A MAD, MAD, World

A MAD, MAD, World

The world lived under the shadow of the acronym MAD for forty years. Mutually Assured Destruction was no laughing matter, but Stanley Kubrick thought dark comedy was the only way to approach a topic as ridiculous as MAD. In this episode we compare and contrast Dr. Strangelove (1964) with Failsafe, a serious film about the same subject that came out the same year. We reveal just how spot on Dr. Strangelove was about MAD versus Failsafe’s unwarranted optimism that limited nuclear war was possible. An army of political scientists and bureaucrats game theoried fighting and winning a nuclear war like it was just another social science problem. Civilians are the warmongers in our MAD films. Dr. Strangelove may be a deranged Nazi freak, but everything he said was seriously considered by real life MAD Men. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episoder(1100)

Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Anglo-Afghan Power ...

31 Jul 30min

The Resurgence of War and the Collapse of Arms Control

The Resurgence of War and the Collapse of Arms Control

How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now ...

31 Jul 34min

Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Anna Lively, "Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at ...

28 Jul 19min

Eamonn Gearon, "The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit" (Hurst, 2026)

Eamonn Gearon, "The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit" (Hurst, 2026)

Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was...

23 Jul 50min

R. Joseph Parrott, "Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism" (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

R. Joseph Parrott, "Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism" (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola,...

21 Jul 1h 18min

Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)

Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit S...

17 Jul 55min

Rory Cormac, "Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Rory Cormac, "Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line (Oxford UP, 2026) reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secre...

17 Jul 0s

Massoud Amin, "Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power" (Wisdom Editions, 2026)

Massoud Amin, "Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power" (Wisdom Editions, 2026)

In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught ben...

15 Jul 1h 12min

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