In the eight decades since the United States deployed the most destructive weapon ever used, conventional wisdom has held that American leaders were faced with a difficult choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Japanese and Allied lives in bloody combat or use the fearsome atom bomb in the hopes of convincing the Japanese emperor to surrender. President Truman—in what many have come to regard as an immoral decision—ordered the military to drop the bomb.

Today’s guest is Alex Wellerstein, author of The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. Wellerstein offers a more complex and nuanced portrayal of Truman, showing a president entangled in secrecy, rushing against time, and operating with limited information. Contrary to the long-held belief that Truman was the decisive force behind the bombings, this book reveals how he was largely unacquainted with the specifics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's targeting until after the fact.

Wellerstein explains how there was no formal decision to use the bomb, nor did President Truman likely know that Hiroshima or Nagasaki were heavily populated cities. Once the bombs were dropped, Truman began a years-long struggle for control of the awesome power of atomic weapons, the ramifications of which are still felt today.

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National pride often comes from shared heritage—like a common language or ethnic background. Religious Nationalism can be seen in historical Russia, where being part of the Orthodox Church was considered key to being Russian, even if you spoke a different language, whereas Ethnic Nationalism is like modern Mongolia, where having the same Mongol background is what counts as national identity, even if people follow different faiths.—but for the small nation of Uruguay, that feeling of unity was forged not in a parliament, but on a soccer pitch. When the Uruguayan national team, La Celeste, stunned the world by winning the 1924 Paris Olympics, it was more than just a sports victory. That triumph created a profound, shared, and globally recognized national identity, transforming the soccer team into a powerful symbol that helped bond the country together in a way politics had struggled to achieve.

Soccer’s ability to literally bring nations into existence has only grown with the growth and spread of the World Cup. Since 1930, the World Cup has become a truly global obsession. It is the most watched sporting event on the planet, and 211 teams competed to make it into the 2022 tournament. From its inception, it has also been a vehicle for far more than soccer. A tool for self-mythologizing and influence-peddling, The World Cup has played a crucial role in nation-building, and continues to, as countries negotiate their positions in a globalized world.

Today’s guest is Jonathan Wilson, author of “The Power and the Glory: A History of the World Cup.”  We look at history of the matches and goals, the tales of scandal and triumph, the haggling and skulduggery of the bidding process, and the political and cultural tides behind every tournament. Jonathan Wilson details not merely what happened but why, based on fresh interviews and meticulous research. The book is as much about the legends of the sport, from Pelé to Messi, as it is about the nations that made them, from Mussolini’s Italy to partitioned Germany to controversy-ridden Qatar.

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The wind-powered sawmill was invented around 1592 in the Netherlands, immediately transforming the nature of labor and industry. This mechanical marvel replaced slow, muscle-powered sawyers, allowing timber to be cut for shipbuilding and construction up to 30 times faster than manual labor, radically lowering the cost of wood products. It used a crankshaft to convert the windmill's rotating motion into the linear, up-and-down movement required for sawing wood, essentially creating an early, powerful assembly line factory. This mechanization allowed for unprecedented, rapid timber production, which quickly made the Dutch rich and enabled the massive expansion of their global fleet and construction projects.

This invention, whose significance has been overlooked, has been researched by today’s guest, Jaime Davila, author of “Forgotten: How One Man Unlocked the Modern World.”

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We have paper money today because it functioned as an IOU, certifying that the holder could redeem it for an equivalent amount of physical gold or silver from the bank's vault. That’s where the English pound got its name as it matched a specific weight of gold (or silver). This was the gold standard, and this is how banks operated for centuries. But it was largely abandoned after World War I, when governments prevented the withdrawal of gold by suspending the convertibility of their paper money into gold to conserve national gold reserves for purchasing vital war supplies and to allow central banks to print money for financing massive military expenditures. Governments abandoned linking their money to anything at all, giving central banks full control over the money supply. Printing money has led to inflation, national debt, and financial instability, which ultimately fueled the creation of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a decentralized, mathematically-scarce alternative.

What if things hadn’t happened this way? What if the gold standard survived the Great War? Today’s guest, Saifedean Ammous , imagines this scenario in his new book The Gold Standard: An Alternate Economic History of the 20th Century.” The story begins with a fictional divergence in 1911: French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot partners with the Wright brothers to create the Blériot Transport Corporation (BTC), an airplane-based, peer-to-peer gold-settlement network. This innovative system quickly becomes a secure alternative to central banks. When World War I starts, the BTC offers Europeans a way to export their wealth to neutral countries, escaping central bank war inflation. This triggers a global financial panic in September 1915, bankrupting the world's central banks, abruptly ending the war, and strangling fiat money in its cradle. With the collapse of central banking and the establishment of a free-market, decentralized gold standard, a radically different 20th century unfolds. Hard-money savings become plentiful and cheap, accelerating technological progress, increasing energy production, and fostering a world of appreciating money and declining prices.

Without the ability to print money to fund expansive projects, governments become more accountable, transforming into mere service providers whose citizens expect better service at a lower cost. This thought-provoking narrative suggests that the absence of central bank financing could have prevented major 20th-century conflicts, eliminated chronic inflation, and ushered in a "Century of Affluence" based on lower time preference, long-term investment, and voluntary governance.

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Nearly a century of Cold War tensions between the United States and Russia hide the incredibly close friendship that the two nations enjoyed before this period. From America’s colonial founding in the 1600s to the eve of World War One, the two distant nations relied on each other in a surprising number of ways. Each country was searching for allies on the world stage, and this culminated in a "blueprint for friendship" during the 1860s and 1870s, spurred by mutual conversations around the abolition of slavery and serfdom. However, this amicable distance dissolved following the Russo-Japanese War, which introduced cycles of mutual stereotyping and a damaging "war of images," where Americans saw Russian authoritarianism and Russians saw US imperialism and racism. Despite these emerging tensions, the relationship continued its characteristic oscillation, with both countries drawing inspiration from one another, leading to a brief "wartime honeymoon" at the start of World War I.

To discuss this forgotten chapter in Russian-American history is today’s guest, Victoria Zhuravleva, one of the authors of “Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American-Russian Relations.” 

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One of the worst nautical disasters in recent American history is the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. On November 10, 1975, the “storm of the century” threw 100 mile-per-hour winds and 50-foot waves on Lake Superior. The ship found itself at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time. When she sank, she took all 29 men onboard down with her, leaving the tragedy shrouded in mystery for a half century.

The sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald is so strange because the ship was exceptionally large and strong, and would normally be able to shrug off storms like this. At 75 feet wide and 729 feet long, the Fitzgerald was at the time of her launch the largest ship on the lakes, and she repeatedly broke her own records for the largest loads, the fastest runs, and the biggest season hauls throughout her career. She was a champion heavyweight, sprinter, and workhorse, all in one.

To make the sinking stranger, she suddenly disappeared in a bad storm on Lake Superior without sending any distress calls despite having a massive modern radio system. The most widely accepted theories for the disaster include the ship hitting a shoal, suffering a structural failure like a broken back, or being overwhelmed by massive "three sisters" rogue waves.

However, some less common and conspiracy-like theories suggest the crew did not properly close the hatch covers, the ship was actually split by a UFO, or that it was the victim of a secret Coast Guard experiment gone wrong.

Todays’ guest is John Bacon, author of “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” We explore the vital role Great Lakes shipping played in America’s economic boom, the uncommon lives the sailors led, the sinking’s most likely causes, and the aftermath for those left behind.

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Over the course of World War II, Germany’s submariners sank over three thousand Allied ships, nearly three-quarters of Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. Winston Churchill famously declared the only thing that truly frightened him during World War II was the U-boat threat. But the treat was more imagined than real. The actual capability of the German Navy was somewhat limited. Some historians think that the Germans would have been better off in WWII if they had built no navy at all and devoted those resources to the army and the Luftwaffe. In the process the submariners endured horrific conditions and suffered a 75 percent death rate, the highest of any arm of service in the conflict.

The campaign began with daring, high-profile successes that fostered a dangerous overconfidence, most notably the sinking of the HMS Royal Oak in 1939 by U-47, which killed 835 British crewmen. Yet, despite these early victories—when the U-boat wolfpacks inflicted devastating losses on weakly defended Allied convoys—the force was never able to maintain the scale needed for a knock-out blow. By the time Germany had sufficient numbers, the industrial and military might of the United States, coupled with increasingly effective Allied countermeasures, had already passed the U-boat's moment of maximum threat. As the war progressed, the elite, superbly trained pre-war crews were wiped out and replaced by those with less training, leading to a steady deterioration in effectiveness.

Today’s guest is Roger Moorhouse, author of “Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War.” We look at how Germany’s U-boat campaign challenged British naval supremacy and brought international trade to its knees. We follow the story of these U-Boat crews from the enthusiasm of the war’s early days, buoyed with optimism about their cause, through the challenges of the Allied counterthreat, to the final horrors of enemy capture and death in the depths.

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America’s growth from a rugged frontier nation to the globe’s industrial superpower in the space of 100 years can be explained by one word: coal. Before coal dominance, American buildings were defined by height limits imposed by stonework. The tallest building in the 1830s was Baltimore’s 235-foot tall Phoenix Shot Tower. Transportation also worked poorly without coal. The early wood-fired 4-4-0 locomotives struggled with top freight speeds around 15 mph and pulling trains of approximately 450 tons. The transition to coal and cheap steel enabled the steel-supported 555-foot Washington Monument and allowed massive coal-fired trains to achieve express passenger speeds up to 100+ mph and haul loads over 4,000 tons. 

For a century the entire world was dependent on coal. It powered railroads, built urban skylines, and provided warmth, light, and power for families rich and poor. Although the American economy soared, society unknowingly suffered from coal’s debilitating health and environmental impacts.  Skies were so dirty that on some days, visibility was limited to a few feet. Coal miners frequently died from cave-ins, explosions, or contracting black lung. Towns like Centralia in Illinois were fundamentally destroyed by an underground fire started in 1962 that continues to burn.

Today’s guest is Bob Wyss, author of “Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal.” We look at a range of figures that were part of coal’s story, from a largely unknown and unrecognized Pennsylvanian inventor who helped spark the Industrial Revolution to a prominent society clubwoman who clashed with the powerful coal forces in Utah that were fouling the air and sickening residents.  It also includes clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and the American public.

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For almost two centuries, Ancient Athens—the most successful democracy in history—selected citizens by lottery to fill government positions. Athens adopted sortition—a random lottery system—to select most public officials and the members of the Council of 500, a reform pioneered in 508 BC to break aristocratic control and distribute power equally among ordinary citizens. Some say it worked much better than the Assembly of Athens. In 406 BC, the Assembly rashly voted to execute all six victorious generals following a victory over Sparta because a storm prevented them from recovering the bodies of those who were lost at sea during a terrible storm. The Council of 500 later intervened by carefully reviewing the case, exposing procedural illegalities, and helping restore calmer judgment that tempered the Assembly's impulsive decision.

This governing system soon disappeared from the earth. The Council of 500 was disbanded in 322 BC when Macedonian forces crushed Athens’ democracy. Rome never adopted it because its republican system favored election of magistrates and a powerful Senate of lifelong aristocrats, viewing random selection as too chaotic and unfit for a large, conquest-driven state.

Athens' ancient sortition has made a modern comeback in America through randomly selected jury trials for fair justice and in new "citizens' assemblies"—which have re-emerged from Oregon to France--where ordinary people are lottery-picked to deliberate and recommend policy.

Today’s guest is Terry Bourcious, author of “Democracy Without Politicians.” He is a former politician from Vermont, and he argues we should return to the Athenian model, adapted for modern governance through "multi-body sortition," where randomly selected citizen bodies, with expert staff, would draft legislation, set agendas, review proposals, and make final decisions.

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The "Madman Theory" was Richard Nixon's foreign policy strategy during the Vietnam War era, where he deliberately cultivated an image of being unpredictable and irrational—hinting he might escalate to nuclear extremes—to intimidate adversaries like North Vietnam and the Soviet Union into concessions. Nixon instructed aides like Henry Kissinger to spread rumors that he was volatile enough to "go crazy" and use drastic measures, hoping fear of his supposed madness would deter aggression and force negotiations without actual escalation.

Nixon's Madman Theory was relatively ineffective in coercing North Vietnam because Hanoi correctly gambled that the U.S. would not use nuclear force against a non-nuclear state—like North Vietnam—due to the massive domestic and international backlash, the high risk of Soviet/Chinese escalation, and the global nuclear taboo. But what if Nixon had used it against an actual nuclear power?

That could have happened if history had only played out a little differently. JFK won his presidential election in 1960 against Nixon by a few thousand votes in key counties, and many suspected voter fraud. What if Nixon had won? And what if he used the Madman Doctrine against the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis?

In today’s episode, were’ joined by Harvy Simon, who wrote a book of alternate history called “The Madman Theory” that imagines exactly that scenario. The book focuses on how President Nixon handles the Cuban Missile Crisis. True to the "Madman" strategy, Nixon maneuvers the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the world to the brink of nuclear war, believing his reputation for unpredictability will force Nikita Khrushchev to back down. We explore the dangers of deliberately appearing irrational and unstable to an adversary—especially in the nuclear age—significantly increases the risk of miscalculation, accidental escalation, or the adversary failing to understand the bluff, thereby triggering an actual catastrophic conflict.

Harvey Simon --- I’m the author of The Madman Theory, which posits that Richard Nixon won the 1960 election against Kennedy. In particular, it focuses on the Cuban missile crisis, and what would have happened differently with Nixon as president.
My book is being reissued with a newly added foreword examining how Nixon’s madman theory has been taken up by President Trump.
If you'd be interested in a show about what would likely have happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis if Kennedy hadn't won--some scholars doubt the outcome was legitimate--I'd be happy to talk with you about my analysis, and, more generally, how counterfactuals can improve our understanding of history.
I'm a former national security analyst with Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and have also worked as a journalist. 

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