business is the perfect vehicle for violence
• The future belongs ... to pirates?

Buy The Gunfighters from an independent bookstore or from Amazon

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Palantir, Anduril and a suite of other Tolkien-inspired tech nightmares want to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of the U.S. military. Both companies have software suites they’re pitching as agents that will help make command decisions during combat. An AI general, if you will.

Yes, that’s a terrible idea.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen will tell us why. Hunter is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen and Bowen is a professor of Astropolitics at Durham University. They’ve just written a paper that skewers the idea that AI will ever be able to make command decisions.

• The narrow definition of AI
• The folly of the AI general
• The games AI can’t win
• “Targeting things is a command decision”
• The IDF’s use of Microsoft’s use of AI systems
• “The enemy gets a vote”
• Killing more doesn’t mean winning more
• American military as a “glass tank”
• Matthew gets lost in a rant
• “They don’t even have an animal’s intelligence”
• The very real military uses of AI

We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general: Artificial Intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war

Palantir’s pitch

Palmer Luckey on 60 Minutes

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

Eastern Europe Wants to Build a ‘Drone Wall’ to Keep Out Russia

How Palantir Is Using AI in Ukraine

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The Pentagon has been trying to pivot to the Pacific for years now. Under President Donald Trump 2.0, who is focused on China, it just might happen. It’s a complicated body of water with dozens of players and a bloody history. One where Beijing is increasingly asserting itself.

Here to walk us through some of it is Angry Planet producer and Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Knodell. He’s just back from the Philippines where he spent two weeks reporting on a joint exercise between the U.S. and its allies in the Pacific.

• Balikatan
• 
  
• Training exercises as signalling
• How 40 years of Balikatan tells the story of U.S.-Philippines relations
• “There are definitely some places where it is about the fish.”
• The Chinese Maritime Militia
• Duterte vs Marcos in 2025
• Why America doesn’t understand China
• Russia’s imperial history in the Pacific (Kevin misspoke here, it’s Fort Elizabeth not Fort Alexandria)
• Why people like Pete Hegseth
• The Nine-Dash line
• The century of humiliation
• Checking up on Red Hill

Hawaii troops forge alliances in Philippines

Army, allies ponder Pacific role

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Recorded 5/7/25

India and Pakistan have been unhappy neighbors since 1947 and Britain’s decolonization of the subcontinent. They’ve fought four wars and there have been countless skirmishes. As Indian jets streak over Pakistani skies and that Muslim nation threatens retaliation, it’s unclear if this is war or just another blip between nations that plain don’t like each other.

Joining us is Sushant Singh, a man with a background that includes academic, journalist and 20-year veteran in the Indian army. He’s written an article on the situation in Foreign Affairs, and brings us up to date.

• The state of play on the morning of May 7th
• The Pahalgam attack
• ‘The Switzerland of India’
• Matthew almost gets everyone into a lot of trouble
• How Pakistan creates instability in Kashmir
• The entire history of the conflict between India and Pakistan in about five minutes
• China’s looming presence
• ‘These are non-escaltory strikes’
• Comparing the militaries
• Getting into the nuclear options
• Pakistan’s tactical nuclear arsenal
• The incredible monetary cost of uncertain missile defense
• We go out on a happy note for once

More than 20 killed after gunmen open fire on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir

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Great power competition has gotten old for President Donald Trump—never one for a fair fight. He’s looking for a little great power collusion instead, dividing the world with his best buds, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. This kind of thing isn’t new, though, Stacie Goddard, a professor at Wellesley, tells us, in fact it’s the 1800s on repeat. Well, look how that turned out… World War I, anybody?

BTW, check out her terrific article on this in Foreign Affairs magazine.

• Welcome to the Concert of Europe
• The post-Napoleon party
• A taxonomy of aspirational Germans
• Retvrn
• Strong men, weak world
• Government by Mafia
• What becomes of the “middle powers”?
• The era of aging dictators
• The long breakdown
• Empire without ickiness
• Turns out might does, in fact, make right
• 
  

The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition

The Concert of Europe

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