Visitors to the filesharing megasite Pirate Bay today might be surprised to see a North Korean flag on the page's usual Pirate Ship logo. The image links to the following post on the site's blog:

The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets.

A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea,[sic] to fight our battles from their network.

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country's changing view of access to information. It's a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it's also ones duty to grab their hand.

The story first appeared a few hours ago on the blog of Swedish Pirate Party founder and chief evangelist Rick Falkvinge. (The Pirate Party and Pirate Bay share political goals and have frequently cooperated but are separate organizations.) Falkvinge writes that the current traceroute for the site can be tracked back to this ISP located in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang.  "North Korea may have the one government on this planet which takes pride in asking Hollywood and United States interests to take a hike in the most public way imaginable," he added.

Pirate Bay lost its hosting from the Swedish Pirate Party last month, after the group faced legal pressure from an alliance of copyright holders.  The hosting was moved to Pirate Parties in Norway and Catalonia, but the Norwegian party apparently dropped the site earlier today. 

The typically reliable website TorrentFreak quotes at "PirateBay insider," saying “We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3g in the country... TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We’ve declined for now.”

So is this for real, or an elaborate prank? TorrentFreak writes, "While it’s hard to believe everything The Pirate Bay says, the site does indeed route through North Korea at the moment."

I'm still not totally buying it, given that back in 2007, the site posted an April Fool's joke about moving its hosting to the North Korean embassy. "We would like to thank Kim Jong-Il for the opportunity and we would like all of our users to review their current feelings towards this great nation!" they wrote at the time. 

In a post last year, the Pirate Bay's blog presented itself as a weapon against North Korean information suppression.  "We receive more than 100 visits daily from North Korea and we sure know that they need it," they wrote. "If there's something that will bring peace to this world it is the understanding and appreciation of your fellow man."

Also, if they were really doing business with North Korea, they would probably know that its official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The "Republic of Korea" is the South.

So there's plenty of reason to be suspicious, though after last week, anything seems possible.

Update: The North Korea Tech blog throws some more cold water on the story: 

The Pirate Bay needs a significant amount of bandwidth — something North Korea doesn’t have.[...]

When I track Internet traffic from my PC to The Pirate Bay’s website, it does appear to flow to North Korea’s Internet gateway point. What happens after that is unclear.

[The track] shows traffic running from Level 3, an Internet backbone operator in the U.S., onto the network of Intelsat. The international satellite operator is one of North Korea’s two providers of Internet connectivity. From Intelsat is runs onto the North Korean Internet, denoted by the Internet address “175.45.177.217? on line 21. But no more data is returned, so it’s difficult to plot the remainder of the path to The Pirate Bay website.

 

I e-mailed Falkvinge, who wrote back that the technical reports casting doubt on the story "look credible":

The Pirate Bay is tremendously skilled at two things: keeping their site online, and pranking the establishment. Given that, I lean toward it being a hilarious hoax.

Update 2: The Pirate Bay comes clean. It was a hoax:

We’ve also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to fuck off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!

This afternoon, I had a chance to speak briefly with former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski. A former minister of sport in Poland's Communist government during the 1980s, Kwasniewski was elected in 1995 as the country's second post-Communist president. He served until 2005.

Along with former Irish politician Pat Cox, Kwasniewski has recently traveled more than a dozen times to Ukraine to monitor the trial of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on behalf of the European Parliament. In an address to the Atlantic Council yesterday, Kwasniweski urged the U.S. to take a more active role in encouraging democracy in Ukraine. He has called Tymoshenko's controversial prosecution "disastrous" for Ukrainian democracy but also believes further EU-Ukraine integration will be productive in encouraging the rule of law.   

Noting that crucial talks on whether Ukraine will sign an association agreement with the EU are coming up in November of this year, Kwasniewski told me today,  "It is necessary to decide if we want to support Ukraine and see it as part of our community of standards and values, or not. The time for this decision is quite limited."

Kwasniewski is an unapologetic euro-optimist, who despite the ongoing economic crisis, which Poland has weathered far better than its neighbors to the West, believes the country will eventually join the common currency.

"I am quite optimistic about the future of the European Union," he said. "I am sure that the EU will not only survive but will develop after the crisis. It should be our goal to be one of the main players along with the United States and China."

Kwasniewski favors "deepening of integration, strengthening of institutions and more common policies" within the European Union as well as a new push to expand to new countries, particularly to what he calls, the "two heavyweights," Ukraine and Turkey.

"The Ukraine question is complicated because of interior problems in Ukraine and because of competition between Russia and European Union," he says. "Turkey also creates questions about the real nature of the European Union and its natural borders." He also favors expanding the EU into the Balkans, though he says they have "huge homework to do" regarding legal reforms and clamping down on corruption.  

He says he's not all that concerned about a crisis-era backlash to Polish immigrants in countries like Britain and France. "We have to accept a new chapter of European history that all European countries will be multicultural," he ways. "Without immigration there's no chance for development. With aging societies, it's necessary to be open." He also noted with some satisfaction that with more than 2 million immigrants in the country, "Polish is almost the second official language of Ireland"  

As a left-leaning Polish politician, I was curious to hear Kwasniewski's take on U.S.-Polish relations under the Obama administration. Following the Obama administration's repositioning of the U.S. missile defense system in Poland - on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, no less - and last year's "Polish death camps" faux pas, much has been made of supposed tensions between the Obama administration and Polish leaders. (Kwasniewski's predecessor and rival Lech Walesa essentially campaigned for Mitt Romney.)

Kwasniewski dismissed these events as "misunderstandings," but sees a bigger problem looming:

"The problem is not very serious in the relationships between Poland and the United States -- Poland is one of the most pro-American societies in Europe -- the much more important question is the American-European relationship. Here I have more fears. I understand American priorities are changing, and that the Pacific is a much more important ocean for U.S. than the Atlantic. Americans are very interested in China, but it's necessary to remember that Europe is still the most valuable and predictable ally of the United States. In my opnion, the engagement of the United States and EU is too weak. I expect more actions from the United States to strengthen these ties in the second term."

Kwasniewski recently helped form a new center-left party aiming to create a list of candidates for the 2014 European Parliament elections. He was somewhat vague when I asked if he had thoughts of returning to elected office himself:

I will support a new list of people to the European parliament and we'll see what reaction we'll have in Europe. It's very difficult to find a place for former presidents. If you are a former president it's difficult to describe what would be interesting and prestigious enough. What will happen in 2014 is difficult to predict. A former president is not a prophet, especially about his own country.

At a hearing yesterday, Pfc. Bradley Manning took full responsibility for leaking the documents that came to be known as the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the "Cablegate" archive of classified diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Given the fate that likely awaits Manning, it's a bit hard not be struck and saddened by his statement that he leaked the documents in order to “spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general” and “cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.”

Whatever the impact of Wikileaks documents, it would be hard to argue they had a major impact on the foreign-policy attitudes of the American public, or even provided much new information that might cause readers to revise their attitudes. 

But two years after the Cablegate leak, there is one legacy of Wikileaks that confronts us nearly every day: the cables have become one of the vital tools of international journalism. Nearly every day, newspaper, wire service, and magazine dispatches from around the world feature theremarkable but no longer unusual phrase, " according to classified State Department cables released by WikiLeaks."

Here are just a few examples from a quick Nexis search of recent coverage:

• The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter opens an article on Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to the Middle East with an anecdote from the then Senator's meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2009. The conversation, in which Kerry asked Assad why so few Arab leaders trust him, was pulled from a Wikileaks cable.
• A Reuters article on the death of AQAP leader Said al-Shehri sources the claim that he "allegedly joined al Qaeda and helped to facilitate the movements of Saudi militants seeking to travel to Afghanistan via Iran" to a Wikileaked Pentagon document. 
• A New York Times article on a British lawsuit involving a U.S. drone strike cites a 2008 cable reporting that "British officials demanded to be given full details of intelligence-gathering flights the United States flew from its base in Cyprus, in case they “put the U.K. at risk of being complicit in unlawful acts.”"
• Reporting on the recent killing of a Kurdish cativist Sakine Cansiz, the AP notes that "in a 2007 cable, U.S. officials had identified Cansiz as one of the outlawed PKK's top two "most notorious financiers" in Europe and wanted her captured to stop the flow of money to the rebels." 
• A Washington Post feature on Yemen's rival clans quotes a classified dispatch from former Amb. Thomas C. Krajeski, describing how former president Ali Abdullah Saleh had allowed the powerful al-Ahmar tribal family to “run their affairs with informal armies, courts and economic empires”. 
• An AP story on the international soccer match-fixing scandal describes how "An American diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoted the U.S. Embassy in Sofia as reporting that "Bulgarian soccer clubs are widely believed to be directly or indirectly controlled by organized crime figures who use their teams as a way to legitimize themselves, launder money and make a fast buck.""
• Writing on Europe's planned Galileo GPS system, Andrew Higgins of the New York Times mentions that a 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin "quoted the OHB chief, Berry Smutny, describing Galileo as doomed to fail."  

Often allegations made in Wikileaks cables are used by reporters as a kind of shorthand for situations where a foreign official is widely believed to be corrupt but there's little publicly available factual data to back up the claim. 

• For instance, reporting on the Paraguayn presidential race, the Times writes that "State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks revealed allegations that a bank under Mr. Cartes’s control was involved in money-laundering in 2007."
• A Los Angeles Times dispatch on the removal of a statue of Azerbaijani leader Heydar Aliyev from a Mexico City park quotes a cable in which "a U.S. ambassador compared his family to the Corleones of "The Godfather" fame."

Ironically, given the political goals of Wikileaks, the use of the cables by reporters often gives U.S. officials the final say on which foreign officials are bad guys.

But on the other hand, if the ultimate goal was to introduce a bit more transparency to international politics, Manning's actions have to be considered at least partially successful. 

A somewhat baffling finding from Pew. The drop-off since 2010 seems to be the result of Republicans who think the U.S. has weakened militarily under Barack Obama -- in 2010, 73 percent put the U.S. at number one. 

Today, Republicans and Democrats actually feel about the same, with 53 percent and 55 percent respectively saying that the U.S. military is No. 1. Independents, on the other hand, are less sure, with only 43 percent saying they think the U.S. has the most powerful military. 

(For the record, the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 13 countries combined.)

Hat tip: Michael Cohen

I realize that as the author of a listicle titled "10 TED Talks They Should Have Censored," I may not be in the best position to tackle this subject, but it seems like the snark and mockery aimed at the annual TED talks -- currently being held in Long Beach and Palm Beach California, and their TEDx offshoots around the world, has reached a fever pitch, and there's something of a pro-TED backlash brewing. 

Slate's Matthew Yglesias and Grist's David Roberts took to Twitter yesterday to express bafflement at all the TED-hate out there, and Roberts offered a pretty cogent defense of the TED phenomenon.

Alternative to casual internet user picking up idea from TED talk is *not* casual internet user being fully educated on a topic.

Like, if Average Joe wasn't burdened with that glib, simplified TED talk, he'd probably go read the original literature, right? 

This got me thinking about why it is that TED irritates so many people. The world "elitist" gets thrown around a lot to describe Chris Anderson's institution, which charges $6,000 for membership. But that's a hard label to pin on them given that they put all their talks online for free.

Some are also put off by the gee-whiz Silicon Valley buzzword culture surrounding TED. Take, for example, the names of of this year's sessions, which include "progress enigma," "beautiful imperfection," and "disrupt!" But let's be honest, anyone who's attended an academic or media conference has seen equally vague but more boring versions of these. Best not even to discuss the World Economic Forum, whose theme was "Dynamic Resilience" this year.

Some charge that TED has devolved into a glorified self-help seminar, a kind of Tony Robbins for geeks. (Sometimes featuring the actual Tony Robbins.) Yes, there's a certain amount of this, but you're just as likely to hear prominent scholars like Saskia Sassen, Jared Diamond, or Peter Singer sharing their latest work.

The biggest charge critics level at TED is that it glorifies "ideas" for their own sake, and rewards snappy presentation over rigorous thought or intellectual debate. 

The New Statesman's Martin Robbins writes:

The genius of TED is that it takes capable-but-ordinary speakers, doing old talks they’ve performed many times elsewhere, and dresses them up in a production that makes you feel like you’re watching Kennedy announce the race to the moon.

Evgeny Morozov, who, by the way, once gave a really good TED talk, takes it further:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void.

Nathan Heller took a similarly skeptical tone in his New Yorker dispatch from TED last year, noting that "More than half of Long Beach talks end in standing ovations."

It's certainly fair to say that not every idea presented at TED is "worth spreading," but quite a few are. I could just as easily put together a list of the "10 dumbest magazine articles" of last year -- hell, of last week -- but I wouldn't condemn the entire form. 

Ultimately, I suspect it's the style more than the content that annoys critics -- and often annoys me. There's a certain dorm-room "is the blue I see the same as the blue you see?" vibe to many TED talks that can be very grating. (The Onion Talks web series parodies this brilliantly with videos like "What is the biggest rock?" and "A future where all robots have penises.")

But again, the magazine comparison is useful. I wouldn't avoid reading an interesting-looking article in Vanity Fair because I'm not really interested in the Kennedy family, Marilyn Monroe, or Hamptons garden parties. Similarly, you don't really have to buy the TED ethos to be grateful for the fact that a slew of fascinating talks are available for free at the click of a mouse.

Over the past few days, we've been sharing interviews with the authors nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize. A literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs.

The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School.  

Next up is Thomson Reuters Digital Editor Chrystia Freeland. Here's the jury's citation for Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else:

"In Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland describes the evolution of a new global elite of unprecedented economic, social and political power. This mobile, denaturalized community affects the lives of billions as its wealth and values distance it from even the wealthiest of societies.  Freeland explores consequent issues of equity and accountability with fluency and intimacy, capturing the human dimension of a powerful and disturbing phenomenon."

You can listen to the interview here.

Last week, the Iranian government organized a conference on "Hollywoodism" in Tehran, at which an international group of activists, religious figures, filmmakers, and politicians discussed the ideology of Hollywood films. In particular, many of the participants argued that films like Argo promote an anti-Iranian, anti-Islamic agenda.

One of the more suprising participants in the event was Mike Gravel, the former two-term Alaska senator, best known for reading the Pentagon Papers into the public record, who ran in the Democratic and Libertarian presidential primaries in 2008. During the campaign, Gravel attracted attention for his anti-establishment views as well as his unconventional advertising. Since leaving electoral politics, he has spoken in support of WikiLeaks and called for a new investigation of the 9/11 attacks.

According to the New York Times, Gravel argued at the conference that it was  "'fundamental' to discuss the American movie industry’s ways of portraying Iran in order to prevent 'an insane war.'"

I spoke with the 83-year-old Gravel Thursday on the phone from his home in California about his impressions from the trip.

Foreign Policy: So who invited you, how did this come about?

Mike Gravel: I've been angling to go to Tehran for some time. I'd been there 40 years ago when I was in the Senate, for a few days, and so I was hoping I'd get a speaking gig where they could pay my way. I can't afford myself to take these kind of trips if they're not funded. So what happened, unbeknownst to me, this was the third Hollywoodism conference.

A fellow by the name of Kevin Barrett [the former University of Wisconsin professor and 9/11 truth activist] who I know, I had spoken on his television show, or radio show, frequently. He suggested to them that they invite me and it took off from there. I've been interviewed on average about once a week on PressTV and so my views are very well known over there and obviously quite safe for an invitation because I wasn't going to rock any boat.

FP: So as I understood it, many people at the conference were arguing that Hollywood movies like Argo are motivated by some kind of pro-Israel, anti-Iranian agenda. What did you think about that?

MG: There was various elements of extremes. I am very much a movie buff, and there's good stuff that comes out of Hollywood and there's bad stuff that comes out of Hollywood. You can take your pick. They take a different viewpoint. [The Iranians] operate from a religious viewpoint and they feel that some of the extremes of Hollywood has deteriorated human culture worldwide and so that's what they're trying to have this conference. They want to try and see if they can't develop an alternative to Hollywoodism and I don't think they can, I think that they will have an influence in their area of movies. Part of the deal was they gave us two, or I'd say 20, maybe more, movies to watch that were part of the conference so I'll be doing that for part of the time here to try to get a feel for how realistic they are.

FP: What were your general impressions of Iran?

MG: I can't tell you how warm the people were. How giving, considerate. And, the thing that was very surprising to me. If you follow American media, you think they're on the ropes. I gotta tell you, there's no question the sanctions are a discomfiture, but in the long run it is the best thing that's ever happened to Iran. It's made them totally independent, and forcing them to internalize their economic activity, to build machines. We rode for about 10 miles right through the heart of Iran where they're building an elevated highway. Boy, I'll tell you, that was an impressive work area. So the city is just like a normal thriving city. It has prosperity. You could tell by the traffic jams. The architecture's extremely attractive and imposing, and so what's happened to the country is it's being forced into independence. But that's exactly what a developing country does. You force domestic wares to be produced and then you turn around and you can export your product very competitively because your money is depressed, and so that's what's going on in Iran. And I don't think the United States has any inkling that what it's doing is counterproductive to arriving at a solution in that part of the world.

FP: Do you think war between the U.S. and Iran is inevitable?

MG: First off, I think it'll happen by accident. I equate what's going on today as to what was going on in February and March of 1914. Everybody's psyched up to the hilt, armed to the hilt. All you need is an accident, all you need is an accident to just blow the whole thing wide open. And that's my fear. When you see a poll, and the polls I've seen vary, but from 40 to 55 percent of the Americans would tolerate an invasion of Iran. Now, I don't think that toleration would last beyond 30 days, but when you see a situation like that and politicians read the tea leaves, they think they can do what they want in this regard.

Let me back up. The sanctions are illegal. There's nothing that I see that Iran ahs done that warrants the sanctions against them. If you want to sanction somebody, do it to Saudi Arabia who has funded the madrasas with Wahhabism, hatred of the gentiles. That's not the approach of the Shia. The Shia is the more benign wing of the Islamic world, and the Ayatollah Khamenei, the imam, is the, literally the pope of all the Shiitex in the world.

FP: The Obama administration publicly says it's trying to avoid war. Do you believe that?

MG: No, I think there's a great insincerity on part of the Obama administration unfortunately. Probably the best approach to this, the Imam has stated very clearly they are not going to pursue the acquisition of the bomb because the Koran dictates that they cannot do that. Now at face value, when you recognize that this is the spiritual leader of the country and the spiritual leader of the world of Shiites and he's making a statement that the Koran does not tolerate an atomic bomb. Now, if you took that at face value, then a lot of things become a little ridiculous, like when the President says ‘well we've got a red line here you can't cross.' They're not going to cross it, they've already said this repeatedly. And there's no intelligence estimates that indicate they're pursuing a bomb. None at all.

Of course, there's a lot of conflict with the IAEA and I don't know if you remember the memo, from the um, Amamo, the Japanese guy, the head of other IAEA to the ambassador in Austria, telling the ambassador that, oh, he's very grateful for the United States in getting the job and that he guarantees that American interests will be protected. Now, I don't particularly view that as an independent kind of a situation, not even fair, but by the same token, Iran has not violated anything of the IAEA. It has had investigators all over the place, and they're going to continue to do that.

FP: So who else did you have a chance to meet with? Did you talk to any officials?

MG: Oh yes, some, but I didn't' recognize who they were. I didn't meet Ahmadinejad. They were trying to put something together, and it sort of fell through. Obviously I didn't meet the Imam. But met other officials who were party to the conference because the whole conference is funded by the government, and so they were at various levels, cultural levels, and maybe not so cultural were monitoring the conference and I was interviewed extensively by the various networks. And I gave the same opinions that I have right now giving to you.

FP: Were you able to talk to any opponents of the regime?

MG: Nope. I know Trita Parsi here in the States but no, I didn't get any feel for any opposition. You know, we were staying at the hotel and then we would just go out to forays. My wife was with me and so she likes to see things. I would just rest in the hotel. You know, I'm 83 at this point, I don't need a whole lot of gallivanting around.

But, we were talking about meeting people from about 35 people from all over the world, motion picture people, writers, activists, and some were off the charts.

FP: What do you mean "off the charts"?

MG: Oh, their attitude toward Zionism. But that wasn't so much. They don't talk about the Jewish lobby, they talk about the Zionist lobby, in their terminology, which is interesting. I doubt there's any change that they'll be able to bring forth. But what they will bring forth is an independent, powerful nation able to defend itself, and will certainly be a leader of the non-aligned, and that's not always in the United States' best interests. And I resent a lot of our imperial attitude that we have to, we're the self-appointed policemen of the world. We police when it's our interests and if not, we don't police very well.

FP: Did it seem like the officials you met with were open to opposing views? Were they tolerant of dissent?

MG: Oh yeah. Yeah. They're very open. Because they know, from their public pinion, that they're operating in the blind. And, oh, there's one other thing I came away with that fascinates me. I, the last 25 or 30 years, I've focused my attention on structure of government, you know, how human beings in society attempt to govern themselves. I look for models. Like Switzerland for direct democracy. They have an interesting model. They have married a theocracy and a political system, and it appears to work. Now, all I can say is that's nothing to cause fear. What we should do is encourage models like this to see how they operate and see what contributions they can make to human governments.

FP: So you think we can learn from the Iranian political model?

MG: Oh yes I think we can. Not so much for ourselves. We say we've got separation of church and state. Well I've gotta tell you Joshua, when you pay your taxes, you are supporting all the churches in the United States. That's the nature of the beast. Since Islam is such a devotional kind of religion -- I mean I was in a couple of meetings where I had to sit there and meditate while they were praying -- this has something to tell us. They have a successful country, and make no mistake about it, they are a very successful country and are suffering as a result of our injustice.

Over the past few days, we've been sharing interviews with the authors nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize. A literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs.

The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School.  

Next up is Yale political scientist Paul Bracken. Here's the jury's citation for The Second Nuclear Age:

The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger and the New Power Politics by Paul Bracken urges an end to complacency about nuclear strategy post-Cold War. With deep personal experience in the field, Bracken examines regional nuclear theatres that barely existed under the 20th Century's duopoly, and makes the case for new paradigms of conflict management in a far more volatile nuclear game.  This is a cautionary treatise of profound potential significance in a newly multilateral world." 

You can listen to the interview here.