In this episode, we talk to Dr. Robert Breedlove about nuclear weapons and the impact they can have on the world. Dr. Breedlove is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of British Columbia, who specialises in nuclear engineering and nuclear weapons.
00:02:49.180Had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT.
00:02:57.260Now, these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium.
00:03:02.620Uranium for the Hiroshima bomb and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
00:03:08.920But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent amount of chemical explosive that you would need.
00:03:18.500So 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.
00:03:54.900It was the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT.
00:04:00.960So 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.
00:04:16.300And there was damage in a radius of up to, I think, 16 blocks, something of that order.
00:04:23.640So absolutely an incredible and devastating event.
00:04:29.960At the same time, that explosion was 6,000 times less energetic than the bombing of Hiroshima.
00:04:42.980So 15,000 tons of TNT versus two and a half tons of TNT.
00:04:48.700So that just begins to give you a scale for just how powerful a single nuclear weapon can be.
00:04:56.220And then on top of it is that we now have weapons that are far more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
00:05:05.840In fact, in 1945, the U.S. had three nuclear weapons.
00:05:10.120One was used as a quote-unquote test, the Trinity test in the desert of New Mexico.
00:05:18.340And then two were used on attacks on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:05:24.140Today, we actually have 12, on the order of 12,500 nuclear warheads, many of which are far more powerful.
00:08:01.000But 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,
00:08:11.920currently, there's still parts of the Marshall Islands where radiological contamination is very high.
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00:12:52.160Over Times Square, one megaton bomb is going to have...
00:12:57.280So there's something that makes the numbers a little more complicated.
00:13:03.060You can have two different kinds of explosions.
00:13:06.180One can be an air burst and one can be a surface explosion.
00:13:09.640In 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.
00:13:25.560A surface burst produces more radiation and kind of more of those long-term effects.
00:13:30.780So between the two, let's just say that basically the radius of this fireball is about a mile.
00:13:42.200And so you now have, depending on where it explodes, you have a radius that...
00:13:50.220And the fireball is quite literally the temperature of the sun.
00:13:54.340And so you have a fireball where everything is evaporated, absolutely evaporated.
00:14:01.440And 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.
00:14:17.100The shock wave is such that everything collapses, buildings collapse, everything collapses.
00:14:23.640Then you might have a kind of lethal radiation dose, concentric circles.
00:14:30.400Then you might have moderate damage where you still have buildings collapsing, injuries are widespread and so on.
00:14:38.600And 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.
00:14:52.080And 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.
00:15:15.520There's also a concentric circle where the temperature is so high that everybody gets third degree burns.
00:15:25.140And this is something that happened, of course, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:15:29.300It's where it just, you know, people's skin quite literally melts.
00:15:35.620There 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.
00:15:48.780This is quite simply a site of total and absolute horror and devastation.
00:16:03.840And render it potentially uninhabitable, you know, for decades, hundreds of years, potentially even thousands of years.
00:16:12.520Again, it all depends on how you do it, how much, you know, how large the weapon is, how it's detonated.
00:16:21.280But 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,
00:16:32.540is 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.
00:16:45.520We 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.
00:16:59.100So 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.
00:17:09.580You know, so you could have a kind of constellation of explosions.
00:17:16.220And 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.
00:17:42.320And 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.
00:18:03.160If 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.
00:18:22.960And these decisions are made in a matter of minutes.
00:18:29.720This is described really kind of with amazing clarity in the book by Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War Scenario,
00:18:39.440where 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.
00:18:58.740So 72 minutes, the entire war, that's the duration of the war.
00:19:02.460That's the duration of a war between the United States and Russia.
00:19:06.500In 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.
00:19:23.680That's an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we detect within seconds of the launch.
00:19:31.160And 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.
00:19:49.300And 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.
00:20:07.280I think the response is something like 82 nuclear warheads.
00:20:11.440But the route that the warheads take from our ICBM silos in the Midwest, in the Dakotas and so on, the route goes over Russia.
00:20:25.680And 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.
00:20:46.100And 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.
00:20:56.160And 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.
00:21:14.160The 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.
00:21:27.600The number of casualties from the moment of the explosions is on the order of 360 million people.
00:21:37.660And 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.
00:21:53.220That'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.
00:22:06.620And then there is the business of what such a nuclear war would actually do to the environment of the planet.
00:22:16.520And there, it's not just about local effects.
00:22:22.520So 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.
00:22:43.660The 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.
00:22:58.200And there are at least two different ways in which this happens.
00:23:02.620One way is called nuclear winter, and I can explain what that is.
00:23:06.800And the other is ozone layer destruction.
00:23:10.600And these are actually things that we've known about both of them for a long time.
00:23:16.700Although 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.
00:23:31.620So 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.
00:23:57.400And that as a consequence of this, for a period of about, again, depends on how many warheads, what energy yields and so on.
00:24:06.300But for a period of up to about 10 years, temperatures would drop so significantly.
00:24:14.200Some estimates for the war that I keep citing of one third of US and Russian arsenals are used up.
00:24:21.260The estimate is 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.
00:24:27.180That's about 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:24:31.360This is a completely different planet.
00:24:34.700And those temperature drops occur very, very quickly.
00:24:38.660And 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.
00:24:55.820And food just begins to stop growing, agriculture begins to fail, and people begin to starve.
00:25:09.680And 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.
00:25:21.260According 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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00:28:26.380The 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.
00:28:38.760We now have more than 8 billion people on the planet.
00:28:41.880So that just quite simply means that you're going to have an extra 1 billion people dying of starvation.
00:28:48.220So it's really, I mean, this is quite simply, this is not, this is the end of human civilization.
00:28:55.280This is the end of humanity as we know it.
00:29:00.180I'm not saying, I don't think we know that everyone would die, although it's quite possible.
00:29:06.700I don't think it means all of life on the planet would be extinguished, although even that's possible.
00:29:13.960But this is quite simply not the planet we'll live on today.
00:29:17.420And then on top of it, there's the radiation effects, and I can talk more about radiation.
00:29:23.480And then there's this business of ozone layer destruction.
00:29:27.640And that's somebody at Columbia whom I actually knew quite well.
00:29:36.160He was one of the first people who they wrote about in the 1970s about nitric oxide production as a consequence of nuclear war
00:29:50.140and the impact that this would have on ozone layer, on the ozone layer.
00:29:56.500And that kind of research has been done also more recently with the new models, simulations, and so on.
00:30:06.700Those estimates suggest that the war scenario I keep mentioning between U.S. and Russia would result in 70% ozone layer destruction.
00:30:20.120This is, again, this is not a place where you go out to sunbathe.
00:30:24.460This 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.
00:30:42.280So, again, this would be another hit on sort of food supplies.
00:30:47.300But, you know, all of this is just so, so horrific, this idea that we would ever conduct something like nuclear war.
00:31:02.340I mean, Reagan and Gorbachev said in 1986, nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
00:31:10.140But, Khrushchev said in the 1960s that the survivors would envy the dead.
00:31:17.380And yet here we are, you know, 80 years into the nuclear age, still in, I would say in many ways, playing nuclear roulette with.
00:31:29.660Ever more recklessly, especially in the last three years.
00:31:32.340Let me ask you a couple of questions just to tie up what you just said.
00:31:38.220You 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.
00:31:51.580What is the effect of a nuclear power plant getting hit by a nuclear weapon?
00:31:57.360That one is really, really devastating.
00:32:01.680I 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.
00:32:19.280And 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.
00:32:35.860That just had not been the case previously.
00:32:38.720And, you know, there are a whole lot of things you could say about nuclear power and potential dangers, threats and so on.
00:32:46.440But in the case of a conflict, a nuclear power plant can become a weapon in and of itself.
00:33:49.100And I can say a little more about those.
00:33:52.320But we also know a whole lot about the impact of nuclear explosions on the environment,
00:33:59.960the impact of radiation on the environment, because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only two or even count Trinity three times.
00:34:11.340It's not that we've exploded nuclear weapons three times.
00:34:14.240We've exploded nuclear weapons more than 2,000 times on this planet.
00:34:19.360And that was as part of nuclear weapons, full nuclear weapons explosions as part of what it's referred to as nuclear weapons testing programs.
00:34:28.760I 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.
00:34:38.280And I was speaking to a woman from French Polynesia where the French tested nuclear weapons.
00:34:46.840She's actually a member of the French Polynesian Parliament now.
00:35:20.640But Hina Moira said to me something really interesting.
00:35:23.680She said, you know, when we call it testing, when I was young and people would talk about, oh, we had the testing.
00:35:30.440I just imagined scientists kind of playing in the laboratory and, you know, doing some kind of a test.
00:35:37.400These were full-blown nuclear explosions.
00:35:40.800They described Bravo, described the Soviet so-called test, the Tsar Bomba.
00:35:47.220There were over 2,000 such explosions, many of them atmospheric tests.
00:35:53.940There was a majority still underground tests, but even underground tests have had devastating consequences.
00:36:02.660In 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.
00:36:18.840And that was a real victory for the people of the world because it helped to – some atmospheric testing continued.
00:36:28.160China and France actually both continued to test in the atmosphere post-1963.
00:36:34.820France tested in the atmosphere until 1974, and China tested in the atmosphere until 1980.
00:42:42.780So, you actually need to invest energy to overcome that electrostatic repulsion.
00:42:51.940And the amount of energy that's needed can only be supplied by something like a fission bomb.
00:42:59.200So, 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.
00:43:12.380How much more powerful is a hydrogen bomb than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
00:43:16.500So, the Bravo one was a thousand times more powerful than a Hiroshima bomb.
00:43:25.620Currently, like if we have a one megaton bomb, that's about 70 Hiroshima bombs.
00:43:32.600But hydrogen bombs, actually, there's kind of no limit.
00:43:36.420Like you could keep making them bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:43:39.160Somehow, we've stopped making the really big ones.
00:43:41.840I think China has probably the most powerful, the most high-energy hydrogen bombs currently in their arsenals.
00:43:52.720I think they have five megaton bombs, hydrogen bombs in their arsenals.
00:44:00.600That's more than 300 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.
00:44:03.880But 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.
00:44:16.040So, basically, what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them.
00:44:26.440And in so doing, you produce some radioactive isotopes, radioactive elements that are going to basically be in the environment both locally.
00:44:40.840They're going to get, you know, kind of blown up.
00:44:43.480You know, things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud.
00:44:47.840You produce these radioactive isotopes.
00:45:37.400The U.S., I mentioned the testing in the Marshall Islands.
00:45:41.060We also tested in another Pacific island state called Republic of Kiribati.
00:45:47.220And 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.
00:46:01.640But the testing in Nevada actually produced fallout that went all around the United States.
00:46:09.300And it quite simply depended on whether or not there was rain in locals.
00:46:17.660So the fallout was carried across towards the east, given the easterly winds.
00:46:23.920And then if there was a rain, a weather event in some place, the fallout would get deposited there.
00:46:32.960And 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.
00:48:07.160And so within a matter of weeks, it's gone from the environment.
00:48:10.820But 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.
00:48:32.080But 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.
00:48:45.540Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years each.
00:48:52.060That means they stick in the environment for a few, a couple hundred years at least.
00:48:58.820And what's interesting about both of these isotopes, strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium.
00:49:08.420And 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.
00:49:18.660And strontium-90 will go to those exact places.
00:49:23.660So 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.
00:49:42.900Also, 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.
00:49:56.800Cesium-137 is the same half-life, you know, around for a long time, is chemically similar to potassium.
00:50:09.060And you also know that if you eat banana or if you drink some kind of electrolyte drink or something, you're taking potassium.
00:50:19.100If cesium is in the soil, plants will take it up, thinking, because it behaves like potassium, they take it up, it gets incorporated.
00:50:30.760And now when you eat that food, that cesium is now getting incorporated into your cells, the kinds of soft tissues that use potassium.
00:50:44.820Your brain actually needs a lot of potassium.
00:50:47.400And 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.
00:51:10.480And now that gamma radiation is inside your body, it's attacking your cells, it's attacking your DNA, it's making you sick.
00:51:18.760And a lot of kind of soft tissue cancers, including brain cancer, come from that cesium-137.
00:51:27.480Did you see markedly higher rates of those cancers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
00:51:33.240I 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.
00:51:53.280And then another 70,000 by the end of 1945 from both kind of acute radiation sickness as well as cancer.
00:53:01.240And after she died, it was actually her friends who wanted to do something in her honor.
00:53:07.920And 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.
00:53:20.840And 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.
00:53:33.840And that's kind of what got taken up by.
00:53:37.220So 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.
00:53:53.180Certainly human life on Earth, human civilization.
00:53:56.040Yeah, I would say it's absolutely, certainly end of the world as we know it.
00:54:04.040Whether we all, you know, perish or some people survive, the latter is certainly possible.
00:54:14.360This actually, the U.N. is now advancing a study on the consequences of nuclear war.
00:54:21.380Something that really hasn't been studied, I would say, in terms of the current, the world that we currently live in, right?
00:54:31.020So we live in a very globalized world.
00:54:34.520You know, we often might eat food from other places in the world, right?
00:54:40.800Like, what is that in the current context that wasn't necessarily true to the same degree in the 1980s?
00:54:48.260People, for example, ate food that was more local and so on.
01:00:19.960A whole, famously, a whole set of things.
01:00:24.620And 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.
01:00:35.960Kennedy was under a tremendous amount of pressure to actually invade Cuba.
01:00:40.140By 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.
01:00:56.280There were incidents during that 13-day period, three of them on the same day, October 27th.
01:01:04.900There was a Saturday, it's often referred to as the Black Saturday.
01:01:10.100There were three things that happened that day.
01:01:12.080One 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,
01:01:30.560and 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.
01:01:47.760Then 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.
01:02:04.020And 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.
01:02:22.000And 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.
01:02:38.420And so they were using ones that would sort of simulate an attack, but not really attack.
01:02:44.340And one Soviet submarine had sort of three officers on board, was being attacked by these depth charges.
01:03:00.580They actually thought that maybe there was a war going on, and they were nuclear armed.
01:03:06.520They had a nuclear torpedo on board, and what they needed, this wasn't, you know, like they needed permission from some higher authority.
01:03:20.800They needed, all three of them needed to agree to employ the nuclear warhead.
01:03:26.680One 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.
01:03:43.220And 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.
01:03:59.500President Kennedy had in turn agreed that the U.S. would withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey.
01:04:07.080This 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.
01:04:23.580It ended the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was a very, very, very dangerous moment.
01:04:30.860It 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.
01:04:42.800He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.
01:04:47.180That was absolutely, really important to him.
01:04:49.420But 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.
01:05:12.060So this is quite simply something we've known for a long time.
01:05:16.220And 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.
01:05:29.160So he understood this at a very deep level.
01:05:32.020The 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.
01:05:48.580That was a tremendous achievement and a really, really important achievement.
01:05:53.160And 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.
01:06:10.440Because 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.
01:06:24.060One 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.
01:06:31.640There are actually different isotopes of plutonium, and some of them have half-lives of thousands of years.
01:06:39.840There's an isotope of plutonium with a 24,500-year half-lifetime.
01:06:45.800That means that thing's going to be in the environment for, you know, a couple of hundred thousand years.
01:06:53.480So this is, again, back to that issue of transcending time and space.
01:06:58.820This is not something that just has an immediate effect.
01:07:05.400The plutonium, in fact, the plutonium has been deposited globally.
01:07:12.940And 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.
01:07:26.680Here's the plutonium line in the geologic record.
01:07:30.580Can I ask you about President Kennedy's efforts to prevent nuclear war?
01:07:40.700One 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.
01:07:51.720I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the president demanding inspections of the Damona site.
01:07:58.240Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister, I think, as a result of this controversy.
01:08:06.140Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any sort of oversight by the President Kennedy thought that proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous.
01:08:22.920He was definitely concerned and didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons.
01:08:29.900This eventually led, even after his death, to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose goal was that.
01:08:38.300But there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well.
01:08:41.780In the case of Israel, he felt very strongly that if this was our ally, you know,
01:08:49.900we 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.
01:09:08.460But they went ahead and, I mean, I think it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966.
01:09:22.760And so this was actually, interestingly, before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came together.
01:09:31.340It was negotiated over a long period of time, but finally kind of signed in 1968, and then it entered into force in 1970.
01:09:46.340It's still currently one of the largest international agreements amongst states in the United Nations.
01:09:56.620How many nuclear armed states have signed it?
01:09:58.400So that treaty, it recognizes five nuclear weapons states, they're U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China.
01:10:11.460Those are the five that had nuclear weapons up to that point, declared nuclear weapons arsenals.
01:10:18.240Again, Israel had actually begun its program.
01:10:21.800At this point, Israel is thought to have 90 nuclear warheads.
01:10:26.980The 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.
01:10:41.320So it sometimes takes time for these treaties to actually bring everything.
01:10:47.820So the other nations would be India, Pakistan, North Korea.
01:10:50.960So 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.
01:11:04.600And then the four that are outside of the treaty, Israel, which has this unique policy of ambiguity of an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
01:11:14.120But again, we think it's a 90 nuclear warhead arsenal.
01:11:21.680I think there's no doubt about whether or not they have them.
01:11:27.480India and Pakistan never joined the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
01:11:32.840They both essentially, you know, tested nuclear weapons underground.
01:11:39.460They each have on the order of 150 nuclear warheads today.
01:11:45.040And 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.
01:11:59.200And we think that North Korea actually currently has 50, 60, maybe 70 nuclear warheads.
01:12:05.780What North Korea has done is it has also actually developed the delivery systems.
01:12:14.880And 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.
01:12:27.620And this to me is actually really for, you know, many reasons why we have to eliminate nuclear weapons.
01:12:38.400I can make a case about that very strongly.
01:12:42.380But 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.
01:12:58.560Who's going to attack the United States?
01:13:03.600I've actually heard our mutual friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, say that the United States could be the safest country in the history of humanity.
01:13:13.460You 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.
01:13:32.240We're vulnerable to them, but we're also vulnerable to a country like North Korea, which is relatively small, relatively poor.
01:13:51.680This is such a heavily politicized question, but there's got to be a science-based answer.
01:13:56.160Where is Iran on the continuum toward getting a nuclear weapon?
01:13:59.260Iran has been enriching uranium to 60%, which is, you don't need that for nuclear power.
01:14:07.900It 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.
01:14:18.100Now, my understanding is that they, and I actually listened to their statements in venues like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meetings at the UN.
01:14:29.260They always say they're not interested in building nuclear weapons.
01:14:35.400They do emphasize that their religion, you know, doesn't, you know, requires them not to pursue nuclear weapons.
01:14:45.680I actually think that they're not pursuing nuclear weapons.
01:14:50.880How 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.
01:14:59.180I would think, I mean, it's just common sense.
01:15:01.240How hard is it, given where they are right now, technologically, how hard would it be for them to build a nuclear weapon?
01:15:31.520It'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.
01:15:44.580It 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.
01:15:56.180Right 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.
01:16:25.680I think this sort of terrorist threat was a big part of why they did this.
01:16:31.660It 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.
01:16:52.160Brought 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.
01:17:17.340Can I ask a dumb question I should have asked before?
01:17:20.220So 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.
01:17:35.840I've never questioned that, but if you think about it, I mean, if there's nothing you can do to stop.
01:17:44.780I 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.
01:17:54.680He passed away a little over a year ago or so.
01:17:59.940Daniel Ellsberg, after that kind of effort to end the Vietnam War, really ended up spending decades speaking about nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons issues.
01:18:14.080And in his book, The Doomsday Machine, there's a quote I really, really love.
01:18:22.580He says that nuclear weapons policies, past and current, are dizzingly insane and immoral.
01:18:31.560And 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?
01:18:47.960Well, I mean, you know, if you can't, if there's some way to stop the nuclear attack, then of course.
01:18:57.620I mean, you know, if it's, if it's them or us, I'm for, you know, I'm for us always.
01:19:03.460However, 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?
01:19:44.660Sometimes when I speak or write or, you know, people will respond.
01:19:48.440Oh, I remember duck and cover when I was in school.
01:19:50.980People, you know, people of a certain generation still sort of have a sense for, for what is going on.
01:19:57.100But many young people are just utterly unaware.
01:20:01.700There 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.
01:20:14.480But 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.
01:20:25.480And there's just no way to, you know, undo or put the genie back in the bottle or any of that.
01:20:31.240And the truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence.
01:20:36.960The first and kind of to me most fundamental is that there is quite simply no plan B for what happens if nuclear deterrence fails.
01:20:48.060It's just kind of like an autopilot, you know, we're under attack.
01:20:54.520And 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.
01:21:14.460We've tried this and there's just no way to actually do that.
01:21:18.480But 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.
01:21:45.940If 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.
01:21:57.860I just want to tell you a story about the United States.
01:22:02.980So 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.
01:22:24.800It was like being in a Jane Austen novel.
01:22:27.360And 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.
01:22:41.940And one week a year, they devote to this nuclear non-proliferation treaty diplomacy.
01:22:48.580And I was invited there last December.
01:23:21.600But a person responded to me and I had made a comment to their remarks and then made this comment about the U.S.
01:23:29.480And this person responded to me, after which I wasn't allowed, according to the rules, to respond.
01:23:37.280So I'll tell you what the response was.
01:23:39.860The response was, you're right, and I was shocked that they accepted this.
01:23:44.700You're right that the United States would be safer in a world free of nuclear weapons, but our allies would not be.
01:23:52.740And 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.
01:24:04.100I 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?
01:24:18.640And take a guess what he responded to me.
01:24:21.320I don't think he cares what the American people think.
01:24:23.120No, he said, now you sound like Trump.
01:24:49.620How are we, how are we accepting to be under mortal threat as a nation, as a people, as humanity all the time?
01:25:04.760JFK had another, he had so many brilliant statements and quotes and so on.
01:25:12.500Another one was like, humanity was not meant to live in a prison awaiting its final destruction.
01:25:20.460I 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.
01:25:30.000It does seem like we're, and there's been this thing, this, the doomsday clock.
01:25:34.460And I don't know how, I don't take that very seriously because like, how would you measure that?
01:25:40.040But just watching the rhetoric carefully, it has changed since the Ukraine war started.
01:25:47.760And 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.
01:26:09.360Yeah, 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.
01:26:31.880I 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.
01:27:21.920In 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.
01:27:48.820What, um, but I mean, these are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan, you know, Tony Blinken, like what are they thinking?
01:27:56.320I 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.
01:28:12.680Um, 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.
01:28:25.800And he goes, yeah, yeah, you're right.
01:28:27.940And I said, and then what, you know, we destroyed the entire, uh, human civilization.
01:28:35.060We make it inhospitable to not just human life.
01:28:38.660And he goes, that's not going to happen.
01:28:40.620You 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.
01:28:56.200Like the, the, to them, the solution is just, you just keep going.
01:29:02.120Um, and to me, it's just unfathomable.
01:29:04.640To 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.
01:29:25.580Um, besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, besides these absolutely ridiculous, stupid accidents in the, in the fifties and even the sixties.
01:29:35.700In 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.
01:29:52.680One 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.
01:30:09.580And they thought they were under attack.
01:30:11.280They started, um, quite literally, you know, putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to, um, to attack.
01:30:18.920And thankfully that was, uh, it, it, it didn't go, um, all the way.
01:30:25.040In 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.
01:30:48.500So that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.
01:30:54.020And it turns out those glitches came from an alignment between high altitude clouds and satellites.
01:31:02.400Uh, so something that had not been predicted or accounted for.
01:31:06.980And, um, according to the computers, the Soviet Union was under attack.
01:31:12.220This 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.
01:31:31.720Or the Cuban Missile Crisis, um, incident that I was describing with the submarine, that's often referred to the man who saved the world.
01:31:40.000And then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the man who saved the world.
01:31:43.640Um, we've quite simply been, uh, have had so many incidences where, uh, uh, we just actually got lucky.
01:31:55.340Um, 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.
01:32:05.080It's that we have really been very lucky.
01:32:09.080Not all countries that have nuclear weapons are the same, though.
01:32:12.220Some are clearly a greater threat, not because they're more evil necessarily, but because they're more unstable.
01:32:17.480And 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.
01:32:25.320It's clearly in a very steep downward trajectory.
01:32:29.440Why should we sit back and allow, like, the UK to have nuclear weapons?
01:32:36.380It actually gets much better than that.
01:33:31.220I mean, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 91, they moved nuclear warheads out of a bunch of different satellite states, including Ukraine.
01:34:30.260To 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.
01:35:20.760So, uh, wow, this, it doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction.
01:35:25.980And we're not moving in the right direction.
01:35:27.980Although there, there are some developments in the international scene.
01:35:32.620Um, 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.
01:35:43.640Um, 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.
01:35:58.540Um, 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,
01:36:13.640a kind of action plan, um, that was very promising.
01:36:18.220Um, 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.
01:36:31.740And then by 2015, all of that had collapsed and it's large part because of what happened in Ukraine, um, in 2014.
01:36:42.740Now we start to see this, you know, distrust between the United States and Russia.
01:36:49.140It'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.
01:37:02.400Um, 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.
01:37:19.260Um, 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.
01:37:36.640So 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.
01:37:51.980And 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.
01:38:06.580So these states started, um, you know, negotiating eventually, um, an agreement, which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
01:38:18.980That 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.
01:38:38.720So in a, in a, in an international agreement, there's sort of, um, two levels.
01:38:44.520One 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.
01:38:59.420And then a ratification follows often through national legislative bodies, um, whatever the, the rules of a particular country are.
01:39:10.540And after ratification, the country is actually committed to everything outlined in the agreement.
01:39:17.500So 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.
01:39:32.840And the goals of this treaty are quite simply to prohibit any and all activities having to do with nuclear weapons.
01:39:41.280And 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.
01:39:52.520Um, 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.
01:40:12.140They're actually a threat to all of us as well.
01:40:15.760And we want a say in the fact that you currently hold the ability to destroy the world as we know it.
01:40:24.120I bet they do want to say, but they're not getting one because nobody cares.
01:40:26.920So if you're North Korea, it's like, why do we care what you think?
01:40:29.400If you're the United States, why do we care what you think?
01:40:31.080I mean, it does seem like the way that states deal with each other encourages everybody to get a nuclear weapon.
01:40:40.160Listen, we don't boss North Korea around anymore because they have nuclear weapons.
01:40:45.140We 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.
01:40:51.880So that's, those are law of the jungle rules, which I object to as a Christian, but I'm, but they seem in force.
01:40:59.700Like, I don't know what you do about that.
01:41:01.280So I think the idea that, I think to me, it is nuclear deterrence that is the problem in and of itself.
01:41:13.240Because 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?
01:41:23.620Then every country that can should acquire nuclear weapons for itself to keep itself safe.
01:41:32.560I totally agree, but I would flip it around.
01:41:35.040I 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.
01:41:42.400I mean, I think nuclear weapons are evil.
01:41:44.240I think they're actually probably inspired by supernatural forces.
01:42:23.640So let me just say something for a minute or two about that for people who don't know.
01:42:29.260So the doomsday clock is something that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, so on,
01:42:37.680who were very worried about the threat of nuclear weapons in the mid-1940s, they founded this organization.
01:42:48.560In 1947, they were publishing their first issue of the Bulletin, and they asked an artist, Mardel Langsdorff or something, to draw a cover.
01:43:05.320And 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,
01:43:21.020with midnight representing this sort of nuclear Armageddon, end of the world type of scenario.
01:43:29.360And 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.
01:43:46.940Also, over time, they added other existential threats to their considerations of the time of the clock.
01:43:53.920Currently, 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?
01:44:03.500I 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.
01:45:03.840And 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.
01:45:23.500The farthest we've ever been from midnight was in 1991.
01:45:31.280So we've really done a lot of damage since.
01:45:35.340And Democrats have actually brought the clock closer to midnight by, actually, I got those numbers.
01:45:44.420Democrats, 19 minutes and 10 seconds, staggering 19 minutes and 10 seconds towards midnight.
01:45:50.720And Republicans, 13 minutes and 39 seconds away from midnight.
01:45:56.600So on the whole, the Republicans have been much better than Democrats.
01:46:03.600And 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.
01:46:19.900I 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.
01:46:35.820President 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.
01:46:45.580He has questioned our plans to modernize the nuclear arsenals and spend actually a tremendous amount of money on them.
01:46:54.320Can I ask you just a second, what would be the thinking behind, quote, modernizing the nuclear arsenal?
01:47:02.780Oh, those are plans that have been set in place for more than 10 years.
01:47:08.600Those are plans that have been made under President Obama.
01:47:12.440So 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.
01:47:27.080The logic is that our weapons are going to get too old and we need new ones.
01:47:31.960But 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?
01:47:47.700We're literally talking about spending trillions of dollars to perfect the way of destroying the world.
01:48:00.360But there's no, I mean, is anyone saying that our current nuclear arsenal just wouldn't work?
01:48:07.400I 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.
01:48:17.000I 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.
01:48:29.760Making them, making them, I mean, this is, a lot of this is.
01:48:35.480Driven by the military industrial complex, no doubt about it.
01:48:39.640They, you know, this is a very important, you know, stream of income for them.
01:48:46.320The 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.
01:49:01.040So I think, here's my conclusion to everything that you've said.
01:49:04.120I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently.
01:49:07.320I think the, and I, but I don't know how to achieve them.
01:49:10.840I'm skeptical of treaties because people just ignore them or won't sign them or whatever.
01:49:14.380I do think the first step toward any change begins with articulating the truth.
01:49:56.100But 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.
01:50:16.280I 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.
01:50:31.560I think, I really do think that the ability to destroy humanity should be seen as a symbol of shame.
01:50:40.540Yeah, fireballs are not progress, actually.
01:51:44.700And without the general public really waking up to the realities of what we're facing, people were very engaged in the 1960s.
01:51:54.580Some 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.
01:52:06.500And the senators were absolutely not interested in passing this.
01:52:11.280He just, he galvanized the general public.
01:52:16.140He went on a kind of two-month tour speaking to people about the issue.
01:52:20.720And by the time the Senate voted, it was an 81 to 18 senator vote.
01:52:43.500I 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.