Brian Laird on WNYC. Fred Kaplan is with us. He's usually here as Slate's war stories columnist covering military affairs and national security.

And he's an author many times over for deeply

reported journalistic books like the bomb, President's Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear

War, and Dark Territory, the Secret History of Cyber War.

But now this master of nonfiction has written a novel, which explores some of the same issues he covers as a journalist

but through the vehicle of satire. It's called a capital calamity. We'll talk about some of

his recent columns on slate as well and a promo wrapped in full disclosure. Fred will be doing

a launch event tonight at Community Bookstore on 7th Avenue

in Brooklyn, interviewed by the journalist who happens to be his wife, our On the Media co-host and

managing editor Brooke Gladstone. Hi, Fred, congratulations on the novel and welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks. Always good to be here. So for you who write about very serious things like

nuclear war and cyber war, why a novel and why a work of satire? Well, there's two answers.

One very prosaic. My last book, The Bomb, came out just a couple weeks before the lockdown.

And a few months into the lockdown,

I felt like writing another book, but the way I write books generally is to go do a lot of face-to-face interviews and go to archival libraries because not everything is online. I couldn't do

that. And I'd had an idea for a novel many, many years ago,

so I just started doing that. The other reason is that, you know, I've been sort of an insider

outsider in the national security community for about 40 years. I've seen a lot of characters,

funny anecdotes, made observations about the whole

milieu. Not enough to write a memoir or a coherent history, but I thought that maybe I could

stick a lot of these characters and plot lines and so forth into a novel. And so here it is.

So you did. And I see from the press materials that your main character is described as a

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