Chatter

In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started.

Strausbaugh’s new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth’s orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren’t quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space.

The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival.

Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include:

The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff

Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X

Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline

Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html

Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/

More about John Strausbaugh:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers--willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold.

Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime officials from Iraq and Libya, including Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. What she discovered led her to question much conventional wisdom about the Iraqi and Libyan nuclear programs, and about proliferation writ large. Her book Unclear Physics--which borrows its title from a typo in an Iraqi report from the late 1960s that characterized well the vague objectives of the early Iraqi nuclear program--presents intriguing information and insight on all of this.

David Priess speaks with Braut-Hegghammer about her interest in WMD proliferation, how she researched secretive nuclear programs, the value of archives, Iraq's quest for the bomb, the impact of Israel's strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981, how close Iraq was to breaking out when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the origins of Libya's nuclear program, Gaddafi's turn to the A.Q. Khan network for the equipment and blueprints needed, implications for the potential proliferation paths of countries from North Korea and Iran to Saudi Arabia and South Korea, the rising salience of nuclear weapons in Arctic security debates, and Norwegian views on nuclear deterrence in today's evolving strategic environment.

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On April 13, 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes conducted his first “special military operation” at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. It involved 14 theater stage lights that Wittes and other activists used to project images of the Ukrainian flag onto embassy walls. Since then, Wittes’s special military operations have garnered increased attention and become more complex—technically and diplomatically.

In his conversation with Katherine Pompilio, one of Lawfare’s associate editors and this week’s Chatter guest host, Wittes talks about the genesis of these special military operations, what it’s like conducting international negotiations with Russian diplomats via the U.S. Secret Service, the international law of light protests, how a paper mache washing machine is involved in all of this, his career, his other projects, and more.

Works mentioned in this episode:

Ben’s Substack Dog Shirt Daily

The video Defect and Repent: A Laser Poem

The video "It's Almost Like the Russians Don't Negotiate in Good Faith": A Video Parable.

The video U.S. Ukrainian Activists Presents Umbrella Boy

The podcast #LiveFromUkraine: Katya Savchenko Survived Bucha—and Wrote About It

The Washington Post article “Activists train spotlight of Ukrainian flag on Russian Embassy”

The video of the spotlight cat and mouse game

The work of Robin Bell

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Biden took office with a big ambition: To repair America’s reputation abroad and set the country on a new path, where foreign policy would be crafted with the middle class in mind. So writes journalist Alexander Ward, whose new book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump, chronicles Biden’s first two years in the White House.

The central players in Ward’s cast as the president’s senior advisers, chief among them National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who, four years earlier, had expected to be serving in the Hillary Clinton administration. Ward joined Shane Harris to talk about the Biden team's early efforts to sketch out a new agenda, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the triumphs of the early days of war in Ukraine. His book offers a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at what may be one of the most experienced teams of foreign policy experts in a generation.

Ward is a national security reporter at Politico. He was part of the reporting team behind one of the biggest scoops in recent memory, the leak of a draft opinion by the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. Ward was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

Ward’s book, The Internationalists: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704738/the-internationalists-by-alexander-ward/

An excerpt from the book: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/19/jake-sullivan-globalization-biden-00141697

Ward’s newsletter at Politico: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily

Ward’s scoop on the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473

Ward on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexbward?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Political scientist Ethan Scheiner appeared on Chatter in early 2022, right before the Olympics in Beijing, to talk about the fascinating intersection of politics, security, and Olympic events. This week, he returns to talk about the compelling connections between hockey and international relations--with a special focus on Czechoslovakia before, during, and after the Cold War. His new book, Freedom To Win, uses the stories of a range of larger-than-life characters across several decades to describe the importance of international hockey play to the Czech and Slovak national experience and to increase awareness of a too-little-known quest for freedom from oppression.

David Priess and Scheiner discussed the broad intersection of hockey and politics, the intensity of the Swedish-Finnish rivalry on the ice, the origins of the game in Europe, how Czechoslovakian hockey players used their sport to fight back against Soviet domination, the 1969 Ice Hockey World Championships in Stockholm, prominent sports figures' defections from the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War, the internationalization of the US National Hockey League, hockey in the former Czechoslovakia after the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, and more.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

The Chatter episode The Olympics, Politics, and Security

The book Freedom to Win: A Cold War Story of the Courageous Hockey Team that Fought the Soviets for the Soul of its People--and Olympic Gold, by Ethan Scheiner

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.