Eric Edelman, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey and Finland, joins the show to talk about how nuclear strategic thinking began and how those debates resonate today.▪️ Times • 01:47 Introduction • 02:45 Oppenheimer’s Borden in reality • 07:00 Brodie and The Absolute Power • 11:12 Deterrence before Hiroshima • 13:15 Blackett and Fear, War, and the Bomb • 19:40 Counter-value vs counter-force • 37:33 Russian nuclear strategy • 42:44 Extended deterrence • 52:37 Pain tolerance Follow along on InstagramFind a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...