The Tucker Carlson Show - Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity

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00:00:30.000 Thank you, Professor, for doing this.

00:00:32.680 Let me start with the most simple of all questions.

00:00:35.200 How are nuclear weapons different from conventional weapons?

00:00:38.860 Nuclear weapons are different from conventional weapons in many ways.

00:00:43.540 One of the things that I like to say is that they really defy the kind of concept of both space and time.

00:00:54.080 And let me explain what I mean by that.

00:00:55.860 If you have a conventional weapon and you exploded over a city or wherever,

00:01:03.020 that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place.

00:01:09.320 And it's going to have that impact in time.

00:01:11.940 And then you could come back and clean up the area and rebuild and so on.

00:01:16.540 Nuclear weapons are not like that.

00:01:18.320 A nuclear explosion in one place, in one location, and in one split moment of time can have both global effects

00:01:31.240 and it can have impacts over actually even thousands of years through the effects of radiation

00:01:39.700 and the kind of radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment.

00:01:44.980 But there are sort of a number of ways in which even a single nuclear weapon explosion

00:02:13.840 can be incredibly dangerous and devastating.

00:02:17.080 And then there are a number of impacts in which a nuclear war, in which many nuclear weapons are used,

00:02:24.560 can be obviously quite clearly much more devastating.

00:02:29.040 So the thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful

00:02:36.960 than any kind of chemical explosion.

00:02:39.700 So, for example, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

00:02:45.620 80 years ago.

00:02:46.360 80 years ago, almost exactly.

00:02:49.180 Had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT.

00:02:57.260 Now, these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium.

00:03:02.620 Uranium for the Hiroshima bomb and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.

00:03:08.920 But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent amount of chemical explosive that you would need.

00:03:18.500 So that's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNTs, how much you would have needed of chemical explosive to produce the energy equivalent to that explosion.

00:03:32.100 And that in and of itself is huge.

00:03:36.680 And just to give you one kind of point of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing, which I'm sure you remember,

00:03:43.880 it was actually the first year that I was living in the United States.

00:03:48.440 It was in April of 1995.

00:03:52.020 And it was a devastating event.

00:03:54.900 It was the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT.

00:04:00.960 So Timothy McVeigh had filled the Ryder truck with chemical explosives, lit it up outside of a federal building, killed 168 people, including 19 children in the daycare center.

00:04:16.300 And there was damage in a radius of up to, I think, 16 blocks, something of that order.

00:04:23.640 So absolutely an incredible and devastating event.

00:04:29.960 At the same time, that explosion was 6,000 times less energetic than the bombing of Hiroshima.

00:04:42.980 So 15,000 tons of TNT versus two and a half tons of TNT.

00:04:48.700 So that just begins to give you a scale for just how powerful a single nuclear weapon can be.

00:04:56.220 And then on top of it is that we now have weapons that are far more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

00:05:05.840 In fact, in 1945, the U.S. had three nuclear weapons.

00:05:10.120 One was used as a quote-unquote test, the Trinity test in the desert of New Mexico.

00:05:18.340 And then two were used on attacks on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

00:05:24.140 Today, we actually have 12, on the order of 12,500 nuclear warheads, many of which are far more powerful.

00:05:33.280 How much more powerful?

00:05:34.020 So we know that both U.S. and Russia have nuclear bombs currently that are on the order of one megaton.

00:05:44.420 That's about 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

00:05:53.120 At the height of the Cold War, when we were first testing nuclear weapons and actually first testing hydrogen bombs,

00:06:03.040 which are different from the atomic bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I can explain that as well,

00:06:09.440 we were even testing the largest test that the U.S. had ever conducted, took place in the Marshall Islands.

00:06:17.100 It's called the Bravo test, Castle Bravo test, and there was a thousand Hiroshima bomb equivalents. 0.60

00:06:25.360 And yet, the Soviets actually tested something even more powerful.

00:06:32.020 They did so up in the North Sea, a region called Novaya Zemlya, and they tested some accounts, say, 50 megatons.

00:06:43.720 So that's more than 3,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

00:06:48.440 I've even seen accounts that say 58 megatons.

00:06:52.460 So that would be basically, you know, 4,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

00:06:57.940 The Castle Bravo test, which took place on March 1 of 1954, that test, that mushroom cloud,

00:07:08.100 so we all sort of, you know, have this vision of a nuclear explosion that produces the mushroom cloud,

00:07:13.620 that mushroom cloud was 25 miles or 40 kilometers high, and at the widest, about 60 miles wide.

00:07:23.380 60 miles?

00:07:24.440 60 miles wide, the mushroom cloud.

00:07:27.320 It's quite simply something that's unimaginable.

00:07:31.660 And that test actually had truly devastating consequences for people living in the Marshall Islands.

00:07:40.360 About 100 miles from where the test was conducted, the population was living in a place called Rongelapatole,

00:07:47.440 and those people were very, very sickened and impacted by the test.

00:07:56.620 It's a long story.

00:07:57.840 They stayed there for three days.

00:07:59.280 They were moved away.

00:08:01.000 But to kind of cut to the present day, and this is actually from some of the research that I've done with colleagues and students at Columbia University,

00:08:11.920 currently, there's still parts of the Marshall Islands where radiological contamination is very high.

00:08:21.440 And that testing ended in 1958.

00:08:24.400 So it's now nearly seven years later, and there's still contamination.

00:08:30.160 That quite simply is not safe.

00:08:33.400 The way I like to put it is it's not safe for a multi-generational community to live in and to live there full time. 1.00

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00:12:43.640 So what would happen if a nuclear weapon, modern nuclear weapon, detonated over Times Square?

00:12:51.400 Yes.

00:12:52.160 Over Times Square, one megaton bomb is going to have...

00:12:57.280 So there's something that makes the numbers a little more complicated.

00:13:03.060 You can have two different kinds of explosions.

00:13:06.180 One can be an air burst and one can be a surface explosion.

00:13:09.640 In the case of an air burst, what you actually do is you cause a lot more damage, a lot more the shock wave is sort of stronger and the destruction of the city is much more effective.

00:13:25.560 A surface burst produces more radiation and kind of more of those long-term effects.

00:13:30.780 So between the two, let's just say that basically the radius of this fireball is about a mile.

00:13:42.200 And so you now have, depending on where it explodes, you have a radius that...

00:13:50.220 And the fireball is quite literally the temperature of the sun.

00:13:54.340 And so you have a fireball where everything is evaporated, absolutely evaporated.

00:14:01.440 And then again, depending on if it's an air burst or a surface explosion, you kind of have these different concentric circles of heavy blast damage where just everything is absolutely destroyed.

00:14:17.100 The shock wave is such that everything collapses, buildings collapse, everything collapses.

00:14:23.640 Then you might have a kind of lethal radiation dose, concentric circles.

00:14:30.400 Then you might have moderate damage where you still have buildings collapsing, injuries are widespread and so on.

00:14:38.600 And you kind of keep going, but you start out with quite literally evaporating everything in this fireball and you kind of keep going out of that.

00:14:52.080 And in New York City, for an air burst, you're looking at something like on the order of one and a half million people dying and about two million people being very severely injured.

00:15:15.520 There's also a concentric circle where the temperature is so high that everybody gets third degree burns.

00:15:25.140 And this is something that happened, of course, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

00:15:29.300 It's where it just, you know, people's skin quite literally melts. 0.83

00:15:35.620 There are kind of descriptions from survivors of the bombing of seeing people with their, you know, skin looking like it was clothing just sort of hanging over them.

00:15:48.780 This is quite simply a site of total and absolute horror and devastation.

00:15:56.640 And it would destroy a U.S. city.

00:16:00.620 The thing that we know.

00:16:02.600 And render it uninhabitable.

00:16:03.840 And render it potentially uninhabitable, you know, for decades, hundreds of years, potentially even thousands of years.

00:16:12.520 Again, it all depends on how you do it, how much, you know, how large the weapon is, how it's detonated.

00:16:21.280 But the really scary thing that we do know, and this comes from the kinds of war games that take place in Washington all the time,

00:16:32.540 is that because we now live in a world with 12,500 nuclear warheads, it doesn't just end with one nuclear warhead being used on one city.

00:16:45.520 We not only have all of those warheads, we also have things like intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can actually carry multiple warheads at once, deliver them all to the same target.

00:16:59.100 So you might, if you wanted to attack New York City, you might explode one in Times Square, but you might explode one, you know, on the Upper West Side and another in Brooklyn.

00:17:09.580 You know, so you could have a kind of constellation of explosions.

00:17:16.220 And the war games in Washington suggest that 100% of the time, one nuclear weapons explosion, regardless of how it starts, an accident, a miscalculation, a deliberate use, it all ends in a full-blown nuclear war.

00:17:42.320 And part of the reason why it all ends in a full-blown nuclear war is that the kinds of structures we've built, the kinds of policies that we have on this are such that you pretty much just follow the protocol, and the protocol is that you attack.

00:18:03.160 If you, the United States has something called launch on warning, and that means that if we think we're being attacked, even though we haven't absorbed an attack, even though we haven't actually, you know, seen that a warhead has exploded in one of our cities, we launch an attack.

00:18:22.960 And these decisions are made in a matter of minutes.

00:18:29.720 This is described really kind of with amazing clarity in the book by Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War Scenario,

00:18:39.440 where she describes exactly minute by minute how nuclear war starts and can start, and then what happens for the next 72 minutes, and then sort of these long-term consequences of nuclear war.

00:18:55.700 And I can talk about some of them.

00:18:58.740 So 72 minutes, the entire war, that's the duration of the war.

00:19:02.460 That's the duration of a war between the United States and Russia.

00:19:06.500 In Annie's book, the scenario is that basically the U.S. gets attacked by a kind of lone warhead coming from North Korea, attacking Washington, D.C.

00:19:23.680 That's an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we detect within seconds of the launch.

00:19:31.160 And then there's a second, in her scenario, there's a second warhead being exploded, launched from a submarine in the Pacific and exploding in Diablo Canyon, which is a nuclear power plant in Southern California.

00:19:49.300 And in that scenario, the U.S. then responds to the nose that's being attacked by North Korea in a matter of minutes, makes a decision to attack North Korea. 0.86

00:20:07.280 I think the response is something like 82 nuclear warheads.

00:20:11.440 But the route that the warheads take from our ICBM silos in the Midwest, in the Dakotas and so on, the route goes over Russia.

00:20:25.680 And in Annie's book, the scenario is such that the U.S. can't communicate fast enough with the Russian leadership and Russians now think they're under attack because they're detecting these warheads coming their way.

00:20:46.100 And so they launch an attack, and so they launch an attack, a thousand nuclear warheads, and then the U.S. responds in turn and attacks the United States.

00:20:56.160 And these kinds of estimates of what would happen, the number of casualties, people who would die and so on in a U.S.-Russia full-blown nuclear war.

00:21:14.160 The current estimate, and this is based on slightly more than a thousand warheads from each direction, and it's equivalent to about one-third of the current arsenals.

00:21:27.600 The number of casualties from the moment of the explosions is on the order of 360 million people.

00:21:37.660 And that's nothing but the deaths from, you know, you were either incinerated or, you know, your body was broken into who knows how many pieces by the shock wave.

00:21:53.220 That's not even including deaths from radiation, which would occur over some period of time, of course, very intensely in the immediate aftermath, but then also over time.

00:22:06.620 And then there is the business of what such a nuclear war would actually do to the environment of the planet.

00:22:16.520 And there, it's not just about local effects.

00:22:20.160 Now we get into the global effects.

00:22:22.520 So back to my initial assertion that nuclear weapons sort of defy rules of time and space, the time aspect is these radiation impacts that can really, the radiation contamination that can last for decades, hundreds, even thousands of years for certain radioactive isotopes.

00:22:43.660 The spatial aspect is that, of course, there is a local impact of the nuclear explosion, but in the case of a nuclear war, the impact becomes global.

00:22:58.200 And there are at least two different ways in which this happens.

00:23:02.620 One way is called nuclear winter, and I can explain what that is.

00:23:06.800 And the other is ozone layer destruction.

00:23:10.600 And these are actually things that we've known about both of them for a long time.

00:23:16.700 Although I will say that more recently, we've had much better simulations, just much more computer power, much more sort of ability to really figure out what that would look like.

00:23:29.880 So let's start in order.

00:23:30.780 What's nuclear winter?

00:23:31.620 So nuclear winter is the idea that following a nuclear war, there would be such widespread fires everywhere that would burn things like everything that's in the city and produce so much soot that would go up into the atmosphere and block incoming sunlight.

00:23:57.400 And that as a consequence of this, for a period of about, again, depends on how many warheads, what energy yields and so on.

00:24:06.300 But for a period of up to about 10 years, temperatures would drop so significantly.

00:24:14.200 Some estimates for the war that I keep citing of one third of US and Russian arsenals are used up.

00:24:21.260 The estimate is 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.

00:24:27.180 That's about 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:24:31.360 This is a completely different planet.

00:24:34.700 And those temperature drops occur very, very quickly.

00:24:38.660 And so the temperature drop, what it does is it actually makes it impossible for food to grow, in particular in the Northern Hemisphere, in kind of our breadbasket latitudes.

00:24:55.820 And food just begins to stop growing, agriculture begins to fail, and people begin to starve.

00:25:09.680 And the estimates there, there's a paper that was published in Nature Food by Alan Roebuck and Lily Gia and their colleagues at Rutgers University.

00:25:21.260 According to that paper, this particular scenario, where it said 360 million people would die from the attacks, they estimate over 5 billion people would die of starvation.

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00:28:15.760 Over $5 billion within two years of a nuclear war from starvation all around the planet.

00:28:24.100 And here's a kicker, actually.

00:28:26.380 The number is actually really more than 6 billion, because when they wrote the paper, they based all of their calculations, simulations, modeling on a worldwide population of 7 billion.

00:28:38.760 We now have more than 8 billion people on the planet.

00:28:41.880 So that just quite simply means that you're going to have an extra 1 billion people dying of starvation.

00:28:48.220 So it's really, I mean, this is quite simply, this is not, this is the end of human civilization.

00:28:55.280 This is the end of humanity as we know it.

00:29:00.180 I'm not saying, I don't think we know that everyone would die, although it's quite possible.

00:29:06.700 I don't think it means all of life on the planet would be extinguished, although even that's possible.

00:29:13.960 But this is quite simply not the planet we'll live on today.

00:29:17.420 And then on top of it, there's the radiation effects, and I can talk more about radiation.

00:29:23.480 And then there's this business of ozone layer destruction.

00:29:27.640 And that's somebody at Columbia whom I actually knew quite well.

00:29:32.220 He passed away recently in his 90s.

00:29:34.960 His name was Mal Ruderman.

00:29:36.160 He was one of the first people who they wrote about in the 1970s about nitric oxide production as a consequence of nuclear war

00:29:50.140 and the impact that this would have on ozone layer, on the ozone layer.

00:29:56.500 And that kind of research has been done also more recently with the new models, simulations, and so on.

00:30:06.700 Those estimates suggest that the war scenario I keep mentioning between U.S. and Russia would result in 70% ozone layer destruction.

00:30:20.120 This is, again, this is not a place where you go out to sunbathe.

00:30:24.460 This is a place in which UV radiation is incredibly dangerous, not just to people, but it would also impact agricultural production because it would impact plants.

00:30:42.280 So, again, this would be another hit on sort of food supplies.

00:30:47.300 But, you know, all of this is just so, so horrific, this idea that we would ever conduct something like nuclear war.

00:31:02.340 I mean, Reagan and Gorbachev said in 1986, nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

00:31:10.140 But, Khrushchev said in the 1960s that the survivors would envy the dead.

00:31:17.380 And yet here we are, you know, 80 years into the nuclear age, still in, I would say in many ways, playing nuclear roulette with.

00:31:27.520 I've noticed.

00:31:28.380 Not.

00:31:29.120 Yeah.

00:31:29.660 Ever more recklessly, especially in the last three years.

00:31:32.340 Let me ask you a couple of questions just to tie up what you just said.

00:31:38.220 You said in the simulation, the theoretical account that Annie Jacobson wrote about in her book, very influential book, Diablo Canyon nuclear site in California is hit with a nuclear weapon.

00:31:51.580 What is the effect of a nuclear power plant getting hit by a nuclear weapon?

00:31:57.360 That one is really, really devastating.

00:32:01.680 I hadn't actually, I mean, I think with the war in Ukraine, we had sort of gotten a sense, right, that a nuclear power plant presents this very kind of special type of threat in war zones.

00:32:19.280 And this was the war in Ukraine was actually quite simply the first war where we had active fighting in a country, active military conflict, violent conflict in a country that had nuclear power plants.

00:32:35.860 That just had not been the case previously.

00:32:38.720 And, you know, there are a whole lot of things you could say about nuclear power and potential dangers, threats and so on.

00:32:46.440 But in the case of a conflict, a nuclear power plant can become a weapon in and of itself.

00:32:55.020 Of course.

00:32:55.420 So I read the book a while back.

00:32:57.920 So I.

00:32:58.540 But is it possible you could get an exponential effect?

00:33:01.300 Absolutely.

00:33:02.120 No, no, no.

00:33:02.620 This is this is now a radiation, you know.

00:33:06.060 So so so now people are dying all over the Western United States from the absolutely enormous amount of radioactivity that is spread.

00:33:17.520 Right.

00:33:17.780 So you hit the nuclear power plant.

00:33:20.240 It's not the blast in the fire.

00:33:22.240 But I mean, yes, it is there locally, but that's not what's going to kill the people in L.A.

00:33:27.180 What's going to kill the people in L.A. is the radiation that's going to spread.

00:33:32.920 So what does that look like?

00:33:34.380 That was my second question.

00:33:35.380 You said you would flesh out the concept of the danger of radiation.

00:33:40.860 Like, what does that look like?

00:33:41.740 We know something about that because of the bombings 80 years ago.

00:33:44.580 But we know something about that because of the bombings from 80 years ago.

00:33:48.260 Absolutely.

00:33:49.100 And I can say a little more about those.

00:33:52.320 But we also know a whole lot about the impact of nuclear explosions on the environment,

00:33:59.960 the impact of radiation on the environment, because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only two or even count Trinity three times.

00:34:11.340 It's not that we've exploded nuclear weapons three times.

00:34:14.240 We've exploded nuclear weapons more than 2,000 times on this planet.

00:34:19.360 And that was as part of nuclear weapons, full nuclear weapons explosions as part of what it's referred to as nuclear weapons testing programs.

00:34:28.760 I was in March at the United Nations, actually, at the third meeting of states parties of a treaty called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

00:34:38.280 And I was speaking to a woman from French Polynesia where the French tested nuclear weapons.

00:34:46.840 She's actually a member of the French Polynesian Parliament now.

00:34:51.380 Her name is Hina Moira Cross.

00:34:53.880 She's a relatively young woman, I think in her 30s.

00:34:57.660 She's a mother.

00:34:59.120 She's had leukemia for many years.

00:35:02.700 And many people in French Polynesia have been impacted by the testing that took place there.

00:35:13.260 Leukemia can be a result of exposure to radiation.

00:35:16.360 Absolutely.

00:35:17.180 And I can explain that as well.

00:35:20.640 But Hina Moira said to me something really interesting.

00:35:23.680 She said, you know, when we call it testing, when I was young and people would talk about, oh, we had the testing.

00:35:30.440 I just imagined scientists kind of playing in the laboratory and, you know, doing some kind of a test.

00:35:37.400 These were full-blown nuclear explosions.

00:35:40.800 They described Bravo, described the Soviet so-called test, the Tsar Bomba.

00:35:47.220 There were over 2,000 such explosions, many of them atmospheric tests.

00:35:53.940 There was a majority still underground tests, but even underground tests have had devastating consequences.

00:36:02.660 In 1963, there was really a kind of seminal agreement that was made initially just by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom of stopping atmospheric testing.

00:36:18.840 And that was a real victory for the people of the world because it helped to – some atmospheric testing continued.

00:36:28.160 China and France actually both continued to test in the atmosphere post-1963.

00:36:34.820 France tested in the atmosphere until 1974, and China tested in the atmosphere until 1980.

00:36:41.980 So both of those continued.

00:36:45.820 Everybody else has conducted, to our knowledge, underground tests.

00:36:52.080 To my knowledge, only underground tests.

00:36:55.200 As important as it is, politics is not the answer to this country's or man's greatest problem.

00:37:00.780 The only solution is Jesus. 0.97

00:37:03.300 Sorry, that's true.

00:37:05.220 At its core, politics is a process of critiquing other people and getting them to change.

00:37:10.680 Christianity is the opposite. 0.96

00:37:13.420 Christianity begins with a call for you to change, me to change. 0.93

00:37:18.280 It's called repentance, and it brings you back to God.

00:37:21.960 When God is at the center, hearts change.

00:37:24.600 Only that will lead to the end of abortion, the greatest atrocity this country's ever participated in.

00:37:31.820 The normalizing of killing babies is a stain on this country.

00:37:36.200 Our friends at Preborn are doing everything they can to stop it by providing free ultrasounds to pregnant women.

00:37:41.240 Preborn has rescued over 380,000 children.

00:37:44.480 There are a lot of nonprofits out there.

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00:38:20.260 There's nothing, nothing more worth it.

00:38:23.540 We hope you'll join us.

00:38:24.260 Did you lock the front door?

00:38:28.380 Check.

00:38:28.920 Closed the garage door?

00:38:30.080 Yep.

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00:38:54.260 What are the new technologies that will change aviation?

00:38:58.800 Well, hydrogen would be one for sure if we got there.

00:39:01.140 I mean, hydrogen is not just a alternative fuel.

00:39:04.400 I mean, hydrogen would change it significantly if we ever managed to break the back of that.

00:39:09.280 Today, I'm speaking with Kalen Rovinescu, the former president of Air Canada and a trailblazer

00:39:16.460 in global aviation.

00:39:18.800 Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy podcast.

00:39:22.120 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

00:39:24.980 So, tell us about the effects of radiation.

00:39:27.820 So, how long does the pollution last?

00:39:32.540 How bad is it?

00:39:33.740 Yeah.

00:39:33.980 So, depending on what kind of a bomb you have.

00:39:38.580 So, let me go back to a kind of key distinction here.

00:39:43.580 We have two types of nuclear weapons. 0.73

00:39:46.460 One we refer to as atomic bombs.

00:39:49.280 Those are, again, 1945 weapons.

00:39:51.320 Those are based on the process of fission.

00:39:56.060 Fission is when a nucleus of an atom splits.

00:40:00.400 And basically, one element, we all know elements like hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and so on.

00:40:08.540 But an element like uranium or plutonium splits and produces two other elements.

00:40:15.640 And energy is produced in such a reaction.

00:40:21.660 And, you know, a tiny amount of energy is produced in one reaction.

00:40:26.680 But when you have many, many, many reactions, you can have a lot of energy.

00:40:30.920 Another process is called the process of fusion.

00:40:34.220 And that's when actually nuclei of two elements come together and produce energy that way.

00:40:41.880 So, for example, two hydrogen nuclei come together to form helium and energy is produced that way.

00:40:50.160 That process actually takes place in the sun.

00:40:54.080 That's how the sun produces its energy.

00:40:57.300 So, fusion is a good thing.

00:40:58.980 We quite simply wouldn't have life on this planet if it weren't for fusion.

00:41:03.060 But, again, using fusion for the purpose of weapons is a whole other thing.

00:41:09.120 So, depending on, you know, sort of what you do.

00:41:12.300 And here's the interesting thing about fusion or hydrogen bombs.

00:41:16.720 In order to actually bring, so, you know that, so if I have hydrogen nuclei,

00:41:25.620 so this is, let's just step one second to just remember what an atom is, what elements are.

00:41:32.640 So, we have different elements on the planet.

00:41:36.480 The atoms are sort of the smallest units of the element.

00:41:41.840 But those atoms are made up of different kinds of particles.

00:41:45.680 So, the nucleus is at the center of the atom.

00:41:48.840 It might have just a single proton like in hydrogen, or it might also have more protons and also neutrons and so on.

00:41:55.080 And then there are electrons around it.

00:41:57.060 In chemical reactions, everything basically happens with, not basically, everything happens with the electrons.

00:42:04.060 So, the nuclei just stay the same.

00:42:06.980 With nuclear reactions, everything is about what happens in the nucleus.

00:42:11.280 The nucleus either splits or the nuclei in fission or nuclei come together in fusion.

00:42:17.620 In fusion, if you have a nucleus that is positively charged, electrons are negatively charged.

00:42:26.880 This is what keeps the atom stable.

00:42:29.160 If you have one nucleus that's positively charged trying to come together with another nucleus that's positively charged,

00:42:37.180 they repel each other, right?

00:42:39.080 So, they repel each other.

00:42:42.780 So, you actually need to invest energy to overcome that electrostatic repulsion.

00:42:51.940 And the amount of energy that's needed can only be supplied by something like a fission bomb.

00:42:59.200 So, even for fusion, for hydrogen weapons, right, we actually need to have fission as the fuel that kind of sets up the conditions for the fusion to actually take place.

00:43:12.380 How much more powerful is a hydrogen bomb than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

00:43:16.500 So, the Bravo one was a thousand times more powerful than a Hiroshima bomb. 0.91

00:43:25.620 Currently, like if we have a one megaton bomb, that's about 70 Hiroshima bombs.

00:43:32.600 But hydrogen bombs, actually, there's kind of no limit.

00:43:36.420 Like you could keep making them bigger and bigger and bigger.

00:43:39.160 Somehow, we've stopped making the really big ones.

00:43:41.840 I think China has probably the most powerful, the most high-energy hydrogen bombs currently in their arsenals.

00:43:52.720 I think they have five megaton bombs, hydrogen bombs in their arsenals.

00:44:00.600 That's more than 300 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

00:44:03.880 But then again, if you have a missile that can carry 10 warheads, it almost doesn't matter, you know, how much a single one is.

00:44:14.280 But just back to radiation.

00:44:16.040 So, basically, what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them.

00:44:26.440 And in so doing, you produce some radioactive isotopes, radioactive elements that are going to basically be in the environment both locally.

00:44:40.840 They're going to get, you know, kind of blown up.

00:44:43.480 You know, things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud.

00:44:47.840 You produce these radioactive isotopes.

00:44:50.160 They're mixed with everything.

00:44:51.180 Some of that will kind of fall back onto the planet locally.

00:44:57.560 Some of it will be carried up into the atmosphere, high-level stratosphere and so on.

00:45:05.660 And actually become, you know, part of sort of a global deposition where you go so high up in the atmosphere.

00:45:17.260 It stays, you know, stays up there.

00:45:20.140 And then you could also end up having, depending on exactly how far up it goes, you could have it come down with weather events.

00:45:29.940 And so when the United...

00:45:31.500 So it's raining nuclear isotopes.

00:45:33.800 It's raining radioactive nuclear isotopes.

00:45:37.400 The U.S., I mentioned the testing in the Marshall Islands.

00:45:41.060 We also tested in another Pacific island state called Republic of Kiribati.

00:45:47.220 And we tested on our own soil, both in Nevada, where there were 100 atmospheric tests and some 828 underground tests, as well as in Alaska, where there were just underground tests.

00:46:01.640 But the testing in Nevada actually produced fallout that went all around the United States.

00:46:09.300 And it quite simply depended on whether or not there was rain in locals.

00:46:17.660 So the fallout was carried across towards the east, given the easterly winds.

00:46:23.920 And then if there was a rain, a weather event in some place, the fallout would get deposited there.

00:46:32.960 And there are maps of the United States that quite simply look like you sort of gave an empty map to a child and they played with paint and kind of, you know, sprayed, you know, blotches of paint onto different parts.

00:46:49.660 Colic painting, yeah.

00:46:50.560 Yeah, exactly.

00:46:51.580 And it's where radiation had been deposited from these.

00:46:57.080 Do we know the health effects of that?

00:46:58.860 The health effects are very severe and very serious.

00:47:02.320 So let me just name a few of the top radioactive isotopes that are problematic.

00:47:10.480 There's something called iodine-131.

00:47:13.560 There's something called cesium-137.

00:47:16.400 Something called strontium-90 and there are a number of different isotopes of plutonium.

00:47:22.680 And the thing about these is that they quite simply last in the environment for different amounts of time.

00:47:31.640 So some of them, there's a concept called half-life.

00:47:36.360 So a radioactive isotope will have a specific half-life.

00:47:40.960 And what that means is if you have, if you start out with, say, a thousand atoms of this isotope, after its half-life, you will have 500.

00:47:52.020 And after another half-life, you'll have 250 and so on.

00:47:55.340 And so after six, seven, call it even 10 half-lives, it's going to be gone from the environment.

00:48:02.460 Iodine-131 has a very short half-life.

00:48:05.820 It's eight days.

00:48:07.160 And so within a matter of weeks, it's gone from the environment.

00:48:10.820 But if you were there at the time of the explosion and if you got exposed to iodine-131, that actually went into your body mostly because the iodine actually went into the grass and then the cows ate the grass and people drank the milk and so on.

00:48:32.080 But it goes right to your thyroid and it has caused, who knows, numerous, numerous cancers in this country, but actually in many other parts of the world.

00:48:45.540 Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years each.

00:48:52.060 That means they stick in the environment for a few, a couple hundred years at least.

00:48:58.820 And what's interesting about both of these isotopes, strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium.

00:49:08.420 And you know that when you drink milk or eat cheese or whatever, you're taking calcium, that calcium goes into your bones, goes into, it's building up your bone marrow.

00:49:18.660 And strontium-90 will go to those exact places.

00:49:23.660 So the reason we mentioned leukemia earlier, the reason that people got, and especially they called leukemia the atomic bomb disease in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings, the reason for that was the exposure to strontium-90.

00:49:42.900 Also, also importantly, because it acts like calcium, it also gets incorporated by plants will take it up from the environment and you can ingest it.

00:49:56.800 Cesium-137 is the same half-life, you know, around for a long time, is chemically similar to potassium.

00:50:09.060 And you also know that if you eat banana or if you drink some kind of electrolyte drink or something, you're taking potassium.

00:50:17.460 Well, the same thing happens.

00:50:19.100 If cesium is in the soil, plants will take it up, thinking, because it behaves like potassium, they take it up, it gets incorporated.

00:50:30.760 And now when you eat that food, that cesium is now getting incorporated into your cells, the kinds of soft tissues that use potassium.

00:50:44.820 Your brain actually needs a lot of potassium.

00:50:47.400 And so when instead of taking up potassium, you've now brought cesium-137 into your body, now the cesium is this radioactive isotope that's going to basically, after a certain amount of time, it's going to split and it's going to give off gamma radiation.

00:51:10.480 And now that gamma radiation is inside your body, it's attacking your cells, it's attacking your DNA, it's making you sick.

00:51:18.760 And a lot of kind of soft tissue cancers, including brain cancer, come from that cesium-137.

00:51:27.480 Did you see markedly higher rates of those cancers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

00:51:31.080 Yes, oh, absolutely.

00:51:33.240 I mean, the estimates for the casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it's often cited what people think it was like 70, the idea is maybe 70,000 people died on the day of the attack.

00:51:53.280 And then another 70,000 by the end of 1945 from both kind of acute radiation sickness as well as cancer.

00:52:03.720 But the cancers continue to happen.

00:52:06.660 There's a particularly touching story of a young girl who was two years old in Hiroshima the day of the bombings.

00:52:16.780 Her name was Sadako Sasaki, and when she was 12, so 10 years after the bombing, she developed leukemia.

00:52:26.760 She had been, you know, growing well and was very athletic and very active, and she developed leukemia.

00:52:35.480 And she is the one who, she learned the story of the paper crane, the folding of the origami.

00:52:43.360 Yes.

00:52:43.680 And she learned the story that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true.

00:52:50.020 There are now some differences in kind of details of what happened, how many paper cranes she folded and so on.

00:52:58.040 But needless to say, she died.

00:53:01.240 And after she died, it was actually her friends who wanted to do something in her honor.

00:53:07.920 And essentially, over, you know, the decades, the paper crane that she was, the paper cranes that she was folding really became a kind of symbol of peace.

00:53:20.840 And this sort of message, you know, she, when she was wishing, folding the paper cranes, she was wishing not just to get better, but she was wishing for world peace.

00:53:33.840 And that's kind of what got taken up by.

00:53:37.220 So if you had the U.S. and Russia fire one third of their nuclear arsenals, you're saying that every study projection has shown like an elimination of like life on Earth, basically.

00:53:53.180 Certainly human life on Earth, human civilization.

00:53:56.040 Yeah, I would say it's absolutely, certainly end of the world as we know it.

00:54:04.040 Whether we all, you know, perish or some people survive, the latter is certainly possible.

00:54:14.360 This actually, the U.N. is now advancing a study on the consequences of nuclear war.

00:54:21.380 Something that really hasn't been studied, I would say, in terms of the current, the world that we currently live in, right?

00:54:31.020 So we live in a very globalized world.

00:54:34.520 You know, we often might eat food from other places in the world, right?

00:54:40.800 Like, what is that in the current context that wasn't necessarily true to the same degree in the 1980s?

00:54:48.260 People, for example, ate food that was more local and so on.

00:54:52.160 So what does that look like today?

00:54:54.660 Anyway, the science of nuclear winter and, for example, ozone layer destruction, that's very, very solid science.

00:55:05.320 It gets attacked all the time, but it is very solid science.

00:55:09.080 And old.

00:55:09.580 You said this has been something that people have been studying for 80 years.

00:55:14.400 How many nuclear weapons are there in the world globally?

00:55:17.720 Today, we have 12 and a half nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine nuclear armed states.

00:55:35.520 U.S. and Russia have the vast majority, over 90% of the nuclear warheads are in the possession of U.S. and Russia.

00:55:43.500 Are we pretty sure of that?

00:55:45.720 I mean, we know where these warheads are.

00:55:48.240 Yeah.

00:55:48.640 No, we actually know.

00:55:50.520 The good news about nuclear weapons is they're not a garage project.

00:55:55.940 There are other things you could do in your garage that could be very dangerous.

00:56:00.060 You can't do that with nuclear weapons.

00:56:02.880 You really, it takes a tremendous amount of not just resources and kind of human ingenuity, but infrastructure.

00:56:14.680 You know, part of the reason they did that in the, you know, the Manhattan Project in the Los Alamos, it was all that isolation and so on.

00:56:23.300 Do we know where they are?

00:56:24.140 We do.

00:56:26.340 For the most part, we know where they are.

00:56:28.680 Not, probably not all of them.

00:56:31.060 I think it's kind of known where, for example, Russia's military bases are, but perhaps not exactly how many were and how.

00:56:40.420 The other piece is that we do have a lot of nuclear warheads on submarines, which could be pretty much anywhere in the world's oceans.

00:56:51.680 What's interesting, so submarines keep moving most of the time.

00:56:55.000 Yeah.

00:56:55.080 Isn't it dangerous to have a nuclear warhead continuously on a boat?

00:57:01.280 Yeah, some of these nuclear submarines are carrying so many warheads.

00:57:09.160 They're carrying so many missiles, and each missile is carrying warheads.

00:57:14.220 But submarines sink.

00:57:14.960 I think they call them handmaidens of the apocalypse.

00:57:17.220 There were incidents in, like, the 1950s where a U.S. and a Soviet submarine, like, you know, crashed into one another.

00:57:27.920 They're also—

00:57:28.980 Nuclear armed.

00:57:30.060 Nuclear armed.

00:57:31.400 What happened?

00:57:31.720 And nothing happened.

00:57:33.500 Like, we've actually been—I mean, this is one way of looking at the history of the entire nuclear age, so 80 years of the nuclear age,

00:57:43.100 is that we've been very, very lucky that the scenarios I'm describing, the scenario Annie Jacobson is describing,

00:57:51.360 the scenario I'm describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, there's a whole other thing,

00:57:57.140 which you probably also know about, because I know you spoke with Dennis Quaid, the electromagnetic pulse.

00:58:04.040 That's another thing you could do.

00:58:05.740 You could shut down the electricity over entire countries.

00:58:09.760 Like, you need, like, three nuclear warheads to shut down the electricity over the entire United States.

00:58:16.160 And this isn't a case where you, you know, it's a blackout and we're all inconvenienced for a week.

00:58:22.540 This is like, the electricity is not coming back.

00:58:25.820 So you wouldn't even need to, like, explode nuclear weapons on cities.

00:58:30.840 You'd just need to shut down our electrical grid. 0.98

00:58:34.680 And then, you know, good luck to—

00:58:36.760 The country starts today.

00:58:37.400 Yeah, yeah, good luck to all of us.

00:58:39.440 So, during the Cold War, a Russian sub, Soviet sub, and a U.S. sub collided.

00:58:46.520 Luckily, you know, the bombs didn't go off, but there were also examples of warheads being lost, right?

00:58:53.580 Yeah, warheads being lost, warheads being dropped to the bottom of the ocean.

00:58:59.040 There are about 50 nuclear warheads at the bottom of the ocean.

00:59:03.300 So, wait, there are 50 nuclear warheads right now at the bottom of the ocean?

00:59:05.980 Right now at the bottom of the ocean, yeah.

00:59:07.660 And no one's tried to retrieve them?

00:59:10.160 Fell off of a submarine, fell off a plane, you know, all kinds of accidents.

00:59:16.760 It wasn't just two submarines colliding.

00:59:20.060 It was also—there was also airplanes carrying nuclear warheads colliding.

00:59:24.300 There was once, yeah, there was once a nuclear warhead that was dropped quite literally into someone's backyard in South Carolina.

00:59:36.340 It didn't go off.

00:59:37.400 It had, like, multiple security kind of systems, and the last one held.

00:59:43.800 Everything else, you know, had given way.

00:59:48.000 Wait, the U.S. military dropped a nuclear bomb in someone's backyard in South Carolina?

00:59:52.980 Yeah, absolutely.

00:59:54.580 I forget the exact year.

00:59:56.320 This was—most of these incidents were in the 1950s. 0.99

01:00:00.320 But that was kind of a period of really stupid accidents. 0.96

01:00:04.920 And then the, you know, what is often referred to in the field as close calls, you know, sort of got more sophisticated. 0.97

01:00:15.740 In 1962, of course, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis.

01:00:19.140 Yes, famously.

01:00:19.960 A whole, famously, a whole set of things.

01:00:24.620 And really what we understand from that is that could have led to a nuclear war, you know, from deliberate kind of, you know, U.S.

01:00:35.960 Kennedy was under a tremendous amount of pressure to actually invade Cuba.

01:00:40.140 By that point, the Soviets actually had nuclear warheads and missiles in Cuba, you know, had that invasion or they're gone, you know, we quite simply would have had a nuclear war.

01:00:54.980 But it wasn't just that.

01:00:56.280 There were incidents during that 13-day period, three of them on the same day, October 27th.

01:01:04.900 There was a Saturday, it's often referred to as the Black Saturday.

01:01:10.100 There were three things that happened that day.

01:01:12.080 One was a U.S. plane that was doing some kind of monitoring in the—near the North Pole and had accidentally gone off, lost radar, lost kind of the ability to navigate where they were,

01:01:30.560 and gone deep into the Soviet Union and was actually too high up for the Soviet, you know, defense to, air defense to, and they really tried to shoot it down, but the guy escaped.

01:01:47.760 Then there was an airplane that was shot down over Cuba and the American captain was killed on that day and Kennedy did not decide to move towards an invasion and so on.

01:02:04.020 And then perhaps the most serious one was where the U.S. was trying to enforce a blockade of kind of, you know, the Soviets weren't supposed to be coming to Cuba to, you know, bring any sort of military equipment.

01:02:22.000 And to enforce this blockade, they were using something called depth charges, but they were using kind of simulating depth charges, and depth charges like a weapon to attack a submarine.

01:02:38.420 And so they were using ones that would sort of simulate an attack, but not really attack.

01:02:44.340 And one Soviet submarine had sort of three officers on board, was being attacked by these depth charges.

01:02:57.840 They interpreted it as a real attack.

01:03:00.580 They actually thought that maybe there was a war going on, and they were nuclear armed.

01:03:06.520 They had a nuclear torpedo on board, and what they needed, this wasn't, you know, like they needed permission from some higher authority.

01:03:20.800 They needed, all three of them needed to agree to employ the nuclear warhead.

01:03:26.680 One of them, his name was Captain Arkhipov, decided that he did not want to approve the use of the nuclear torpedo and basically saved the world in that moment.

01:03:43.220 And the very next day, October 28th, was actually the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets, you know, agreed to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba.

01:03:59.500 President Kennedy had in turn agreed that the U.S. would withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey.

01:04:07.080 This wasn't known until relatively recently, because at the time, Kennedy asked Khrushchev, you know, you have my word, we'll do this, but I just need a little time, and I'm not going to make it public.

01:04:22.360 And that was the agreement.

01:04:23.580 It ended the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was a very, very, very dangerous moment.

01:04:30.860 It seems to have changed President Kennedy's views of nuclear weapons or hardened his views, and he became entirely committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.

01:04:42.800 He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.

01:04:47.180 That was absolutely, really important to him.

01:04:49.420 But he was also, he was very, he was looking towards disarmament, and it was even before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961, he gave a very famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated something to the effect of, we must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.

01:05:12.060 So this is quite simply something we've known for a long time.

01:05:16.220 And this was, Kennedy understood this before we understood nuclear winter, before we understood ozone layer destruction, maybe around the time we were figuring out electromagnetic pulse and so on.

01:05:29.160 So he understood this at a very deep level.

01:05:32.020 The part where he really put in his energy was the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, and that was negotiated with Khrushchev the following year in 1963.

01:05:48.580 That was a tremendous achievement and a really, really important achievement.

01:05:53.160 And going back to our discussion of radiation, you know, I often sometimes when I sit in a room full of people, or stand or whatever, and speak about this, I sometimes say, you know, there are people in this room who are alive today because of that Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty.

01:06:10.440 Because had we continued to test to the degree and the levels that we were doing, we would have just sickened more and more and more people in our own country and around the world.

01:06:24.060 One thing I'll just add is that I didn't say earlier, because I was talking about the isotopes, I never told you about plutonium.

01:06:31.640 There are actually different isotopes of plutonium, and some of them have half-lives of thousands of years.

01:06:39.840 There's an isotope of plutonium with a 24,500-year half-lifetime.

01:06:45.800 That means that thing's going to be in the environment for, you know, a couple of hundred thousand years.

01:06:53.480 So this is, again, back to that issue of transcending time and space.

01:06:58.820 This is not something that just has an immediate effect.

01:07:03.300 We clean it up and we move on.

01:07:05.400 The plutonium, in fact, the plutonium has been deposited globally.

01:07:12.940 And we actually have an understanding that hundreds of years from now, hopefully, there will be scientists who study the planet who will say, oh, look, this is when they tested nuclear weapons.

01:07:26.680 Here's the plutonium line in the geologic record.

01:07:30.580 Can I ask you about President Kennedy's efforts to prevent nuclear war?

01:07:40.700 One of the things he did, it's been written about to some extent, is try to prevent David Ben-Gurion, then Prime Minister of Israel, from developing a nuclear weapon at the Damona site.

01:07:51.720 I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the president demanding inspections of the Damona site.

01:07:58.240 Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister, I think, as a result of this controversy.

01:08:02.140 What happened there?

01:08:06.140 Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any sort of oversight by the President Kennedy thought that proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous.

01:08:22.920 He was definitely concerned and didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons.

01:08:29.900 This eventually led, even after his death, to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose goal was that.

01:08:38.300 But there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well.

01:08:41.780 In the case of Israel, he felt very strongly that if this was our ally, you know,

01:08:49.900 we were going to tell the rest of the world not to acquire nuclear weapons, we also had to actually, you know, do what we were preaching and sort of be consistent in our approach to Israeli nuclear weapons. 0.52

01:09:08.460 But they went ahead and, I mean, I think it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966.

01:09:22.760 And so this was actually, interestingly, before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came together.

01:09:31.340 It was negotiated over a long period of time, but finally kind of signed in 1968, and then it entered into force in 1970.

01:09:46.340 It's still currently one of the largest international agreements amongst states in the United Nations.

01:09:56.620 How many nuclear armed states have signed it?

01:09:58.400 So that treaty, it recognizes five nuclear weapons states, they're U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China.

01:10:11.460 Those are the five that had nuclear weapons up to that point, declared nuclear weapons arsenals.

01:10:18.240 Again, Israel had actually begun its program.

01:10:21.800 At this point, Israel is thought to have 90 nuclear warheads.

01:10:26.980 The other five, what's interesting is they were from the very beginning of the treaty, all five were recognized as nuclear weapons states, but China and France didn't join the treaty until 1992.

01:10:41.320 So it sometimes takes time for these treaties to actually bring everything.

01:10:47.820 So the other nations would be India, Pakistan, North Korea.

01:10:50.960 So there are, yes, so there are four others, so nine nuclear armed states, five recognized by the United Nations, also all five members of the UN Security Council with veto power.

01:11:04.600 And then the four that are outside of the treaty, Israel, which has this unique policy of ambiguity of an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

01:11:14.120 But again, we think it's a 90 nuclear warhead arsenal.

01:11:17.840 And we're pretty sure that there is.

01:11:20.660 Oh, absolutely.

01:11:21.680 I think there's no doubt about whether or not they have them.

01:11:27.480 India and Pakistan never joined the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

01:11:32.840 They both essentially, you know, tested nuclear weapons underground.

01:11:39.460 They each have on the order of 150 nuclear warheads today.

01:11:45.040 And then North Korea was actually a part of the treaty until they left the treaty in the early 2000s and have since, you know, pursued a nuclear weapons program.

01:11:59.200 And we think that North Korea actually currently has 50, 60, maybe 70 nuclear warheads.

01:12:05.780 What North Korea has done is it has also actually developed the delivery systems. 0.62

01:12:14.880 And we think that today North Korea actually has the kind of delivery systems that could deliver a nuclear warhead to any part of the United States.

01:12:27.620 And this to me is actually really for, you know, many reasons why we have to eliminate nuclear weapons.

01:12:38.400 I can make a case about that very strongly.

01:12:42.380 But in the case of North Korea, it seems utterly crazy to me that you have a country like the United States, which let's for just a moment imagine that we live in a world free of nuclear weapons. 0.54

01:12:58.560 Who's going to attack the United States?

01:13:00.400 You know, we've got the oceans.

01:13:01.700 We've got the conventional military.

01:13:03.600 I've actually heard our mutual friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, say that the United States could be the safest country in the history of humanity.

01:13:13.460 You know, but in a world with nuclear weapons, we are so vulnerable and we're not just vulnerable with however you want to classify Russia and China, but let's call them, you know, peer adversaries or near peer adversaries.

01:13:32.240 We're vulnerable to them, but we're also vulnerable to a country like North Korea, which is relatively small, relatively poor. 0.86

01:13:41.840 This is not a world superpower.

01:13:45.000 And yet North Korea could destroy the United States as we know it. 0.69

01:13:50.320 Where is Iran?

01:13:51.680 This is such a heavily politicized question, but there's got to be a science-based answer.

01:13:56.160 Where is Iran on the continuum toward getting a nuclear weapon?

01:13:59.260 Iran has been enriching uranium to 60%, which is, you don't need that for nuclear power.

01:14:07.900 It is not quite weapons grade, although if you wanted to make a weapon, you actually could make a weapon even out of the highly enriched uranium they currently have.

01:14:18.100 Now, my understanding is that they, and I actually listened to their statements in venues like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meetings at the UN.

01:14:29.260 They always say they're not interested in building nuclear weapons.

01:14:35.400 They do emphasize that their religion, you know, doesn't, you know, requires them not to pursue nuclear weapons.

01:14:45.680 I actually think that they're not pursuing nuclear weapons.

01:14:50.880 How hard would it be for, I mean, they have every incentive to any country that, you know, has its capital city bombed, probably wants a nuclear deterrent.

01:14:59.180 I would think, I mean, it's just common sense.

01:15:01.240 How hard is it, given where they are right now, technologically, how hard would it be for them to build a nuclear weapon?

01:15:08.360 I don't think it would be very hard.

01:15:09.960 I think if they wanted a nuclear weapon, they could have had it a long time ago.

01:15:15.380 How hard in general is it to build one?

01:15:17.360 It is hard.

01:15:18.320 It is a huge investment of, you know, resources, both human and financial resources.

01:15:26.780 It is a hard thing to do.

01:15:29.620 It's not a garage project.

01:15:31.520 It's not something that's going to evade, especially if you, if we were to pursue nuclear disarmament, especially in the world of today's technologies.

01:15:44.580 It would be very, relatively easy to track activity, to set up inspections, to do the kinds of things that would rid the world of this threat.

01:15:56.180 Right after 9-11, we heard a lot about the potential for a dirty bomb, nuclear material with conventional explosives attached that would pollute an area.

01:16:07.620 What would that look like?

01:16:08.860 Is that an actual threat?

01:16:10.840 I think that's still, that remains a threat.

01:16:13.680 I think that woke up some people in the early 2000s to kind of think a little bit about, about the threat of nuclear weapons.

01:16:22.680 Interestingly, it was in 2007.

01:16:25.680 I think this sort of terrorist threat was a big part of why they did this.

01:16:31.660 It brought Kissinger and George Shultz, both of whom were former secretaries of state under Republican presidents, as well as Bill Perry, Department of Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and Sam Nunn, a longtime Democratic senator from Georgia.

01:16:52.160 Brought the four of them together in 2007, they wrote the first of a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal titled something like Toward the World Free of Nuclear Weapons, in which they actually make the case for both why we need a world free of nuclear weapons and why the United States should lead that effort.

01:17:17.340 Can I ask a dumb question I should have asked before?

01:17:20.220 So you've said it's been longstanding policy for over 70 years, that if the United States believes there are incoming nuclear missiles, that it will strike the country of origin.

01:17:34.520 What's the thinking there?

01:17:35.840 I've never questioned that, but if you think about it, I mean, if there's nothing you can do to stop.

01:17:44.780 I think so much of this is actually, I love, there's a quote from Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers and is best known for that.

01:17:54.680 He passed away a little over a year ago or so.

01:17:59.940 Daniel Ellsberg, after that kind of effort to end the Vietnam War, really ended up spending decades speaking about nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons issues.

01:18:14.080 And in his book, The Doomsday Machine, there's a quote I really, really love.

01:18:22.580 He says that nuclear weapons policies, past and current, are dizzingly insane and immoral.

01:18:31.560 And that's really all I have to say in response to why would we, you know, why would we, if we think we're being attacked by one or two nuclear warheads, why would we send 82 to North Korea? 0.77

01:18:46.580 You know, I think.

01:18:47.960 Well, I mean, you know, if you can't, if there's some way to stop the nuclear attack, then of course.

01:18:57.620 I mean, you know, if it's, if it's them or us, I'm for, you know, I'm for us always.

01:19:03.460 However, if there's no way to stop the missiles from coming, if there really is no technology that allows that, then what, what is the point of killing a hundred million other people?

01:19:14.440 Yeah.

01:19:15.020 If you're going to die.

01:19:16.240 It's a really, it's a really good question.

01:19:18.920 I think one.

01:19:20.080 Has this been debated?

01:19:22.180 So nuclear deterrence.

01:19:25.640 Which I understand.

01:19:26.420 Has kind of become a sort of mantra.

01:19:29.700 So let me just step back for a second.

01:19:32.520 I think one of the problems we have currently in this country is number one, most people are not aware of this threat.

01:19:40.860 Don't understand nuclear weapons.

01:19:42.700 Don't understand what they could do.

01:19:44.660 Sometimes when I speak or write or, you know, people will respond.

01:19:48.440 Oh, I remember duck and cover when I was in school.

01:19:50.980 People, you know, people of a certain generation still sort of have a sense for, for what is going on.

01:19:57.100 But many young people are just utterly unaware.

01:20:01.700 There is a section of society, however, that is aware and understands what nuclear weapons are and, you know, understand some of the basic facts that we've been talking about and so on.

01:20:14.480 But has been convinced by this idea that nuclear deterrence works and nuclear weapons keep us safe and that's just all there is to it.

01:20:25.480 And there's just no way to, you know, undo or put the genie back in the bottle or any of that.

01:20:31.240 And the truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence.

01:20:36.960 The first and kind of to me most fundamental is that there is quite simply no plan B for what happens if nuclear deterrence fails.

01:20:48.060 It's just kind of like an autopilot, you know, we're under attack.

01:20:53.300 We're going to attack them.

01:20:54.520 And even if you think about a scenario in which we somehow actually managed, whoever the enemies are, we managed to disarm them or disable or or even if we somehow magically had a dome over the country, which, by the way, we're not going to.

01:21:13.220 It's never going to work.

01:21:14.460 We've tried this and there's just no way to actually do that.

01:21:18.480 But even if we did to destroy such an enemy, right, we would need to use so many hundreds or thousands of warheads that we would create, we would create nuclear winter, we'd create ozone layer destruction.

01:21:34.080 It would be in the Cold War.

01:21:36.560 We called it mutually assured destruction or MAD.

01:21:40.080 It is actually always sad.

01:21:43.520 It's always self-assured destruction.

01:21:45.940 If you're going to go into nuclear war, whether or not you end up getting attacked, you're going to create conditions that are going to actually destroy your own nation.

01:21:57.860 I just want to tell you a story about the United States.

01:22:02.980 So this, you know, the claim that I made a little earlier about the United States actually having, in my mind, having the most to gain from pursuing a world free of nuclear weapons.

01:22:18.660 I was at a place called Wilton Park.

01:22:23.220 It's in the United Kingdom.

01:22:24.800 It was like being in a Jane Austen novel.

01:22:27.360 And it's a place where the UK's foreign ministry basically brings experts, diplomats, academics, and so on to discuss various issues all year long.

01:22:41.940 And one week a year, they devote to this nuclear non-proliferation treaty diplomacy.

01:22:48.580 And I was invited there last December.

01:22:52.300 And these meetings are held.

01:22:54.800 It was about 30 of us actually spoke, but it's a large room.

01:22:59.320 It's about 80 people.

01:23:00.880 And it was all very, very interactive.

01:23:03.100 And in one such exchange, I actually made this case that the United States has the most to gain from a world free of nuclear weapons.

01:23:11.580 And these meetings are held under what's called Chatham House rules.

01:23:15.560 So I can talk about what happened, but I can't talk about who said it.

01:23:20.060 So I'm not going to say who said it.

01:23:21.600 But a person responded to me and I had made a comment to their remarks and then made this comment about the U.S.

01:23:29.480 And this person responded to me, after which I wasn't allowed, according to the rules, to respond.

01:23:37.280 So I'll tell you what the response was.

01:23:39.860 The response was, you're right, and I was shocked that they accepted this.

01:23:44.700 You're right that the United States would be safer in a world free of nuclear weapons, but our allies would not be.

01:23:52.740 And so because I wasn't allowed to respond in the room, I waited until it was after, you know, that session had ended in the lunch line.

01:24:04.100 I approached this person and I said, how would the American people feel if you told them that we're not pursuing nuclear disarmament because of our allies?

01:24:18.640 And take a guess what he responded to me.

01:24:21.320 I don't think he cares what the American people think.

01:24:23.120 No, he said, now you sound like Trump.

01:24:26.740 And I said, that's not an answer.

01:24:31.840 A person goes, you want an answer?

01:24:36.940 There would be no Europe. 0.77

01:24:38.900 It would all be Mother Russia. 0.95

01:24:42.200 So, you know, there's this, the idea. 0.71

01:24:44.720 Well, they're deranged.

01:24:45.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:46.380 But I mean, seriously, like.

01:24:48.480 They'd be better off anyway.

01:24:49.620 How are we, how are we accepting to be under mortal threat as a nation, as a people, as humanity all the time?

01:25:04.760 JFK had another, he had so many brilliant statements and quotes and so on.

01:25:12.500 Another one was like, humanity was not meant to live in a prison awaiting its final destruction.

01:25:20.460 I mean, that was, his view was like, we're all just sitting in this prison awaiting, you know, the nuclear war destroying, destroying our world.

01:25:30.000 It does seem like we're, and there's been this thing, this, the doomsday clock.

01:25:34.460 And I don't know how, I don't take that very seriously because like, how would you measure that?

01:25:40.040 But just watching the rhetoric carefully, it has changed since the Ukraine war started.

01:25:47.760 And you're seeing, I read a piece by some lunatic at the Atlantic Council recently suggesting that we, you know, engage in a limited nuclear strike.

01:25:57.080 Like, absolutely insanity.

01:25:59.180 And so the taboo around using nuclear weapons, at least in this country, has, has almost evaporated.

01:26:08.340 Like, what is that?

01:26:09.360 Yeah, I mean, I think the taboo is still there, but I think some people are definitely pushing, pushing the envelope and pretending as if we really can fight and win a nuclear war.

01:26:24.520 So, what would be the win?

01:26:26.240 What, of course I agree.

01:26:27.560 What does it, what does it mean though?

01:26:29.780 Technically a limited nuclear strike.

01:26:31.880 I think people think that you could have exchanges on, say, say that we gave Ukraine a few, you know, kind of low energy yield and low energy yield means Hiroshima bombs or, you know, that, that, that kind of size and, and near range that you could use on the battlefield.

01:26:58.220 Nuclear weapons.

01:26:59.260 Yeah, nuclear weapons.

01:27:00.400 And people have called for that.

01:27:01.840 Yeah, I, I think that's, I think that's in discussion.

01:27:06.100 I mean, I think the.

01:27:07.300 Anyone who discusses that should be imprisoned for treason.

01:27:10.340 I agree.

01:27:11.440 I agree.

01:27:12.520 I agree.

01:27:13.320 Yeah.

01:27:13.660 Any policymaker who advocates for that is, is imperiling our entire nation and world.

01:27:20.040 And that's a crime.

01:27:21.640 Yeah.

01:27:21.920 In the fall of 2022, after the start of the Ukraine war, there were serious discussions in the White House and, and an estimate from the Biden administration that there was a 50% chance of nuclear weapons use over the war in Ukraine.

01:27:39.980 No, you're a, you teach at Columbia.

01:27:41.960 I mean, you must know some of the people in the Biden White House.

01:27:44.920 I mean, like what?

01:27:45.800 I actually don't.

01:27:46.800 You don't.

01:27:47.440 Okay.

01:27:47.580 They don't want to talk to you.

01:27:48.420 I actually don't.

01:27:48.820 What, um, but I mean, these are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan, you know, Tony Blinken, like what are they thinking?

01:27:56.320 I mean, the closest I come to is when I, when I try to speak to diplomats, these are people mostly from the State Department or from the, um, U.S. mission to the United Nations, um, or examples like the one I gave from Wilton Park.

01:28:12.680 Um, I've also spoken to diplomats from other nuclear weapons states, um, including like a UK, uh, diplomat where I was making this case that, you know, nuclear deterrence could fail.

01:28:25.800 And he goes, yeah, yeah, you're right.

01:28:27.940 And I said, and then what, you know, we destroyed the entire, uh, human civilization.

01:28:33.440 We destroyed the planet.

01:28:35.060 We make it inhospitable to not just human life.

01:28:38.660 And he goes, that's not going to happen.

01:28:40.620 You know, like, so they, they not only, um, don't have a plan B for if nuclear deterrence fails, they also really don't want to think about it.

01:28:55.660 Right.

01:28:56.200 Like the, the, to them, the solution is just, you just keep going.

01:29:02.120 Um, and to me, it's just unfathomable.

01:29:04.640 To me, the idea that we're kind of putting all of our eggs in this nuclear deterrence basket, when we actually recognize that things could go wrong, not just deliberately, not just because someone decided, um, to implement the strike, but because accidents could happen, because a miscalculation could happen. 0.53

01:29:25.580 Um, besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, besides these absolutely ridiculous, stupid accidents in the, in the fifties and even the sixties.

01:29:35.700 In the 1980s, we had two incidents in 1983, um, the first one in September, the second one in November, where we quite literally, um, you know, could have had, uh, uh, the start of a nuclear war.

01:29:52.680 One was called Abel Archer, that was in November, that was a NATO exercise that had become, they had, um, actually, um, added some new kind of elements of realism, uh, that were interpreted then by the Soviets for the real thing.

01:30:09.580 And they thought they were under attack.

01:30:11.280 They started, um, quite literally, you know, putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to, um, to attack.

01:30:18.920 And thankfully that was, uh, it, it, it didn't go, um, all the way.

01:30:25.040 In September, there was an incident where a, um, an officer in the Soviet army in some, um, military base that was monitoring whether the Soviet Union was under attack, received, uh, literally like a computer glitch, uh, five signals in a row.

01:30:48.500 So that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.

01:30:54.020 And it turns out those glitches came from an alignment between high altitude clouds and satellites.

01:31:02.400 Uh, so something that had not been predicted or accounted for.

01:31:06.980 And, um, according to the computers, the Soviet Union was under attack.

01:31:12.220 This person, um, his name was, um, Captain, um, Stanislav Petrov, uh, had decided this was a false alarm and actually, you know, didn't pass the information onto his superiors, thus averting, um, nuclear war.

01:31:31.720 Or the Cuban Missile Crisis, um, incident that I was describing with the submarine, that's often referred to the man who saved the world.

01:31:40.000 And then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the man who saved the world.

01:31:43.640 Um, we've quite simply been, uh, have had so many incidences where, uh, uh, we just actually got lucky.

01:31:55.340 Um, and, um, there are scholars who really kind of study all of these examples who say, no, no, no, it's not the nuclear deterrence has worked.

01:32:05.080 It's that we have really been very lucky.

01:32:09.080 Not all countries that have nuclear weapons are the same, though.

01:32:12.220 Some are clearly a greater threat, not because they're more evil necessarily, but because they're more unstable.

01:32:17.480 And the UK, I would say, is a perfect authoritarian country, a failed state in a lot of ways that's got rioting in the streets.

01:32:25.320 It's clearly in a very steep downward trajectory.

01:32:29.440 Why should we sit back and allow, like, the UK to have nuclear weapons?

01:32:36.380 It actually gets much better than that.

01:32:38.880 The UK has nuclear warheads.

01:32:41.340 They're their own nuclear warheads.

01:32:43.440 But the only way they can launch them is using, um, US delivery systems.

01:32:51.060 Um, and so it's not just that they have them.

01:32:53.780 It's that it actually will help them to have a viable, you know, quote unquote nuclear deterrent.

01:33:01.400 Uh, so it's a, it's, it's, it's, that one's actually in our corner, uh, squarely.

01:33:07.540 And we just recently, um, transferred or began transferring some nuclear warheads onto, um, UK soil.

01:33:17.340 It was something we used to do.

01:33:19.620 Um, and then we removed them and now we brought them back.

01:33:22.380 Why would we do that?

01:33:23.780 I don't know.

01:33:24.540 In a country that's collapsing, um, that will not be there in current form in 20 years.

01:33:29.440 It's, it's, that seems very reckless.

01:33:31.220 I mean, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 91, they moved nuclear warheads out of a bunch of different satellite states, including Ukraine.

01:33:38.780 Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan.

01:33:41.040 Right.

01:33:41.980 And when South Africa, you know, ended apartheid in 1994, they moved the,

01:33:46.560 Yeah.

01:33:47.380 Moved the nuclear weapons out.

01:33:48.420 So, but we're moving nuclear weapons into an increasingly volatile country.

01:33:52.380 And we actually have, so it's, we, of course, have our own nuclear, um, weapons.

01:33:58.940 And then we have on our territory, as well as in these submarines that, that, um, travel all around the planet.

01:34:06.040 And we also have nuclear warheads in five other, now six, because it's clear we, we brought some back to the United Kingdom.

01:34:16.160 We have them, we have them in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Turkey.

01:34:23.180 Um, to me...

01:34:24.260 Do we have any in Romania?

01:34:25.900 Um, not to my knowledge.

01:34:28.380 Not to my knowledge.

01:34:30.260 To me, if you look at a globe and you look at how small Europe is, nuclear weapons in Europe are just about the craziest thing that, that you could be doing.

01:34:41.600 Then they're all aimed at Russia.

01:34:43.260 Uh, they are, yeah, aimed at, I, many of them would need kind of bombers, planes to, to be delivered.

01:34:51.540 I meant figuratively aimed.

01:34:53.140 Yeah.

01:34:53.520 They're there to deter Russia. 0.94

01:34:55.200 They're there to deter Russia. 0.94

01:34:56.340 I mean, what some, a country like Belgium is doing with nuclear weapons, because really all you would need is like, Belgium is so small.

01:35:05.980 You'd need like 10 nuclear warheads to destroy all of Belgium.

01:35:09.800 So there's never a Belgium ever again.

01:35:13.200 Um, you know, it just, it's, it's real insanity.

01:35:16.060 Well, Belgium can't even settle its own ethnic disputes internally.

01:35:19.280 Uh, uh, yeah.

01:35:20.540 Yeah.

01:35:20.760 So, uh, wow, this, it doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction.

01:35:25.980 And we're not moving in the right direction.

01:35:27.980 Although there, there are some developments in the international scene.

01:35:32.620 Um, so let me just make this case for, you know, for the U S just to underscore this point that the U S has a lot to gain from this.

01:35:43.640 Um, so in 2007, Kissinger, Schultz, Perry, Nunn, they write this article, they say the U S should be leading the world, um, uh, towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

01:35:56.540 The U S has a lot to gain from this.

01:35:58.540 Um, and then it was, I think that hall in 2010, there was actually a review conference of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that actually had, um, come up with a,

01:36:13.640 a kind of action plan, um, that was very promising.

01:36:18.220 Um, it was a 13 steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons, kind of, um, uh, action plan, um, with sort of very specific, both a kind of set of goals and timelines and so on.

01:36:31.740 And then by 2015, all of that had collapsed and it's large part because of what happened in Ukraine, um, in 2014.

01:36:42.740 Now we start to see this, you know, distrust between the United States and Russia.

01:36:49.140 It's again, it's no, no longer, you know, maybe we're working together to rid the world of the threat, which was really the goal of both Reagan and Gorbachev.

01:36:59.620 Instead, now we're adversaries again.

01:37:02.400 Um, and now in some sense, the international community is, um, sort of, um, uh, locked in on, um, uh, kind of living in a world which could end at any point.

01:37:19.260 Um, and it was really a group, uh, a large group of states, um, this was an effort that was, uh, beginning right around that time, uh, that focused on what, um, people refer to as humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.

01:37:36.640 So this is again, going back to what have nuclear weapons done to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what have they done through these nuclear, so-called nuclear testing programs to 2000 explosions around the planet. 0.60

01:37:51.980 And what is the research, the kind of stuff that I've been describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, so on, that, um, tells us about what is at stake in the world with nuclear weapons.

01:38:06.580 So these states started, um, you know, negotiating eventually, um, an agreement, which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

01:38:18.980 That was negotiated in 2017, um, and it's an, um, international treaty that, um, entered into force in 2021 and that currently has 73 state parties, um, though, and, and another 25 signatories.

01:38:38.720 So in a, in a, in an international agreement, there's sort of, um, two levels.

01:38:44.520 One is a signatory, a head of state or someone like a foreign minister signs, and that signals to the country is, um, sort of ready to, you know, uh, commit to these things in principle.

01:38:59.420 And then a ratification follows often through national legislative bodies, um, whatever the, the rules of a particular country are.

01:39:10.540 And after ratification, the country is actually committed to everything outlined in the agreement.

01:39:17.500 So the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, basically arose, um, now almost, um, you know, 10 years ago, um, and has been active, uh, since entering into force in 2021.

01:39:32.840 And the goals of this treaty are quite simply to prohibit any and all activities having to do with nuclear weapons.

01:39:41.280 And the idea here is that, um, the countries that are part of it, so clearly none of the nuclear armed states are part of it.

01:39:50.920 And, and I would say not yet.

01:39:52.520 Um, but the idea here is that because of things like nuclear winter, because of things like radiation that spreads all around the planet, these countries are saying that, you know, your nuclear arsenals are not just a threat to your enemies or to your own populations.

01:40:12.140 They're actually a threat to all of us as well.

01:40:15.760 And we want a say in the fact that you currently hold the ability to destroy the world as we know it.

01:40:24.120 I bet they do want to say, but they're not getting one because nobody cares.

01:40:26.920 So if you're North Korea, it's like, why do we care what you think? 1.00

01:40:29.400 If you're the United States, why do we care what you think?

01:40:31.080 I mean, it does seem like the way that states deal with each other encourages everybody to get a nuclear weapon.

01:40:40.160 Listen, we don't boss North Korea around anymore because they have nuclear weapons.

01:40:45.140 We just killed a bunch of people, including civilians in Tehran, and there's nothing they can do about it because they don't have nuclear weapons. 0.86

01:40:51.880 So that's, those are law of the jungle rules, which I object to as a Christian, but I'm, but they seem in force. 1.00

01:40:59.700 Like, I don't know what you do about that.

01:41:01.280 So I think the idea that, I think to me, it is nuclear deterrence that is the problem in and of itself.

01:41:13.240 Because if we're going to continue to claim that we have nuclear weapons because they keep us safe, then absolutely everything you just said follows from that, right?

01:41:23.620 Then every country that can should acquire nuclear weapons for itself to keep itself safe.

01:41:30.520 That is, of course, preposterous.

01:41:32.560 I totally agree, but I would flip it around.

01:41:35.040 I mean, by the way, I just wanted to say, I'm arguing with you because I don't think any of this will work, but I share your views on the goals.

01:41:42.400 I mean, I think nuclear weapons are evil.

01:41:44.240 I think they're actually probably inspired by supernatural forces.

01:41:48.700 That's my view.

01:41:49.620 And, and I think they've wrecked the world already.

01:41:52.940 However, I just know the way people are.

01:41:56.200 And I don't think that people have nuclear weapons in order to secure their own safety.

01:42:00.060 I think they have nuclear weapons to ensure their own power.

01:42:03.160 I have at times described it as a license to be bad.

01:42:09.580 Well, of course.

01:42:10.680 What are you going to do about it?

01:42:12.560 I got nuclear weapons.

01:42:13.440 Right, right.

01:42:14.340 I mean, I think from my perspective, kind of looking through the history, it's been actually really interesting to study.

01:42:22.280 You mentioned the doomsday clock.

01:42:23.640 So let me just say something for a minute or two about that for people who don't know.

01:42:29.260 So the doomsday clock is something that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, so on,

01:42:37.680 who were very worried about the threat of nuclear weapons in the mid-1940s, they founded this organization.

01:42:48.560 In 1947, they were publishing their first issue of the Bulletin, and they asked an artist, Mardel Langsdorff or something, to draw a cover.

01:43:05.320 And she drew a cover with a clock with the time showing seven minutes to midnight, because she thought we would sort of, you know, that was a kind of good representation of how dangerous things were,

01:43:21.020 with midnight representing this sort of nuclear Armageddon, end of the world type of scenario.

01:43:29.360 And over time, the clock sort of became something that they would annually sort of adjust and became a kind of indicator of where we are in terms of the dangers.

01:43:46.940 Also, over time, they added other existential threats to their considerations of the time of the clock.

01:43:53.920 Currently, the clock is 89 seconds to midnight, and we can totally talk about, oh, is this, you know, like, how do you make sense of these numbers and so on?

01:44:03.500 I don't really see them as, I don't see them literally as, oh, it's 89 seconds to midnight, and that somehow means something.

01:44:12.800 I see them as relative numbers.

01:44:14.800 So are we, for example, one way you can think about it is at the beginning versus at the end of a presidency, right?

01:44:24.000 Is the doomsday clock further or closer to midnight?

01:44:30.420 And I did this little analysis.

01:44:33.140 Since 1947, we've had 14 presidents.

01:44:36.760 Interestingly, seven Republicans and seven Democrats.

01:44:41.020 And very interestingly, only under five presidents has the clock actually moved away from midnight.

01:44:49.500 And those five were four Republicans, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.

01:44:55.780 And only one Democrat, you can probably guess, John F. Kennedy.

01:45:01.920 Those are the ones.

01:45:02.920 He paid for it, yeah.

01:45:03.840 And so under Republican administrations, there has been a move, a cumulative move away from midnight of something like 19 minutes and 10 seconds over time.

01:45:23.500 The farthest we've ever been from midnight was in 1991.

01:45:29.060 It was 17 minutes to midnight.

01:45:31.280 So we've really done a lot of damage since.

01:45:35.340 And Democrats have actually brought the clock closer to midnight by, actually, I got those numbers.

01:45:44.420 Democrats, 19 minutes and 10 seconds, staggering 19 minutes and 10 seconds towards midnight.

01:45:50.720 And Republicans, 13 minutes and 39 seconds away from midnight.

01:45:56.600 So on the whole, the Republicans have been much better than Democrats.

01:46:03.600 And I think we have to, I think for this country, first and foremost, the general public needs to be aware of what's at stake and needs to hold its leaders responsible.

01:46:19.900 I think President Trump is probably since John F. Kennedy and then arguably Reagan as well, who was very committed to this after a certain point in his presidency.

01:46:35.820 President Trump is the only one who has said, who has said things like, we have so many nuclear weapons, we could destroy the world with them.

01:46:45.580 He has questioned our plans to modernize the nuclear arsenals and spend actually a tremendous amount of money on them.

01:46:54.320 Can I ask you just a second, what would be the thinking behind, quote, modernizing the nuclear arsenal?

01:47:02.780 Oh, those are plans that have been set in place for more than 10 years.

01:47:08.600 Those are plans that have been made under President Obama.

01:47:12.440 So President Obama got up in Prague and talked about a world, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons in 2008, and then more or less turned around and made plans for modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

01:47:27.080 The logic is that our weapons are going to get too old and we need new ones.

01:47:31.960 But the price tag is currently estimated up to $2 trillion, but given the overruns and all kinds of ways in which these types of programs can go over budget, who knows?

01:47:47.700 We're literally talking about spending trillions of dollars to perfect the way of destroying the world.

01:48:00.360 But there's no, I mean, is anyone saying that our current nuclear arsenal just wouldn't work?

01:48:07.400 I don't think that's, I think it's a, I think it's a plan, you know, over a decade or two of kind of replacing.

01:48:17.000 I do think that they've, in some sense, consistently been updating, but this is a whole other, this is like a whole sort of new way of, you know, building them.

01:48:29.760 Making them, making them, I mean, this is, a lot of this is.

01:48:33.680 Pay off to defense contractors.

01:48:35.480 Driven by the military industrial complex, no doubt about it.

01:48:39.640 They, you know, this is a very important, you know, stream of income for them.

01:48:46.320 The U.S. not only spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, we also spend more on nuclear weapons than all countries that have them combined.

01:49:01.040 So I think, here's my conclusion to everything that you've said.

01:49:04.120 I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently.

01:49:07.320 I think the, and I, but I don't know how to achieve them.

01:49:10.840 I'm skeptical of treaties because people just ignore them or won't sign them or whatever.

01:49:14.380 I do think the first step toward any change begins with articulating the truth.

01:49:18.900 Yeah.

01:49:19.780 And stigmatizing, re-stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons.

01:49:23.300 Anyone who is even suggesting or thinking about or opening the possibility of using nuclear weapons is a threat to the world.

01:49:30.460 And that's certainly worse than cigarette smoking or drunk driving or any other crime that we heavily stigmatize in this country.

01:49:37.260 Absolutely.

01:49:37.880 And that person should be like disinvited from every dinner party.

01:49:41.400 And like, you should look at that person and scream criminal at him because that's what he is.

01:49:44.940 And let's just start there.

01:49:46.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:49:47.120 If I light a cigarette in an elevator, I am a criminal and I'm treated like one.

01:49:51.620 Man, if you did that and someone caught you on video, like you'd lose your job.

01:49:55.120 Light a cigarette in an elevator.

01:49:56.100 But if you get up at the Atlantic Council, you're like, we may need to use like, you know, low-yield nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine or lob them into Russia to win the eastern provinces back.

01:50:05.800 It's like, well, we'll debate it.

01:50:08.060 No, no, no. 1.00

01:50:09.200 You're evil and you're a threat to the world. 0.99

01:50:12.560 Like, maybe we just start there with social sanction. 1.00

01:50:15.940 Absolutely.

01:50:16.280 I think we also have to, in some sense, stigmatize the very idea that somehow nuclear weapons are a symbol of progress, of advancement, of, you know, success.

01:50:31.560 I think, I really do think that the ability to destroy humanity should be seen as a symbol of shame.

01:50:40.540 Yeah, fireballs are not progress, actually.

01:50:43.060 No, I don't think so.

01:50:44.780 They're a symbol of hell.

01:50:46.280 Yeah, absolutely.

01:50:48.340 Pope Francis was actually a strong supporter of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

01:50:54.200 And he wrote, declared, stated more than once that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was immoral.

01:51:04.980 In, you know, in my mind, this is quite simply the, really, the most important issue in the world.

01:51:14.440 Because everything else is, you know, not going to get solved if we destroyed the world in a nuclear war. 0.61

01:51:23.420 Most mistakes are fixable, this one, isn't it?

01:51:24.860 Yeah, absolutely.

01:51:25.780 And I, you know, I mentioned Jeffrey Sachs before as well.

01:51:31.700 We were at the Vatican together last November and he said something like, we can fix all these other things unless we blow ourselves up.

01:51:41.800 And that's quite simply what we're facing.

01:51:43.640 No, I totally agree.

01:51:44.700 And without the general public really waking up to the realities of what we're facing, people were very engaged in the 1960s.

01:51:54.580 Some of that general public engagement was really key to Kennedy actually getting the atmospheric test ban treaty passed because it needed to be ratified by the Senate.

01:52:06.500 And the senators were absolutely not interested in passing this.

01:52:11.280 He just, he galvanized the general public.

01:52:16.140 He went on a kind of two-month tour speaking to people about the issue.

01:52:20.720 And by the time the Senate voted, it was an 81 to 18 senator vote.

01:52:26.940 I mean, it was an absolute wipeout.

01:52:29.640 Well, again, I would refer you to the end of that story.

01:52:31.940 Yeah.

01:52:32.300 And he was replaced by maybe the worst president in American history who embraced not just the Vietnam War, but nuclear proliferation.

01:52:39.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:52:41.920 Professor, I really appreciate this.

01:52:43.500 I hope every member of the U.S. Senate sees it, and I hope you keep trying to stigmatize the most obvious evil I can think of, which is nuclear war.

01:52:51.340 Thank you so much.

01:52:52.200 Thank you.

01:52:52.520 Thank you for having me, Tucker.

01:52:53.180 Oh, my gosh.

01:52:53.900 Thank you.

01:52:54.320 Thank you.

01:53:02.280 We've got a new website we hope you will visit.

01:53:04.520 It's called NewCommissionNow.com, and it refers to a new 9-11 commission.

01:53:11.540 So we spent months putting together our 9-11 documentary series.

01:53:15.600 And if there's one thing we learned, it's that, in fact, there was foreknowledge of the attacks.

01:53:22.260 People knew.

01:53:23.720 The American public deserves to know.

01:53:25.820 We're shocked, actually, to learn that, to have that confirmed, but it's true. 1.00

01:53:28.540 The evidence is overwhelming.

01:53:29.880 The CIA, for example, knew the hijackers were here in the United States.

01:53:32.820 They knew they were planning an act of terror.

01:53:35.520 In his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America.

01:53:39.820 A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.

01:53:47.800 How did he know there would be an event to document in the first place?

01:53:50.180 Because he had foreknowledge.

01:53:51.760 And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines,

01:53:58.400 the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.

01:54:05.580 They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.

01:54:10.460 Who did that? 0.91

01:54:11.520 You have to look at the evidence.

01:54:13.740 The U.S. government learned the name of that investor, but never released it.

01:54:18.400 Maybe there's an instant explanation for all this, but there isn't, actually.

01:54:24.060 And by the way, it doesn't matter whether there is or not.

01:54:26.460 The public deserves to know what the hell that was.

01:54:30.000 How did people know ahead of time?

01:54:31.500 Why was no one ever punished for it?

01:54:33.780 9-11 commission, the original one, was a fraud.

01:54:37.040 It was fake.

01:54:38.680 Its conclusions were written before the investigation.

01:54:41.360 That's true.

01:54:42.320 And it's outrageous.

01:54:43.200 This country needs a new 9-11 commission, one that actually tells the truth and tries to get to the bottom of the story.

01:54:51.020 We can't just move on like nothing happened.

01:54:53.580 9-11 commission is a cover.

01:54:56.420 Something did happen.

01:54:58.340 We need to force a new investigation into 9-11 almost 25 years later.

01:55:03.800 Sorry, justice demands it.

01:55:06.000 And if you want that, go to newcommissionnow.com to add your name to our petition.

01:55:11.780 We're not getting paid for this.

01:55:12.740 We're doing this because we really mean it.

01:55:14.900 Newcommissionnow.com

The Tucker Carlson Show - October 17, 2025

Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity

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