The Reason We’re All Still Here
- Épisodes
- 20
- Format
- Série – à écouter depuis le début
- Dernier épisode
- 1 Nov 2023
À propos du podcast
Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here. This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink. Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues. Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Épisodes 20
Live Bonus Episode
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 Using dialogue from the film as prompts, our panel explains to listeners its historical references and draws parallels to today’s international diplomatic landscape.
Signs for the Future
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
An Illegal Floating City
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
The Leak from Compound 19
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Ground Control to Space Junk
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Windmills in a North Korean Cabbage Patch
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Skinny-Dipping in the USSR
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
You’re Welcome (A Prologue)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Introducing: The Reason We’re All Still Here
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Episode 5: The Worst Case Scenario (Almost)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.Episode 4: Stuxnet
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.Episode 3: Safeguards
If we held inspections and action-movie style violence to the same standard, we’d see that inspections do way more to stop the spread of nuclear weapons than assassinations or sabotage. But we don’t. Which is a …
Notes de l’épisode
If we held inspections and action-movie style violence to the same standard, we’d see that inspections do way more to stop the spread of nuclear weapons than assassinations or sabotage. But we don’t. Which is a shame, because inspections are, in their own understated way, really freaking cool. Featuring IAEA site inspector Sandra Munos.
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.Episode 2: Nuclear Rx
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.Episode 1: What Is Past Is Prologue
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.Episode 5: The Power to Hurt
It could happen again. Content warning: This episode refers to Islamophobic sentiments in the American public. Read: Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and …
Notes de l’épisode
It could happen again.
Content warning: This episode refers to Islamophobic sentiments in the American public.
Read: Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants by Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security, Volume 42, Issue 1, Summer 2017.
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.Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.
Episode 4: The Unraveling
In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes the claim that “Iran lied,” and things quickly begin to fall apart. The Deal tells the story of the Iran nuclear deal: how it came together, how it fell …
Notes de l’épisode
In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes the claim that “Iran lied,” and things quickly begin to fall apart.
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.
Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.
Episode 3: The Scientists
American Secretary of Energy Dr. Ernie Moniz and Dr. Ali Salehi, director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, are brought to the world’s highest-stakes negotiating table to do what the diplomats can’t …
Notes de l’épisode
American Secretary of Energy Dr. Ernie Moniz and Dr. Ali Salehi, director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, are brought to the world’s highest-stakes negotiating table to do what the diplomats can’t.
Read Richard Stone’s reporting on Ali Salehi in Science magazine.
BONUS: Dr. Ernie Moniz on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart explaining the deal in 2015.
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.Learn more at www.IranDealPodcast.com.
Episode 2: The Backchannel
An international crisis is a little like a relay race. In 2011, the baton passes into the hands of diplomats like American ambassador Wendy Sherman, who led the P5+1 team negotiating the Iran deal. The Deal …
Notes de l’épisode
An international crisis is a little like a relay race. In 2011, the baton passes into the hands of diplomats like American ambassador Wendy Sherman, who led the P5+1 team negotiating the Iran deal.
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.
Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.
Episode 1: The Revelation
In 2002, Corey Hinderstein, a young research analyst, follows a hunch after a routine press conference in Washington, D.C. The results of her scavenger hunt sparked a diplomatic crisis that stretched more than …
Notes de l’épisode
In 2002, Corey Hinderstein, a young research analyst, follows a hunch after a routine press conference in Washington, D.C. The results of her scavenger hunt sparked a diplomatic crisis that stretched more than a decade, lasted through two presidencies, and ended with a deal that, depending on whom you ask, either “makes our country, and the world, safer and more secure” or is “a horrible deal that should never, ever have been made.”
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.
Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.
The Deal: Coming Soon
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Learn more at IranDealPodcast.com.
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