War & Peace: Planning for Nuclear Armageddon
War & Peace: Planning for Nuclear Armageddon
Podcast / Europe & Central Asia 1 minutes

War & Peace: Planning for Nuclear Armageddon

This week on War & Peace, Olga Oliker and Hugh Pope discuss with researchers Edward Geist and Ivan Kalugin what planning for the worst looks like in the U.S. and Russia, comparing today to the peaks of nuclear anxiety during the Cold War.

S2 Episode 13: Planning for Nuclear Armageddon

While the threat of imminent nuclear armageddon may not be at the forefront of the average person’s mind today, it was a real, globe-spanning fear not so long ago during the Cold War. Absent the treaties and confidence-building measures developed since to mitigate the risk of such an event, U.S. and Soviet civil defence then was totally consumed with the daunting task of planning for the worst.

So how does a state prepare for the event of a nuclear attack? How do you ensure continuity of government in a country laid waste? How conscious are ordinary citizens of this reality and how involved are they in preparedness efforts?

Olga and Hugh debate these all-important questions from the height of their salience to now with Edward Geist, policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and author of the book Armageddon Insurance: Civil Defense in the United States and Soviet Union, and Ivan Kalugin, Moscow-based researcher and Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) affiliate. Together they discuss how the two superpowers went about tackling them, from the survivability of essential infrastructure and public information campaigns to the logic of mutually assured destruction and the rumoured existence of automatic launching systems known as the ‘Dead Hand’.

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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