If you're looking for a no bullshit analysis of the Republican debate that happened Wednesday night,

make sure to tune into Thursday's Special Podsive America episode.

Post Tommy Vittor and Ben Rhodes were joined by Republican strategists Sarah Longwell

to break down what went right and wrong for the contenders.

Listen to new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays of Podsive America wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

There's a kind of darkly funny subplot in American history.

You may have seen it immortalized in the movie Oppenheimer, which is that the scientists who built

the first atomic bomb couldn't be completely certain that the chain reaction that produces

the explosion in a fission device wouldn't just continue forever and ignite the atmosphere

ending life on Earth. They were to be clear, pretty sure that wouldn't happen obviously,

or they wouldn't have detonated it, but they were playing for the very first time with powers

that were hard even for them to fathom and that frightened them. So, Boyler, the atmosphere

did not catch fire, but unleashing the nuclear gene carried other unintended consequences for humankind,

starting with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obviously, but also the radioactive fallout

of nuclear weapons tests and the thermonuclear arms race, mutually assured destruction.

On the other side of the coin, there's the clean energy of nuclear power, the theoretical

allure of fusion power, and those things that are offset by the very real harms of a few nuclear

meltdowns. Some day we might be able to pencil out whether it was all worth it, but wherever we

land on that question, it's hard to imagine a version of history where scientists became theoretically

aware that they could harness the power of the Sun, but then agreed for all eternity not to try.

Even absent the exigent circumstances of World War II, humans being humans, the nuclear age

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