Today's Talking Politics Guide is with Aaron Raport, who is an expert on American foreign

policy and the psychology of war, and he's going to be talking to us about nuclear weapons.

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To start at the beginning, when the United States developed its nuclear program, what did

they think it would be used for? Well, initially the United States developed

this atomic weapons program with a very specific goal in mind, which was ending World War

2. And it wasn't quite sure who the target was going to be if it was going to be Nazi

Germany or Imperial Japan. We know how history turns out. The targets are Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There's also historical debate over whether or not the decision to use bombs against Japan

was in part a kind of long-term signaling device to the Soviet Union saying this is kind of the new

world order. This is the way that the military is going to work from now on. But it's also worth

noting that the Truman administration, afterworld, or to embarked on a serious campaign to

internationalize nuclear materials and nuclear weapons, which is to say that no state would have had

unilateral possession over them. So they were originally designed to be used, what changes to the logic

when you go from one power having them to two powers having them? So the US nuclear monopoly gets

broken up in 1949 when the Soviets test their first weapon, sometimes called Joe one, after Joseph

Stalin. And that actually doesn't do a terrible amount to the logic of using nuclear weapons,

which is to say that the Eisenhower administration, even though the Soviet test has done under the

Truman administration, when the Eisenhower administration comes into power, they adopt nuclear

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