‘We're Pretty Close’ To Nuclear War

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Journalist, historian and author Lesley M. M. Blume, historian of science David Hecht, and nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein join Katie to discuss the threat of nuclear war today. How does Oppenheimer shed a light on what we're seeing today in Ukraine?

Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Town & Country, Air Mail, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. She often writes about historical nuclear events, historical war journalism, and the intersection of war and the arts. Blume in New York, 2016. Blume’s second major non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World, was released by Simon & Schuster on August 4, 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

David K. Hecht is a historian of science, focusing on the modern United States. His particular interest is in public images of science, and he has published on the phenomenon of "scientific celebrities." His first book, Storytelling and Science: Rewriting Oppenheimer in the Nuclear Age, was published 2015 (University of Massachusetts Press), and he is currently researching a second book project on the intersections between nuclear and environmental history. Other scholarly interests include the history of energy, as well as the role that popular rhetoric about science plays in reinforcing (and sometimes challenging) the status quo. His courses include "The Nuclear Age," "The History of Energy," "Image, Myth, and Memory," and "Science on Trial." In 2011 he was awarded the Sydney B. Karofsky prize, Bowdoin's annual teaching prize for junior faculty.

Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science and nuclear technology. He is a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he is the Director of Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts and Letters. His first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), is the first attempt at a comprehensive history of how nuclear weapons ushered in a new period of governmental and scientific secrecy in the USA. His current projects include: a new book about Harry Truman and nuclear weapons; research into the past, present, and potential future of Presidential nuclear weapons use authority; and a video game about life after a full-scale nuclear war set in the early 1980s. His writings on the history of nuclear weapons have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and the Washington Post, among other venues, and his online nuclear weapon effects simulator, the NUKEMAP, has been used by over 50 million people globally. He occasionally maintains a blog: Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

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