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

34:42To my knowledge, only underground tests. As important as it is, politics is not the answer to this country's or man's greatest problem. The only solution is Jesus. Sorry, that's true. At its core, politics is a process of critiquing other people and getting them to change. Christianity is the opposite. opposite. Christianity begins with a call for you to change, me to change. It's called repentance, and it brings you back to God. When God is at the center, hearts change. Only that will lead to the end of abortion, the greatest atrocity this country's ever participated in. The normalizing of killing babies is a stain on this country.

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36:41Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background. finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. So tell us about the effects of radiation. So how long does the pollution last? How bad is it?

37:20Yeah. So depending on what kind of a bomb you have, so 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 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 and produces two other elements. And energy is produced in such a reaction. and 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.

38:18Another 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 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, 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.

39:19So 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.

40:06In 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, right? So we know, you know, 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.

40:59How much more powerful is a hydrogen bomb than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? So the Bravo one was a thousand times more powerful than a Hiroshima bomb. 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.

41:51But 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 gonna get kind of 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 kind of 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, you know, part of sort of a global deposition where you, it goes so high up in the atmosphere, it stays, you know, stays up there.

43:07And 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. It's raining radioactive nuclear isotopes. The US, 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.

43:56And it quite simply depended on whether or not there was rain in locals. 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 different parts. A Jackson Pollock painting, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's where radiation had been deposited from these. Do we know the health effects of that?

44:46The 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's 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.

45:39And 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 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 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.

46:32Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half lives of about 30 years each. That means they stick in the environment for 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're taking 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 the atomic bomb disease in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings, the reason for that was the exposure to strontium-90.

47:31also importantly because it acts like calcium it also gets incorporated by plants will take it up from the environment and you can you can um ingest it uh 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 If you eat banana or if you drink some kind of 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.

48:31Your 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 the cesium is this radioactive isotope that's going to basically, after a certain amount of time, it's going to split and it's going to give off gamma radiation. 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 kind of soft tissue cancers, including brain cancer, come from that cesium-137 exposure. Did you see markedly higher rates of those cancers after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

49:18Yes. 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 kind of 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 Sadako 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.

50:20and 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 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.

51:21And 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, and the world as we know it, whether we all, you know, perish or some people survive, the latter is certainly possible. There'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 world that we currently live in.

52:17Right. 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 people have been studying for 80 years. How many nuclear weapons are there in the world globally?

53:05Today we have 12 and a half nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine. Twelve and a half. Thousand, sorry. Twelve and a half thousand. Twelve and a half thousand nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine nuclear armed states. U.S. and Russia have the vast majority, over 90 % of the nuclear warheads are in the possession of U.S. and Russia. Are we pretty sure of that? I mean, we know where these warheads are. 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.

53:47You 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. You know, part of the reason they did that in the, you know, the Manhattan Project in the Los Alamos, it was all that isolation and so on. 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 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 world's oceans.

54:38What'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 submarines sink. I think they call them handmaidens of the apocalypse. There were incidents in the 1950s where a U.S. and a Soviet submarine crashed into one another. Nuclear armed. Nuclear armed. What happened? And nothing happened. But like we've actually been, I mean, this is one way of looking at the history of the entire nuclear age.

55:28So 80 years of the nuclear age is that we've been very, very lucky that the scenarios I'm describing, the scenario Annie 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.

56:09This is like the electricity is not coming back. So you wouldn't even need to like explode nuclear weapons on cities. You just need to shut down our electrical grid and then, you know, good luck. The country starves today. Yeah, yeah. Good luck to all of us. So during the Cold War, a Russian sub, Soviet sub and a U.S. sub collided. 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 wait, there are 50 nuclear warheads right now at the bottom of the ocean?

56:53Right now at the bottom of the ocean, yeah. And no one's tried to retrieve them? Fell off a 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. 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 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?

57:40Yeah, 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 what is often referred to in the field as close calls, sort of got more sophisticated. In 1962, of course, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, famously. 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.

58:38You 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 U.S. 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.

59:35Then 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.

1:00:31And 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. And they were nuclear armed. They had a nuclear torpedo on board and what they needed, this wasn't, you know, 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 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.

1:01:46President 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 that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that was a very, very, very dangerous moment. Seems to have changed President Kennedy's views of nuclear weapons or hardened his views. And he became. He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.

1:02:34That was absolutely really important to him. But he was also, he was very, he was looking towards disarmament. And it was even before the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1961, he gave a very famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated something to the effect of we must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. 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 electromagnetic pulse and so on. So he understood this at a very deep level.

1:03:19The part where he really put in his energy was the Atmospheric Tasman 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.

1:04:11One 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 ,500 year half lifetime. That means that thing's 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.

1:04:59And 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. 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 Damona site. I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the president demanding inspections of the Damona site.

1:05:45Ben-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 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.

1:06:44We 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 it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966. And so this was actually, interestingly, before the nuclear nonproliferation 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 Nations. How many nuclear armed states have signed it?

1:07:45So that treaty recognizes five nuclear weapons states, 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 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 bring everything. So the other nations would be India, Pakistan, North Korea.

1:08:38Yes, 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 them. India and Pakistan never joined the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Both essentially, you know, tested nuclear weapons underground.

1:09:26They 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 many reasons why we have to eliminate nuclear weapons.

1:10:25I 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. 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 peer adversaries or near peer adversaries.

1:11:19We'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.

1:12:05Now, my understanding is that they and I actually listened to their statements in venues like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 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, 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?

1:12:55I 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 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.

1:13:54What 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 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 Shultz, both of whom were former secretaries of state under Republican presidents, as well as Bill Perry, Department of Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and Sam Nunn, a longtime Democratic senator from Georgia. Brought the four of them together in 2007.

1:14:42They 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 longstanding policy for over 70 years that if the United States believes there are incoming nuclear missiles, that it will strike the country of origin. What's the thinking there?

1:15:27I'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. 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, past and current, are dizzingly insane and immoral.

1:16:18And that's really all I have to say in response to why would we, you know, why would we, if we think we're being attacked by one or two nuclear warheads, Why would we send 82 to North Korea? You know, I think. Well, I mean, you know, if you can't, if there's some way to stop the nuclear attack, then of course. I mean, you know, 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 is the point of killing 100 million other people if you're going to die? It's a really good question.

1:17:05I think one... Has this been debated? So nuclear deterrence... Which I understand. ...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.

1:17:48There is a section of society, however, that is aware and understands what nuclear weapons are and, you know, understand some of the basic facts that we've been talking about and so on, 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, you know, 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.

1:18:35It's just kind of like on 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.

1:19:20It 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.

1:20:11them. 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.

1:20:58And these meetings are held under what's called Chatham House Rules. So 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 it. But a person responded to me and I had made a comment to their remarks and then made this comment about the U.S. 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.

1:21:40And so because I wasn't allowed to respond in the room, I waited until it was after, you know, that session had ended in the lunch line. 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, you know, there's this, the idea. Well, they're deranged.

1:22:33Yeah, yeah. But I mean, seriously, like. They'd be better off anyway. How are we, 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, and there's 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?

1:23:27But 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. 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. So, May I ask, what is it? What would be the win? Of course, I agree.

1:24:14What 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, you know, kind of low energy yield. And low energy yield means Hiroshima bombs or, you know, that kind of size and near range that you could use on the battlefield. 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. I agree. Yeah. Any policymaker who advocates for that is imperiling our entire nation and world.

1:25:07And 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. So you must know, 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 actually don't. But I mean, these are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken. Like, what are they thinking? I mean, the closest I come to is when I try to speak to diplomats.

1:25:48These 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 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 not only don't have a plan B for if nuclear deterrence fails, they also really don't want to think about it, right?

1:26:43Like 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 could have had the start of a nuclear war.

1:27:40One was called Abel Archer. That was in November. That was a NATO exercise that had actually added some new kind of elements of realism that were interpreted then by the Soviets for the real thing. 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 was 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 literally like a computer glitch, five signals in a row that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.

1:28:41And 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, you know, 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 the man who saved the world. And then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the man who saved the world.

1:29:31We'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 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.

1:30:17Why 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, 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.

1:31:09Why 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, you know, 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.

1:31:53And we also have nuclear warheads in five other, now six, because it's clear we brought some back to the United Kingdom. We have them in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Turkey. 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. They are, yeah, aimed. 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.

1:32:43I 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. You know, it just, it's real insanity. Well, Belgium can't even settle its own ethnic disputes internally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, 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 in 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.

1:33:29has a lot to gain from this. So in 2007, Kissinger, 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 Non-Proliferation Treaty that actually had come up with a kind of action plan that was very promising. It was a 13 steps towards the 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.

1:34:23And in 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 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.

1:35:23So this is, again, going back to what have nuclear weapons done to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What have they done through these nuclear so-called nuclear testing programs to 2000 explosions around the planet? And what is the research, the kind of 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. 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 state parties and another 25 signatories.

1:36:25So 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, you know, 10 years ago. and has been active since entering into force in 2021.

1:37:20And 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 as we know it.

1:38:11I 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 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 they seem in force.

1:38:46Like, 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. 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 I don't think any of this will work but I share your views on the goals I mean I would I think the weapons are evil I think they're actually probably inspired by supernatural forces that's my view and um 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.

1:39:47I 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 actually really, really 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 something for a minute or two about that for people who don't know. So the Doomsday Clock is something that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, so on, who were very worried about the threat of nuclear weapons in the mid-1940s.

1:40:32They founded this organization. In 1947, they were publishing their first like issue of the bulletin. And they asked an artist, Mardel Langdorf, Langsdorf or something, to draw a cover. And she just, she drew a cover with a clock with the time showing seven minutes to midnight because she thought we would sort of, you know, that was a kind of good representation of how dangerous things were 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.

1:41:33Also, 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, 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.

1:42:20Since 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. 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.

1:43:18So 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.

1:44:24President 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 that the U.S. public... Can I ask you just 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.

1:45:13nuclear 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 the way of destroying the world. But there's no, 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.

1:46:09But 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. Payoff to defense contractors. Driven by the military industrial complex. No doubt about it. They, you know, this is a very important, you know, stream of income for them. The U.S. not only spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, we also spend more on nuclear weapons than all countries that have them combined. So I think here's my conclusion to everything that you've said. I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently. I think, but I don't know how to achieve them.

1:46:58I'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 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.

1:47:32And 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.

1:48:03I 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 he wrote, declared, stated more than once that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was immoral. in you know in in my mind this is quite simply the really the most important issue in the world because everything else is you know not gonna get solved if we destroyed the the the world in a most mistakes are fixable this one isn't yeah absolutely and i you know i mentioned um jeffrey Sachs before as well.

1:49:18We 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 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, he galvanized the general public.

1:50:02He 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. 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.

1:50:41Thank you. Thank you.

1:50:49We'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 that 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 to the United States of America.

1:51:26A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event. I didn't know there would be an event to document in the first place because he had foreknowledge. 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 U.S.

1:52:01government 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 it's 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.

1:52:38We can't just move on like nothing happened. 9-11 Commission is a cover. Something did happen. We need to force a new investigation into 9-11 almost 25 years later. Sorry, justice demands it. And if you want that, go to newcommissionnow.com to add your name to our petition. We're not getting paid for this. We're doing this because we really mean it. Newcommissionnow.com.