April 5 – Dumb and Getting Dumber; A Nuclear Weapons Designer on Iran’s Nukes; The Filmmaker of “The Island President’

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the “Age of Ignorance”, the title of an article in the New York Review of Books by Charles Simic, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. We discuss his forty year experience in teaching college students, where he finds that students coming out of high school know less and less every year.

Part 2

Then we are joined by a former Secretary of the Air Force who headed the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office and was a Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy. A former nuclear weapons designer, Thomas Reed discusses his new book “Tehran Triangle” and the extent and nature of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Jon Shenk, the filmmaker of a new feature documentary “The Island President” that closely follows Mohammed Nasheed’s first year as president of the Maldives, an island nation gradually being swallowed by the Indian Ocean due to the effects of global warming. We discuss this heroic man’s effort to save his country and alert the world to the peril of climate change.