Making Sense - Sam Harris - #210 — The Logic of Doomsday

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:23.120 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:25.580 Okay.

00:00:26.220 Today, this is yet another occasion where I'm putting the whole podcast outside the

00:00:32.180 paywall.

00:00:33.220 We've been doing this a lot during the pandemic.

00:00:36.480 There are certain topics where I feel a responsibility to reach the widest possible audience, and

00:00:41.240 I seem to be doing podcasts on these sorts of topics of late.

00:00:45.080 So the topic today is the threat of nuclear war, and as you'll hear, I think the prospect

00:00:51.800 of our blundering into a nuclear war, either by accident or political miscalculation, is

00:00:59.940 probably the greatest risk we face, and its danger is compounded by the fact that almost

00:01:07.040 no one appears to be thinking about this risk.

00:01:09.860 So, this podcast is another PSA.

00:01:14.240 I'll just remind you that if you value what I'm doing over here, subscribing is what makes

00:01:19.120 that possible, and it's what helps this platform grow, and it's what makes it a place where

00:01:27.280 I can talk about anything.

00:01:28.940 Now, as chance would have it, we're coming up on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb

00:01:36.660 in about a week.

00:01:38.780 July 16th is the 75th anniversary of Trinity, the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the

00:01:46.300 Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

00:01:48.440 Whatever the merits or necessity of our building the bomb, and even using it to end the war with

00:01:56.020 Japan, that can certainly be debated, but what is absolutely clear to anyone who studies

00:02:02.840 the ensuing 75 years, is that these were 75 years of folly, nearly suicidal folly.

00:02:12.400 And, this has been a chapter in human history of such reckless stupidity, that it's been

00:02:21.760 a kind of moral oblivion, and there's no end in sight.

00:02:28.160 Rather, we have simply forgotten about it.

00:02:31.520 We have forgotten about the situation we are in every day of our lives.

00:02:36.860 This is really difficult to think about, much less understand.

00:02:43.200 The enormity of our error here is stupefying, in some basic sense.

00:02:50.620 It's like we were convinced 75 years ago to rig all of our homes and buildings to explode,

00:03:00.440 and then we just got distracted by other things, right?

00:03:04.820 And most of us live each day totally unaware that the status quo is as precarious as it

00:03:12.740 in fact is.

00:03:13.940 So, when the history of this period is written, our descendants will surely ask, what the hell

00:03:20.840 were they thinking?

00:03:22.160 And we are the people of whom that question will be asked, that is, if we don't annihilate

00:03:28.740 ourselves in the meantime, what the hell are we thinking?

00:03:35.200 What are our leaders thinking?

00:03:38.080 We have been stuck for nearly three generations in a posture of defending civilization, or imagining

00:03:47.220 that we are, by threatening to destroy it at any moment.

00:03:51.960 And given our capacity to make mistakes, given the increasing threat of cyber attack, the

00:04:01.160 status quo grows less tenable by the day.

00:04:04.980 The first book I ever read about the prospect of nuclear war was Jonathan Schell's The Fate

00:04:10.260 of the Earth, which originally came out in the New Yorker in 1982.

00:04:15.500 It's interesting that Schell's work here stands exactly at the midpoint on the timeline between

00:04:22.360 the world of today and the invention of the bomb.

00:04:27.360 So, 37 years had elapsed since the Trinity test when Schell wrote The Fate of the Earth,

00:04:33.620 and another 37 years and a few months and change have elapsed since he wrote that book.

00:04:39.760 If you haven't read it, it's a beautifully written and amazingly sustained exercise in

00:04:47.220 thinking about the unthinkable.

00:04:50.200 And I'd like to read you a few passages to give you a sense of it.

00:04:54.080 This is from the beginning, starting a few sentences in.

00:04:57.620 These bombs were built as weapons for war, but their significance greatly transcends war and

00:05:03.480 all its causes and outcomes.

00:05:05.600 They grew out of history, yet they threatened to end history.

00:05:09.100 They were made by men, yet they threatened to annihilate man.

00:05:14.800 They are a pit into which the whole world can fall, a nemesis of all human intentions,

00:05:20.700 actions, and hopes.

00:05:22.900 Only life itself, which they threatened to swallow up, can give the measure of their significance.

00:05:29.500 Yet in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on

00:05:34.240 the whole, to think about them very much.

00:05:35.820 We have thus far failed to fashion, or even to discover within ourselves, an emotional

00:05:41.980 or intellectual or political response to them.

00:05:44.820 This peculiar failure of response, in which hundreds of millions of people acknowledge the

00:05:50.100 presence of an immediate, unremitting threat to their existence, and to the existence of

00:05:54.680 the world they live in, but do nothing about it, a failure in which both self-interest and

00:06:00.440 fellow-feeling seem to have died, has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has

00:06:06.720 to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament, as this has existed

00:06:11.200 so far.

00:06:12.960 End quote.

00:06:13.420 So there, Shell gets at the strangeness of the status quo, where the monster is in the

00:06:20.480 room, and yet we have managed to divert our attention from it.

00:06:26.200 And I love this point he makes.

00:06:27.840 It's a violation both of self-interest and fellow-feeling.

00:06:33.060 Our capacity to ignore this problem somehow seems psychologically impossible.

00:06:37.940 It's a subversion of, really, all of our priorities, both personal and with respect to our ethical

00:06:45.520 commitments to others.

00:06:47.460 A little bit later on, he talks about this state of mind a little more.

00:06:52.220 Because denial is a form of self-protection, if only against anguishing thoughts and feelings,

00:06:58.380 and because it contains something useful, and perhaps even, in its way, necessary to life.

00:07:03.500 Anyone who invites people to draw aside the veil and look at the peril face-to-face is at

00:07:09.780 risk of trespassing on inhibitions that are part of our humanity.

00:07:14.060 I hope in these reflections to proceed with the utmost possible respect for all forms of

00:07:19.280 refusal to accept the unnatural and horrifying prospect of a nuclear holocaust.

00:07:25.280 So there, Shell is being more tactful than I'm being here, admitting that this denial is

00:07:31.140 on some level necessary to get on with life, but it is nonetheless crazy.

00:07:37.600 Year after year after year, we are running the risk of mishap here.

00:07:43.820 And whatever the risk, you can't keep just rolling the dice.

00:07:50.660 And so it seems time to ask, when is this going to end?

00:07:55.140 As Shell describes the prospect of nuclear war or nuclear accident, about as clearly as

00:08:03.720 anyone can, this is from later in the book.

00:08:07.240 Let us consider, for example, some of the possible ways in which a person in a targeted country

00:08:13.140 might die.

00:08:15.040 He might be incinerated by the fireball or the thermal pulse.

00:08:18.920 He might be lethally irradiated by the initial nuclear radiation.

00:08:22.680 He might be crushed to death or hurled to his death by the blast wave or its debris.

00:08:29.020 He might be lethally irradiated by the local fallout.

00:08:31.960 He might be burned to death in a firestorm.

00:08:34.500 He might be injured by one or another of these effects and then die of his wounds before he

00:08:39.280 was able to make his way out of the devastated zone in which he found himself.

00:08:43.340 He might die of starvation because the economy had collapsed and no food was being grown or

00:08:48.520 delivered.

00:08:48.840 Or because existing local crops had been killed by radiation.

00:08:53.020 Or because the local ecosystem had been ruined.

00:08:55.580 Or because the ecosphere of the earth as a whole was collapsing.

00:08:59.720 He might die of cold for lack of heat and clothing.

00:09:03.120 Or of exposure for lack of shelter.

00:09:05.620 He might be killed by people seeking food or shelter that he had obtained.

00:09:09.680 He might die of an illness spread in an epidemic.

00:09:12.320 He might be killed by exposure to the sun if he stayed outside too long following serious

00:09:17.820 ozone depletion.

00:09:19.100 Or he might be killed by any combination of these perils.

00:09:22.800 But while there's almost no end to the ways to die in and after a holocaust, each person

00:09:28.160 has only one life to lose.

00:09:30.180 Someone who has been killed by the thermal pulse can't be killed again in an epidemic.

00:09:34.580 Therefore, anyone who wishes to describe a holocaust is always at risk of depicting scenes of devastation

00:09:41.160 that in reality would never take place.

00:09:43.860 Because the people in them would already have been killed off in some other earlier scene

00:09:48.420 of devastation.

00:09:49.880 The task is made all the more confusing by the fact that the causes of death and destruction

00:09:53.840 do not exist side by side in the world, but often encompass one another in widening rings.

00:09:59.780 Thus, if it turned out that a holocaust rendered the earth uninhabitable by human beings, then

00:10:05.100 all the more immediate forms of death would be nothing more than redundant preliminaries,

00:10:09.140 leading up to the extinction of the whole species by a hostile environment.

00:10:12.920 In much the same way, if an airplane is hit by gunfire and thereby caused to crash, dooming

00:10:17.800 all the passengers, it makes little difference whether the shots also killed a few of the passengers

00:10:23.020 in advance of the crash.

00:10:25.060 On the other hand, if the larger consequences, which are less predictable than the local ones,

00:10:29.480 failed to occur, then the local ones would have their full importance again.

00:10:34.160 And then jumping a little further on here, there are two further aspects of a holocaust

00:10:38.780 which, though they do not further obscure the factual picture, nevertheless vex our understanding

00:10:44.380 of this event.

00:10:45.800 The first is that although in imagination we can try to survey the whole perspective scene

00:10:50.820 of destruction, inquiring into how many would live and how many would die, and how far the

00:10:56.080 collapse of the environment would go under attacks of different sizes.

00:10:59.480 And piling up statistics on how many square miles would be lethally contaminated, or what

00:11:04.520 percentage of the population would receive first, second, or third degree burns, or be

00:11:08.920 trapped in the rubble of its burning houses, or be irradiated to death.

00:11:13.200 No one actually experiencing a holocaust would have any such overview.

00:11:17.240 The news of other parts necessary to put together that picture would be one of the things that were

00:11:22.520 immediately lost, and each surviving person, his vision drastically foreshortened by the collapse

00:11:28.360 of his world, and his impressions clouded by his pain, shock, bewilderment, and grief, would see only as

00:11:35.560 far as whatever scene of chaos and agony happened to lie at hand, for it would not be only such

00:11:41.160 abstractions as industry and society and the environment that would be destroyed in a nuclear

00:11:47.240 holocaust.

00:11:47.880 It would also be, over and over again, the small collections of cherished things, known landscapes,

00:11:54.600 and beloved people that made up the immediate contents of individual lives.

00:12:00.360 The other obstacle to our understanding is that when we strain to picture what the scene would be

00:12:04.360 like after a holocaust, we tend to forget that for most people, and perhaps for all, it wouldn't

00:12:10.520 be like anything, because they would be dead. To depict the scene as it would appear to the living is to

00:12:17.160 that extent a falsification, and the greater the number killed, the greater the falsification.

00:12:22.920 The right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse, but from that

00:12:28.280 vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report. Anyway, the writing is wonderful,

00:12:35.960 and it's still an important book, 37 years hence. And in today's episode, I'm speaking to

00:12:45.000 a man who has been presiding over this impossible situation since nearly the beginning, because today

00:12:54.200 I am speaking with William J. Perry and also with his granddaughter, Lisa Perry. As many of you know,

00:13:00.600 William Perry has served in many capacities here with respect to our stewardship of nuclear weapons

00:13:08.040 and our navigation of the Cold War. He was the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering

00:13:14.840 in the Carter administration, and then he was Secretary of Defense under President Clinton. He oversaw the

00:13:20.760 development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal, and his offset strategy

00:13:26.760 ushered in the age of stealth and smart weapons and other technologies that changed the face of

00:13:33.560 modern warfare. In 2015, he founded the William J. Perry Project, outlining his vision of a world free of

00:13:41.400 nuclear weapons. And he's been trying to educate the public on how urgently we need to take practical

00:13:47.880 steps to reduce the danger of the status quo. He has a new book out called The Button,

00:13:54.520 The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. And The Button goes into this

00:14:02.280 terrifying history and the terrifying status quo. He's also an emeritus professor at Stanford University.

00:14:10.040 And as you'll hear, at 92 years old, William Perry is quite worried about our situation. And he

00:14:20.280 continues to work to convey that concern to the general public. I mentioned it in the podcast,

00:14:25.640 but if you haven't seen his video on the prospect of nuclear terrorism, which is only one facet of the

00:14:34.520 problem of nuclear risk, you really should see it. It's a great animation that brings home just how crazy our

00:14:43.000 situation is with respect to that variable alone. Also joining me today is Lisa Perry. Lisa is the

00:14:49.880 communications director for the William J. Perry Project. As I said, she's the granddaughter of

00:14:55.240 Secretary Perry. And she's now dedicated to helping sound this alarm about the modern threat of nuclear

00:15:03.080 weapons. And to that end, she has a new podcast titled At The Brink. You can go to atthebrink.org

00:15:11.240 or just download it in your podcatcher. And that podcast is well worth listening to. And it was a great

00:15:17.960 honor to talk to both Secretary Perry and Lisa Perry. And as you might expect, we discuss the

00:15:26.280 ever-present threat of nuclear war. We talk about the history of nuclear weapons, the bombing of

00:15:32.120 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the present threat of accidental nuclear war, nuclear

00:15:40.520 terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, so-called tactical nuclear weapons,

00:15:47.080 cyber security, the details of command and control, nuclear proliferation, some of the intermediate

00:15:54.520 steps we could take toward safety, the prospects of strategic missile defense, nuclear winter,

00:16:02.840 and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Secretary William J. Perry and Lisa Perry.

00:16:10.360 I am here with Secretary William Perry and his granddaughter, Lisa Perry. Thank you both for

00:16:20.840 joining me. Thank you. Yes, we're happy to do it. So, Secretary Perry, I've already told you I'm

00:16:27.080 going to stumble over your honorific. I'm going to default to calling you Bill, which you've already

00:16:32.040 assured me is inoffensive. So thank you for that. But you have a book coming out titled The Button,

00:16:38.760 The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. And you also have started the

00:16:46.040 William J. Perry Project at WilliamJPerry.org, the purpose of which is to educate the public on the

00:16:51.800 dangers of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. And we were just talking offline about how we've gone to

00:16:59.960 sleep on this topic. So I do want to get into the psychology of this with both of you. And Lisa,

00:17:06.760 happily, you have a new podcast titled At the Brink, which discusses your grandfather's work and the

00:17:13.400 ongoing dangers of nuclear weapons. And when that comes out, I will remind people, both through this

00:17:19.480 podcast and whatever other podcast I release at that point, that they should tune into it. Because I do

00:17:24.520 think this is probably still the most pressing issue of our time. And it is quite deranging to

00:17:33.640 recognize how little attention it is getting, even from people like myself who acknowledge that it's

00:17:41.160 probably the most pressing issue of our time. It's probably been the most pressing issue of

00:17:45.160 every moment I've been alive. And yet, most of my moments have been spent blithely ignoring this

00:17:51.320 issue. So I just want to welcome both of you. And perhaps we can begin with you, Bill. What is your

00:17:58.120 history of engagement with this topic? I have been involved as a consultant on nuclear issues dating

00:18:08.440 back to Eisenhower. And I've been personally advising presidents since President Carter.

00:18:15.720 So in the earlier administrations, I was an anonymous person working on studies. In later

00:18:21.560 administrations, I was not anonymous. Where would you have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

00:18:27.560 which is, you know, often thought to be the moment of greatest peril we've ever experienced? Did you

00:18:33.320 have a moment-to-moment experience of that? Or is that something that you... I did. It was, again,

00:18:38.680 it was an anonymous, well, but a very important role. I was called back before I ever knew there was a

00:18:44.520 Cuban Missile Crisis. Before we even heard that term, I was called to come back to Washington

00:18:50.520 to help out by the deputy director of CIA. And he asked me to head a small team. There must have been

00:18:57.320 six of us, I think, whose job was to study the intelligence that was coming in every day,

00:19:02.600 particularly the photographs from the overflights, but the communications intelligence as well.

00:19:09.080 And to write a report by the end of the day, which would assess whether or not the medium-range

00:19:15.400 missiles which were being deployed in Cuba were operational yet, or how long it would be

00:19:19.560 before they became operational. This report got to President Kennedy first thing in the morning

00:19:25.160 and helped him decide how much more time he had for diplomacy. So, it was a very important role in

00:19:32.200 that in the face of advisors of his who were urging an attack on Cuba, military attack, he was trying to

00:19:39.480 hold that off as long as possible to give diplomacy a chance to work. But he wanted to know how long he had

00:19:45.640 to do that, and so the purpose of this study we were doing each day was to basically advise him how

00:19:51.160 many more days he had for diplomacy. I didn't appreciate until very recently, I just recorded

00:19:57.560 a podcast with Fred Kaplan, who wrote a book focusing on the experience of each administration

00:20:05.240 that has engaged with our nuclear policy. And I wasn't aware of the degree to which Kennedy was

00:20:12.360 essentially being goaded to war, and the mistaken impression we got that he sort of stared Khrushchev

00:20:21.080 down and Khrushchev blinked. There was a sort of back-channel deal around pulling our nukes out of

00:20:27.560 Turkey, which is what de-escalated the crisis. And I think that wasn't revealed until 20 years later.

00:20:34.280 What lesson do you draw from that moment in history, and how has your thinking about nuclear weapons evolved since?

00:20:43.000 Well, I was close enough to what was happening that I believed, well, every day that I went into the

00:20:49.160 analysis center, I believed it was going to be my last day on Earth. I knew the president was being

00:20:56.440 pressured to take military action. I could see how dangerous the military action would be and how likely

00:21:02.760 would be to escalate. What I did not know at the time, and therefore the president did not know,

00:21:07.960 was that in addition to the medium-range missiles, which were not yet operational,

00:21:12.600 the Soviets had also deployed so-called tactical nuclear missiles. They were already there,

00:21:18.440 they were already loaded with nuclear warheads, and the military commander of that unit had the

00:21:24.760 authority to use them. So if Kennedy had accepted the advice of his military advisors to attack Cuba,

00:21:31.880 in particular, if he'd made an invasion of Cuba, our troops undoubtedly would have been decimated on

00:21:37.720 the beachhead with tactical nuclear weapons, and the general nuclear war would surely have called it.

00:21:42.600 Now, we didn't know that at the time. And so when Kennedy assessed that the likelihood of a Cuban

00:21:48.920 missile crisis erupting into a catastrophic nuclear war was one chance in three, he made that assessment

00:21:54.840 without the knowledge that those tactical nuclear weapons were already there and already operational.

00:22:01.160 So the situation was much more dangerous than he realized. I would assess the likelihood of

00:22:06.040 that ending a catastrophic war, knowing what I now know is better than 50-50.

00:22:10.920 And take me back to the beginning of our thinking about these weapons and their use. I mean,

00:22:19.480 I guess the real beginning is our first use of them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

00:22:24.200 Right.

00:22:24.440 At the time, how did you view our use of... I mean, I guess Nagasaki is harder,

00:22:32.760 or perhaps easier to dismiss as a misuse of nuclear weapons. But what did you think,

00:22:38.840 and what do you think about our use at Hiroshima?

00:22:42.280 Well, at the time, I can easily tell you what I thought then. I was a 17-year-old.

00:22:49.160 I was about ready to go into the army.

00:22:51.880 You would have been sent to Japan?

00:22:53.640 I was actually sent to Japan, but that was after the war was over. So a few months after the bomb

00:22:59.080 was dropped, I went into the army, and after basic training, went on to the army of occupation in

00:23:05.000 Japan. So I was wholly in favor of it at the time. It was only later that I began to see the

00:23:10.920 ramifications well beyond the quick ending of the war.

00:23:15.400 Right. We should remind people of the history here, because the war against Germany had already

00:23:21.560 been won. I mean, Hitler was already dead at that point. And this was really a story of ending the

00:23:27.960 war with Japan earlier than it would have ended otherwise. Really, I don't think, correct me if

00:23:34.360 I'm wrong, but I don't think there was any concern that we were going to lose the war with Japan.

00:23:38.760 But we were thinking we were going to save many, many American lives by ending it emphatically

00:23:45.800 with this first use of nuclear weapons. I just plead ignorance here. What was the justification

00:23:52.840 for Nagasaki? And why not let the implications of the bombing of Hiroshima have their psychological

00:24:01.640 effect? Why did we so quickly follow on with the bombing of Nagasaki?

00:24:05.640 Well, the outcome was never in doubt. What was in doubt is how many deaths would be resolved. We

00:24:12.600 required for that to happen. We had at the time an invasion force already on the way to Japan and

00:24:18.680 being assembled to go to Japan. It would have been an invasion force even larger than when we had

00:24:24.760 at Omaha Beach. So this would have been a big invasion, very costly invasion. That was one

00:24:31.000 point. Second related point was the Japanese army was not prepared to surrender. Even with invasion,

00:24:38.360 they were prepared to fight on the beaches, in the towns, in the hills, on the mountains,

00:24:44.440 fight to the death. So it would have been a very costly invasion in human lives. Not just,

00:24:51.000 we thought, of course, about American human lives, but there probably would have been millions of

00:24:54.440 Japanese deaths resulting from that, and a long, prolonged guerrilla warfare. So at the time,

00:25:01.560 and even to this day, I have no doubt that the alternative to dropping the bomb would have been

00:25:07.080 a very costly invasion. Even after we dropped the first bomb, the Japanese army was not prepared to

00:25:13.960 surrender. And even after we dropped the second bomb, the army was still not prepared to surrender,

00:25:20.360 and the surrender only occurred when the emperor did something that was totally unprecedented. He

00:25:25.800 intervened, and he went on the radio and announced the surrender. The army was still

00:25:31.160 opposed to surrender, and in fact, there was an aborted attempt to make a palace coup after he

00:25:37.000 announced the surrender. So the resistance to surrendering in Japan was very strong, and it was

00:25:45.080 by the most powerful group in Japan at the time, the Japanese army. So any assessment of the bomb

00:25:52.280 dropping has to be made with the understanding of what the alternative was. And we have pretty good

00:25:58.120 information then, and even better information now, on how recalcitrant the Japanese army was being,

00:26:05.640 and how unwilling they were to surrender.

00:26:07.480 I think it's also important historical context to understand. Truman didn't actually,

00:26:14.120 so when he was vice president, he was not informed about the Manhattan Project. He did not know about

00:26:20.920 it until he became the president. They told him that they had been working on this project,

00:26:26.760 and they had developed an atomic bomb, which came as quite a shock to him. And so when it was actually

00:26:33.640 the generals who brought forth this plan to Truman, saying, we have these weapons, and we have put

00:26:41.080 together this plan to attack these cities in Japan. And originally, actually, it was not Hiroshima who was

00:26:49.560 the first city that was chosen, and then they moved it to Hiroshima. But as historical evidence indicates,

00:26:58.040 they somewhat misled Truman to believe that they were targeting military targets, not specifically

00:27:05.240 civilian cities. So when Truman agreed to this plan, he thought that they were mostly going to be

00:27:11.080 targeting military targets. And just with the amount of communication and how long it took for

00:27:16.280 information to get out, it wasn't really until the Nagasaki bomb was dropped that they were really

00:27:21.960 understanding the numbers of deaths that were coming out from these incidences. And that is when Truman

00:27:27.800 actually went in. They had a plan to continue to drop bombs. They were going to drop more than just

00:27:34.120 Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And after Nagasaki and the reports were coming in of the, you know, hundreds of

00:27:39.560 thousands of deaths that Truman went and said, no more, I will not let you drop any more bombs, and took the

00:27:46.600 power away from the generals to have any authority over these weapons. And in fact, that is the history

00:27:52.520 of the beginning of what eventually would become presidential sole authority over nuclear weapons was

00:27:59.080 that transfer of military to civilian power and making sure that nuclear weapons stayed under civilian

00:28:07.960 control to make sure and try to take this power away from any potentially power hungry sort of military

00:28:15.000 members, which, as you know, you know, then sort of morphed into its own problem.

00:28:21.880 So we have just landed really in the center of the morass here because this is not an easy problem

00:28:29.640 to think about because we have already demonstrated the actual utility under certain circumstances of

00:28:36.040 having these weapons. In fact, it's even plausible to say that that lives were saved by the use of

00:28:42.440 the first atomic bombs in World War II. And we've already demonstrated our willingness, obviously,

00:28:48.920 to use them under certain circumstances. And as you point out, Lisa, the transfer to civilian control,

00:28:57.000 which makes so much sense in light of that first experience, is now its own enormous problem in the

00:29:06.200 presence of someone like Donald Trump, who's followed every moment of the day with the so-called nuclear

00:29:12.280 football. We're in the process of rethinking that or trying to inspire our society to rethink that.

00:29:18.440 And it's hard to find a line through this that is going to check all the boxes that we want to check

00:29:25.800 here or it's going to allow us to arrive at all the topics we want to arrive at in a systematic way.

00:29:30.600 But I mean, here's the general picture that worries me and that I'm getting from having begun

00:29:34.840 listening to your podcast, Lisa, and becoming aware of Bill's work and reading other sources here.

00:29:40.760 There's a logic of nuclear proliferation and deterrence, which seems somewhat inescapable

00:29:49.240 and diabolical because having nukes is the difference that makes the difference on the

00:29:55.000 world stage in so many cases. Countries just treat you differently once you have nukes.

00:30:00.520 They don't tend to invade you. You know, the reason why a country like North Korea or Pakistan or India

00:30:06.920 would want nukes or Iran now, it's not crazy for them to want these weapons because it's a fact of

00:30:13.080 the matter that this power matters. And deterrence only works between nations on the assumption that

00:30:22.040 a country will actually use its nukes. So the fact that we believe that nuclear armed countries will use

00:30:28.440 their nukes to respond to any significant aggression and, of course, any kind of nuclear first strike,

00:30:35.640 that's the psychological reality that gives the game theory its mode of force.

00:30:41.880 But this status quo, the fact that we have countries and individuals who have nuclear weapons on hair

00:30:50.920 trigger alert and with launch on warning protocols, and we have this demonstrated, at least professed

00:30:57.720 willingness to use these weapons under certain circumstances, is what makes the possibility of

00:31:04.280 stumbling into an accidental nuclear war so real. And I know, Bill, in your book, you write that actually

00:31:12.200 the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war is much higher than a war started in earnest because some

00:31:18.840 country will initiate a first strike on another. I don't know if you have a first point of purchase

00:31:24.760 you want to take on this problem, Bill, but it just seems to me that the status quo should really

00:31:30.520 be intolerable to us because we have a world that has been rigged to explode really based on mishap,

00:31:38.680 right, based on misinformation, based on the prospect of faulty radar or cyber attack or even the

00:31:46.120 derangement of a single individual. How's it that you think about the current moment? Because I'll just

00:31:51.400 add one more fact here. The doomsday clock that has been registering our alarm for, you know, 70

00:31:58.680 some odd years now is at its closest point to midnight than it has been at any point in history.

00:32:03.800 It's now 100 seconds to midnight in 2020. And in, you know, 1953, it was at two minutes to midnight,

00:32:10.040 and it was at around four to five minutes to midnight during most of the Cold War. So, you know,

00:32:15.240 according to the clock, we are at more risk than we've ever been. And yet, it seems to me that most

00:32:22.600 people have gone entirely to sleep on this issue. So, talk to us about what it's like to be on the

00:32:27.960 brink, Bill. The first point I would make is that I agree with the bulletin's assessment. And without

00:32:34.600 putting minutes or seconds on it, I would simply say that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today

00:32:41.320 is at least as great as it was at any time during the Cold War. And yet, almost no one in the public

00:32:47.480 understands that reality. So, that's just one important point. The second thing to consider is

00:32:56.280 we have assessed the danger for decades now as being the danger of a surprise attack on the United

00:33:05.320 States, what we called during the Cold War a bolt out of the blue. And we geared our policies and we

00:33:13.480 geared our force structure to deal with that threat. I believe the reality today and even the reality during

00:33:21.000 the Cold War was that was never the main threat. The threat has always been the danger of an

00:33:27.480 accidental war, the danger of blundering into a nuclear war, either through a political miscalculation

00:33:34.600 or through a technical error. We had several examples of each of those during the Cold War,

00:33:40.360 which happily we survived. One of them, of course, the most significant chance of a political

00:33:47.240 miscalculation with the Cuban Missile Crisis. And as we talked about earlier, I believe the chance of

00:33:52.600 that having erupted into an absolutely catastrophic nuclear war was probably better than 50-50.

00:33:59.000 There were other political miscalculations during the Cold War, but that's perhaps the most,

00:34:02.680 that's the poster child of them. Beyond that was the possibility of a technical accident. And we had at

00:34:09.560 least three false alarms in the United States that I'm aware of, and at least two in the Soviet Union

00:34:14.920 that I'm aware of. And any of those could have resulted in an accidental nuclear war. So the

00:34:22.680 real danger during the Cold War was not a bolt out of the blue. The real danger was blundering into

00:34:30.120 nuclear war. And I believe that that is the same situation today and with at least the same likelihood

00:34:36.520 today. Not that Russia or North Korea or Iran, you name the country, is going to

00:34:42.360 deliberately launch an attack against the United States, but that we will blunder into some kind

00:34:48.680 of a nuclear exchange with Russia or with one of the smaller powers.

00:34:54.360 Just to sort of demonstrate the level of randomness and really how dangerous and how likely we could

00:35:05.880 really just stumble into an accidental nuclear war. There's this really pretty crazy story of actually

00:35:14.040 what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was an incident at a air base in Duluth, Minnesota,

00:35:19.800 where it was late at night and patrols were patrolling the base. And it's in the middle of the

00:35:27.880 Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone was on very high alert at the time. And someone noticed that there was

00:35:34.440 someone trying to climb the fence into the air base. And they went in a panic and tried to set off the alarm

00:35:42.520 for an intruder. And they actually, they hit the wrong switch. And they instead set off an alarm,

00:35:49.560 which then notified the base to then launch their nuclear armed planes to start working towards a

00:36:00.360 possible attack. It turned out that it was a bear. A bear was climbing a fence at an air base

00:36:08.520 in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And something as simple as that could have stumbled

00:36:15.720 us into a nuclear war. And it's truly when we're at these moments, these politically charged moments,

00:36:23.320 when things are at their most scary, when it's the easiest for us to stumble, it's part of the reasons

00:36:29.880 why the fire and fury rhetoric from President Trump was so concerning. Because whether you believe he would

00:36:37.880 actually follow through or not, just putting out the notion that he might supercharges the atmosphere

00:36:45.400 for people to interpret things that they might not otherwise and to make decisions based on those

00:36:52.760 interpretations, which could really lead us to this escalating situation. I think the logic of

00:36:59.240 deterrence is pretty straightforward and is fairly solid. But part of the issue is that there are actually

00:37:06.600 some assumptions that we make about the situation that is in place for deterrence to hold up. And

00:37:14.840 some of those assumptions include, we assume that the people involved are rational actors. And we also

00:37:21.800 assume that everyone involved has accurate and complete information, which unfortunately, especially

00:37:29.080 in crisis situations, is not always true. And when you don't have full and complete information,

00:37:34.760 make decisions based on incomplete information, deterrence can fall apart.

00:37:41.000 Yeah. We're talking about human minds here, and human emotions, and human assumptions, and the

00:37:48.360 psychology of confronting risk. And just to unpack a little more what you said about the fire and fury

00:37:57.160 moment. So what we have there is President Trump threatening nuclear war. He's not the first president to do

00:38:05.000 that. Many have done that since the first and only time we used these weapons. It should be understood that we have

00:38:12.840 not renounced the option of a nuclear first strike. So the world is on notice that we and other nuclear powers are poised to

00:38:23.160 to use these weapons. It's our stated policy that, you know, under some circumstances, we will use them,

00:38:28.760 even in response to conventional aggression. And in Trump's case, he was threatening their use in response

00:38:37.080 to mere provocation, not conventional war making on the part of North Korea, but just further nuclear

00:38:44.680 testing or even just further verbal threats that move the line of bellicosity a little further.

00:38:52.360 But it's often thought that we would make an enormous gain, enormous step towards safety,

00:38:59.560 if we would renounce a first strike policy and had merely had a second strike policy. But as you look at

00:39:06.440 this, it should be clear that even if we had just a second strike policy, even if we told the world that

00:39:12.440 under no circumstances would we be the first to use these weapons, we would merely respond to an

00:39:18.760 attack upon us with a second strike. Even that policy leaves us open to an accidental nuclear war.

00:39:27.080 Bill, your book starts with a scenario where a fictional U.S. president gets bad information about

00:39:34.360 an incoming strike that he learns too late was bad information, and he launches a retaliatory strike,

00:39:41.080 which then becomes the real first strike to which the Russians respond with their retaliatory strike,

00:39:47.320 you know, more or less ending human history. So, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Bill, but it seems

00:39:51.880 to me that, you know, while it would be progress of a sort to get to a second strike policy, we still

00:39:57.480 have a time bomb on our hands. We still do, notwithstanding that I'm strongly in favor of moving to this

00:40:04.440 second strike policy. But before we start talking about the possible path back from the brink here,

00:40:18.200 maybe we should just talk about a few other terrifying concerns. Honestly, one of the most

00:40:23.240 terrifying pieces of media I've seen over the years was an animation that you put out, Bill,

00:40:30.360 now a few years ago on nuclear terrorism, which it doesn't really fit into this logic of proliferation

00:40:36.200 and deterrence in quite the same way, because any group that would do this is not, these don't tend to

00:40:42.520 fall into the rational actor category. And also, it wouldn't necessarily be a nation state against

00:40:48.920 which we could retaliate in response to an act of nuclear terrorism. But anyone who hasn't seen

00:40:54.360 this video needs to see it, I'll put a link to it on my website. But Bill, describe the scenario you

00:41:03.160 concoct for nuclear terrorists and just how destabilizing a very low-tech attack on us could be.

00:41:11.320 The scenario we imagined was a rogue group within a small country's nuclear program. This is a rogue

00:41:21.640 group that has access to the material, but is not under full control of the government. And they

00:41:28.280 build one nuclear bomb, ship it back to the United States, where their agents in the United States then

00:41:37.320 detonate it on Pennsylvania Avenue. The level of catastrophe of just one, let's say, Hiroshima-type

00:41:46.360 bomb is more than most people would ever imagine. You know, besides a hundred thousand or so people

00:41:53.240 casualties from this, there is the terror and the panic. In this case, it's in Washington,

00:42:00.920 the government is decapitated. And the conclusion from it is a level of catastrophe that's really hard

00:42:08.520 to imagine until you start going through the possibilities of a scenario like that.

00:42:12.760 So we made that video to dramatize the point of how catastrophic one small nuclear bomb could be,

00:42:24.680 and the danger of nuclear terrorism. The good news from all this is that the one

00:42:29.240 danger that we actually made some headway on in the last number of years is the one of nuclear

00:42:33.800 terrorism. President Obama instituted a program of getting all the nuclear powers together to take

00:42:41.480 steps to improve the safeguards on the fissile material. And I would say that whatever the

00:42:48.760 probability of a terror group getting a nuclear bomb was 10 years ago is substantially reduced because

00:42:55.320 of what he has done in that area. So there is one bit of good news in all this is that we have taken

00:43:00.760 steps, taken actions to reduce the likelihood of nuclear terrorism. The only real likelihood of a

00:43:08.360 nuclear terror group being able to get a bomb and make it go is if they could somehow get their

00:43:12.280 hands on the fissile material. If they could do that, it's easy to imagine how they might be able

00:43:16.680 to build a crude but effective nuclear bomb.

00:43:19.800 Yeah, yeah. Have you followed any progress or lack thereof in our ability to detect nuclear materials

00:43:28.280 coming into ports in shipping containers?

00:43:31.080 I don't believe we could count on being able to detect that. Put another way, if I were the terror

00:43:36.760 group, I would be pretty confident I could find a way of getting the fissile material in.

00:43:40.600 Right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in that video you talk about the prospect of

00:43:45.240 a group setting off one bomb and then saying, you know, we have 10 other bombs in 10 other cities,

00:43:52.520 you know, meet our demands or those go off too.

00:43:54.840 Yeah. In the video, they only had one bomb and they brag about, they threatened the use of other

00:44:01.960 bombs and the terror effect of that threat is as great as if they actually had them.

00:44:07.640 So the panic, not just in Washington, but all across the country, is very great. And the economic

00:44:14.520 catastrophe that results from that is very great.

00:44:16.360 Right. And you can look at the, just the changes that happened in our country after 9-11 and you

00:44:23.480 can just imagine and extrapolate how much greater that something like a nuclear terrorist attack could

00:44:30.040 be. I mean, there have been some experts who say, you know, this could be the end of our

00:44:33.960 constitution as we know it, that this would really challenge pretty much everything that we hold as

00:44:40.200 a nation to approach something like this. There is an upside to this though, which is that there are

00:44:48.120 things that we can do. And as my grandfather brought up, part of why we need to be having

00:44:54.600 dialogues with countries like Russia, no matter what is happening in other realms in politics,

00:45:00.680 we need to continue to have dialogues with all nuclear nations, Russia in particular, because of how

00:45:07.720 much this is an issue and that we cannot address the threat of nuclear terrorism as a single country.

00:45:14.600 This is a global issue and particularly nuclear powers need to be the most adamant to work on this

00:45:21.160 because they have the materials, they have access to the materials, they need to make sure that they

00:45:25.960 are securing these materials because it is quite a intense endeavor to, to process these materials.

00:45:33.720 It is not simple. It's not something that can be done casually. So generally when you're talking

00:45:39.400 about terrorists getting their hands on fissile material, it's going to be coming from somewhere

00:45:44.760 else. They're not going to be generating it themselves. And if it's coming from somewhere,

00:45:49.240 it's coming from, you know, a refinery that, that is established and there are ways to track that.

00:45:53.960 And that is, you know, what came down to with the Iran deal is that despite all of whatever critics

00:46:00.600 may say, there are ways to track these things and then they're quite robust, but we need to have

00:46:06.600 a global cooperation to make sure that everyone is doing their part to secure these materials and to

00:46:15.400 make sure that they are staying out of the hands of bad actors. But that requires dialogue, which

00:46:21.880 unfortunately in our current political environment has pretty much gone away, particularly between the

00:46:27.480 U.S. and Russia. And that does leave us more open to this sort of situation.

00:46:33.320 What was your views about our rescinding the, the Iran nuclear deal or stepping out of it ourselves?

00:46:41.160 It was a major step backwards. We were gaining some degree of nuclear security through the Iran,

00:46:48.920 the treaty we had with Iran or the agreement we had with Iran. And we just walked away from it. We

00:46:54.680 walked away from it because the agreement we had did not include restrictions on other things that

00:47:00.520 Iran was doing that we didn't approve of. And I understand why we were concerned about those.

00:47:08.280 But because an agreement did not do everything, doesn't mean we should give away what it did do. And we,

00:47:14.840 what we did give away was the ability to constrain the nuclear program. That was, I think, a serious mistake.

00:47:20.760 Hmm. What about the argument that we should just unilaterally disarm or at least declare that

00:47:31.240 there's really no scenario under which we would use these weapons? These can no longer be viewed as

00:47:37.400 weapons of war, given the logic of deterrence. I think we could take significant steps in that

00:47:47.720 direction. Not all of the steps that needed, but some of them. One in particular, when the last year

00:47:54.040 or so of the Obama presidency, he, or the second term of the Obama presidency, he was planning to reduce

00:48:02.920 our nuclear stockpile unilaterally down to a thousand weapons, that is the number of weapons deployed.

00:48:09.720 We had a treaty which limited it to about 1600. And he said, we don't need 1600s. And so rather than going

00:48:16.120 through the details of a new treaty or agreement with Russia, he just unilaterally said, we're going

00:48:21.720 to drop them to a thousand. That was a sensible thing to do, whether or not Russia followed suit,

00:48:27.880 which was the least of possibility. But he got so much static on that that he backed away from it.

00:48:34.120 So yes, it's a good idea, but politically in the United States and then probably in Russia as well,

00:48:38.520 politically, it's very difficult to do if it's not matched by what Russia's doing. And we didn't

00:48:44.920 have any agreement that Russia would go down to a comparable amount. So a good idea, but politically

00:48:52.120 very hard to do. Right. Well, I guess just in thinking about this, it's, I mean, there is something

00:48:59.080 fatalistic or even nihilistic about one's cast of thinking when one kind of goes through these

00:49:05.880 scenarios. But if you just imagine the case of the worst case scenario, Russia decides to execute a

00:49:14.680 full first strike against us and we're informed of it with a dozen minutes to spare. What is the

00:49:23.640 rationale for retaliating under those conditions? Why would any president or any administration want to

00:49:32.120 pointlessly kill hundreds of millions of people on the other side simply because we're all about

00:49:40.200 to die? You're essentially doubling the likelihood that you'll usher in a full nuclear winter and erase

00:49:49.560 human history entirely. If we could think ourselves to the point of realizing that it wouldn't be tempting

00:49:55.480 to use these weapons even in the case where they seem to most cry out for their use, at least the

00:50:03.880 legitimacy of their use, what is the point of having them? What you're describing is what would certainly

00:50:10.440 go through the mind of any president if he saw an attack heading towards the United States is exactly,

00:50:15.960 I think, what he would be thinking. And he might very well decide not to launch the retaliatory

00:50:21.400 tech, even though he was capable of doing so, for the reasons you've described. But of course, for deterrence

00:50:29.480 to be effective, each leader, the leader of each country has to take the posture that he's going to do

00:50:36.120 that. Yeah. And it has to be a credible posture so he cannot allow any doubt to creep into the other side's

00:50:42.840 of his mind. But no matter how firm he is before this happens, no matter how clear he is of what he

00:50:49.400 will do before this happens, if the attack has actually taken place, he would certainly go through

00:50:54.680 that line of thinking. Any human being who is the president of that state would certainly have to

00:51:01.480 consider the possibility of not responding. But I think the more fundamental point, Sam, is that

00:51:08.600 all of our thinking on this has been oriented around the possibility which is exceedingly remote,

00:51:16.200 which is that the other side is going to launch, see some political advantage to launching a major

00:51:23.160 attack on us. You know, hundreds of nuclear weapons going off in the United States. What is the advantage

00:51:29.320 of the other country to do that? What is the reason that he would do that? It just seems to me to be

00:51:34.440 almost an irrational viewpoint, and yet our whole deterrence, our whole force posture, all of our

00:51:41.720 policies are based on that as being the threat. Whereas in fact, the real threat is a threat of

00:51:48.840 blundering into a nuclear war through an accident or through a political miscalculation. That certainly

00:51:54.200 was true all during the Cold War, and it's also true still today. And because we've made the wrong

00:52:02.440 assumption of what the threat is, we've taken a whole set of actions in terms of policy, in terms

00:52:08.040 of force structure, and that designed to deal with this non-threat, which in fact aggravate,

00:52:16.040 make worse, the real threat we have, which is a threat of an accidental or blundering into a war.

00:52:21.720 What incremental steps could we take that would importantly change the risk calculus? I mean,

00:52:29.160 I think one idea that I've heard you discuss is just removing our land-based missiles. Maybe if you

00:52:36.440 think that's a good idea, talk about that, and then let's talk about any other good ideas that are out

00:52:42.760 there. Well, ICBMs are by almost, by definition, a first-strike weapon because they are in low-known

00:52:51.640 locations, and it can be taken out. And so the advantage, you would use them as a first-use weapon,

00:52:59.720 not in a response weapon, because they would be taken out before you could respond.

00:53:05.480 So that makes them exceedingly dangerous because of their vulnerability. If the president is alerted

00:53:14.360 to an attack coming on the United States, he would have to assume that that attack is going to be,

00:53:19.000 the first wave of that attack is going to be directed against their ICBMs. And therefore,

00:53:23.480 he'd be faced with the decision as to whether to launch those ICBMs before the attack impacts.

00:53:31.720 And if he decides not to launch them, he risks losing all of the ICBMs. If he decides to launch them,

00:53:40.360 he risks having accidentally started a nuclear war if, in fact, the alert he got was a false alert.

00:53:45.720 So the ICBMs are, first of all, a first-strike weapon, which we don't plan to do,

00:53:52.440 and secondly, uniquely dangerous because of the possibility of leading to an accidental war.

00:53:57.960 For that reason, I think whatever level of nuclear forces we think we need for deterrence ought to be

00:54:06.440 put into the submarine forces and air forces, and we should let the ICBM force phase out before it

00:54:12.920 actually precipitates this accidental war.

00:54:16.440 Mm-hmm.

00:54:17.240 And the decision that my grandfather was talking about, if the president were to be alerted that

00:54:22.840 there is an attack underway, the time frame for that decision is roughly on the minute value of

00:54:30.280 five to ten minutes. And mind you, you know, this could be in the middle of the night, woken up,

00:54:36.120 the president coming out of bed saying, there are missiles on the way, you have five to ten minutes

00:54:42.120 to decide whether you use our ICBMs to launch a retaliatory strike, or we lose all of those ICBMs.

00:54:51.080 And it's really, it adds to this level of tension and this level of risk that you would insert into

00:54:59.640 this situation that really seems untenable to maintain that situation. And that's an issue that's

00:55:05.800 not an issue with any of our other, any of our other nuclear weapons, our land, our air and sea

00:55:12.600 missiles, since those are generally considered in moving around in different locations and wouldn't be

00:55:18.360 able to be so susceptible to a first strike.

00:55:21.080 Mm-hmm.

00:55:22.280 That, that danger is not academic to me. Many years ago, many decades ago, when I was the

00:55:28.120 Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, I got a phone call in the middle of the night,

00:55:33.240 about 3 a.m. This was 1979, I believe. Phone call in the middle of the end when the voice on the other

00:55:40.040 end identified himself as the watch officer at the North American Air Defense Command. He said his

00:55:45.640 computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. He quickly

00:55:53.960 went on to explain that he was convinced his computers were in error, and he was calling me.

00:55:59.320 I was the technical person in defense upon it. I wasn't in the chain of command at the time.

00:56:03.720 He was calling me to see if I could help him figure out what went wrong with his computers.

00:56:07.480 But before he called me, before he knew it was a false alarm, he did call the president. The call

00:56:14.680 went through to the president's national security advisor, who was Brzezinski. And Brzezinski waited

00:56:20.520 for a few minutes before waking the president. And before he actually got to the president to awaken him,

00:56:26.760 he got the second call telling him there was a false alarm. But he was within a minute or two

00:56:31.240 of waking the president, Carter, who would have then had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch

00:56:37.400 our ICBMs. In the middle of the night, no opportunity to consult with anybody, no way of getting context

00:56:44.600 on what was going on, no way of assessing whether this was correct or not correct. He would have to

00:56:49.480 make that decision. No president, no person should have to make a decision like that. But it's completely

00:56:55.400 because of the vulnerability of our ICBMs to attack.

00:57:00.440 It's interesting. As I hear these details, I'm just cast back onto my underlying concern here,

00:57:07.000 which is that I feel like we are ill-equipped to have an appropriate psychological response to how

00:57:17.000 insane this system is that we've built. We're now into the third generation of

00:57:26.840 human beings who have built and maintained the system of self-annihilation, which in the limit

00:57:36.840 must approach a probability of one of malfunctioning. I mean, we're just living year after year

00:57:43.320 in this completely untenable circumstance. And yet, the insanity of it, the masochism of it,

00:57:52.200 is hard to keep in focus. As much as I'm paying attention to nothing else in this conversation,

00:57:59.640 I know I'm going to go on with the rest of my day, you know, after we get off the line. And other

00:58:05.080 things will capture my attention and be far more compelling to me than this problem, which I can do

00:58:10.920 very little about. And I can do more than most people about it by having conversations with people

00:58:16.440 like yourselves. There's a kind of moral paralysis around this because this is unlike so many other

00:58:24.600 threats to our survival. This is completely self-imposed. We're having this conversation

00:58:31.640 in the context of coronavirus making its progress around the globe and terrifying everybody. And that's a

00:58:38.120 real problem that we didn't invent and that we are not sedulously maintaining. And it's the solution of

00:58:46.920 those sorts of problems that should draw all of our ingenuity and energy. And yet, we have this other

00:58:54.520 problem. You'd think it would take, you know, either the real existence of Satan or, you know, some

00:59:01.400 diabolical super-intelligence to mislead us into a place of being this idiotic with how we've prioritized

00:59:09.720 our values. We're here, we're stuck here, and we can't find a way out. I don't know if you have

00:59:16.440 anything to say in response to that. I'm just kind of dumbstruck by the fact that this is such an enormous

00:59:23.320 problem, it is so unnecessary, and yet it is also difficult to keep in view.

00:59:29.960 So, I do have something to say about

00:59:32.120 that. First of all, I agree with your assessment of how serious and how idiotic the problem is.

00:59:39.160 But I do not agree with your assessment there's very little you can do about it.

00:59:43.400 It's the view that people have that they can't do anything about it that has got us in the fix

00:59:47.400 we're in today. There are things you can do about it. In fact, this podcast is one of those things.

00:59:54.040 The reason we have the problem is an education problem. People do not understand how dangerous

00:59:59.080 it is. The political leaders do not understand how dangerous it is. And therefore, we continue

01:00:03.880 proceeding down the path with policies that allow us this dangerous situation to continue.

01:00:10.200 There are a number of things we can do about it. Concrete, specific things. There are political

01:00:14.840 actions which no one of us can take. But if we can educate the public and educate the political

01:00:20.600 leaders, then they can take those changes which would greatly reduce. Simple changes which would

01:00:25.400 greatly reduce. For example, ending the presidential sole authority, prohibiting first use, prohibiting

01:00:31.160 launch on warning. All of those things which are easy to do could make a big difference in the danger.

01:00:37.800 And you and I can take actions through education that can lead to the public view, state of mind,

01:00:46.040 which could create the environment in which the politicians could take those actions.

01:00:50.600 It's part of why I got so invested in this when my grandfather started his foundation to start

01:00:57.400 working to educating the public on these issues. I was so inspired because, as you said,

01:01:03.400 I am part of the so-called millennial generation. And despite who my grandfather is, I really didn't

01:01:10.760 understand that these were issues that were relevant today, that these are modern issues,

01:01:16.520 that these are something that I needed to worry about. And when I started to grasp the scale and

01:01:22.120 the severity of what was really happening around me, I couldn't do anything but try and do something

01:01:28.760 about it to try to raise the alarm on it. That is why we started our podcast. And that's sort of the

01:01:34.600 focus of what we're talking about is not just diving into what are the specific issues. Let's understand

01:01:43.000 how we got here, what they are, but also talking about what are concrete solutions that we can start

01:01:49.480 working towards to reduce the danger. Because I think one of the things that happens when we talk about

01:01:55.800 nuclear weapons in particular that comes up a lot in the dialogue about this issue is people tend to

01:02:01.320 have this sort of all or nothing approach. And it's understandable. It's this really overwhelming

01:02:08.840 concept. It's hard for us as humans, for our minds to grasp the level of devastation, the level of

01:02:16.120 destructive power that nuclear weapons have. And it's much easier for us to just shut them out than it is

01:02:22.280 to think about what it is that we have created here. But the truth is, is that there are incremental

01:02:29.480 things that we can do to start to lower the risk. And that is actually very worthwhile in doing. It is

01:02:36.360 very worthwhile in taking the time to push for these changes. And in fact, it may not seem like it, but there

01:02:42.200 have been things that have happened over the decades since nuclear weapons were invented that have lowered the

01:02:47.880 risks. And it's just a matter of need to bring the attention back to these issues so that we can

01:02:52.840 continue to push for those things. And one of the things right now that is so concerning to me is that

01:02:58.920 because we do not have this general public education about this as an issue, there are things that are

01:03:03.960 happening in the background that we are doubling down on nuclear weapons because no one is standing up

01:03:10.760 to say, no, we do not want this. We do not accept this particularly. And unfortunately, this actually

01:03:16.760 happened under the Obama administration is that he approved what is so-called the nuclear modernization

01:03:23.000 program. He approved this as a way to get the new START deal passed. And unfortunately, as good as the

01:03:30.120 new START deal is, and I'm glad that he was able to get that passed, the fact that he pushed through

01:03:35.560 this nuclear modernization plan, I think is going to be largely a negative. What the nuclear modernization

01:03:42.280 plan is doing is taking all of our older nuclear arsenal and updating them. But it is more than that,

01:03:51.000 because understandably, it does make a lot of sense. And it is very smart to make sure that if we

01:03:57.240 are going to have nuclear weapons, that we make sure that those weapons are in strict operational shape,

01:04:03.800 that they are in the best operational shape that we can make them to be. However, what is happening

01:04:09.720 is that we are basically rebuilding a Cold War arsenal without ever questioning whether we should

01:04:16.900 continue to have any of these weapons, when this is really the perfect time to say, let's look at what

01:04:22.920 we have and really question, maybe we could do better with less. Maybe we could reduce and get rid of

01:04:29.480 our ICBMs, just let them go into the trash heap, let them phase out. Maybe we could, you know, lower

01:04:37.320 the number of weapons that we have overall. And in fact, as part of this nuclear modernization plan,

01:04:42.520 the Trump administration has tacked on to it. And we are now developing so-called lower yield tactical

01:04:49.560 nuclear weapons, which are particularly concerning, because there is this thought and this fear,

01:04:56.200 fear, and I think it's a very founded fear, that having a lower yield nuclear weapon lowers the

01:05:02.760 threshold for our military believing that they could use these weapons in a tactical and military

01:05:08.680 sense. And as many experts will say, there is no understanding of when you use any nuclear weapon,

01:05:16.440 whether it is a so-called tactical nuclear weapon or a full warhead, whether that would not escalate to

01:05:23.980 a full-blown nuclear war. And of course, to give you context, these tactical nuclear weapons are

01:05:29.780 roughly, you know, eight to 10 kilotons, which is on par with a Hiroshima style nuclear bomb. So these are

01:05:36.740 still incredibly disastrous, devastating weapons. And this is the sort of thing that we are slipping

01:05:43.940 into because we do not have the public awareness and that political pressure to start changing things.

01:05:50.640 There's really not too many people in our elected government right now who are fighting for these

01:05:55.720 things. There are a few who are educated and are fighting, but they don't have enough allies to

01:06:00.580 really make much happen. There is, in fact, actually legislation. There is a no first use legislation

01:06:06.800 that has been put forth. There is also a limiting presidential sole authority legislation.

01:06:13.400 Congressman Ted Lieu and Edward Markey have put forth legislation that would remove presidential

01:06:22.140 sole authority to launch nuclear weapons first without the approval of Congress. It does allow for

01:06:28.460 a president to be the sole decider in the event of an attack to allow for that safety scenario, but it

01:06:34.680 would remove what is currently our U.S. policy, where the president and the president alone has the power

01:06:41.620 and complete authority to launch a nuclear weapon without any checks or balances. And those are

01:06:48.180 things that we can do concrete today, right now, to lower these risks, to start to work towards a

01:06:55.080 world in which eventually maybe we don't have nuclear weapons anymore.

01:06:58.900 Can you see the possibility of getting rescued by new technology here? I mean, what one idea that,

01:07:06.560 I mean, perhaps other people have had it and spoken about it and I'm just not aware of it,

01:07:09.800 but what if our cyber war capabilities became, you know, suddenly decisive and we could just

01:07:17.680 turn out the lights and zero out the financial system in a target country? And in response to that,

01:07:26.060 we decided, okay, we're getting out of this nuclear game, you know, we're never going to launch these

01:07:30.720 weapons, but threaten us with those weapons, we'll turn your lights out. Is there any rescue that could

01:07:36.660 come from a lateral move here that would take us out of the standard logic of deterrence?

01:07:42.840 I do not believe so. I think just the opposite, that the new technology, for example, cyber, aggravates

01:07:51.620 rather than mitigates the threat. The cyber could be used by a rogue nation or by a malignant

01:08:03.160 third party to interfere with our command and control or Russia's command and control. So as I

01:08:10.980 see it, it increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch rather than, and so to me, the cyber

01:08:19.700 is a problem and not a solution.

01:08:21.960 Hmm. I want to just remind everyone of the human element here because the current scenario is that

01:08:29.940 this is for the president to decide and the clock in many of these cases is ticking very quickly. And

01:08:38.160 so you have, you know, Carter being woken up in the middle of the night or almost woken up and he

01:08:43.040 would have had minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs. Is it true, Bill, that this could be

01:08:48.820 apocryphal, but I remember hearing that Reagan thought that our ICBMs could be recalled after launch.

01:08:56.060 Is that true? Has any president actually believed that?

01:08:59.540 I don't know if that's true, but it's a certainly plausible theory because you would think we would

01:09:06.520 have that capability. And in fact, we have decided not to have, deliberately decided not to have that

01:09:13.120 capability because of the fear that somebody might, some, again, some malignant person after we launched

01:09:20.060 might send up a signal to deactivate the nuclear warheads. So whether that was a good reason or

01:09:29.680 not a good reason, we do not have that capability. So once we launch them, they are gone. Now it's

01:09:35.500 reasonable for people to believe that we would have a recall capability or destruction capability,

01:09:40.500 and therefore it's quite possible that Reagan actually believed that for a while. But I'm sure

01:09:44.220 somebody would have set him straight on it if he did.

01:09:47.980 Yeah, but obviously the current occupant of the Oval Office doesn't really advertise his

01:09:53.840 eagerness to fill in the blank spots on his map of what's going on. And that's married to a claim

01:10:01.380 to understand everything, no matter what the topic is before him. And none of this inspires confidence.

01:10:07.400 And I think even his supporters would imagine that he knows less about the details here than

01:10:16.700 probably any occupant of the Oval Office before him, right? And so you can imagine, you know,

01:10:22.880 he's being given the prospect of using, you know, tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons

01:10:29.800 and never even bothering to understand that, at least as you say, these weapons are as big as what

01:10:38.220 we dropped on Hiroshima. Like the idea of just using these on the battlefield in Eastern Europe

01:10:43.620 in response to some provocation, and the logic or lack thereof by which you arrest a slide into a

01:10:50.180 full-scale nuclear war having used them. Even his supporters, I think, can't have any confidence

01:10:56.540 that he has thought through any of this or upon being forced to think it through with the clock

01:11:02.800 ticking will be especially good at it. Who's happy with the status quo here? It seems hard to change

01:11:09.580 the status quo. Who's making it hard to change? I have to say that I share your concerns there,

01:11:15.960 but I've also been concerned about other presidents through the years as well.

01:11:19.700 So anytime you have a president that has a psychological problem, anytime you have a

01:11:26.940 president who's into heavy drinking, anytime you have a president that's taking medication for

01:11:32.740 whatever reason, President Kennedy, for example, has taken heavy medication to alleviate the pain

01:11:37.840 he suffered. And we have no way of knowing that that could have caused an impairment of his thinking,

01:11:44.040 but it's conceivable. We do know that Nixon was into heavy drinking in the last month or so of his

01:11:50.060 presidency, and that would be a very substantial problem. So while I'm particularly concerned about

01:11:58.620 the problems you described with President Trump, I really do not want any president to have the

01:12:03.600 sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Yeah. Yeah. Although, as Lisa pointed out, this was

01:12:09.140 considered progress when we lifted it from the hands of the military-industrial complex.

01:12:16.160 Well, we took it from the military, and that was the right thing to do.

01:12:19.240 Right. Why does it have to be with just one civilian? Why can't it? We have, when we declare war,

01:12:25.420 according to our constitution, it requires an act of Congress. The founders believed that declaring war

01:12:31.260 is such a consequential act that it should require, there should be impediments put in the way to doing

01:12:36.320 it, and then no single person should make that decision. And certainly, launching a nuclear attack

01:12:42.120 on another country is an extreme version of declaring war.

01:12:48.620 Right. But then how would this apply to a retaliatory strike? Because if we only have 12 or, you know,

01:12:53.920 the outside 30 minutes to get our act together?

01:12:56.760 The reason we have evolved such a dangerous set of policies is because we have believed that the

01:13:03.120 threat was a surprise attack from the Soviet Union originally, and now from Russia, a surprise attack

01:13:09.940 against the United States. And therefore, all of our policies, including how we respond to that,

01:13:15.220 have been based on that theory. And given that, then the idea of having a single person make the

01:13:21.660 decision and make it quickly makes some sense. But if you take away the necessity to make a decision

01:13:29.340 in five minutes, if you say, we have an hour to make the decision, or a day to make the decision,

01:13:34.960 or a couple of days to make the decision, then having a single person make that decision makes no sense at

01:13:40.620 all. And I think I want to illustrate just how scary our presidential sole authority system is,

01:13:48.280 is that right now, the way that the U.S. system works, partly, you know, in that mode to respond

01:13:55.800 to this threat of a potential bolt out of the blue, the president can order a launch of nuclear weapons

01:14:03.140 using the football. That order would then go on to the National Military Command Center, which would

01:14:10.760 then go to the missileers and the bases and things. There have been generals in recent meetings

01:14:18.220 in questioning whether we should rescind this power in lieu of the threats that President Trump has

01:14:24.400 made. Generals who have said, formal generals of STRATCOM, claiming that we shouldn't worry because

01:14:31.660 the military would not follow any unlawful order. In particular, they bring up the notion of military

01:14:37.020 law requires the notion of proportionality and appropriateness. However, those orders do not

01:14:45.500 necessarily go through STRATCOM to get to our missileers. They do go to STRATCOM, but they go at the same

01:14:51.840 time. And actually, I've spoken with Bruce Blair, who is a nuclear security professor, as well as a

01:14:59.560 founder of Global Zero, and in his history was himself a nuclear missileer several decades ago. And he talks

01:15:07.240 about, you know, during his time in that position, how rigorously that they are trained to respond to

01:15:15.020 these orders. And roughly in the space of three to five minutes that they would get this order. So this

01:15:21.440 is really a regimented system that when it goes, when the order is confirmed, it goes through, no one can

01:15:29.000 countermand it. It goes through from the president to the missileers in a couple of minutes that we would

01:15:35.900 then be going to turn the keys to launch these nuclear weapons. And in fact, he said in all of

01:15:41.160 the years that he was doing this, they were never trained to stop. They were never trained to stop

01:15:45.960 or ask. As long as it was confirmed, they would turn the keys to launch the weapons.

01:15:52.780 I think the simple point to make here is when the general says they would not follow a new legal order,

01:15:59.380 if the president sends a command to launch, that's a legal order.

01:16:04.020 Whatever the reasons behind it, it's a legal order. So what the Stratcom general was saying was really

01:16:12.200 a non-sequitur.

01:16:14.500 Yeah, this also came up in my discussion with Fred Kaplan. And he pointed out that the fairly Kafka-esque

01:16:20.080 logic here is that any protocol, any launch command that's already in the book, right, has been vetted by

01:16:29.560 military lawyers. So if you launch anything that's off the menu, it is by definition a legal order.

01:16:35.700 And now you're just adding the further logic that if it's coming from the president, it is also by

01:16:40.180 definition a legal order. It's amazing. So let's just talk about proliferation for a moment, because

01:16:45.500 it's obviously the greatest risk is the status quo of mutually assured destruction between Russia and

01:16:53.100 the US. But many other countries are acquiring or have acquired or seeking to acquire these weapons

01:17:00.200 for reasons that are not surprising. The difference between, you know, if you're North Korea with nukes

01:17:09.360 and without nukes, you are treated very differently by the powers you provoke. And so it is with Pakistan.

01:17:17.240 And so it would be with Iran. What are your thoughts on proliferation? I mean, there's, it's easy to see,

01:17:22.800 you know, from their point of view, you, we have a system that I forget which country first used this

01:17:28.880 phrase. It might've been India, but we have a system that looks like nuclear apartheid, the haves and the

01:17:33.920 have-nots with this technology. What do you think about the prospects of halting proliferation at this

01:17:42.260 point and even rolling it back? Not very good for the reason you've just given that any country can see the

01:17:49.180 advantage to their security of having nuclear weapons. That's not a illusory advantage. It's a real advantage.

01:17:55.500 North Korea, when they got nuclear weapons for obvious reason, which is they believed it would give them

01:18:01.500 security, what they saw as a real threat, which is a threat of the United States overthrowing the regime. So they got

01:18:09.120 nuclear weapons to deter that threat. And they successfully, I think, accomplished that mission.

01:18:16.740 So any country can see that as a, as a good, as a good deal. For that reason, years ago, we created

01:18:24.440 what's called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that the countries that wanted to take advantage of

01:18:31.500 that would have some reason not to. And the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty gets the non-nuclear

01:18:38.960 powers to agree not to go nuclear. And in return for that, the nuclear powers agree to work towards

01:18:46.340 phasing out and decreasing their nuclear capability. So that was a two-sided deal. And that has been

01:18:53.480 pretty amazingly effective through the years. But if you look at that today, you can see that the

01:18:58.960 nuclear powers are not maintaining their end of the deal. In particular, both Russia and the United

01:19:03.740 States are now beginning a major new buildup of nuclear weapons, basically repeating, with new and

01:19:11.900 better technology, repeating the buildup of the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. So the attraction of

01:19:18.540 having nuclear weapons is very real. The Non-Proliferation Treaty has managed to offset that attraction and

01:19:26.280 given us a very successful several decades of relatively low proliferation. But I think that's

01:19:34.560 beginning to fall away now because of the action of the nuclear powers and not holding up their end

01:19:40.160 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Is there a tension between non-proliferation and fighting climate change

01:19:47.080 now, given that new generations of nuclear power seem to hold a lot of promise for us? Is that part of

01:19:53.400 the unraveling of the prospects of the unraveling of the prospects of non-proliferation or is that not

01:19:57.700 a variable? Well, it figures into the equation as follows, that a way of proliferating and proliferating

01:20:07.620 more or less secretly is to do it under the guise of nuclear power. And the poster child for that is

01:20:15.680 North Korea, which had what they advertised as a commercial nuclear power program, which they used to

01:20:23.600 build nuclear weapons. So that's the only case I know of where that has happened. And it probably

01:20:31.740 could have been prevented by better monitoring through the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I would not use that as an

01:20:40.380 argument against the use of nuclear power, which has a considerable advantage in terms of another

01:20:46.140 existential threat we face, which is a threat of global warming. So yes, nuclear power could be an

01:20:53.660 avenue, a path towards nuclear weapons that you have managed to keep your nuclear aspirations secret.

01:21:02.380 But there's only one example that I know of where that has been done. There's a possibility that

01:21:08.900 Iran might have a dual use program as well, but there's been quite a lot of attention and pressure

01:21:14.800 to keeping that from happening. There is also actually a flip side to that in which there is

01:21:19.640 a potential perceived benefit, which first of all, there is quite a difference in the type of facility

01:21:26.420 that you would have as a nuclear power facility that you would need to have to enrich the type of

01:21:32.220 material you would need for fissile material. And it's quite different from most facilities that you

01:21:37.360 would build for nuclear power. So it is actually fairly easy to detect whether there might be

01:21:43.620 illicit action happening there. And that's often what is the focus of the surveillance on Iran and

01:21:50.000 making sure that they were not working towards a bomb. But there's also the potential positive side,

01:21:56.640 which is actually, if we were to try and work towards disarmament, there needs to actually be a place

01:22:03.300 to put all of this fissile material. You cannot just abandon it. You actually need to put it somewhere.

01:22:09.620 You need to recycle it. You need to blend it down. And one of the best ways to do that, one of the best

01:22:15.380 ways to get rid of that material is actually to blend it down and put it into nuclear power facilities.

01:22:22.760 And there's actually one of my favorite stories. During my grandfather's tenure as Secretary of Defense,

01:22:28.560 he helped to champion a program, which is the Nun Lugar program, which unfortunately,

01:22:35.080 I think has not gotten enough attention throughout history, is a program that was instituted in post-Cold

01:22:41.640 War to try and go into former Soviet countries, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, who after the

01:22:50.560 collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly became nuclear weapon states overnight.

01:22:54.860 And did not have the money or the infrastructure or the political will to maintain these things.

01:23:01.540 And in fact, Ukraine at the time became the third largest nuclear weapon state in the world

01:23:07.540 when this happened. So to the level of the numbers of weapons that we're talking about here,

01:23:12.360 this is a huge endeavor. And, you know, all of these countries were incredibly financially unstable.

01:23:18.300 This posed a huge security risk. And the Nun Lugar program was a program instituted in the U.S.

01:23:23.940 to work alongside these countries and the newly formed Russia to go in and secure these weapons,

01:23:31.080 to dismantle them, and also work with the former military members there to rehome them, to retrain

01:23:38.120 them so that they wouldn't be brought up by potential terrorist organizations who might be seeking

01:23:44.240 these weapons or seeking, you know, scientists or people who know how to work with these weapons

01:23:48.840 and to dismantle the submarines and all of the things that go into a nuclear infrastructure.

01:23:56.400 This is a huge multi-year endeavor to do this. And part of what they did is the material that was

01:24:03.740 dismantled and blended down from these former missiles was bought by the U.S. by nuclear power

01:24:10.640 plants. And roughly, let's see, the math that Senator Nunn explained to me, who was, you know,

01:24:19.160 namesake of this legislation, was that at the time from roughly, I think it's 1995 to about 2002,

01:24:29.280 some 20 percent of U.S. electricity was coming from nuclear power. And for those, you know, roughly a

01:24:37.280 decade, the amount of power that we were drawing from these former nuclear missiles was about 50 percent.

01:24:44.840 So our lights for 10 percent of our lights in the entire U.S. were powered by former Soviet missiles

01:24:54.600 for about a decade.

01:24:56.520 Wow, that's symbolically quite beautiful. It would be nice to go further in that direction.

01:25:01.140 So the Nunn-Lugar effort there, did that reach some kind of fulfillment or did it sort of peter out

01:25:08.660 for a lack of...

01:25:10.220 Well, we succeeded in eliminating all of the nuclear weapons in those three countries,

01:25:16.560 Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, all of them.

01:25:18.700 That's fantastic.

01:25:19.220 That all happened during the term I was Secretary of Defense. Before I left office, those were all dismantled.

01:25:24.120 I recall post-September 11th, there was an ongoing concern that al-Qaeda, in that case, could get

01:25:33.240 nuclear materials from, you know, one of the former Soviet republics because you had materials that were,

01:25:40.460 you know, under padlock in certain cases. And you had the implosion of economies where you had some thousands

01:25:48.460 or even tens of thousands of nuclear engineers and scientists who had no jobs, right, or, you know,

01:25:54.620 driving taxi cabs or working in some menial way. And you have the prospect of this incredibly valuable

01:26:01.780 material being able to be stolen and distributed to terrorists. How sanguine are you about how fully

01:26:08.520 that's been contained?

01:26:10.660 The Nunn-Lugar program was directed at all three of those problems. And the first one,

01:26:14.580 dismantling the nuclear weapons and fissile material, that was 100% completed during the time

01:26:20.120 I was here, period I was Secretary of Defense. On the second one, in the nuclear sciences and nuclear

01:26:28.880 technology, we made progress on that. And I think that problem is greatly mitigated, but you could never

01:26:35.820 say it was completely eliminated.

01:26:38.420 What, in your view, are the most tractable, most achievable concrete steps that we

01:26:44.540 could take now? I mean, for instance, bring us back to the command and control

01:26:48.340 issue, where to get this out of one ape's

01:26:52.460 hands and at least make it a decision by

01:26:56.040 some committee or consultation with Congress, what would be required

01:27:00.600 to do that? Could Congress unilaterally decide to

01:27:04.080 diminish the President's power to launch a first strike or a

01:27:08.500 retaliatory strike?

01:27:09.380 Yes, there is legislation already pending with the Congress, which has no chance of approval

01:27:15.740 in the present environment. But there's legislation pending to end presidential sole authority

01:27:22.820 and first use. The question is how effective that legislation could be against the President's

01:27:31.040 determined to use them anyway. But that would be a major step in that direction. Certainly,

01:27:37.420 we could, through legislation, retire the ICBMs. That could be an action taken solely by Congress

01:27:45.600 if they decided they wanted to do that. We could also limit strategic missile defense. That's again

01:27:50.740 an action that could be taken by Congress.

01:27:53.420 Let's just linger for a moment on that. What is your view of strategic missile defense and

01:27:59.260 any possible improvements that could be had along those lines? Is it just destabilizing to the logic

01:28:07.160 of deterrence? Or do you think it could actually land us at some place of greater safety?

01:28:13.340 The biggest problem with strategic missile defense, aside from the fact that it's pretty expensive,

01:28:17.720 is that it doesn't work.

01:28:19.360 Do you think that it actually can't work, given that it's always going to be easier to evade it

01:28:26.800 than to respond to the evasions?

01:28:29.260 Yeah. The reasons it doesn't work are quite fundamental. Without going into detail, it amounts

01:28:37.760 to the fact that the offense, in this case, as in many other cases in the military, but certainly

01:28:41.880 in this case, the offense has a huge advantage over the defense, maybe a 10-to-1 advantage.

01:28:46.920 In the case of missile defense, that is primarily because of the ability to put decoys out, which

01:28:54.760 can easily saturate the system. Now, that is limited to the case of strategic missile defense systems

01:29:01.140 that operate in the outer space, not in the atmosphere. But that's the way our system works.

01:29:07.620 It works in outer space, and therefore it's highly susceptible to decoys. And so fundamentally,

01:29:12.860 it has very little chance of working. So that's one disadvantage of strategic missile defense.

01:29:18.860 The other disadvantage is that the other side fears it might work, and therefore they have

01:29:23.940 incentives to find ways of bolstering the offense. So it stimulates the offense without mitigating it.

01:29:33.020 That's aside from the fact it costs a lot of money.

01:29:35.160 Right. Yeah. And it also, it adds to the sense that if you imagine the view from the other side,

01:29:44.200 the view from our adversaries, if they believe that we believe that we have a dome protecting us

01:29:51.520 from any incoming nuclear missiles, they will judge the likelihood of our possible first use as being

01:29:58.380 higher because we think, you know, we're immune from retaliation, which then is just provocative in

01:30:04.620 his own right. To be clear, no, even the most pessimistic analysts in Russia today could not

01:30:12.480 believe that our present deployed missile defense system poses any threat at all to the ICBM force.

01:30:18.660 That's too small for further. But they do fear that it's the base on which we could rapidly build,

01:30:26.940 and that we could build a system which we might believe would defend our country. And they base

01:30:32.520 their policies and their programs on the belief that we're going to follow through on that possibility.

01:30:38.360 I did want to bring up one other effort that we really haven't touched on that is happening to

01:30:43.180 try and work towards securing our future, a future, you know, maybe free from nuclear danger,

01:30:50.260 which is that actually several years ago, a treaty was passed at the UN, which the prohibition on

01:30:56.960 nuclear weapons, a treaty was passed at the UN to ban nuclear weapons entirely. And now this treaty

01:31:03.240 has not been ratified yet, because we're still waiting on several countries, we need a few more

01:31:08.300 countries before it is fully ratified, but they're actually quite close to that. The organization that

01:31:14.420 was behind that is ICANN, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICANN is a, actually an

01:31:21.040 organization that is a number of organizations that come together to work towards this effort. And it

01:31:26.660 was actually a legal push to try and make nuclear weapons illegal. And they've actually been quite

01:31:33.160 successful. They were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their effort to pass this ban. And you have a lot

01:31:39.540 of critics who come out and say that this is a pie in the sky effort, that this was, there was no point

01:31:46.740 to do this, that this is impossible. But I spoke with Beatrice Finn, who is the head of ICANN, an

01:31:53.120 incredibly intelligent woman who is championing this issue. And I think she made a great point,

01:32:00.140 which is they based this treaty off of the treaty to ban landmines, which is actually been incredibly

01:32:07.680 successful. And it's not to say that there are no more landmines or that we even expect that, you know,

01:32:13.020 in, you know, five, ten years that there will be no more nuclear weapons. But you need to institute a goal.

01:32:19.740 You need to set a standard for the world to start to work towards, to put this global pressure. And

01:32:26.940 particularly what I think is really interesting that came out of the UN treaty was you had all of these

01:32:33.560 non-nuclear states who finally had a voice in this issue. Because you really, as you said, there is this sort of

01:32:40.740 dividing line between the haves and the have-nots. And the majority of the world does not have nuclear

01:32:46.520 weapons. However, they are subject to the decisions of the nuclear weapon states and how they decide to

01:32:54.080 manage these weapons. They're really held hostage by this insanity. And, you know, how incredibly

01:33:01.080 inappropriate is it that a few countries get to decide the fate of the world based on the power that

01:33:08.260 they have decided to develop and also preventing other people from developing it themselves. And these

01:33:13.800 non-nuclear weapon states are standing up and saying they do not accept this risk value. They do not accept

01:33:19.840 that this is how it should be done. And they are trying to reclaim their power and say that they should have a

01:33:25.720 voice in how this is handled and that we should really be looking at, you know, how the world wants to handle

01:33:32.780 these nuclear weapons. And while, you know, even the people working on this treaty understand that

01:33:39.260 just putting it into place doesn't mean that it'll happen tomorrow. They understand that this is a

01:33:44.720 process, but it is about sending a message and about setting an expectation to work towards this.

01:33:50.380 Of course, all of the nuclear weapon states have refused to participate in this discussion, as you might

01:33:56.260 expect. But I think, you know, this isn't just, you know, an issue between Russia and the U.S. This

01:34:03.740 isn't just an issue between India and Pakistan. Just to demonstrate the level of seriousness that,

01:34:12.020 you know, the devastation that could happen even from a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. And just so

01:34:17.360 people understand, there's roughly about 15,000 nuclear weapons around the world scattered throughout

01:34:23.440 the nine nuclear weapon states. And U.S. and Russia have about 90% of those. And then the rest

01:34:30.200 are scattered around. But there have been studies done to show that even a limited exchange of nuclear

01:34:37.120 weapons, about 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, and this is often experts worry about India and Pakistan in

01:34:45.320 particular being maybe if there were to be a exchange between nuclear weapon states, those two

01:34:51.660 countries may be the most likely for something like that. If there were to be an exchange of 100

01:34:56.760 nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan, the devastation, not just the number, the millions

01:35:04.260 of people who would die, but the global impact on our climate, you know, the issue of nuclear winter,

01:35:11.520 which unfortunately, you know, was, people thought that it was debunked, you know, in the 80s,

01:35:17.520 but that's actually not true. There's quite a lot of research that has come out with modern tools

01:35:21.780 to demonstrate that this is actually a very real fear. And just 100 nuclear weapons could cause a

01:35:29.660 global climate catastrophe of a drop of roughly two to three degrees Fahrenheit in global temperature.

01:35:37.120 And the fallout on our production of food and the mass starvation that would follow based on these

01:35:45.560 studies shows on the numbers of one to two billion people would be affected by the mass starvation

01:35:53.700 that would follow. So this really is something that all countries should have a voice on because it's

01:36:00.540 something that affects everyone.

01:36:03.120 Just to be clear that the issue with nuclear winter is you're talking about all the ash and debris lifted

01:36:09.780 into the atmosphere blocking sunlight.

01:36:13.400 Into the stratosphere.

01:36:14.120 Yeah.

01:36:14.700 Yeah. So we're talking about crop failures. Once you have cloudy skies for years at a stretch,

01:36:22.600 you would expect food production to go way down. I guess I want to close the door to any

01:36:28.280 climate denier in Trumpistan who thinks, oh, that sounds like, that sounds rather good. We can mitigate

01:36:34.280 the fiction of global warming by reducing global temperature by a few degrees. What's wrong with that?

01:36:42.020 So yeah, actually, you brought me to, let's just address for a second, the claim that going to

01:36:50.160 nuclear zero is a completely quixotic and impossible dream. What should seem impossible is the maintenance

01:36:59.420 of the status quo. We should recognize that the place where we started, where we acknowledged the perverse

01:37:06.600 utility of Hiroshima, there are certain bounded circumstances in which you can make the case that

01:37:13.800 having and using nuclear weapons actually works. We're not in that situation anymore. We're in a

01:37:20.860 situation where the prospect, I mean, certainly when you're talking about the US and Russia, the prospect of

01:37:29.200 winning a nuclear war, it no longer exists, right? You know, you can annihilate your enemy, but your enemy also gets

01:37:36.720 to annihilate you. And you've also, by reference to what we just talked about, you've probably annihilated

01:37:43.380 yourself anyway by ushering in a proper nuclear winter. And there may be some local cases where

01:37:50.040 one nuclear power could destroy a non-nuclear power or even another, you know, more primitive nuclear power

01:37:57.880 without suffering the logic of retaliation. Most of the world is not in that circumstance right now.

01:38:05.720 And the circumstance we are in is of a really badly calibrated doomsday machine poised to detonate based

01:38:17.480 on misinformation, right? So it's anyone who thinks it's impossible to walk back from the brink here

01:38:23.780 isn't really thinking about how untenable it is to just maintain our perch right on the edge of it.

01:38:31.340 You've both been incredibly generous with your time, and this has been an education

01:38:35.320 Is there anything you want to say by way of conclusion here and bring us into the end zone?

01:38:42.240 Yes, I do. My first comment would be that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is not going to

01:38:48.760 happen soon, if ever. But the danger is so great, the danger to all civilization is so great,

01:38:56.160 this is a goal we should be working towards. Ideas matter. And the idea that nuclear weapons are

01:39:02.840 danger to all mankind is a fundamentally important idea. And we should continue to keep that idea in

01:39:08.860 front of the world. But secondly, even before that happens, or if it never happens, there are many

01:39:15.340 things we can do to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons. And that danger primarily resides in an

01:39:22.240 accidental or blundering use of nuclear weapons through a technical error, through a political

01:39:27.420 miscalculation. And there are a dozen or so very important political steps which we could take

01:39:34.500 this year, next year, which would greatly reduce those dangers. We should be focusing our attention

01:39:39.860 on doing those. Some of those involve ending the political presidential to authority, involve

01:39:46.660 prohibiting launch on warning, prohibiting first use. These are dangers we face we don't have to face.

01:39:52.180 We can simply get rid of them. We can retire all of our ICBMs and still maintain a strong, very strong

01:39:58.900 deterrence. And that not only greatly reduces the danger, but saves us hundreds of billions of dollars.

01:40:05.740 We can limit strategic missile defense for the same benefits. We don't have to wait for new treaties.

01:40:12.260 We can take actions to reduce our nuclear forces without the benefit of treaties. And we can elect a

01:40:19.960 president that is understand these issues and is committed to trying to deal with them. Those are all things

01:40:25.520 that can be done in the relatively near term that will greatly reduce our dangers while we, over the longer

01:40:30.500 period of time, work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons.

01:40:35.080 And beyond making political noises to those ends, are there organizations that people can support that are

01:40:42.620 doing effective work in this area? I mean, what's the role for philanthropy here?

01:40:47.140 Yes, there's many such organizations. The Nuclear Threat Initiative is one very important

01:40:53.120 initiative in Washington, D.C. that works for illuminating the nuclear dangers and taking

01:40:58.960 steps towards minimizing them. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago is another such

01:41:05.100 organization. Many of the world affairs councils and councils of formulations around the country

01:41:10.360 work in this direction. So there are things that can be done to reduce political dangers. There's one

01:41:17.440 organization that's focused particularly on this issue, which is called the Plowshares Fund.

01:41:22.800 And so the Plowshares, that's located in San Francisco. And the Plowshares Fund has supported

01:41:27.580 other organizations that are working towards reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. So if a person

01:41:33.800 says to himself, what can I do? I would say there are two things that they can do. The first is to get

01:41:40.620 yourself educated on this problem, which listening to this podcast is one way, but it could also be a

01:41:47.660 pathway towards other ways of getting educated. And the second thing it can do is to support the

01:41:53.580 organizations like Plowshares and like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that are working, and like the

01:41:58.780 nuclear threat initiatives, that are working with very capable professionals working on this problem

01:42:04.800 full-time.

01:42:06.440 Oh, that's great. That's great. Lisa, do you have any closing thoughts?

01:42:09.640 Yeah, I think you hit on it exactly, which is that we cannot afford nuclear weapons, both in risk and even

01:42:18.060 financially. The nuclear modernization program right now is projected to cost upwards of $1.7 trillion,

01:42:25.560 trillion with a T, $1.7 trillion just for this program alone, just for nuclear weapons over the

01:42:33.960 next 20 or 30 years. And the risks that it presents to us are untenable. We cannot afford to maintain

01:42:42.420 this status quo. And I think it's really important when talking about this, it can be easy to get

01:42:49.000 overwhelmed. It's easy to feel defeated and hopeless. But there really is hope here. Nuclear

01:42:55.800 weapons, like you said, these are man-made weapons, unlike climate change, which is involving a lot of

01:43:02.220 different forces that are being influenced by humans. We created these weapons and we control these

01:43:07.880 weapons. And when it's a people-made problem means that there can be political solutions. What we need

01:43:15.280 now is the political will to start pushing for those solutions. And like my grandfather said,

01:43:22.300 it is about educating yourself and educating others. So it's, you know, listening to this podcast,

01:43:28.280 listening to our podcast, sharing it with people, talking with people, making a ruckus,

01:43:33.560 you know, really starting to get the dialogue started, in particular with younger generations who,

01:43:39.840 you know, did not grow up during the Cold War and may have not realized that these risks were there

01:43:45.500 and that they were there at such a level as to say, you know, if you don't accept the existential

01:43:50.840 threat of climate change, you shouldn't accept the existential threat of nuclear weapons, even more so

01:43:55.900 that, you know, we are doing this to ourselves. And to go out there and to push our government,

01:44:01.640 to push our politicians, to start to make these changes, to reduce the dangers, and start to work

01:44:07.640 towards a world in which maybe we can start to have the conversations about working towards a

01:44:12.120 global zero. There is a world in which that can happen, but we need to make these first steps to

01:44:17.960 start the dialogue. Sam, I'd make one final comment. I've stressed several times, and you yourself have

01:44:25.980 stressed the importance of education in this field. And I'd like to give you an example, which is

01:44:32.700 three years ago. My granddaughter, Lisa, knew nothing about this problem. And she hopped on the

01:44:39.720 project, went through a self-education process, and now I consider to be an expert in this field.

01:44:45.280 So it is possible for people, if they get concerned, if they get interested, to learn enough about it,

01:44:50.940 to become real experts and to know what actions to take and how to take them that can reduce the

01:44:55.920 dangers. So do not give up. The first step is educating yourself, and the next step is try to take

01:45:00.920 political actions to manifest some of the things that your education points you towards.

01:45:06.180 That's a great note to end on, and I just want to thank you both for taking the time to educate me.

01:45:11.500 Again, I'll remind people that, Lisa, your podcast is coming. It may, in fact, be out the moment we

01:45:17.940 release this, or if not, very soon thereafter, and that is At the Brink, and we will link to that.

01:45:24.720 And Secretary Perry, your book, The Button, is soon to be born. I look forward to that. And also,

01:45:30.560 you have the website, thewilliamjperryproject.org. And I just want to say, again, I'm now going to

01:45:36.540 promote you back with your honorific. Secretary Perry, I just want to thank you for decades of

01:45:41.340 service on this front. Of all the people who are anywhere near the chain of command, so many of

01:45:48.220 them advertise their unfitness for the job, and you have never been one of those people. So thank you

01:45:55.440 for being the smart person in the room.

01:45:57.500 Thank you, Sam. Good to talk to you this morning.

01:46:00.180 Thank you so much.

01:46:01.440 Thank you.

01:46:02.440 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 09, 2020

#210 — The Logic of Doomsday

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