I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez Show, part 11 of the Cold War series.

How are you doing, Thomas?

I'm doing very well, man.

Thank you for, that you were hosting me as always.

Today, an aspect of the later Cold War that has become neglected by a lot of historians um there's one

guy in particular his name's mark ambinder it's kind of hard to put his politics on the map

on some on some mistakes some kind of neoconish something kind of like paleo-liberal, even kind of like Walter Mondale type liberal.

He's become something of a presidential historian.

He wrote a book called The Brink, which was about the able, it's about, about half it's about like the Abel Archer war scare.

And the rest is kind of about nuclear

command of control and the final phase of the Cold War and you know the deeper parodies

therein and kind of how this informed policy and it's really fascinating book but it's about the

only guy I can think of who's written a dedicated book about like the post-de-toned

pre-peristrika Cold War, which I don't really understand because that's tremendously important.

A lot of the technologies we take for granted just in day-to-day life, you know, telecom stuff.

It literally like came out

of that epoch. I mean, this stuff was in people's contemplation, you know, in a research

and development capacity for decades before that, but the perfection of those things, you know,

I mean, including the internet, you know, the survivable command and control platform. I mean, the stuff all came out of like late Cold War, um, you know, uh, um, strategic planning. And, um, the degree to which the potentiality of and preparation for a general nuclear war kind of shaped American life in ways

prosaic and profound that really can't be overstated you know i've people um people under about

45 they don't remember that and even some people who are, it didn't like impact them in their daily life and in concrete terms. So they think I'm overstating it, but I'm not. And if you look at the structure of the U.S. government, you know, as I'm always coming back to this point, it's quite literally like structured to wage the Cold War and not much else.

And the strategic nuclear dimension of that obviously became preeminent,

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