Why This WWII Story Matters More Than Ever
Historian Garrett Graff sees no coincidence that democracy is backsliding globally just as we're losing the Greatest Generation — the people who actually fought fascism, liberated concentration camps, and understood how hard authoritarianism is to root out once it takes hold.
Eighty years after the atomic bombs ended WWII, Graff's gripping new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb captures over 500 oral histories from that pivotal moment — from teenage girls who unknowingly refined uranium in secret Tennessee factories to Japanese survivors who had no word for what had happened to them. But this isn't just history.
It's a reminder of extraordinary human ingenuity under pressure. The Manhattan Project pioneered the government-science partnership that gave us the internet, smartphones, and COVID vaccines — proving what's possible when we commit to ambitious collaboration. Yet Graff argues we're now dismantling the very systems that created our modern world, abandoning this proven model just as new global challenges emerge.
As current crises test our institutions, these stories show how previous generations built remarkable solutions from scratch. The generation that created NATO, the UN, and eight decades of relative global peace understood something crucial: that our prosperity and security aren't accidents, but achievements that required intentional effort and sustained commitment.
This conversation reveals both the fragility and resilience of the systems we've inherited—what we're forgetting about how difficult our current stability was to achieve, and the power we still have to strengthen rather than abandon what they built for us.
You can find Garrett’s many other books here. And you can find Garrett’s newsletter, Doomsday Scenario, here. Hope you enjoy the conversation. It was taped on August 14, 2025.
