NH #765: Nuclear Humor?! Foreign Policy Expert Bill Hartung Relieves Ugly Nuke Facts w/Stand-Up Comedy + Reactor Radiation Mutations

This Week’s Featured Interview:

William L. Hartung

• William G. Hartung is a Foreign Policy Advisor with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and his work focuses on the arms industry and US military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force. Bill is the co-author, with Ben Freeman, of the recently released book: The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.
  
  But as Bill Hartung, he performs stand-up comedy on foreign affairs and nuclear issues at comedy clubs and for special events.
  
  Contradiction in terms? We think not…

Bill Hartung at West Side Comedy Club, February, 2025

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

• A different kind of Numnutz this week, on mutations in proximity to the nuclear reactor disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Kids, worms, and pigs — can people be far behind?

Links:

• Karl Grossman’s Enviro Close-Up: Saving Nuclear Power Plants to Cost $33 Billion
• Harvard Study: Proximity to nuclear power plants associated with increased cancer mortality
• Global spending on nuclear weapons topped $100 billion in 2024
• Forever Chemicals and Nukes: PFAS were originally used to contain nuclear chemicals, new book finds
• M.V. Ramana article: The Innate and Inseparable Ties Between Nuclear Weapons and Energy