Cold War Cast

There’s a lot going on in this episode in the immediate aftermath of WWII… The commies are looking like they’re going to gain control in Greece and the Soviet Union is trying to reach her tentacles out into Turkey, which would put the communist world at a big strategic advantage in the Middle East. In …

In June of 1946 the US Navy tested two atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in order to test how well a navy would withstand an atomic attack – or were they projecting force to intimidate the USSR?  With 46,000 men involved and 90 surplus ships as targets (and tens of thousands …

George Kennan was a real cold warrior – at least at the very beginnings of the Cold War.  His Long Telegram and “X Article”/”Sources of Soviet Conduct” were key documents of the period that greatly influenced thinking.   In this episode I talk a little bit about Kennan’s career and the significance of these two …

This 1937 book is one of the most important philosophical works of the Cold War in my opinion because Mao Zedong breathed life into communism as an ideology by making it more recognizable to the third world – replace the bourgeoisie with the landlord and imperial occupiers and the urban proletarian with the peasant farmer. …

Today we’re looking at an essay from October of 1945 by George Orwell called “You and the Atom Bomb”.  In this essay Orwell speculates on the future of the world and gets a few things right and is off target on a few other things, either way it’s good insight into the times from one …

Today we’re looking at the division of Germany immediately following WWII.  This is significant because, well, it will ultimately end up as the major fault line and focal point of the Cold War.  Germany will truly be where East meets West in the world going forward. In this episode we will just look at the …

The story of one of the most famous songs of Russia (and the world, really) is very similar to that of Alexander Nevsky.   This song is remarkably unpolitical, which leads us to ask if it’s a sign of things to come for the USSR – will they abandon revolutionary zeal in favor of more …

We’re right around the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…and every year at this time the moral debate of whether or not it was ok to nuke Japan in order to (potentially) forego an invasion of mainland Japan and save hundreds of thousands of American lives. There’s more to the story …

As the war was winding down, members from all 44 allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to discuss the postwar economic order.   Over the course of three weeks, they hammered out the details on creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the precursor to the World Bank (the International Bank of Reconstruction and …

The Manhattan Project was a top secret collaboration between the US government and the civilian scientific community to take the theory of an atomic bomb into reality.   Spoiler alert – it worked.  This program was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements in history, especially considering it was pulled off during a time of …