On this morning’s Leonard Lopate Show, the authors of America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise talk about nuclear arsenal in Pakistan and the Middle East. According to David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, although the issue is getting some attention now, “it’s a little bit too late. The time to be worry about this was 30 years ago, when the United States was condoning Pakistan’s development of these weapons.” Armstrong and Trento give a scary outlook on how far-reaching the problem is, and “that there are repercussions we have begun to faced, yet.”

Listen to this interview below.

On a less scary topic, Graham Robb, author of The Discovery of France, joins Lopate to talk about how “as recently as 1890, large parts of France were divided by tribal allegiances; pre-Christian beliefs remained widespread; and French was even a minority language.”

Listen to this interview below.

Girls aren’t daring enough until they learn how to play with jacks and skip rope, or at least that’s what we gathered from watching this morning’s Today Show. Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, authors of The Daring Book for Girls (a companion to The Daring Book for Boys), talk with Meredith Vieira about what a daring girl is, and apparently it involves a lot of retro activities their moms used to play. “A daring girl wakes up every morning, and says, ‘this is an opportunity for fun and adventure,’” says the authors “She is brave…and she sticks up for herself, or sticks up for others.” (Did these three miss the boat on Girl Power, or what?) But the clip also talks about how girls no longer know how to play as children. Instead they are immersed in a world of cell phones and computers, and “need to learn not to grow up so quickly.” Since it’s Halloween, the authors explain how to tell a ghost story.

Somebody please introduce these people to a T-Mobile Sidekick. Watch the clip here, and listen to the authors on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show below.