Having published over 80 episodes covering everything from the Pentagon's bizarre history of stifling — and stoking — UFO panic to the massive surveillance system on our smartphones to how Afghanistan was lost to the Taliban — twice, In the Room is taking a hiatus, and a chance to think about what other topics and formats we might pursue. Stay tuned!

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Very quietly, and with little public discussion, the U.S. military has undertaken a $1.5 trillion project to modernize America’s nuclear triad – the planes, submarines and missiles that deliver nuclear weapons. It’s one of the biggest and most expensive projects in American military history – more costly, even, than the Manhattan Project. But how necessary is this modernization effort? And what message does it send to our nuclear adversaries?

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With the rise of technology in the late 1990s, a new national security threat quickly emerged. And the U.S. government had to find a way to protect itself — and its secrets — from foreign adversaries and cybercriminals. It needed the cutting-edge technologies coming out of Silicon Valley, from startups that had never done business with the government — and probably didn’t see much reason to. Enter In-Q-Tel, a non-profit venture capital firm designed to fund innovations that would meet U.S. intelligence needs. Twenty-five years later, the firm now sits on approximately $1 billion in assets. What is this strange, secretive VC firm? How does it work? And what value does it deliver to ordinary Americans? Sue Gordon, a career intelligence official and one of its founders, tells us all about it.

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Financial Times columnist Ed Luce says President Donald Trump might love trade wars, but he’d rather not engage in military ones. While he acknowledges there’s a lot that’s unpredictable, Luce is cautiously optimistic that with unpredictability there can also be opportunity, including for peace deals. So, what might U.S. foreign policy look like over the next four years?

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In his first term, Donald Trump did more to politicize top U.S. law enforcement institutions than any U.S. President, according to journalist David Rohde. Through interviews with numerous people inside Trump’s term-one FBI and Justice Department, Rohde carefully documented the impact on the FBI and DOJ during Trump round one. Join us for a conversation about what he thinks is coming in round two.

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The 39th president is remembered today with great affection. That hasn’t changed the popular perception of him as a failure while in office, weak and overwhelmed by events, and forever defined by the 444-day long debacle of the Iran hostage crisis. But is it time for another look—especially when it comes to the late president’s foreign policy record? Because with the passage of time, Jimmy Carter’s key initiatives abroad—from Central America to the Middle East, and with human rights at the center — are now looking more visionary by the day.

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The job comes with all sorts of risks and responsibilities plus exposure to a lot of violence and trauma — whether that’s out in a war zone or in the office, where analysts may work on cases involving horrific human rights abuses. All of that can take its toll. CIA Director William Burns has acknowledged the agency needs to do more to “take care” of its officers. You’ll hear how stressful and crushing intelligence can be from former intelligence officers who did it and from the CIA’s top psychologist and the CIA’s new wellbeing chief, about what can be done about it. (Originally published 1/20/2024.)

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In the annals of violent conflict, the decades of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland seemed especially intractable. As the long-running strife flares violently again between Israelis and Palestinians, two negotiators of the astonishing and lasting peace agreement in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, Monica McWilliams and John Alderdice, explain what it takes to get people to sit down with their enemies and whether the path to peace in Northern Ireland offers a way forward for the Middle East.

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American Presidents have been addicted to international sanctions for much of the modern era, as a way to influence the behavior of other countries. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria – all have been subject to U.S. sanctions over the past four decades. But these regimes remain as defiant of U.S. geostrategic goals as ever. This week we explore Russian yacht snatching, the impact of sanctions on the Iranian people, and how a once-obscure office inside the Treasury Department ended up putting a chokehold on national economies all over the world.

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In recent years, several high-profile abuses of power have fractured public trust in police and created a false tension between police accountability and public safety. But somewhere between a blanket defense of the police and “defund the police” lie effective solutions. Peter talks with three thoughtful, accomplished people who have worn the badge to find out what they’ve learned about what is broken in American policing, how to fix it, and whether some types of police work might be better left to someone else. (This episode contains strong language.)

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The FBI has had a cozy relationship with Hollywood since the days of the Bureau’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, working behind the scenes with filmmakers to burnish its image. We explore how the collaboration actually works, how extensive it is, and whether moviegoers are getting spoon-fed a sugar-coated version of the truth.

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