Dec 30, 2020
In the final episode of the series, Usha takes a closer look at the people behind the nuclear arms race. At the 1955 Geneva Summit, the superpowers tried to manage the dangers of the Cold War through face-to-face diplomacy, dealing with each other as people rather than as faceless nuclear arsenals. Yet Khrushchev's...
Dec 16, 2020
Once the Soviets got the nuclear arsenal Stalin had sought, they had to learn to live with the bomb - and all the dilemmas that came with it. This episode examines how the Soviet Union adjusted to the difficult new reality of being a nuclear power. Leaders like Khrushchev and Molotov struggled to resolve the...
Dec 2, 2020
What happens when a poor country, ravaged by war and brutalized by a totalitarian dictator, but dead-set on international greatness, tries to become a nuclear superpower? This episode - the first of three covering the Soviet nuclear program - explores how Josef Stalin, desperate to match American nuclear might...
Nov 18, 2020
In the 1950s and 1960s, it became clear that any strategy that involved threatening to start a nuclear war was playing with fire. But what was the alternative? Strategists began searching for ways to wage "limited" nuclear conflicts that wouldn't bring about Armageddon. But they soon found that putting limits on...
Nov 4, 2020
The idea of nuclear war became unimaginable almost overnight when the United States and Soviet Union tested the first hydrogen bombs in the early 1950s. But for President Dwight Eisenhower, preventing nuclear war meant convincing everyone that you weren’t afraid to fight one. Was Eisenhower playing with fire - or...