Ep 125: Nick Bunker on America and the Early Cold War

Nick Bunker, journalist and author of In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950, joins the show to talk about the dangerous, chaotic first decade of the Cold War.
Times
• 01:36 Introduction
• 02:26 Countdown to war
• 05:17 Biden and Truman
• 09:05 A failure of American policy?
• 13:09 Present at the Creation
• 21:16 Stalin’s view of the world
• 25:50 Stalin and China
• 30:44 Developing nuclear thinking
• 32:39 Bob Taft’s vision of Asia
• 38:01 No choice but to defend Korea
• 46:44 “NSC68 was politically absurd”
#coldwar #history #militaryhistory #combat #war