Things That Go Boom

Last night it looked like we were headed for war. Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two military bases in Iraq in response to US escalation in the region. How worried should we be? And, now that we know that President Trump is willing to take the most extreme option offered (ie: killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani with a drone) should we be even more concerned about his authority to launch nukes? — Things That Go Boom is a production of PRX and Inkstick Media. This episode was produced by Ruth Morris and written by Laicie Heeley. Darien Schulman composed our music. A special thanks to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their support. For more information, visit us at https://inkstickmedia.com/.

When we left off with our second season, there were... a few things happening with Iran… And Amb. William Burns has a unique perspective -- he's been down this road with Iran before, as one of the architects of the 2015 nuclear deal. We ask Burns for a gut check on the current situation, from Iran's threats to ramp up uranium enrichment, to the fallout from President Trump's 'exchange of love letters' with North Korea. He also shares some of the lessons from "the most depressing brainstorming session" of his career. William Burns served five presidents and retired as the State Department's No. 2 official. Today he’s the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, DC. His book is “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal.”

The first clue something was wrong came in the form of an alert on Yegi Rezaian’s phone. Where I grew up,” she says, “these things don’t happen by accident.” Within hours, Yegi and her husband, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, found themselves in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. And interrogations quickly turned surreal. Jason’s captors seemed convinced his Kickstarter campaign to bring avocados to Iran was some kind of spycraft. So… it took some time before they came to realize that, one of the reasons they were arrested… and, one of the reasons that Jason would spend the next 544 days in prison… Was the Iran deal. In our final episode of the season, we look at collateral damage. Because when the US entered the Iran deal, and when President Trump pulled out, it kicked off a whole series of international events with consequences we’re still feeling today.

If you want to know how sanctions are playing out in Iran — look no further than the classified ads. You’ll find folks selling unused cosmetics, pets, and… something even more unusual. But you might also come across people like Alireza Jahromi, an entrepreneur with a chain of trendy burger joints. He says sanctions are like a tsunami— destructive. But if you know how to surf, you grab your board and paddle out. And he says Iran, metaphorically speaking, is a country of surfers. On this episode, we ask if US policymakers may have underestimated Iranian resiliency and whether President Trump’s suffocating sanctions are likely to lead to new nuclear negotiations, or just reinforce a bitter feud.

Money in politics is a little bit like an iceberg — there’s the stuff you can see, like lobbying firms, and then there’s all the stuff below the waterline. On this episode of Things That Go Boom… we wade into the swamp. We focus on one of the loudest groups that weighed in on the Iran nuclear deal to get a better sense of how the system works. The story that emerges includes a Greek shipping magnate, a gold trader, an investigative reporter, and the world’s largest collections of Rembrandts. The question at the center of it all: Is our foreign policy for sale?

Before they were enemies, the US and Iran used to have a thing. In fact, we started their nuclear program. Like any failed relationship… it’s not just one thing that led us all here. Years of misinformation, politics, greed, reality tv, and some real security interests on both sides brought us to this point. This is the story of how the US and Iran broke up -- because you can’t truly understand the Iran deal without first understanding why the US and Iran have bad blood.

Jake Sullivan is no James Bond. He's a nice kid from Minnesota. But Sullivan's top secret diplomacy may have staved off catastrophe as the U.S. pursued the Iran nuclear deal. On this episode, we dig into how diplomacy gets done -- and, not the Hollywood-movie version. (Diplomacy, it turns out, isn’t as sexy as Bond.) This is the real-life version, where sleep-deprived people pore over thousands of pages of technical documents, sleep on couches and floors, and lose their cool more than once. There are even a few broken bones. It’s not glamorous, it’s grueling. But when it works, it can stop a war.

Time magazine called Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster a “pre-eminent warrior-thinker.” President Trump called him a pain. So when McMaster left the White House to be replaced by the hawkish John Bolton, foreign policy experts saw the writing on the wall. The Iran nuclear deal was next on the chopping block. In this episode, we track how advisors clashed right up to the moment Trump yanked the United States out of the deal. Some wanted to push for a better deal. Others seemed intent on pressuring Iran until it breaks. Was Trump right to walk away? Or, was there something else -- something more political -- motivating the president’s decision?

Prepping a fallout shelter might sound like an exercise from an era of soda fountains and hula hoops. But for Ron Hubbard, president of Atlas Survival Shelters, business is, well… booming. Ron says he sold a shelter a month when he started out in 2011. Now he sells about one a day — from a barebones hideout to a luxury model that doubles as a wine cellar. So, why are 60s-style underground fallout shelters no longer so, well, underground? Nuclear expert Sharon Squassoni tells us the threat of nuclear war is as grave now as the darkest days of the Cold War. One reason for the heightened concern is President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Deal. But that decision also tells us a lot about how US foreign policy is shifting. Could the decision to withdraw render the US irrelevant? Did it make us safer? Or should we all be building fallout shelters in our backyards?

It’s been called President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement -- so why does the Trump administration think it was the “worst deal ever” made? On this season of Things That Go Boom, we’ll take a look at the Iran deal -- but this isn’t an Iran deal explainer. This is a story about how America stays out of a nuclear war. And the answer is messier than you might think. The government does not have it all figured out. Even good deals can be flawed. And swampy dynamics in Washington have the potential to send us all down a dangerous path fast.