Episode · Behind the Bastards · 2025-12-02
Books mentioned on Part One: The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All
Robert sits down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about how mankind went from building one atomic bomb to building tens of thousands of them, permanently 15 minutes or less away from ending all life on earth. (5 Part Series) Sources: https://warontherocks.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Command and Control
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser is a meticulous investigative history of nuclear weapons safety and the alarming catalog of accidents and close calls that have threatened global security.
Discussed“And this is not something I knew until I read the book Command and Control by Eric Schllother, which is one of the sources, one of several books that I used as sources for these episodes.”
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The World Set Free
Discussed“and at the start of his book, Schlloer points out that the first person to conceive directly of an atomic bomb was HG Wells, who wrote a 1914 novel titled The World Set Free.”
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Nuclear War
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is a non-fiction investigation that details the sequence of events and catastrophic consequences of an unfolding nuclear exchange.
Recommended“This is why a lot of people, there's a good book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson that lays all of this out in a pretty unsparing term and her provides like a theoretical and her theoretical is North Korea's mad king launches missiles for unclear reasons, right?”
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The Command of the Air
The Command of the Air is a foundational military treatise written by Italian general and theorist Giulio Douhet in 1921, outlining the strategic importance of air power in modern warfare.
Discussed“In 1921, it was published under the title the command of the air.”
