Episode 2: The Backchannel

The United States Library of Congress selected Dr. Strangelove as one of the first 25 films in the National Film Registry. As we approach the 60th anniversary of Dr. Strangelove (in Jan 2024), our live podcast panel takes a critical look at the dark comedy and reveals how the satire is uncomfortably realistic, even to this day. Using dialogue from the film as prompts, our panel explains to listeners its historical references and draws parallels to today’s international diplomatic landscape.

Some questions fall far outside the scope of what governments are designed to answer. How will we explain ourselves to extraterrestrials? What can we say to warn humans 10,000 years in the future about the nuclear waste we’re leaving behind? Assuming we develop the proper technology, would it be beneficial to breed glowing cats?Two decades after NASA shot a message to aliens into deep space, one of its authors joined an eclectic group of experts and went down a similar rabbit hole regarding nuclear waste. The result was one of the most outlandish, mind-bending, and heartfelt reports ever commissioned by the US government. This episode features artist Jon Lomberg, former NRDC lawyer Dan Reicher, and futurist Ted Gordon.

Fishermen dying mysteriously off the coast of Japan. Entire populations of sea animals disappearing. Despite decades of work by the international community, the high seas remain law enforcement’s biggest blind spot, and the site of environmental crimes whose effects reach around the world. But some people are attempting to stop these crimes: We follow the investigations of two private-citizen sleuths, one using satellites to expose massive but previously untraceable illegal fleets, another using spycraft to infiltrate a criminal network of poachers and smugglers operating on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.This episode features Sara Mitchell, professor of political science at the University of Iowa; as well as Jaeyoon Park of Global Fishing Watch and Andrea Crosta, founder and Executive Director of Earth League International.

In February 2020, an elite group of biosecurity experts, worried about the threat of pandemics, plays a bizarrely prescient role-playing game. They run into an age-old pattern of secrecy and mistrust, one that thwarts their efforts to ‘beat’ the game. We travel back to a (real-life) period when dozens of mysterious deaths occurred in a closed Soviet city. As it turns out, hidden pieces of lung tissue help shed light on what, to this day, keeps the nations of the world from working together to fight infectious disease.

There are no international laws against littering in space, which is a shame, because individual governments love to blow things up in low-Earth orbit. The result? A crisis of ricocheting debris that goes on forever. As private industry sends an unprecedented number of satellites into orbit, security experts find themselves in a race against the clock to bring sanity (or sanitation?) to the space around us. This episode features former NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler, Professor Mariel Borowitz of Georgia Tech, and Victoria Samson and Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation. 

An arms-control advocate accepts an invitation to the dacha of a hard-partying North Korean power broker. There, through a haze of smoke and propaganda, they identify some common ground and set out to test a hypothesis: That it’s possible for Americans and North Koreans to work together toward peace. The result is a tense but extraordinary moment in the relationship between North Korea and the West, a rare example of collaboration that has been almost entirely lost to history.This episode features Peter Hayes and Lyuba Zarsky, co-founders of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, and David von Hippel, an energy expert who worked with Peter in North Korea.

As the Cold War draws to a close, a group of American scientists hatches a plan to board a Soviet warship with a nuclear weapons detector to prove to their own government that the USSR is open to nuclear arms verification. Meet the guys who brought a slug of depleted uranium through security at LaGuardia Airport, sat atop a Soviet nuclear device in the Black Sea, and skinny-dipped with their counterparts from the other side of the Iron Curtain.This episode features three physicists: Tom Cochran, formerly of the NRDC; Frank von Hippel, a professor of physics at Princeton University; and Steve Fetter, a professor at the University of Maryland. 

If you’re reading this, and you’re not in some sort of irradiated, post-apocalyptic hellscape… well, you can thank our host Jeffrey Lewis. He studies nukes—who has them, who wants them, and how to prevent them from going off—so that we’re less likely to die in a nuclear war.  The thing is, lots of people have jobs like this. They’re not celebrities and they’re not even politicians. They’re the people looking for solutions to problems that most people haven’t thought about yet, doing research that most people won’t ever hear about, and, of course, writing papers that most people are never going to read. But collectively, they’re making it a little less likely that war will break out, bombs will fall, and we’ll all die horribly. Call them wonks, call them cranks, call them idealists…we call them the reason we’re all still here.This prologue establishes what you’ll hear this season: the type of international, non-governmental diplomacy that aims to keep civilization alive. Sometimes solutions are found in unlikely places… like a suitcase shop in Tehran. This episode features an unlikely friend of Dr. Lewis: Max Angerholzer, CEO of George and Barbara Bush Foundation.

With the Iran nuclear deal dead as a doorknob, Jeffrey Lewis set out to make a new podcast, one that tells stories of scientists, journalists and maybe a vigilante or two... private citizens who are working to solve diplomatic problems and prevent the next global catastrophe. Yes this podcast is about saving the world – one arduous, unlikely, under-funded, seemingly impossible mission at a time. Skinny dipping physicists, activists living on houseboats and, of course, at least one person looking at satellite images in his pajamas..The Reason We’re All Still Here is a production from Gilded Audio and The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Proliferation is just a fancy word for the spread of nuclear weapons. Nonproliferation is stopping it. 

The Deal tells the story of the Iran nuclear deal: how it came together, how it fell apart, and what that means for the rest of us. Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He tweets @armscontrolwonk. In Season 2 The Deal brings the story of the Iran nuclear deal into the present. Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis examines the options available to Joe Biden by looking at the past. Will we make the same mistakes?  Or have we learned our lessons?You don't have to listen to season one to follow season two, but it helps! Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.