4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2021
⏱️ 103 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In episode 155, Dr. Shermer speaks with Martin Sherwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, about his new book Gambling with Armageddon, the definitive history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War — how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn’t happen. Luck, coupled to reason and diplomacy, saved the world from thermonuclear war. As existential threats go, a nuclear exchange is second to none. Understanding how we dodged Armageddon in 1962 is vital for the future of humanity. This conversation explores those themes and more.
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0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. |
0:07.0 | Or I introduce today's guest, tell you about our sponsor's latest offer. The sponsor is the |
0:15.3 | great courses plus it's an app you can get on your phone you just have it like that |
0:20.3 | opens right up to a whole bunch of courses, hundreds and hundreds of |
0:24.6 | courses, so thousands and thousands of lectures. The latest one I'm listening to |
0:28.9 | here is battles of World War II, the Pacific Theater. |
0:34.0 | And here there's a total of 24 lectures, each of them are about 29, 30 minutes. |
0:42.0 | And this is the fun of this app and the reason we're |
0:47.4 | advertising them on the show I'm not selling you pillows or anything like that that in fact it's great intellectual content and what I like about it is that you can skip around. |
0:57.0 | But for example, here are some of the lectures in this particular course. |
1:01.0 | The road to the war in the Pacific, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, |
1:05.9 | Japan moves south, the Doolittle raid on Japan, midway, just skip it along here, Guadalcanal, The U.S. leaps to the Marianas. |
1:15.0 | MacArthur returns to the Philippines and then all the way down to Kamikaze pilots, the |
1:19.7 | Battle for Okinawa, and then dropping the atomic bomb. Can't wait to listen to that one. |
1:24.5 | So I've just started this course and and you should try it too. It's a great source of |
1:30.0 | online digital content if you access it through this show you can get $30 off for the |
1:39.1 | annual plan and that comes out to just 10 bucks a month. |
1:42.6 | So basically that's what, two and a half vente lattes |
1:45.9 | at Starbucks for unlimited access to all this great knowledge. |
1:51.5 | So to get the special offer through this show, this great |
1:53.0 | knowledge. |
1:54.1 | So to get the special offer through this show, that is $30 off the annual plan. |
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