Carl Robichaud

And someone told me, you got to take a class with Jonathan Schell.

He was a writer at the New Yorker and an editor there.

And they said, he's one of the best people if you want to learn to write well.

So I signed up for his class, which happened to be on thinking the unthinkable.

So I showed up in the class.

I was the 13th person in a 12-person class.

And I went to him afterwards because the lecture was amazing.

And I said, I really want to be in this course.

And he let me in.

And that changed the course of my life because I was sort of pulled the curtain back on this hidden world of nuclear weapons that shape so much of what we take for granted in the modern world.

And he agreed to advise me on my senior thesis, which I wrote about nuclear weapons.

And I've done other things since and worked on other aspects of international security policy.

But I always keep coming back to this question.

It was 1998.

I had thought... Yeah, I think the film embraces an older version of the history, and there's a more recent historiography that has access to all of the declassified documents, and

shows that in many ways we were sold a false narrative when it comes to the necessity of the use of these weapons.

And the Truman administration after the war was really keen to shape the perception of these weapons.

And they framed it up as if there had been this debate where Truman considered all the options carefully and with a heavy heart, decided that nuclear weapons would save American lives, would save Japanese lives, and went ahead.

And in many ways, that's a piece of post-war propaganda because the debate at that time was not over whether to use the bomb or to invade.

They were planning to use the bomb and to invade, and they didn't know what the future would be.