Cold War Cast

The film for the Stephen King book The Long Walk just hit the theaters over the weekend. While we have a lot of accounts of the horrors of war, this story is the product of the dread over the prospect of being forced to fight a war from the perspective of a young horror writer. The boomers get a lot of grief for having had it easy, but King captured the horror of having the draft and Vietnam looming over your head as a young man in the 60’s.

In a recent episode about nuclear first strike plans, I got carried away and forgot to mention the strategic rocket forces of Russia/the Soviet Union. In this episode, I talk about one of the world’s most unique military branches including their history and their purpose over the years. The rocket forces are the guardians of Russia’s superpower status, with their finger on the button as their motherland’s ultimate trump card.

Today we are addressing a listener question on how nuclear strike plans have changed over the course of the Cold War for both the United States and her adversaries. This is a fun question to answer because a lot changed during the Cold War and into the present day in both countries as far as military, economic, and demographic concerns go.

In this episode I cover who makes these plans and how they do it for both sides and what potential for strikes would look like in the United States as far as the top targets. Enjoy! I always like talking about nuclear war.

Breaking news of Cold War interest! Poland invokes article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty in response to Russian drones violating Polish airspace. In this off the cuff episode i discuss what the article means and its history.

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In this episode we talk about how a Cold War rival became one of the United States’ greatest allies - Poland. This episode is for my wife (and kids), as my stepson recently deployed with the Army to Poland. I’ll explain what they’re doing there and how the relationship between our two nations started.

Today we are talking about Finland’s Cold War experience - one of coerced neutrality and military preparedness. We’ll also spend some time talking about Finland’s recent NATO membership and geopolitical considerations with her neighbor Russia.

Today we’re going south of the equator for an interesting Cold War perspective from Argentina - El Eternauta, a comic series that originated in 1957 and was recently remade into a Netflix series. We’re going to discuss some of the Cold War influences and themes in the series. While The Eternaut on Netflix takes place in three modern day, it is a nice throwback to the spirit of classic 1950’s sci-fi.

The last episode we talked about the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and today we’re concluding it with the Dalai Lama escaping to India. In an already contentious world, the actions of this one man from an inconsequential part of the world put 1/3 of the world’s population at each other’s throats.

In this episode we talk about how the Chinese occupation became intolerable, the dramatic escape and the political fallout afterwards

The Dalai Lama became a symbol that maybe one side of the Cold War wasn’t always right, but one was definitely wrong.

Today we’re talking about the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. We’ll discuss how China lost Tibet in the first place, the “century of humiliation” and the agreement China gave Tibet. We’ll also discuss how India reacted and Tibet’s unlikely ally - El Salvador

With the recent tensions between India and Pakistan, i figured it was a good time to talk about India’s entrance to the nuclear club. We’ll talk about the reasons why India would want the bomb and the world’s reaction (particularly Pakistan’s). We’ll also discuss some issues of nuclear proliferation- if the US and USSR can have these weapons and be trusted to not end civilization as we know it, what’s the problem with nations like India or Pakistan having them? Enjoy!