Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity

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Thank you, Professor, for doing this.

Let me start with the most simple of all questions.

How are nuclear weapons different from conventional weapons?

Nuclear weapons are different from conventional weapons in many ways.

One of the things that I like to say is that they

really

defy the kind of concept of both space and time.

And let me explain what I mean by that.

If you have a conventional weapon and you explode it over a city or wherever,

that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place

and it's going to have that impact in time.

And then you could come back and clean up the area and rebuild and so on.

Nuclear weapons are not like that.

A nuclear explosion in one place, in one location, and in one split moment of time

can have both global effects and it can have impacts over actually even thousands of years through

the effects of radiation and the kind of radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment.

But there are sort of a number of ways in which even a single nuclear weapon explosion can be incredibly dangerous and devastating.

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

can be obviously, quite clearly, much more devastating.

So

the thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful than any kind of chemical explosion.

So, for example,

the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

80 years ago, almost exactly,

had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT.

Now,

these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium, uranium for the Hiroshima bomb and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.

But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent

amount of chemical explosive that you would need.

So that's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNT is how much you would have needed of chemical explosive to produce the energy equivalent to that explosion.

And

that in and of itself is huge.

And just to give you one kind of point of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing, which I'm sure you remember, it was actually

the first year that I was living in the United States.

It was in April of 1995.

And it was a devastating event.

It was

the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT.

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

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

So, absolutely an incredible and devastating

event.

At the same time, that explosion was

6,000 times

less energetic than the bombing of Hiroshima.

So 15,000 tons of TNT versus 2,5 tons of TNT.

So that just begins to give you a scale

for just how powerful a single nuclear weapon can be.

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

In fact, in 1945, the U.S.

had three nuclear weapons.

One was used as a quote-unquote test,

the Trinity test in the desert of New Mexico.

And then two were used on attacks on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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

How much more powerful?

So

we know that both U.S.

and Russia have nuclear bombs currently that are on the order of one megaton.

That's about

70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

At the height of the Cold War, when we were first testing

nuclear weapons and actually first testing hydrogen bombs, which are different from the atomic bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I can explain that as well, we were even testing the largest test that the U.S.

had ever conducted, took place in the Marshall Islands.

It's called the Bravo test, Castle Bravo test, and that was a thousand Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

And yet, the Soviets actually tested

something even more powerful.

They did so up in the North Sea, a region called Novara Zemya.

And they tested some accounts say 50 megatons.

So that's

more than 3,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

I've even seen accounts that say 58 megatons.

So that would be

basically

4,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

The Castle Bravo Bravo test, which took place on March 1 of 1954,

that test, that mushroom cloud, so we all sort of

have this vision of a nuclear explosion that produces the mushroom cloud, that mushroom cloud was 25 miles or 40 kilometers high and at the widest, about 60 miles wide.

So I think 60 miles?

60 miles wide, the mushroom cloud.

It's quite simply something that's unimaginable.

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

About a hundred miles from where the test was conducted, a population was living in a place called Rongola Patole.

And those people were very, very sickened and

impacted by the test.

It's a long story.

They stayed there for three days, they were moved away.

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,

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

And that testing ended in 1958.

So it's now nearly seven years later, and there's still contamination that quite simply is not safe.

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.

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So, what would happen if a nuclear weapon, modern nuclear weapon, detonated over Times Square?

Yes, over Times Square, a one-megaton bomb is going to have, so there are two, there's something that makes the simple numbers a little more complicated.

You can have two different kinds of explosions.

One can be an airburst and one can be a surface explosion.

In the case of an airburst, 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.

A surface burst produces more radiation and kind of more of those long-term effects.

So between the two,

let's just say that the basically the radius of this fireball is about two, about a mile.

And so you now have, depending on where, where it explodes, you have a radius

that, and the fireball is quite literally the temperature of the sun.

And so you have a fireball where everything is evaporated, absolutely evaporated.

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

The shock wave is such that it just...

just everything collapses, buildings collapse, everything collapses.

Then you might have a kind of lethal radiation dose,

concentric circles.

Then you might have moderate damage where you still have buildings collapsing,

injuries are widespread, and so on.

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.

And in New York City,

for an airburst, 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.

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

And this is something that happened, of course, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's where it just, you know, people's skin quite literally melts.

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.

This is

quite simply a site of total and absolute horror and devastation.

And it would destroy, it would destroy a U.S.

city.

The

thing that we know.

And render it uninhabitable.

Render it and render it potentially uninhabitable, you know, for decades, hundreds of years, potentially even thousands of years.

Again, it all depends on how you do it, how much,

you know, how

large the weapon is, how it's detonated.

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, is that because we now live in a world with 12 and a half thousand nuclear warheads,

it doesn't just end with one nuclear warhead being used on one city.

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.

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 and another, you know, so you could have a kind of a

constellation of explosions.

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.

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.

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

seen that

a warhead has exploded in one of our cities, we launch an attack.

And

these decisions are made in in a matter of minutes this is um

uh described really uh kind of with amazing clarity in the book by any jacobson nuclear war scenario where she describes exactly minute by minute how nuclear uh war starts um and can start and then what happens for the next 72 minutes and then sort of these long-term consequences of nuclear war and i can talk about some of them

so 72 minutes the entire war that's the duration of the war that's the duration of a war between the United States and Russia in Annie's book the scenario is that basically the US gets attacked

by a kind of lone warhead coming from

North Korea attacking Washington DC

that's an intercontinental ballistic missile which we detect within seconds of the launch.

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.

And

in that,

you know, in that scenario, the U.S.

then responds to

the knows it's being attacked by North Korea.

In a matter of minutes, makes a decision to attack North Korea.

I think the response is something like 82 nuclear warheads.

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.

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.

And so they launch an attack, a thousand nuclear warheads, and then the US responds

in turn and attacks the United States.

And

these kinds of

sort 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, 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.

The number of casualties from the moment of the explosions is on the order of 360 million people.

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 shockwave.

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.

And then

there is the business of what such a nuclear war would actually do to the environment of the planet.

And there, it's not just about local effects.

Now we get into the global effects.

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.

The spatial aspect is that, of course, there is a local um impact of the nuclear explosion.

But in the case of a nuclear war, the impact becomes global.

And there are at least two different ways in which this happens.

One way is called nuclear winter, and I can explain what that is.

And the other is ozone layer destruction.

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

Although I will say that more recently, we've had much better simulations,

just much more computer power, much more surveyability to really figure out what that would look like.

So let's start in order.

What's nuclear winter?

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.

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

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

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

The estimate is 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.

That's about 18 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is a completely different planet.

And those temperature drops occur very, very quickly.

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

bread basket latitudes.

And

food just begins to

stops growing.

Agriculture begins to fail and people begin to starve.

And the estimates there, there's a paper that was published in Nature Food by Alan Roebach and Lily Gia

and their colleagues at Rutgers University.

According to that paper, this particular scenario where I said 360 million people would die from the attacks,

they estimate over 5 billion people would die of starvation.

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Over 5 billion within two years of a nuclear war from starvation all around the planet.

And here's a kicker: actually, the number is actually really more than 6 billion because when they wrote the paper, they based all of their calculations, simulations, and modeling on a worldwide population of 7 billion.

We now have more than 8 billion people on the planet.

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

So it's really, I mean, this is

quite simply, this is not, this is the end of human civilization.

This is the end of humanity as we know it.

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

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

But this is quite simply not the planet we'll live on today.

And then on top of it, there's the radiation effects.

And I can talk more about radiation.

And then there's this business of ozone layer destruction.

And that's somebody at Columbia, whom I

actually knew quite well.

He passed away recently in his 90s.

His name was Mal Ruderman.

He was one of the first people who they wrote about

in the 1970s about nitric oxide production as a consequence of nuclear war and the impact that this would have on ozone layer, on the ozone layer.

And

those, um, that kind of research has been done also more recently with the new models, simulations, and so on.

Those estimates suggest that the war scenario I keep mentioning between US and Russia

would result in 70% ozone layer destruction.

This is again, this is not a place where you go out to sunbathe.

This is a place in which UV radiation is incredibly dangerous, not just to people,

but it would also be,

it would also impact agricultural production because it would impact plants.

So again, this would be another hit on sort of food supplies.

But, you know,

this is all of this is just so, so horrific.

This idea that we would

ever

conduct something like nuclear war.

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

Khrushchev said in the 1960s that the survivors would envy the dead.

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 i've noticed

not yeah ever more recklessly especially in the last three years let me ask you a couple of questions just to tie up what you just said um 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.

What is the effect of of a nuclear power plant getting hit by a nuclear weapon?

That one is really, really devastating.

I hadn't actually, I mean, I think with the war in Ukraine,

we had sort of gone a sense, right, that a nuclear power plant presents this very kind of special type of threat in war zones.

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.

That just had not been the case previously.

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

But in

the case of a conflict, a nuclear power plant can become a weapon in and of itself.

Of course.

So I read the book a while back.

So I...

But is it possible you could get an exponential effect?

Absolutely.

No, no, no.

This is now a radiation, you know, so now people are dying all over the western United States from the absolutely enormous amount of radioactivity that is spread, right?

So you hit the nuclear power plant.

It's not the blast and the fireball.

I mean, yes, it it is there locally, but that's not what's going to kill the people in LA.

What's going to kill the people in LA is the radiation that's going to spread.

So, what does that look like?

That was my second question.

You said you would flesh out the concept of

the danger of radiation.

Like, what does that look like?

We know something about that because of the bombings 80 years ago, but we know something about that because of the bombings from 80 years ago, absolutely.

And

I can say a little more about those, but we also know know a whole lot

about the impact of nuclear explosions on the environment, the impact of radiation on the environment, because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only two.

or even count Trinity three times.

It's not that we've exploded nuclear weapons three times.

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

And that was as full nuclear weapons.

Full nuclear weapons explosions as part of what is referred to as nuclear weapons testing programs.

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.

And I was speaking to

a woman from French Polynesia where the French tested nuclear weapons.

She's actually a member of the French Polynesian parliament now.

Her name is Hinemoira Cross.

She's a relatively young woman, I think in her 30s.

She's a mother.

She's had leukemia for many years.

And

many people in French Polynesia have been impacted by the testing that took place there.

Leukemia can be a result of exposure radiation.

Absolutely.

And

I can explain that as well.

But Hine Moira said to me something really interesting.

She said, you know, when we call it testing, when I was young and people would talk about, oh, we had the testing, I just imagined scientists kind of playing in a laboratory and, you know, doing some kind of a test.

These were full-blown nuclear explosions.

They described Bravo, described the Soviet

so-called test, the Tsar Bomba.

There were over 2,000 such explosions,

many of them atmospheric tests.

The majority still underground tests, but even underground tests have had devastating consequences.

In 1963, there was

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China and France actually both continued to test in the atmosphere post-1963.

France tested in the atmosphere until 1974 and China tested in the atmosphere until 1980.

So both of those continued.

Everybody else has conducted, to our knowledge,

underground tests, to my knowledge,

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So, but tell tell us about the effects of radiation.

So,

how long does the pollution last?

How bad is it?

Yeah.

So,

depending on what kind of a bomb you have, so there, let me go back to a kind of

key distinction here.

We have two types of nuclear weapons.

One we refer to as atomic bombs.

Those are, again, 1945 weapons.

Those are based on a process of fission.

Fission is when a nucleus of an atom splits.

And basically, one element,

we all know elements like hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and so on, but an element like uranium or plutonium splits and produces two other elements.

And energy is produced in such a reaction.

And you know, a tiny amount of energy is produced in one reaction but when you have many many many reactions you can have a lot of energy another process is called the process of fusion and that's when actually nuclei of two elements come together and produce energy that way so for example two hydrogen nuclei come together to form helium and energy is produced that way that process actually takes place in the sun.

That's how the sun produces its energy.

So fusion is a good thing.

We wouldn't, we quite simply wouldn't have life on this planet if it weren't for fusion.

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

So depending on, you know, sort of what you do, and here's the interesting thing about fusion or hydrogen bombs.

In order to actually

um bring so

you know that so if i have hydrogen nuclei so this is, let's just step one second to just remember what an atom is, what elements are.

So we have different elements on the planet.

The atoms are sort of the smallest units of the element, but those atoms are made up of different kinds of particles.

So the nucleus is at the center of the atom.

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

And then there are electrons around it.

In chemical reactions, everything basically happens with, not basically, everything happens with the electrons.

So the nuclei just stay the same.

With nuclear reactions, everything is about what happens in the nucleus.

The nucleus either splits or the nuclei in fission or nuclei come together in fusion.

In

fusion, if you have a nucleus that is positively charged, the electrons are negatively charged that's what keeps the atoms stable if you have one nucleus that's positively charged trying to come together with another nucleus that's positively charged they repel each other right so we know you know yeah so they repel each other so you actually need to

invest energy to overcome that electrostatic repulsion.

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

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.

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

So, the Brava one was a thousand times more powerful

than a Hiroshima bomb.

The currently, like if we have a one-megaton bomb, that's about 70 Hiroshima bombs.

But hydrogen bombs, actually, there's kind of no limit.

Like you could keep making them bigger and bigger and bigger.

Somehow, we've stopped making the really big ones.

I think China has

probably the most powerful, the most high-energy hydrogen bombs currently in their arsenals.

I think they have five-megaton

bombs, hydrogen bombs in their arsenals.

That's more than 300 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

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.

But just back to radiation.

So

basically,

what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them.

And in so doing, you produce some radioactive isotopes, radioactive elements that are going to basically

be in the environment both locally, they're going to get, you know, kind of blown up, you know, things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud.

You produce these radioactive isotopes.

They're mixed with everything.

Some of that will

kind of fall back onto the planet locally.

Some of it will be carried up into the atmosphere, high levels of stratosphere, and so on, and actually become, you know, part of

sort of a global deposition where you

go so high up in the atmosphere, it stays, you know, stays up there.

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.

And so, when the United So, it's raining nuclear isotopes.

Raining radioactive nuclear isotopes.

The U.S., I mentioned the testing in the Marshall Islands.

We also tested in

another Pacific island state called Republic of Kiribati.

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.

But the testing in Nevada actually produced fallout that went all around the United States.

And it quite simply depended on whether or not

there was rain in local.

So the fallout was carried across

towards the east, given the easterly winds.

And then if there was a rain, a weather event in some

place,

the fallout would get deposited there.

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 Jackson Pollock painting.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's, and it's where

radiation had been deposited from these.

Do we know the health effects of that?

The health effects are very severe and very serious.

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

There's something called iodine-131.

There's something called cesium-137.

something called strontium-90 and there are a number of different isotopes of plutonium.

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

So some of them, there is a concept called half-life.

So a radioactive isotope will have a specific half-life.

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.

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

And so after six seven call it even 10 half-lives it's going to be gone from the from the environment iodine 131 has a very short half-life it's eight days and so within a matter of weeks it's gone from the environment 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 you know, people drank the milk and so on.

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.

Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years each.

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

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

And you know that when you drink milk or eat cheese or whatever, you take in calcium, that calcium goes into your bones, goes into, it's building up your bone marrow.

And strontium-90 will go to those exact places.

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.

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.

Cesium-137

is the same half-life, you know,

around for a long time,

is chemically similar to potassium.

And you also know that if you eat banana or if you drink some kind of an electrolyte drink or something, you take in potassium.

Well, the same thing happens.

If cesium is in the soil, plants will take it up,

thinking

because it behaves like potassium, they take it up, it gets incorporated.

And now,

when

you eat that food, that cesium is now getting incorporated into your cells, the kinds of soft tissues that use potassium.

Your brain actually needs a lot of potassium.

And so

when instead of taking up potassium, you've now brought cesium-137 into your body.

Now this 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.

And now that gamma radiation is inside your body.

It's attacking your cells.

It's attacking your DNA.

It's making you sick.

And a lot of um kind of soft tissue cancers, including brain cancer, come from that cesium ones.

Do you see markedly higher rates of those cancers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Yes, oh, absolutely.

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 and then another 70,000 by the end of 1945

from

both kinds of acute radiation sickness as well as cancer.

But the cancers continued to happen.

There's a particularly

touching story of a young girl who was two years old in Hiroshima the day of the bombings.

Her name was Sadaku Sasaki.

And when she was 12, so 10 years after the bombing, she developed leukemia.

She had been, you know, growing well and was very athletic and very active.

And she developed leukemia.

And she is the one who

She learned the story of the paper crane, the folding of the origami.

Yes.

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

There are now some

differences in kind of details of what happened, how many paper cranes she folded, and so on.

But needless to say, she died.

And after she died, it was actually her friends who wanted to do something

in her honor.

And essentially, over the decades, the paper crane that she was, the paper cranes that she was folding really became a kind of symbol of peace.

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.

And that's kind of what got taken up by.

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, certainly human life on Earth, human civilization.

Yeah, I would say it's absolutely, certainly, end of

the world as we know it.

Whether we all, you know, perish or some people survive,

the latter is certainly possible.

It's actually the UN is now advancing a study on the consequences of nuclear war, something that really hasn't been studied, I would say,

in terms of the current, the world that we currently live in, right?

So we live in a very globalized world.

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

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

People, for example, ate food that was more local and so on.

So, what does that look like today?

The science of nuclear winter

and, for example, ozone layer destruction, that's very, very solid science.

It gets attacked all the time, but it is very solid.

And old.

You said this has been something that people have been studying for 80 years.

How many nuclear weapons are there in the world, globally?

Today, we have 12 and a half nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine

thousand sorry

nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine nuclear armed states US and Russia have the vast majority over 90% of the nuclear warheads are in the possession of US and Russia are we pretty sure of that I mean we know where these warheads are yeah no we actually know I the

the good news about nuclear weapons is they're not a garage project There are other things you could do in your garage that could be very dangerous.

You can't do that with nuclear weapons.

You really,

it takes a tremendous amount of not just resources

and kind of human ingenuity, but infrastructure.

Part of the reason they did that in the, you know, the Mehan Project in the Los Alamos, it was all that

isolation and so on.

Do we know where they are?

We do.

For the most part, we know where they are.

Probably not all of them.

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

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.

What's interesting, so submarines keep moving most of the time.

Yeah.

Isn't it dangerous to have a nuclear warhead continuously on a boat?

Yeah, some of these nuclear

submarines are carrying so many warheads.

They're carrying so many missiles, and each missile is carrying warheads.

And submarines.

I think they call them handmaidens of the apocalypse.

There were incidents

in like the 1950s where a U.S.

and a Soviet submarine like, you know, know, crashed into one another.

They're also there.

Nuclear armed.

Nuclear armed.

What happened?

And nothing happened.

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, is that we've been very, very lucky that the scenarios I'm describing, the scenario Andy Jacobson is describing, the scenario I'm describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, There's a whole other thing, which you probably also know about, because I know you spoke with Dennis Quaid.

The electromagnetic pulse, that's another thing you could do.

You could shut down the electricity over entire countries.

Like you need like three nuclear warheads to shut down the electricity over the entire United States.

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

This is like the electricity is not coming back.

so you wouldn't even need to like explode nuclear weapons on cities you'd just need to shut down our electrical grid and then you know good luck the country starts yeah yeah good luck to all of us so a during the cold war a russian sub soviet sub and a u.s sub collided um

luckily you know the bombs didn't go off but there were also examples of warheads being lost right yeah warheads being lost warheads being dropped to the bottom of the ocean.

There are about 50 nuclear warheads at the bottom of the ocean.

So there are 50 nuclear warheads right now at the bottom of the ocean?

Right now at the bottom of the ocean, yeah.

And no one's tried to retrieve them.

Fell off the submarine, fell off a plane, you know,

all kinds of accidents.

It wasn't just

two submarines colliding.

It was also, there was also airplanes carrying nuclear warheads colliding.

There was once, yeah, there was once

a nuclear warhead that was dropped quite literally into someone's backyard in South Carolina.

It didn't go off.

It had like multiple security kind of systems and the last one held.

Everything else,

you know, had given way.

Wait, the U.S.

military dropped a nuclear bomb in someone's backyard in South Carolina?

Yeah, absolutely.

I forget the exact year.

This was most of these incidents were in the 1950s.

But that was kind of a period of really stupid accidents.

And then the, the, you know, the, what is often referred to in the field as close calls, you know, sort of got more

sophisticated.

Uh, in 1962, of course, we had the Cuban missile crisis.

Yes, that's a whole famously, a whole

set of things.

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.

Kennedy was under a tremendous amount of pressure to actually invade Cuba.

By that point, the Soviets actually had nuclear warheads and missiles in Cuba, you know, had that invasion or they're gone.

It, you know, we quite simply would have had a nuclear war.

But it wasn't just that.

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

It was a Saturday.

It's

often referred to as the Black Saturday.

There were three things that happened that day.

One was a US plane that

was doing some kind of

monitoring

near the North Pole and had accidentally gone off, lost radar, lost kind of the ability to navigate where they were, 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.

Then there was an airplane that was shut 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.

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.

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.

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

And one

Soviet submarine

had sort of three

officers on board,

was being attacked by these depths charges.

They interpreted it as a real attack.

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

They had a nuclear torpedo.

um on board um and what they needed they this wasn't you know like they needed um uh permission from some higher authority they needed all three of them needed to agree to employ the nuclear warhead.

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.

The very next day, October 28th, was actually the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Soviets

agreed to withdraw their nuclear missiles

from Cuba.

President Kennedy had in turn agreed that the U.S.

would withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey.

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.

And that was the agreement.

It ended the Cuban missile crisis.

And that was a very, very, very dangerous moment.

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.

He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.

That was absolutely really important to him.

But he was also, he was very,

he was looking towards disarmament.

And 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.

So this is quite simply something we've known for a long time.

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 the electromagnetic pulse and so on.

So he understood this at a very deep level.

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.

That was a tremendous achievement and a really, really important achievement.

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.

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.

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 there are actually different isotopes of plutonium and some of them have half-lives of thousands of years there's an isotope of plutonium with a 24 and a half thousand year half-lifetime.

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

So this is this is again back to that that issue of transcending time and space.

This is not something that just has an immediate effect.

We clean it up and we move on.

The plutonium, in fact, the plutonium has been deposited globally.

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.

Here's the plutonium line in the geologic record.

And

can I ask you

about President Kennedy's efforts to

prevent nuclear war?

One of the things he did that'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 Dimona site.

I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the president demanding inspections of the Dimona site.

Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, I think, as a result of this controversy.

What happened there?

Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any sort of

oversight by the President Kennedy

thought that

proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous.

He was definitely concerned and and didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons.

This eventually led, even after his death, to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose goal was that, but there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well.

In the case of Israel, he felt very strongly that

if this was our ally, you know, we

and 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.

But they went ahead.

And

I mean,

I think the

it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966.

And so this was actually, interestingly, before

the nuclear non-proliferation treaty came together.

It was negotiated over

a long period of time, but finally kind of signed

in 1968.

And then it entered into force in 1970.

It's still currently one of the largest international agreements amongst states

in the United States nuclear armed states have signed it.

So that treaty recognizes five nuclear arms state nuclear weapon states on their US, Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China.

Those are the five that had nuclear weapons up to that point, declared nuclear weapons arsenals.

Again, Israel

had actually begun its program.

At this point, Israel has

is thought to have 90 nuclear warheads.

The other five, what's interesting is they were from the very beginning of the treaty, all five were recognized as nuclear weapon states.

But China and France didn't join the treaty until 1992.

So it sometimes takes time for

these treaties to actually

be India, Pakistan, North Korea.

So there's, 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.

And then the four that are outside of the treaty, Israel,

which has this unique policy of ambiguity of an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

But again, we think it's a 90 nuclear warhead arsenal.

And we're pretty sure that there is.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

I think there's no doubt about whether or not they have have them.

India and Pakistan never joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Both

essentially, you know, tested nuclear weapons underground.

They each have on the order of 150 nuclear warheads today.

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.

We think that North Korea actually currently has 50, 60, maybe 70

nuclear warheads.

What North Korea has done is it has also

actually developed the delivery systems.

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.

And this to me is actually

really for,

you know,

many reasons why we have to eliminate nuclear weapons.

I can make a case about that

very strongly.

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.

Who's going to attack the United States?

You know, we've got the oceans, we've got the conventional military.

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.

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 adversary, you know, peer adversaries or near-peer adversaries.

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

This is not a world superpower.

And yet North Korea could destroy the United States as we know it.

Where is Iran?

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

Where is Iran on the continuum toward getting a nuclear weapon?

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

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.

Now, my understanding is that they,

and I actually listened to their statements

in venues like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty meetings at the UN.

They always say they're not interested in

building nuclear weapons.

They do emphasize that their religion,

you know, doesn't, you know, requires them not to pursue nuclear weapons.

I actually think that they're not pursuing nuclear weapons.

How hard would it be for?

I mean, they have every incentive to any country that has its capital city bombed

probably wants a nuclear deterrent, I would think, I mean, it's just common sense.

How hard is it, given where they are right now

technologically, how hard would it be for them to build a nuclear weapon?

I don't think it would be very hard.

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

How hard in general is it to build one?

It is hard.

It is a huge investment of

resources, both human and financial resources.

It is a hard thing to do.

It's not a garage project.

It's not something that's going to evade, especially

if we were to pursue nuclear disarmament, especially in the world of today's technologies, 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.

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.

What would that look like?

Is that an actual threat?

I think that's still, that remains a threat.

I think that woke up some people

in the early 2000s to kind of think a little bit about the threat of nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, it was in 2007.

I think this sort of terrorist threat was a big part of why they did this.

It brought Kissinger and George Schultz,

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, 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.

Can I ask a dumb question I should have asked before?

So you've said it's been long-standing policy for over 70 years that if the United States believes there are incoming nuclear missiles,

that it will strike the country of origin.

What's the thinking there?

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

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.

He passed away a little over a year ago or so.

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.

And in his

book, The Doomsday Machine,

there's a quote I really, really love.

He says that nuclear weapons policies, current past and current are dizzyingly insane and immoral and that's really all i have to say in response to why would we you know why would we if if if we think we're being attacked by one or two nuclear warheads why would we send 82 to north korea uh you know i i think well i mean it you

you know If you can't, if there's some way to stop the nuclear

attack then of course i mean uh you know if it's if it's them or us i'm for you know i'm for us always

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 yeah if you're gonna die it's a really it's a really good question i think one has this been debated

so nuclear deterrence um

has kind of become a sort of mantra.

So, let me just step back for a second.

I think one of the problems we have

currently in this country is: number one, most people are not aware of this threat, don't understand nuclear weapons, don't understand what they could do.

Sometimes, when I speak or write, or you know, people will respond, oh, I remember duck and cover when I was in school.

And, you know, people of a certain generation still sort of have a sense for what is going on,

but many young people are just utterly unaware.

There is a section of society, however, that is aware and understands what nuclear weapons are and, you know, understands some of the basic facts that we've been talking about and so on, 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 and there's just no way to

undo or put the genie back in the bottle or any of that.

And the truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence.

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.

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

We're going to attack them.

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 even if we somehow magically had a dome over the country, which, by the way, we're not going to, it's never going to work.

We've tried this, and there's just no way to actually do that.

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.

It would be in the Cold War, we called it mutually assured destruction or mad.

It is actually always sad.

It's always self-assured destruction.

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.

I just want to tell you a story about

the United States.

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.

I was at a place called Wilton Park.

It's in the United Kingdom.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel.

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.

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

And I was invited there last December.

And these meetings are held.

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

It's about 80 people.

And it was all very, very interactive.

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.

And these meetings are held under what's called Chatham House rules.

So I can talk about what happened, but I can't talk about who said it.

So I'm not going to say who said.

But a person responded to me, and I had made a comment to their remarks and then made this comment about the US.

And

this person responded to me after which I wasn't allowed according to the rules to respond.

So I'll tell you what the response was.

The response was, you're right, and I was shocked that they accepted this, you're right that the United States would be safer.

in a world free of nuclear weapons, but our allies would not be.

And so because I wasn't allowed to respond in the room, I waited until it was

after, you know, that session had ended and in the lunch line, 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?

And take a guess what he responded to me.

I don't think he cares what the American people think.

He said, now you sound like Trump.

And

I said,

that's not an answer.

He goes, you,

a person goes, you want an answer?

There would be no Europe.

It would all be Mother Russia.

So, you know, there's this idea.

Oh, they're deranged.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, seriously, like, they'd be better off anyway.

How are we accepting

to be

under mortal threat as a nation, as a people,

as humanity,

all the time?

JFK had another,

he had so many brilliant statements

and quotes and so on.

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

I mean, that was his view was like, we're all just sitting in this prison awaiting, you know, the

nuclear war

destroying our world.

It does seem like we're moving, and there's just been this thing, the doomsday clock.

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

But just watching the rhetoric carefully, it has changed since the Ukraine war started.

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.

Absolute insanity.

And so the taboo around using nuclear weapons,

at least in this country, has

almost evaporated.

Like, what is that?

Yeah, I mean, I think the taboo is still there,

but I think some people are definitely

pushing the envelope and pretending as if we really

can fight and win a nuclear war.

So may I ask it?

win?

Of course, I agree.

What does it mean, though, technically, a limited nuclear strike?

I think people think that you could have exchanges on, 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 near-range range that you could use on a battlefield.

Nuclear weapons.

Yeah, nuclear weapons.

And people have called for that.

Yeah,

I think that's

I think that's in discussion.

I mean, I think the you know anyone who discusses that should be imprisoned for treason.

I agree.

I agree.

I agree.

Yeah, any policymaker who advocates for that is

imperiling our entire nation and world.

And that's a crime.

Yeah.

No, in the fall of 2022, after the start of the Ukraine war, there were serious discussions in the White House and an estimate from the Biden administration that there was a 50% chance of nuclear weapons use over the years.

You teach at Columbia.

I mean, you must know some of the people in the Biden White House.

I mean, like, what?

I actually don't.

You don't.

Okay.

They don't want to talk to you.

I am.

But, I mean, these are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken.

Like, what are they thinking?

I mean, the closest I come to is when I try to speak to diplomats.

These are people mostly from the State Department or from the

U.S.

mission to the United Nations,

or examples like the one I gave from Wilton Park.

I've also spoken to diplomats from other nuclear weapon states,

including like a UK

diplomat where I was making this case that, you know, nuclear deterrence could fail.

And he goes, Yeah, yeah, you're right.

And I said, and then what?

You know, we destroy the entire human civilization.

We destroy the planet.

We make it inhospitable to not just human life.

And he goes, that's not going to happen.

So they

not only

don't have a plan B for if nuclear deterrence fails, they also really don't want to think about it, right?

Like the

to them, the solution is just you just keep going.

And to me, it's just unfathomable.

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

to implement the strike, but because accidents could happen, because a miscalculation could happen.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis, besides these absolutely ridiculous, stupid accidents in the 50s and even the 60s, in the 1980s, we had two incidents in 1983.

The first one in September, the second one in November, where we quite literally,

you know, could have had

the start of a nuclear war.

One was called Abel Archer.

That was in November.

That was a NATO exercise.

They had

actually

added some new kind of elements of realism

that were interpreted then by the Soviets for the real thing.

And they thought they were under attack.

They started

quite literally, you know, putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to attack.

And thankfully, that wasn't going

all the way.

In September, there was an incident where

an officer in the Soviet army in some military base that was monitoring whether the Soviet Union was under attack received literally like a computer glitch,

five signals in a row that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.

And it turns out those glitches came from an alignment between high-altitude clouds and satellites.

So something that had not been predicted or accounted for.

And

according to the computers, the Soviet Union was under attack.

This person,

his name was

Captain Stanislav Petrov, had decided this was a false alarm and actually

didn't pass the information on to his superiors, thus averting

nuclear war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis incident that I was describing with the submarine, that's often referred to as the man who saved the world.

And then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the man who saved the world.

We've quite simply been,

have had so many incidences where

we just actually got lucky.

And there are scholars who really kind of study all of these examples who say, no, no, no, it's not that nuclear deterrence has worked.

It's that we have really been very lucky.

Not all countries that have nuclear weapons are the same, though.

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

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

It's clearly in a very steep downward trajectory.

Why should we sit back and allow

like the UK to have nuclear weapons?

It actually gets much better than that.

The UK has nuclear warheads, their own nuclear warheads, but the only way they can launch them is using

US delivery systems.

And so it's not just that they have them, it's that it actually will help them to have a viable, you know, quote-unquote nuclear deterrent.

So it's a, it's, it's, it's, that one's actually in our corner squarely.

And we just recently

transferred or began transferring some nuclear warheads onto UK soil.

It was something we used to do, and then we removed them and now we brought them back.

Why would we do that?

I don't know.

In a country that's collapsing, that will not be there in current form in 20 years.

That seems very reckless.

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

Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Right.

And when South Africa ended apartheid in 1994, they moved the

nuclear weapons out.

But we're moving nuclear weapons into an increasingly volatile country.

And we actually have, so it's, we, of course, have our own nuclear

weapons, and then we have on our territory as well as in these submarines that

travel all around the planet.

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

We have them in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Turkey.

To me, do we have any in Romania?

Not to my knowledge.

Not to my knowledge.

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

And they're all aimed at Russia.

They are, yeah, aimed at

many of them would need kind of bombers, planes to be delivered.

I meant figuratively aimed.

They're there to deter Russia.

They're there to deter russia 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 you'd need like 10 nuclear warheads to destroy all of belgium so there's never belgium ever again um you know it just it's it's real insane well belgium can't even settle its own ethnic disputes internally

i yeah yeah

so uh wow this it doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction and We're not moving in the right direction, although

there are some developments on the international scene.

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.

So, in 2007, Kischinger, Schultz, Perry, Nunn, they write this article.

They say the U.S.

should be leading the world

towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

The U.S.

has a lot to gain from this.

And then it was, I think, that whole in 2010, there was actually a review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that actually had

come up with a kind of action plan that was very promising.

It was a 13 steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons kind of

action plan with sort of very specific both a kind of set of goals and timelines and so on.

And then by 2015, all of that had collapsed.

And

it's large part because of what happened in Ukraine in 2014.

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

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

Instead, now we're adversaries again.

And now, in some sense, the international community is sort of

locked in on

kind of living in a world which could end at any point.

And it was really a group, a large group of states.

This was an effort that was beginning right around that time

that focused on what people refer to as humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.

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, the 2000

explosions around the planet?

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

So these states started

negotiating eventually

an agreement, which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that was negotiated in 2017.

And it's an international treaty that entered into force in 2021, and that currently has 73 states parties

and another 25 signatories.

So,

in an international agreement, there's sort of two levels.

One is a signatory, a head of state, or someone like a foreign minister signs, and that signals that the country is

sort of ready to you know,

commit to these things in principle.

And then a ratification follows often through national legislative bodies,

whatever the rules of a particular country are.

And after ratification, the country is actually committed to everything outlined in the agreement.

So the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, basically arose now almost

10 years ago

and has been active since entering into force in 2021.

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

And the idea here is that

the countries that are part of it, so clearly none of the nuclear armed states are part of it and I would say not yet.

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.

They're actually a threat to all of us as well.

And we want a say

in the fact that you currently hold the ability to destroy the world.

I bet they do want a say, but they're not getting one because nobody cares.

So if you're North Korea, it's like, why do we care what you think?

If you're the United States, why do we care what you think?

I mean, it does seem like

the way that states deal with each other encourages everybody to get a nuclear weapon.

We don't boss North Korea around anymore because they have nuclear weapons.

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.

So

those are law of the jungle rules, which I object to as a Christian, but I'm, but they seem in force.

Like, I don't know what you do about that.

So

I think the idea that

I think to me it is nuclear deterrence that is the problem in and of itself.

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?

Then every country that can should acquire nuclear weapons for itself to keep itself safe.

That is, of course, preposterous.

I totally agree, but I would flip it around.

I mean, by the way, I just want 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.

I mean, I think nuclear weapons are evil.

I think they're actually probably inspired by...

supernatural forces.

That's my view.

And

I think they've wrecked the world already.

However, I just know the way people are.

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

I think they have nuclear weapons to ensure their own power.

I have at times described it as

a license to be bad.

Well, of course.

And it's licensed to be bad.

What are you going to do about it?

I got nuclear weapons.

Right.

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

You mentioned the doomsday clock.

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

So the doomsday clock is something, the bulletin of the atomic scientists, which was founded by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, so on, who were very worried about the threat of nuclear weapons

in the mid-1940s.

They

founded this organization in 1947.

They were publishing their first

issue of the bulletin, uh, and they asked an artist, um, Mardell Langdorf, Langstorf, or something, uh, to draw a cover.

And she just drew a cover with a clock, um, 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 with midnight representing this sort of nuclear Armageddon end of the world

type of scenario.

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.

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

Currently, the clock is 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?

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.

I see them as relative numbers.

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

Is the doomsday clock further or closer to midnight?

And I did this little analysis

since 1947.

We've had 14 presidents.

Interestingly, seven Republicans and seven Democrats.

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

And those five were four Republicans, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr., and only one Democrat,

you can probably guess, John F.

Kennedy.

Those are the ones.

Paid for it.

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.

The farthest we've ever been from midnight

was in 1991.

It was 17 minutes to midnight.

So we've really done a lot of damage since.

And Democrats have actually brought the clock closer to midnight

by actually, I got those numbers.

Democrats 19 minutes and 10 seconds, staggering 19 minutes and 10 seconds towards midnight, and Republicans

13 minutes and 39 seconds away from midnight.

So, on the whole, the Republicans have been much better than Democrats.

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.

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.

President Trump is the only one

who has said things like, we have so many nuclear weapons, we could destroy the world with them.

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

So I think think that the U.S.

public-

Can I ask you to stop for a second?

What would be the thinking behind, quote, modernizing the nuclear arsenal?

Oh, those are plans that have been set in place for

more than 10 years.

Those are plans that have been made under President Obama.

So President Obama got up in Prague and talked about

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.

The logic is that our weapons are going to get too old and we need new ones.

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?

We're literally talking about

spending

trillions of dollars to,

you know, perfect a way of destroying the world.

It is all.

I mean, is anyone saying that our current nuclear arsenal just wouldn't work?

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.

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 making them i mean this is a lot of this is um payoff to defense contractors driven by the military industrial complex no doubt about it they you know this is a a very important um you know stream of uh income for them the u.s um 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.

So I think here's my conclusion to everything that you've said.

I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently.

I think the and I, but I don't know how to achieve them.

I'm skeptical of treaties because people just ignore them or won't sign them or whatever.

I do think the first step toward any change begins with articulating the truth

and stigmatizing, re-stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons.

Anyone who is even suggesting or thinking thinking about or opening the possibility of using nuclear weapons is a threat to the world.

And that's certainly worse than cigarette smoking or drunk driving or any other crime that we heavily stigmatize in this country.

Absolutely.

And that person should be like disinvited from every dinner party.

And like you should look at that person and scream criminal at him because that's what he is.

And let's just start there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If I light a cigarette in an elevator, I am a criminal.

And I'm treated like one.

Man, if you did that and someone caught you on video, like you'd lose your job.

Light a cigarette in an elevator.

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.

It's like, well, we'll debate it.

No, no, no.

You're evil and you're a threat to the world.

Like, maybe we just start there with social sanction.

Absolutely.

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

success.

I think, I really do think that the ability to destroy humanity should be seen as a symbol of shame.

Yeah, fireballs are not progress, actually.

No, I don't think so.

They're a symbol of hell.

Yeah, absolutely.

Pope Francis was actually a strong supporter of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and

wrote, declared, stated

more than once that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was immoral.

In my mind, this is quite simply

really the most important issue in the world because everything else

is, you know, not going to get solved if we destroy

the world in a nuclear weapon.

Most mistakes are fixable, this one, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I, you know, I mentioned Jeffrey Sachs

before as well.

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.

And that's quite simply what we're facing.

I totally agree.

And without the general public really waking up to the realities of what we're facing, people were very engaged in the 1960s.

Some of that general 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.

And the senators were absolutely not interested in passing this.

He

just

galvanized the general public.

He went on a kind of two-month tour speaking to people about the issue.

And by the time the Senate voted, it was an 81 to 18 senator vote.

I mean, it was an absolute wipeout.

Well, again, I would refer you to the end of that story.

Yeah.

He was replaced by maybe the worst president in American history who embraced not just the Vietnam War, but nuclear proliferation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, yeah.

Professor, I really appreciate this.

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.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, my gosh.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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