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One of the things the Cold War was very good at was squeezing out the little guys off the big stage. The the Cold War were still on and there was still a Soviet Union,

I'm pretty sure that North Korea would never have developed a nuclear weapon

because no one would have let them. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt

Jason Fields will be here in just a moment speaking to you from the past.

We are airing a rerun this week and wanted to give you a little bit of context on it.

This one is from 2015 and what a difference a few years makes.

Back then we talked to Tom Nichols, who's a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension.

His most recent book is The Death of Expertise, but back then he had written a book called No Use,

which was about U.S. nuclear policy or at the time the lack thereof.

Now Tom argued then that the great superpowers, mostly Russia, China, and the United States lacked a coherent nuclear strategy in that this was

precipitating a slide towards North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. Well it's 2018. North Korea's

nuclear program is continuing unabated and the White House's nuclear posture

review has called for a change in American nuclear policy that looks a lot

like it did during the Cold War.

With all that in mind, we thought it might be a good idea to go back to 2015 and see just what the world looked like back then.

So what is the current US nuclear strategy if we can just jump right into it? I mean, what role do they play nuclear weapons and what does US see them as being for?

...