What A Day - 80 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, New Nuclear Threats Emerge

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

President Donald Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this week to discuss a potential end to the war in Ukraine (which Russia started.) To call the meeting ‘high stakes’ would be an understatement — already critics are warning of the potential for a ‘1938 Munich Moment,’ when Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany to take control over a swath then-Czechoslovakia in a bid to preserve peace on the continent. But the parallels to WWII don’t end there. Earlier this month, Trump said nuclear submarines were ‘in the region’ ahead of special envoy Steve Witkoff’s meeting with Putin in Moscow. As we mark 80 years this month since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historian Garrett Graff, author of the new book ‘The Devil Reached Toward the Sky,’ joins us to talk about what we learned — and we didn’t learn — in the decades since the U.S. dropped those bombs.And in headlines: Thousands of people in Israel demonstrated against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to take control of Gaza City, Trump ramped up threats to take federal control of Washington D.C., and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued to remove 13 Democratic state lawmakers from office amid an ongoing fight over redistricting.Show Notes:Check out Garrett's new book –https://tinyurl.com/y28cfex3Call Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Monday, August 11th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wadde. The show that thinks it might know where Venezuela's president, Nicholas Maduro, might be. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced that there's a $50 million bounty for the president of Venezuela, accusing him of being a narco-trafficker. Is there a chance that the president of Venezuela is located in Venezuela? On today's show, thousands of people in Israel demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to escalate the war in Gaza. And the redistricting fight in Texas rages on. But let's start with nuclear weapons. Yes, nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this week to discuss a potential end of the war in Ukraine, which Russia started. NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta told CBS's face the nation Sunday the meeting is an important step, but not the final. one. What will happen on Friday is testing Putin by President Trump. And I commend him for the fact

that he organized this meeting. I think it is important. And obviously when it comes to peace talks, the ceasefire and what happens after that on territories, on security guarantees for Ukraine, Ukraine will have to be and will be involved. We'll tell you more about this week's planned meeting later in the show. But to say its high stakes would be putting it mildly. critics are already warning of the potential for a 1938 Munich moment when Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany to take control over a swath of what was then Czechoslovakia in a bid to preserve peace on the continent. World War II started less than a year later. The parallels to the Second World War don't end there. The threat of nuclear weapons has hung over

the conflict in Ukraine since the beginning. Last week, President Trump announced that nuclear submarines were, quote, in the region ahead of special envoy Steve Whitkoff's arrival in Moscow to meet with Putin. It was in response to saber-rattling from former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. He posted on telegram that the U.S. should remember Russia's ability to respond with nuclear weapons if something should happen to a Russian leader. Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. But if you're my age or younger, you didn't grow up with a shadow of nuclear war constantly hovering over you like our parents did in the midst of the Cold War.

But nuclear weapons never went away. And I think it's worth going back to the two times in history when these bombs. were used, the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, 80 years ago this month. So to talk about what we learned and what we didn't, I spoke to historian Garrett Graff. He's the author of the new book, The Devil Reached Toward, an oral history of the making and unleashing of the atomic bomb. Garrett, welcome back to Water Day. Thanks so much for having me. So the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are well-told stories in history, I think, for most people. So what were you hoping to add to that

story by writing this book? So this book pulls together the voices about 500 participants. It's an oral history, so it's all in their own words, first-person memories, first-person letters, testimony, so on and so forth. And I think that there's a unique power that comes from oral history because it helps put you back in a historical moment before people knew the outcome. I think so often in narrative history, there's a tendency to make events seem needer, cleaner, simpler, and more preordained than they felt to anyone at the time. This led to that. This led to that.

But you don't know that in the time, right? And you don't know that at the time. And, you know, look at our current moment right now. You know, the challenge of this whole thing that we are living through right now is we don't know how this story ends. And so to me, the power of this story is going back to a moment when the people working on the Manhattan Project didn't know who was going to win World War II. They didn't know whether Adolf Hitler was going to get the bomb first, and they didn't know whether an Adam bomb would work at all. And so my goal was to try to tell these stories with all of the uncertainty and messiness that they were for the people who lived them at a moment that they are slipping in our life from living memory into permanent history. While the bomb, for a good reason, is associated with the war in the Pacific and Japan, something that often gets overlooked is the fact that the bomb's roots come from the war in Europe, specifically with Jewish physicists who fled Nazi Germany.

Can you talk a little bit about that and the influence that had on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb? Yeah, I often joke that I write history that unfortunately gets filed under current events. And the part of this book that I found most chilling was the chapter about the memories of, as you said, mostly Jewish refugee scientists fleeing the enveloping cloak of Hitler's fascism in Europe in the 1930s. and the way that they watched institutions that were supposed to stand for democracy and freedom crumble, the way that they saw their colleagues sort of go along to get along with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party because they thought it was going to be good for their careers and that they, you know, there are these incredible quotes of these physicists saying, you know, none of my friends thought Adolf Hitler would actually do any of the things that he said that he was going to, to do. You know, how bad could he actually be? Like most politicians make these big promises and don't

actually do any of the things. So like, how bad could Hitler actually be? And of course, over the 1930s, it becomes clear that it's quite bad and that they flee to the United States and from 1939, 1940, 1941, are pushing the U.S. government and the U.S. military to engage in this crash program to build the atomic bomb because they are afraid that Adolf Hitler is going to get the bomb first. And it's actually only on Saturday, December 6th, 1941, that the U.S. government embarks on a sort of full-scale Manhattan Project effort to develop the atomic bomb. And, of course, the next day is Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7th, and, you know, the U.S. is at war. Yeah. Do you see not necessarily parallels in leadership, but do you see parallels to today and the rise of fascism here in

United States, where people keep saying, this person isn't going to do what he says he's going to do, but also I voted for him to do those things. Yes. And I think you also see in Hitler's rise something that has befuddled the Republican Party for the last decade, which is all of these sort of, you know, quote-unquote wise power brokers who have turned to support Trump thinking that they can control him, thinking that. that, you know, once he gets into power, like, I'm going to be in a position or the party's going to be in a position to control him. And of course, what we have seen is that they are not and that Trump is in control of the Republican Party and not vice versa. And to me, actually,

the parallels are very chilling with the added warning that what's saying is. saves the world and freedom and democracy in the 1930s and 40s, is the United States is there to fight for it and turn around and rescue Europe. And it's not clear to me now in this moment if authoritarianism takes root here, who is the person, who is the country, who is the world leader that is going to stand up and be able to fight for the United States. You also, in your book, gathered some first-hand accounts of survivors of the bombings. How did their stories change your understanding of what happened on those days? The reading the testimony of the Hibokusa, the bomb-affected survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

I think stands as some of the most searing reading of any human experience I have ever come across. To me, it's a important reminder that nuclear weapons are not just any other weapon, that these are community destroying, civilization, killing, people destroying weapons unlike anything else in the human arsenal. And at this moment, I think many people don't appropriately realize that we are probably closer to nuclear danger today in. 2025 than we have been for much of the intervening 80 years. We've already seen conflict this year between India and Pakistan, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict. We've seen the U.S. and Israeli raids on the Iranian nuclear program. Before Donald Trump decided that he actually wanted to have a summit with Putin, he was saying that he was moving nuclear submarines into a more threatening position with Russia. And we are watching the

rising instability of the U.S. in geopolitical alliances lead to conversations around the world about new nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, in Europe, and in Asia, such that over the next decade, I think we are probably going to see more countries join. the nuclear club than there have ever been before. And the weapons that we have today dwarf, even the terror of the weapons that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So to put that in very concrete terms, the two nuclear submarines that Donald Trump moved into a more threatening position with Russia in the last two weeks are Ohio.

bio-class ballistic missile submarines. They carry 20 missiles apiece, Trident missiles. Each Trident missile has four warheads, and those warheads range from 100 kilotons. That's 1,000 tons of TNT, to 475 kilotons. 475 is 30 times larger than the weapons that were used in here. Hiroshima, and a single U.S. submarine can use those weapons to destroy every city in Russia larger than 250,000 people, which is just an incredible amount of firepower that would take about 17 minutes from the time that the missiles are launched.

Wow. Okay. I'm never going to stop thinking about that for the rest of my natural life. But I want to ask you, as the final survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass on, where does that leave us? How can future generations carry their mantle to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again? So what I hope at this moment, as we watch this generation pass, as a new generation, I hope, commits to the idea that we should continue to never use these weapons again. we can have a serious conversation about both building better safeguards around their use, you know, for instance, requiring a congressional resolution to back a presidential use of nuclear weapons or sort of anyone other than the president doing it by himself. And by the way, I believe that would be a smart measure,

whether the president was Democratic or Republican, male, or female, that's, we just shouldn't have that world ending power in a single person in a democracy. And I think we should have serious conversations about the size and scale of our nuclear arsenal. You know, we have thousands of nuclear weapons still today. And I have spent years of my life working on covering nuclear weapons and written at this point two books about the nuclear arsenal of the United States. And it remains completely unconvincing to me that we need anything more than an incredibly small arsenal of weapons, you know, maybe a few dozen if we keep those weapons at all, which I think should be part of that debate. Garrett, thank you so much for taking

the time to talk to me. Thanks so much. It's an important subject to talk about, even though it's not necessarily a pleasant one. That was my conversation with historian Garrett Graff. His new book is called the devil reached toward the sky, an oral history of the making and unleashing of the atomic bomb. We'll link to it in our show notes. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show,

make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review and up a podcast, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day? brought to you by Lola Blankets. I did not know I could be as excited about a blanket as I am about my Lola blanket, which I sleep under every single night. Lola is the world's number one blanket,

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but you've got to make peace here. And the only way to make peace is to sit down and talk. You can't finger point. You can't, you know, wag your finger at somebody and say, you're wrong, we're right. The way to peace is to have a Decisive leaders sit down and force people to come together. Vice President and not very convincing person, J.D. Vance, appeared on Fox News Sunday morning futures, where host Maria Bartaroma allowed him to read directly from his talking points. I mean, where Vance spoke eloquently about the U.S.'s role in a peace process between Russia and Ukraine. The conversation came days after President Trump announced that he'd be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this coming Friday.

Trump noted that land swaps between Russia and Ukraine would likely be part. of their conversation. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky responded Saturday that his country would not cede any land to Russia. In his interview on Fox, Vance seemed to address Zelensky's rejection of a potential land swap. We're going to try to find some negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and the Russians can live with, where they can live in relative peace where the killing stops. It's not going to make anybody super happy. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians probably at the end of the day are going to be unhappy with it. A solution nobody is happy with? Is that the art of the deal, J.D.? Vance went on to say that the U.S. was, quote,

done with funding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, the U.S. would be happy to sell weapons to any European nations that wish to get involved on behalf of Ukraine, which is kind of funding the conflict. It's possible that Zelensky will join the meeting at Alaska, though at the time of our taping Sunday evening Pacific time, it's unclear if he'd even been invited. Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he's trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.

Illinois Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, did not hold back his feelings about President Trump during an interview that aired Sunday with NBC's Meet the Press. Pritzker criticized Texas for its effort to find five more congressional seats for its Lord and Savior Donald Trump in next year's midterms. Illinois and other Democratic-led states are currently housing a six. slew of Texas State House Democrats who fled Texas to prevent Republican legislators from moving forward with redistricting plans. On Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit to the all-Republican State Supreme Court. He's seeking to have 13 of the Democratic lawmakers immediately removed from office, or at least given a 48-hour warning that they must return or have their offices declared vacated. Democrats in the Texas House have thus far prevented

lawmakers from doing business by staying out of the state. But Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott said On Fox News Sunday, this fight could go on for a long time. Because in Texas, I'm authorized to call a special session every 30 days. It lasts 30 days. And as soon as this one is over, I'm going to call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one, then another one. If they show back up in the state of Texas, they will be arrested and taken to the Capitol. If they want to evade that arrest, they're going to have to stay outside of the state of Texas for literally years. Great.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Israel over the weekend to express their opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to expand the occupation of Gaza. Demonstrations were held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where protesters demanded an immediate end to the conflict and the release of all remaining hostages. Netanyahu told a Fox News reporter Thursday that he planned to expand Israel's offensive in Gaza. Will Israel take control of all of Gaza? We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza, and to pass it to civilian governance. That is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel.

Hours later, Netanyahu's office confirmed that Israel's Security Council approved a plan to take Gaza City. That approval stops short of taking total control of Gaza. The news still sparked outrage around the world. The plan was condemned by United Kingdom Prime Minister Kierre Starmer, who said it would, quote, only bring more bloodshed. Netanyahu's plan has also raised concerns from the family members of Israeli hostages in Gaza. They fear that their loved ones might be killed in further attacks.

On Sunday, they called for a general strike next week to stop the occupation of Gaza. The priority is to show for us in an American city. We know he can do that. here. But it won't be because there's a spike in crime. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser appeared on MSNBC Sunday. She commented on President Trump's recent order to increase federal law enforcement in our nation's capital. Trump's interest in addressing crime in D.C. came after a former Department of Government Efficiency employee was injured in an attempted carjacking earlier this month. Following the incident, Trump ordered

an increased presence of federal law enforcement in the city. He also wants to threaten a federal takeover of D.C. For now, the surge in federal policing is reportedly expected to last seven days, but could be extended. Trump announced on True Social that he would be holding a press conference today in order to, quote, stop violent crime in D.C. As Mayor Bowser pointed out on Sunday, though, violent crime in D.C. has been decreasing over the last two years. City data shows a 26% drop in violent crime this year compared to last, a fact which Trump's biggest allies credited him with just a few months ago. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that Trump authorized the deployment of 120 FBI agents to D.C. Make it make sense. And that's the news. That's all for today. If you like the show,

make sure you subscribe, leave a review, hoard some Arizona iced tea, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just about how because of Trump's tariffs on metal, Arizona's 99-cent ice tea might soon cost more than 99 cents, like me. What Today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and tariffs are attacks on consumers. That's you. What Today is a production of Crooked Media.

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