HOUR ONE:
The Cold War is over and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is little threat of an all-out, mutually destructive nuclear war. But investigative journalist Eric Schlosser points out that most of those weapons are still out there…and many of them are still on hair-trigger alert. In his book Command and Control, he writes that school children no longer practice to “duck and cover” — even as the danger of an accidental war or accidental nuclear detonations may have increased. Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified government documents and on interviews with scores of military personnel and nuclear scientists, Schlosser writes about our illusion of safety when it comes to today’s nuclear weapons.
Then Bob checks in with Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten on his latest project. Weingarten is still pulling together stories relating to one day chosen at random – December 28, 1986. The forthcoming book will be called One Day and will prove that old journalism axiom that good stories can be found anywhere.
HOUR TWO:
Today we replay our most popular and our most powerful original documentary. It’s one last encore presentation of our award-winning show Stories from Third Med: Surviving a Jungle ER. The documentary features stories of the Navy’s Third Medical Battalion, which served alongside the Third Marine Division. They were based near the DMZ, closest to the enemy in North Vietnam. They shared their dramatic and emotional stories with us four decades later, told over a soundtrack of the music that meant everything to them in the late 1960s.