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

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 concept of both space and time. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you have a conventional weapon and you exploded over a city, wherever, that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place, and it's going to have that impact in time. 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 radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment. There are a number of ways in which even a single nuclear weapon explosion can be incredibly dangerous and devastating. 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. The The thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful than any chemical explosion.

For example, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eighty years ago. Eighty years ago, almost exactly, had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT. Now, these bombs were made 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. That's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNTs, how much you would have needed of chemical explosive to produce the energy of equivalent into that explosion. That in and of itself is huge. Just to give you one 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 McVeer had filled the rider truck with chemical explosives, lit it up outside of a federal building, killed 168 people, including 19 children in the 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 two and a half 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 Nagasaki bombs. In fact, in 1945, the US had three nuclear weapons. One was used as a test, the Trinity test in the desert of New Mexico, and then two were used on the tax on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, we actually have on the order of 12,500 nuclear warheads heads, many of which are far more powerful. How much more powerful? We know that both US 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 US had ever conducted that took place in the Marshall Islands.

It's called the Bravo Test, Castle Bravo Test. And there was a thousand Hiroshima bomb equivalents. And yet the Soviets actually tested something even more powerful. They did so up in the North Sea region called Novaria Zemlia. They tested, at some accounts, say, 50 megatons. 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 test, which took place on March 1 of 1954, that test, that mushroom cloud, so we all 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- Sixty miles? Miles wide, the mushroom Cloud. It's quite simply something that's unimaginable. That test actually had truly devastating consequences for people living in the Marshall Islands, about 100 miles from where the test was conducted, the population was living in a place called Ron Galapa, Tau. 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 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.

That testing ended in 1958. 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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Yes. Over time square, one megaton bomb is going to have... There's something that makes the 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 to cause a lot more damage, a lot more the shockwave is stronger and the destruction of the city is much more effective. A surface burst produces more radiation and more of those long term effects. So between the two, let's just say that basically the radius of this fireball is 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. Absolutely evaporated. And then, again, depending on if it's an airburst or a surface explosion, you have these different concentric circles of heavy blast damage where just everything is absolutely destroyed. The shockwave is such that it just everything collapses, buildings collapse, everything collapses. Then you might have a 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 keep going, but you start out with quite literally, if evaporating everything in this fireball, and you 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. This is something that happened, of course, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's where people's skin quite literally melts. There are descriptions from survivors of the bombing of seeing people with their skin looking like it was clothing just hanging over them. This is quite simply a site of total and absolute horror and devastation. It would destroy a US city. The thing that we know- And render it uninhabitable. And render it potentially uninhabitable for decades, hundreds of years, potentially even thousands of years. Again, it all depends on how you do it, how much, 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 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 on the Upper West Side and another in Brooklyn. So you could have a constellation of explosions. The war games in Washington suggests 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 in the 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. 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 a matter of minutes.

This is described really with amazing clarity in the book by Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War Scenario, which describes exactly minute by minute how nuclear war starts and can start, and then what happens for the next 72 minutes, and then these long term consequences of nuclear war, and I can talk about some of them.

So 72 minutes It's 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 via a lone warhead coming from North Korea attacking Washington, DC. That's an Intercontinental Ballistic missile, which we detect within seconds of the launch. 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. In that scenario, the US 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 war warheads take from our ICBM silos in the Midwest, in the Dakotas and so on, the route goes over Russia. In Annie's book, the scenario is such that the US can't communicate fast enough with the Russian leadership, and Russians now think they're under attack because they're detecting these warheads heads 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 estimates of what would happen, the number of casualties, people who would die and so on in a US, 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 were either incinerated or 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. 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 effect. So back to my initial assertion, the nuclear weapons defy rules of time and space, the The time aspect is this radiation impacts that can really the 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 impact of the nuclear explosion. But in the case of a nuclear war, the impact becomes global. There are at least two different ways in which this happens. One way is called nuclear winter. 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 ability to really figure out what that would look like.

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 estimate It's for the war that I keep sighting of one-third of US and Russian arsenals are used up. The estimate is 10 to 15 degrees celsius. That's about 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a completely different planet, and those temperature drops occur very, very quickly. The temperature drop, what it does is it actually It makes it impossible for food to grow, in particular in the northern hemisphere, in our bread basket latitudes. Food just stops growing, agriculture begins to fail, and people begin to starve. The estimates there, there's a paper that was published in Nature Food by Alan Roback and Lily Gea 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.

Five billion?

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Over 5 billion within two years of a nuclear war from starvation all around the planet. 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 calculation, simulations, modeling on a worldwide population of 7 billion. We now have more than 8 billion people on the planet. So that just It quite simply means that you're going to have an extra one 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 live on today. Then on top of it, there's the radiation effects, and I can talk more about radiation. Then there's this business of ozone layer destruction. And that's somebody at Columbia who I actually knew quite well. He passed away recently in his '90s. His name was Miles 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 the ozone layer. That 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. 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 impact agricultural production because it would impact plants. So Again, this would be another hit on food supplies. But all of this is just 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 I've said in the 1960s that the survivors would envy the dead. And yet here we are, 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. 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 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 gone a sense that a nuclear power plant presents this very 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 there are a whole lot of things you could 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. I read the book a while back So I- But is it possible you could get an exponential effect? Absolutely. No, this is now a radiation. So now people are dying all over the Western United States from the There's an absolutely enormous amount of radioactivity that is spread. So you hit the nuclear power plant, it's not the blast in the fireball. I mean, yes, 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.

What does that look like? That was my second question. You said you would flesh out the concept of the danger of radiation. What does that look like? We know something that because of the bombings 80 years ago.

We know something about that because of the bombings from 80 years ago, absolutely. I can say a little more about those. But we also 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 part of-Full nuclear weapons? Full nuclear weapons explosions as part of what it's 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 Weisons. 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 Hina Moira 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. Is there.

Leukemia can be a result of exposure radiation.

Absolutely. I can explain that as well. But Hina Morera said to me something really interesting. She said, you know, we call it testing. When I was young and people would talk about, Oh, we had the testing. I just imagine scientists playing in the laboratory and doing some 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 really a seminal agreement that was made initially just by the US, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom of stopping atmospheric testing. That was a real victory for the people of the world because it helped to... Some atmospheric testing continued. 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, only underground tests.

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Yeah. So depending on what a bomb you have. So there's... Let me go back to a key We have two types of nuclear weapons. One we refer to as atomic bombs. Those are, again, 1945 weapons. Those are based on the 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 splits and produces two other elements. Energy is produced in such a reaction. 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. That's when actually nuclei of two elements come together and produce energy that way. 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 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 what you do and here's the interesting thing about fusion or hydrogen bombs. In order to actually bring... If I have hydrogen nuclei, so this is just step one second to just remember what an atom is, what elements are. We have different elements on the planet. The atoms are 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 is either split in fusion or the nuclei infusion or nuclei come together in fusion. In fusion, if you have a nucleus that is positively charged, electrons are negatively charged. This is what keeps the atom 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.

Like a magnet. They repel each other. You actually need to invest energy to overcome that electrostatic repulsion. The amount of energy that's needed can only be supplied by something like a fusion bomb. So even for fusion, for hydrogen weapons, we actually need to have fission as the fuel that 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. Currently, if we have a one mega ton bomb, that's about 70 Hiroshima bombs. But hydrogen bombs, actually, there's no limit. 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 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 how much a single is. But just back to radiation. Basically, what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them. 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 blown up. Things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud. You produce these radioactive isotopes. They're mixed with everything. Some of that will fall back onto the planet locally. Some of it will be carried up into the atmosphere, high level stratosphere and so on, and actually become part of a global deposition where it goes so high up in the atmosphere, it stays up there.

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 US, I mentioned the testing in the Marshall Islands. We also tested in another Pacific Island state called Republico Kyribas. 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. It quite simply depended on whether or not there was rain in a local. So the fallout was carried towards the east, given the Easterly winds. And then if there was a weather event, in some place, the fallout would get deposited there. And their maps of the United States, they quite simply looked like you gave an empty map to a child and they played with paint sprayed, blotches of paint onto Jackson Pollack painting. Yeah, exactly. And it's where radiation had been deposited from these- Do we know the What are the health effects of that?

The health effects are very severe and very serious. 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. The thing about these is that they quite simply last in the environment for different amounts of time. Some of them, there's a concept called half-life. A radioactive isotope will have a specific half-life. What that means is if you start out with, say, 1,000 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 6, 7, call it even 10 half lives, it's going to be gone 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 people drink the milk and so on.

But it goes right to your thyroid. 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 couple of hundred years, at least. 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 calcium, that calcium goes into your bones, 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 diatomic bomb disease in Hiroshima, 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, one 37 is the same half-life, around for a long time, is chemically similar to potassium. And you also know that if you eat banana or if you You drink some 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 It leaves like potassium. They take it up, it gets incorporated. Now when you eat that food, that cesium is now getting incorporated into your cells, the 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 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 soft tissue cancers, including brain cancer, come from that cesium-137.

Did 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 acute radiation sickness as well as cancer. But the cancers continue 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 Sada Kusasaki. When she was 12, so 10 years after the bombing, she developed leukemia. She had been growing well and was very athletic and very active, and she developed leukemia. She is the one who... She learned the story of the paper crane, the folding of the She learned the story that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. There are now some differences in 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. Essentially, over the decades, the paper crane the paper cranes that she was folding really became a symbol of peace.

And this message, when she was wishing, folding the paper crane, she was wishing not just to get better, but she was wishing for world peace. And that's what got taken up by.

So if you had the US and Russia fire one-third of their nuclear your arsenal is you're saying that every study, projection has shown an elimination of life on Earth, basically, certainly human life on Earth, human civilization.

Yeah, I would say it's Absolutely, certainly, and the world as we know it, whether we all perish or some people survive, the latter is certainly possible. 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 world that we currently live in. We live in a very globalized world. We often might eat food from other places in the world. What is that in 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. 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 science. And old.

You said this has been something people have been studying for 80 years. How many nuclear weapons are there in the world globally?

Today, we have 12. 5 nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine nuclear-12.

5?

Thousand. Sorry. Twelve and a half thousand. Twelve and a half thousand 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. We know.

Yeah. No, we actually know. 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. It takes a tremendous amount of not just resources and human ingenuity, but infrastructure. Part of the reason they did that in the Manhattan project in the Los Almas, 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 known where, for example, Russia's military bases are, but perhaps not exactly how many were 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 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. But some are in sync. I think they call them Handmaidens of the Apocalypse. There were incidents in the 1950s where US and the Soviet submarine crashed into one another. They're also- Nuclear armed. Nuclear armed. What happened? And nothing happened. 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 at their age, is that we've been very, very lucky that the scenarios I'm describing, the scenario Andrew 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. You need three nuclear warheads to shut down the electricity over the entire United States. And this isn't a case where 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 explode nuclear weapons on cities.

You just need to shut down our electrical grid. And then good luck.

The country starts today.

Yeah. Good luck to all of us.

So during the Cold War, a Russian sub, Soviet sub, and a US sub collided. Luckily, 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 wait, 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 of a submarine, fell off of a plane, all kinds of accidents. It wasn't just two two submurines colliding. There was also airplanes carrying nuclear warheads colliding. Seriously? 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 multiple security systems, and the last Last one held. Everything else had given way.

Wait, the US 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 a period of really stupid accidents. And then what is often referred to in the field as close calls. So God more sophisticated. In 1962, of course, we had the Cuba Missile Crisis. Yes, famously. 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 from deliberate US. 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. Had that invasion or they're gone, 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 monitoring near the North Pole and had accidentally gone off, lost radar, lost the ability to navigate where they were and gone deep into the Soviet Union and was actually too high up for the Soviet defense to air defense 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. Then perhaps the most serious one was where the US was trying to enforce a blockade of the Soviets weren't supposed to be coming to Cuba to bring any military equipment. To enforce this blockade, they were using something called depth charges, but they were using simulating depth charges. And depth charges like a weapon to attack a submarine. And so they were using ones that would simulate an attack but not really attack. And one Soviet submarine had three officers on board, was being attacked by these depth charges. They interpreted it as a real attack. They actually thought that maybe there was a war going on. They were nuclear armed. They had a nuclear torpedo on board. What they needed... This wasn't like they needed 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 Archipov, 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 US would withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey. This wasn't known until relatively recently because at the time, Kennedy ask Khrushchev, 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 it was even before the the Cuba 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. This was Kennedy understood this before we understood nuclear winter, before we understood those on layer destruction, maybe around the time we were figuring out the electromagnetic pulse and so on. So he understood this at the very deep level. The part where he really put in his energy was the Atmosphoric 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, our I often sometimes when I sit in a room full of people or stand or whatever and speak about this, I sometimes say, 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 is going to be in the environment for a couple of hundred thousand years. So this is, again, back to 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 We actually have an understanding that hundreds of years from now, hopefully, there will be scientists who studied the planet who will say, Oh, look, this is when they tested nuclear weapons. Here's the plutonium line in the geologic record.

Can I ask you about President Kennedy's efforts to prevent nuclear war? One of the things he did, been written about to some extent is try to prevent David Ben Gurian, then Prime Minister of Israel, from developing a nuclear weapon at the Demona site. I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the President demanding inspections of the Demona site. Ben Gurian resigned as Prime Minister, I think, as a result of this of this controversy. What happened there?

Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any oversight by the... President Kennedy thought that proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous. He was definitely concerned and didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons. This eventually led, even after his death, to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, whose goal was that. But there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well. In the case of But in Israel, he felt very strongly that if this was our ally, and we were going to tell the rest of the world not to acquire nuclear weapons, we also had to actually do what we were preaching and be consistent in our approach to Israeli nuclear weapons. But they went ahead. The I think it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966. This was actually, interestingly, before the nuclear nonproliferation treaty came together. It was negotiated over a long period of time, but finally 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 Nations.

How many nuclear armed states have signed it?

That treaty, it recognizes five nuclear weapons states, the 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 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. It sometimes takes time time for these treaties to actually bring everything.

So the other nations would be India, Pakistan, North Korea.

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.

We're pretty sure that there is. Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. I think there's no doubt about whether or not they have them. India and Pakistan never joined the nuclear non proliferation treaty, both essentially tested nuclear weapons underground. They each have on the order of 150 50 nuclear warheads today. Then North Korea was actually a part of the treaty until they left the treaty in the early 2000s and have since 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. We think that today, North Korea actually has the delivery systems that could deliver a nuclear warhead to any part of the United States. And this, to me, is actually really for 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? We've got the oceans, we've got the conventional military.

I've actually heard our mutual friend, Professor Jeffrey Sacks, say that the United States could be the safest country in the history of humanity. But in a world with nuclear weapons, we are so vulnerable. We're not just vulnerable with however you want to classify Russia and China, but let's call them 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 not a world's 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 non proliferation in the treaty meetings at the UN. They always say they're not interested in building nuclear weapons. They do emphasize that their religion requires them not to pursue nuclear weapons. I actually think that they're not pursuing nuclear weapons.

How hard would it be? I mean, they have every incentive to any country that has its capital city bombed, probably wants a nuclear deterrent, I would think. 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 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 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 remains a threat. I think that woke up some people in the early 2000s to think a little bit about the threat of nuclear weapons. Interestingly, it was in 2007, I think this terrorist thread 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 Weisons, in which they actually make the case for both why we need a world free of nuclear their 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 their 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 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 effort to end the Vietnam War, really ended up spending decades speaking about nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons issues. In his book, The Doomsday Machine, there's a quote I really, really love. He says that nuclear weapons policies, past and current, are dizingly insane and immoral. And that's really all I have to say in response to why would we... If we think we're being attacked by one or two nuclear warheads, why would we send 82 to North Korea? I think- Well, I mean, if there's some way to stop the nuclear attack, then of course, I mean, if it's them or us, 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 is the point of killing 100 million other people if you're going to die?

It's a really good question. I think one- Has this been debated? So nuclear deterrence- Which I understand. Has become a 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 people will respond, oh, I remember duck and cover when I was in school. People of a certain generation still 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 understand 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. The truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence. The first, and to me, most fundamental is that there is quite simply no plan B for what happens if nuclear deterrence fails.

It's just like an autopilot. We're under attack, we're going to attack them. 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, we would need to use so many hundreds or thousands of warheads that we would create. We would create nuclear winter, we would create those on layer destruction. It would be in the Cold War, we called it mutually assured destruction or mad. It is actually always It's 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. 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 place where the UK's Foreign Ministry basically brings experts, diplomats, academics, and so on to discuss various issues all year long. One a week, a year, they devote to this nuclear non proliferation treaty diplomacy. I was invited there last December. These meetings are held. It was about 30 of us actually spoke, but it's a large room. It's about 80 people. It was all very, very interactive. 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. These The meetings are held under what's called Chatham House rules. 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. 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 that session had ended 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. A person goes, You want an answer? There would be no Europe. It would all be Mother Russia. So there's this, the idea- Well, they're deranged. Yeah, but I mean, seriously.

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. Jeff Kate 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 the nuclear war destroying our world.

It does seem like we're... And there's been this thing, the doomsday clock, and I don't know how... I don't take that very seriously because 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 engage in a limited nuclear strike.

Absolutely 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.

What would be the win? Of course, I agree. What does that mean, though, technically, a limited nuclear strike?

I think people think that you could have exchanges on, say, that we gave Ukraine a few low energy yield, and low energy yield means Hiroshima bombs or that size and a near range that you could use in a or something.

Nuclear weapons.

Yeah, nuclear weapons.

And people have called for that.

I think that's in discussion. I mean, I think the- Anyone who discusses that should be imprisoned for treason. I agree.

I agree. Yeah. Any policymaker who advocates for that is imparreeling our entire nation and world. And that's a crime.

Yeah. 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 war in Ukraine.

You teach at Columbia. I mean, you must know some of the people in the Biden White House? I actually don't. You don't. Okay. They don't want to talk to you. I actually- These are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken. What are they thinking?

The closest I come to is when I try to speak to diplomats, these are people mostly from the State Department or from the US 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 a UK diplomat, where I was making this case that nuclear deterrence could fail. And he goes, Yeah, you're right. And I said, And then what? We destroyed the entire human civilization. We destroyed the planet. We make it inhospitable to not just human life. And he goes, That's not going to happen. So they They not only don't have a plan B for if nuclear deterrence fails, they also really don't want to think about it. To them, the solution is just you just keep going. To me, it's just unfathomable. To me, the idea that we're 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, be 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 could have had the start of a nuclear war. One was called Able Archer. That was in November. That was a NATO exercise. They had actually added some new elements of realism that were interpreted them by the Soviets for the real thing. They thought they were under attack. They started quite literally putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to attack. And thankfully, it didn't go 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 He received literally like a computer glitch, five signals in a row that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States. 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 Stanislaw Petrov, had decided this was a false alarm and actually didn't pass the information onto his superior years, thus averting nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis incident that I was describing with the submarine, that's often referred to the man who saved the world.

And then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the 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 study all of these examples who say, no, no, no, it's not the 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 perfect 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 the UK to have nuclear weapons?

It actually gets much better than that. The UK has nuclear warheads. They're 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 Well, quote unquote, nuclear deterrent. That one's actually in our corner squarely. We just recently transferred or began transferring carrying 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... 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 And South Africa ended Apartheid in 1994, they moved the nuclear weapons out. But we're moving nuclear weapons into an increasingly volatile country.

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 Europe, 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, 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 you could be doing.

Then they're all aimed at Russia. Russia?

They are, yeah, aimed at... Many of them would need bombers planes to be delivered.

I meant figuratively aimed. They're there to deter Russia.

They're there to deter Russia. I mean, what 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 It's real insanity.

Well, Belgium can't even settle its own ethnic disputes internally.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, wow, it doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction.

We're not moving in the right direction, although there are some developments in the international scene. So let me just make this case for the US, just to underscore this point that the US has a lot to gain from this. In 2007, Kishinger, Schultz, Perry, Nun, they write this article. They say the US should be leading the world towards a world free of nuclear weapons. The US has a lot to gain from this. Then it was, I think that call in 2010, there was actually a review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that actually had come up with a action plan that was very promising. It was a 13 steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons action plan with very specific, both a set of goals and timelines and so on. Then by 2015, all of that had collapsed, and it's a large part because of what happened in Ukraine in 2014. Now we start to see this distrust between the United States and Russia. It's again, it's no longer, maybe we're working together to rid the world of the threat, which was really the goal of both Reagan and Gorbachev. Instead, now we're adversaries again.

Now, in some sense, the international community is locked in on on living in a world which could end at any point. It was really 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. This is, again, going back to what have nuclear weapons done to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki What have they done through these so-called nuclear testing programs, the 2000 explosions around the planet? What is the research, the stuff that I've been describing nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, so on, that tells us about what is at stake in the world with nuclear weapons. These states started negotiating, eventually, an agreement which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weisons. That was negotiated in 2017. 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 two levels. One is a signatory, a head of state or someone like a foreign minister signs, and that signals that the country is ready to 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. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Wepons or TPNW basically arose now almost 10 years ago and has been active since entering into force in 2021. The goals of this treaty are quite simply to prohibit any and all activities having to do with nuclear weapons. 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 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 as we know it.

I bet they do want to 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 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. Those are law of the jungle rules, which I object to as a Christian But they seem in force. 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. 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 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. I mean, I I think the weapons are evil. I think they're actually probably inspired by supernatural forces. That's my view. I think they've wrecked the world already. However, I just know the way people are. 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 this license to be actually really bad.

What are you going to do about it? I nuclear weapons.

I think from my perspective, looking through the history, it's been actually really interesting to study. You mentioned the doomsday clock. So let me just say something for a minute or two about that for people who don't know. The doomsday clock is something that 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, and they asked an artist, Mardole Langsdorff, or something, to draw a cover. She drew a cover with a clock with the time showing seven minutes to midnight because she thought we would... That was a good representation of how dangerous things were with midnight representing this nuclear Armageddon end of the world type of scenario. Over time, the clock became something that they would annually adjust and became an 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 89 seconds to midnight, and we can totally talk about, Oh, is this...

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, 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 senior, and only one Democrat, you can probably guess, John F. Kennedy. Those are the ones- He paid for it.

Yeah.

And so under Republican administrations, there has been a move, a 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 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. I think for this country, first and foremost, the general public 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 and 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.

I think that the US public Can I ask you just for a second, what would be the thinking behind modernizing the nuclear arsenal? 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 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 US 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 perfect the way of destroying the world.

It is all insane. 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 plan over a decade or two 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 new way of building them, making them. I mean, a lot of this is- Pay off to defense contractors.

Driven by the military-industrial complex, no doubt about it.

This is a very important stream of income for them. The US not only spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, we also spend more on nuclear weapons than all countries, they have them combined.

So I think here's my conclusion to everything that you said. I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently, but I don't know how to achieve them. I'm skeptical of treaties because people 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, restigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is even suggesting or thinking about or opening the possibility of using nuclear weapons is a threat to the world. That's certainly worse than cigarette smoking or drunk driving or any other crime that we heavily stigmatized in this country. Absolutely. That person should be disinvited from every dinner party. You should look at that person and scream criminal at him because that's what he is. Let's just start there. 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, you'd lose your job. Light a cigarette in an elevator. But if you get up at the Atlantic Counts, you're like, We may need to use low-yield nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine or to Russia to win the Eastern province is back.

It's like, Well, we'll debate it. No, you're evil, and you're a threat to the world. 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 really do think that the ability to destroy humanity should be seen as a symbol of shame.

If fireballs are not progress, actually, Really?

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 Weisons. He 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 not going to get solved if we destroy the world in the nuclear war.

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

Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned Jeffrey Sacks 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. No, 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 public engagement was really key to Kennedy actually getting the Atmosphère Test Ban Treaty passed because it needed to be ratified by the Senate. And the senators were absolutely not interested in passing this. Just He galvanized the general public. He went on a 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. Professor, I I really appreciate this. I hope every member of the US 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, Tucker. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. Thank you.

We've got a new website we hope you will visit. It's called newcommissionnow. Com, and it refers to a new 9/11 Commission. So we spent months putting together our 9/11 documentary series. And if there's one thing we learned, it's that, in fact, there was foreknowledge of the attacks. People knew.

The American public deserves to know.

We're shocked, actually, to learn that, to have It's not confirmed, but it's true. The evidence is overwhelming. The CIA, for example, knew the hijackers were here in the United States. They knew they were planning an act of terror. In his passport is a visa to go the United States to America. A foreign national was caught celebrating as the Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, To document the event. How do you know there would be an event to document in the first place? Because he had floor knowledge. And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9/11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks. They made money on the 9/11 attacks because they knew they were coming. Who did that?

You have to look at the evidence.

The US government learned the name of that investor but never released it. Maybe there's an instant explanation for all this, but there isn't actually. And by the way, it doesn't matter whether there is or not. The public deserves to know what the hell that was. How did people know ahead of time why was no one ever punished for it? 9/11 Commission, the original one, was a fraud. It was fake. Its conclusions were written before the investigation. That's true. And outrageous. This country needs a new 9/11 Commission, one that actually tells the truth that tries to get to the bottom of the story. We can't just move on like nothing happened.

9/11 Commission is a cup of water.

Something did happen. We need to force a new investigation into 9/11 almost 25 years later. Sorry, justice demands it. If you want that, go to newcommissionnow. Com to add your name to our petition. We're not getting paid for doing this because we really mean it. Newcommissionnow. Com.