A COLD WAR

* President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards. * Side note: his daughter Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother. * Which is complete bullshit BTW. * The committee met for the first time on 21 October 1...

* In 1913, H. G. Wells wrote a book called The World Set Free * The novel begins: "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. . . . Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more." * In the book, the human race develops an atomic bomb. * This was written in 1913. * A few years earlier...

* The Potsdam declaration on Japan was tricky. * It was drafted while Churchill was still PM. * In fact it was probably one of the last things he did as PM. * But it was signed by Attlee. * Stalin had to be involved, but he couldn’t sign it because the U.S.S.R. was still technically under a non-agression treaty with Japan. * Truman also wanted Chiang KaiShek to sign it. * Which meant it needed the...

* Episode 69. * Ray’s favourite number. * Have you actually had one yet, Ray? * Sister in law? * Truman had given his final approval to the plan to invade Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan, just two weeks before leaving for Potsdam. * A Russian invasion of Manchuria and Korea figured prominently in the grand strategy that underlay that plan. * Second, even an invasion of the home islands d...

Well the election result shocked everyone. And the rest of the contingent at Potsdam weren’t very happy about it either. We might think that the Soviets would be please to be dealing with a British government made up of socialists. But that wasn’t the case. Stalin didn’t like Attlee or the British Labour Party. Despite Churchill’s attempts during the election to paint Labour as pro-Soviet, neither...

Attlee was Churchill’s lame duck deputy PM. In fact he was the first Deputy PM the UK ever had. I didn’t realise this, but in the UK the role of the Deputy PM isn’t like you’d expect, like it is in Australia or like the Vice-President in the USA. The Deputy PM doesn’t take over if the PM is incapacitated or resigns. If the PM is sick or dies, the Deputy does NOT take over. In the UK, only the sove...

Stalin arrived in Potsdam a day late. Claimed he had a small heart attack. Might have been a ruse. It gave the others a day to take a tour of Berlin on July 16 and see the destruction first hand. During the first week of the conference, everyone was jubilant, having won the war - but Truman quickly learned the Russians weren't going to give in to his demands, and the Allies and Stalin both had sec...

Prof Michael Neiberg is Chair of War Studies and Professor of History, Department of National Security and Strategy, US Army War College. He has also written a number of excellent books on the First World War - as well as the book we are talking about today - Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show i...

After a string of fuckups, Truman starts listening to other people, like Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1937-38, one of the guys he had ignored before his first meeting with Molotov. They decide a new meeting of the Big Three is needed - and start to plan the Potsdam Conference. Truman announced James Byrnes, the man who should be President, would be his new Secretary of S...

Truman listens to certain people who tell him he should get tough with the Russians. At his first meeting with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister said “I have never been talked to like that in my life." “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Truman replied. Then Truman decides to look tough by ending the Lend Lease shipments to the Soviets. Unfortunately nobody seems...

Harry S. Truman. Farmer. Soldier. Failed businessman. Given his political career by a mobbed-up bootlegger. Became President through fate. Adopted John Wayne persona to try to look tough. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'...

Then, on April 12, 1945, FDR died, aged only 63. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the first six episodes totally free. You might want to start with Episode 1, unless of cou...

FDR sends one of his inner circle, Edward Flynn, a staunch Catholic, to meet the Pope to try to keep the peace between him and Stalin. Stalin meanwhile revived caesaropapism, the old tradition dating back to Constantine, making himself head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not a bad promotion for someone who once studied to become an Orthodox priest. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, yo...

Stalin crushes the Ukrainian Catholic Church, partly because socialists believe religion is the opium of the masses, and partly because the Pope, Pius XII, had done a deal with Hitler and was a virulent anti-Communist. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the...

March 8, 1945. Allen Dulles, the Bern station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), met in secret with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the former head of Heinrich Himmler’s secretariat, who in the last years of the war became the commander of SS forces in northern Italy, to discuss Germany's surrender. The Anglo-Americans neglected to tell the Soviets about the me...

On February 13, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius and his staff were invited to a reception hosted by Vyshinsky in the commissariat’s guesthouse in Moscow. Little did the Americans know that one member of their staff was a Soviet spy. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you ha...

What does Dracula have to do with the Cold War? The next issue to drive a wedge between the Big Three was the government of Romania. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the fi...

Our first post-Yalta episode! Churchill and Roosevelt go home and give big speeches about how well Yalta went and how the Big Three really get each other. And then it all fell apart. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll li...

The last day of Yalta! We're out, baby! Churchill fell asleep in the middle of an important debate and then woke up ranting about the wrong things. Iran wants everyone to leave their oil alone but no-one cares. Stalin wanted access to the Black Sea Straits. And Frank does the last big deal of his life - getting Joe's agreement in writing to join the fight against Japan. HOW TO LISTEN If you're alr...

Just when I thought I was out... they pulled me back in! To Yalta! Before the Big Three left Yalta, they signed a document that promised to allow the people of Europe "to create democratic institutions of their own choice". Of course, at the time, the British were waging a war in Greece to prevent the people creating a government of their own choice... but let's not worry about inconvenient detail...

As the Yalta conference comes to a close, the question of German reparations is settled on, but it’s obvious that Stalin still doesn’t trust the other two. And the feeling is mutual. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll li...

Stalin goes hard on the issue of German reparations but meets with pushback from Churchill, while Roosevelt can't seem to make up his mind. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player. If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to...

So after they agreed on Poland, the rest of the February 9 plenary session is spent talking about Germany. Specifically - what to do with the Nazi big dogs. Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that Churchill had been advocating since 1942 for a policy of summary execution for the top Nazis. But Stalin suggested, you know, maybe they should be put on t...

We have a very special guest. Professor Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s the author of quite a few award-winning books including "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine", which in 2015 won the world's most important award for non-fiction, the Lionel Gelbe...

Day 9 at Yalta! The official, famous photographs are taken, and someone worries that he's going to be sent to the Gulag as a result. And the Polish question is finally settled to everyone's relief. They can almost go home. Oh and there was no raping. HOW TO LISTEN If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player....