HeyJaredFrontlines and Backrooms
Frontlines & Backrooms is a documentary-style podcast about the world’s most complex conflicts — told with context, precision, and humanity.Hosted by journalist Vladimir Bobetić, the series blends lived experience, deep research, and unfiltered conversations with historians,…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
Alex Wellerstein | Who Controls the Bomb? (opens the original)
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A president can order a nuclear strike. Controlling what happens next is another matter. Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein joins Vladimir Bobetic to talk about what Truman really knew before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how military planners shape presidential choices, and why a smaller nuclear bomb offers no guarantee of control. We also talk about NUKEMAP, his tool for showing what a nuclear explosion would do to places we know. Wellerstein is an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technol
Elke Schwarz | War on AI Autopilot (opens the original)
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AI is already helping militaries identify targets, rank them and act at machine speed. Professor Elke Schwarz explains why the “human in the loop” may be little more than a fig leaf when operators have only seconds to approve a system’s recommendation. We discuss Palantir’s Maven, Claude, targeting in Iran and Gaza, private technology companies inside the kill chain, autonomous weapons and the danger of AI agents entering nuclear command. Elke Schwarz is Professor of Political Theory at Queen Ma
Ankit Panda | Managed Armageddon (opens the original)
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The world is entering a nuclear era with more players, fewer restraints, and a dangerous new confidence that escalation can be controlled. In the opening episode of Season 3, Vladimir Bobetic speaks with Ankit Panda, Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon. Can nuclear war begin by mistake? Does the nuclear taboo truly exist if nuclear states plan for nuclear war all th
Dina Matar | Western Media as a Propaganda Tool for Israel (opens the original)
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Recorded in December 2025, this conversation remains painfully current. Dina Matar, Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at SOAS University of London, speaks about the role Western media has played in shaping how Gaza is understood: the erasure of Palestinian history, the reduction of victims to statistics, the use of “both sides” language in a deeply unequal conflict, and the silencing of Palestinian journalists and voices. She describes this as epistemic violence — violence agai
Zachary Foster | Gaza Was Created as a Warehouse for Superfluous People (opens the original)
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Was Gaza inevitable? Historian Zachary Foster says no. In this episode, we discuss the origins of the Gaza Strip, the Nakba, why the expulsion of Palestinians should be understood as an ongoing process rather than a single historical event, and why the two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf. We also discuss the role of Western media, international diplomacy, and the political decisions that continue to shape the conflict today. Originally recorded in December 2025 and first re
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