A Personal History of the United States in 13 parts written and narrated by Alistair Cooke

On a July day in 1945 the first atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert. Three weeks later President Truman ordered the bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In two centuries America had gone from a small nation trusting in a rifle by the fireside to the 'shatterer of worlds.'
From a parade ground in Washington, where Marine recruits learn to be 'tough hombres in uniform,' to a single aircraft commanding 1,000 nuclear missiles, Alistair Cooke looks at the way warfare has changed as America has become a military mammoth. 'Will the technology of the unthinkable war,' he asks, 'grow so strong and subtle as to acquire a momentum all its own which mere men will be powerless to resist?'

(Rptd: Monday, 10.10 pm. This series is currently printed in The Listener)