The car bomb
Wednesday 21 February 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Matthew Sweet talks to the cultural historian Mike Davis about the car bomb, a weapon of war from which there is no defence. First deployed in New York in 1920, the car bomb has influenced everything from patterns of behaviour to the design of cities themselves.
Playlist
On Night Waves tonight, Matthew Sweet delves into the history of political violence, terrorism and the ways of countering it.
He talks to the American historian Mike Davis about his history of the car bomb, beginning in 1920s New York.
With the release of a major new film by Robert de Niro about the early years of the CIA, Matthew is joined by two historians of the Agency to discuss its roots in the sophisticated liberal elites of America's East Coast.
Its early mission was to promote liberal Western values. So could this initial impetus could have taken the CIA in a more benign direction?
After a series of bombs were left at symbolic targets across London in the early Seventies by a group called the 'Angry Brigade', four people were imprisoned in 1972 for conspiracy to cause some of the explosions.
None has since spoken publicly about their activities, but now one of them, John Barker, joins Matthew to discuss why he thought crossing the line into political violence was justified in a democracy.
Plus, a discussion of what we are to do with all this history today. Do democratic states risk fighting old battles in their counter-terror strategy - or do we forget the lessons of the past at our peril?
