How Close Was Iran to Nukes Really?

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It's like creating a miniature sun on earth.

You don't even have to kill us all, we'll just kill each other, but human civilization

is going to be gone.

This is Dr. Evena Hughes.

She's a chemist at Columbia University in the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

She's advised on nuclear issues tied to the United Nations, studied the real world

followed of nuclear testing and spends her life thinking about one uncomfortable truth.

The fact that a tiny group of humans controls the fate of the entire world.

We often talk about nukes like they're just being bombs, a mushroom cloud, but that's

not what actually kills you.

What matters is what happens after, firestorms, ashes, darkened skies, and potentially even

nuclear winter.

And here's the part that should bother you the most.

The fate of the planet doesn't sit with the voters or with the people of nations, it

sits with maybe 10 people.

We're told that the system is safe because if everyone has nukes, everyone will be calm.

But this system only works if everyone stays rational forever.

And history suggests that that might be optimistic.

And today Dr. Hughes explains what a nuclear bomb would actually feel like.

What the colors would look like in the sky, how the heat would actually affect your skin.

She also explains how current war is happening right now in Europe and in the Middle East

are pushing us closer to a nuclear disaster.

This episode is absolutely fascinating, Dr. Hughes is brilliant and extremely eloquent

and I really enjoyed hearing her perspective and her passion for humanity.

So if you are interested in the global state of affairs, the most up-to-date information

on nuclear wars and nuclear technology, and why it matters to you and maybe just a glimmer

of hope about how we can actually overcome this.

Well, this is the episode for you.

So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp.

Ivana, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

I'm thrilled to be with you.

We spoke about a year and a half ago about the existential threat of nuclear war.

And when we spoke the first time, I had mentioned to you that I came into the conversation fairly

naive.

And after our conversation, I had a fundamentally different perspective on how truly existential

the threat is and how all times to live in history, this is the moment that I'm brought

into.

And we've eradicated diseases, childhood mortality is down in many parts of the world.

But yet there is this technology that looms almost as a cloud hanging over every single

person on this earth that is in the control of a small number of people that could effectively

wipe out humanity.

So today we're going to rehash some of the things from our previous conversation that

haven't changed, like the threat of nuclear war.

And we're also going to discuss the current status of where things are the state of the

world.

And if that nuclear Tuesday clock is ticking closer to midnight, and what that really means.

And ultimately, ideally, we come away from this conversation with some idea of how big

this is and what we can do.

And I, you know, as just regular people.

And where that kind of leaves us.

So I guess maybe the first place to start is just kind of painting a vivid picture of

what nuclear threat is and what exactly a nuclear attack on the United States would look

like.

Because I think for many people, it feels like a really far away problem.

So if you could paint the picture, what would the minute by minute kind of scenario be?

Thank you for having me again.

I know it's not an easy or actually not the most fun conversation talking about nuclear

weapons.

But I think you put it really beautifully that we are living at the time of so much progress

and just so much opportunity and hope for humanity in the better future.

And at the same time, here we are on this gorgeous, beautiful planet with, you know, wars,

erupting with countries, you know, in conflict, overtly, covertly tensions all over the

place.

It's really not a good time.

And on top of all of this is really this technology that in some sense we've been building

for now 80 years and technology that throughout that time has quite literally threatened to destroy

the planet.

I don't mean that the planet itself would disappear.

The planet would still be there whether or not it would be livable is a really big question

mark and certainly I think that a nuclear war on this planet would actually most certainly

destroy human civilization, whether all humans are wiped out is a question whether all life

is wiped out is a question, but human civilization is going to be gone.

And so what is that picture that picture starts with an understanding that currently in

the world we have 12 and a half thousand nuclear warheads in possession of nine different

countries, including the United States, United States and Russia have the most nuclear weapons

actually.

Russia has a little bit more than the United States.

They're both at about five, five and a half thousand nuclear warheads each.

So the rest of the states that have them the other seven, much smaller number in the,

mostly low hundreds would shine up to about five hundred today.

And each of these nuclear warheads is most of them are far more powerful than the bombs

that were used on attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So in July of 1945, the United States had three nuclear warheads.

And used one of them in what's called a test, the Trinity test in the deserts of New

Mexico actually had devastating consequences for a local population, what said that the

side for for the moment.

And then it used to in attacks in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in those

attacks on the order of 200,000 people died between the two, the two cities, which just

to put in context, that's a time when there's only three nuclear warheads that exist that

exists in possession of one country and that resulted in fundamentally changing the polarity

of the world.

It affected the global power structure and resulted in the casualties of 200,000.

Absolutely.

The humanitarian catastrophe that unfolded in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is just really

unimaginable.

I mean, these were human beings that were vaporized, right?

So in the right by the epicentre, both of these bombs were airbursts.

They were exploded about five hundred meters above the ground.

So they formed a fireball and then that energy dissipated.

When we talk about this fireball, the fireball basically has the temperature of the sun.

It's like creating a miniature sun on earth.

And so people were quite literally people buildings, quite literally vaporized.

So just turn kind of like your water on the stove disappears, right?

And then obviously as you move further and farther and farther from the epicentre, then

you would have people with their degree burns.

You would have destruction from just the blast, the destruction from the energy that goes

into the blast.

And then on top of all of this, you also have radiation.

And again, this is just one single bomb.

Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT.

So that's 15,000 tons of a chemical explosive.

So that's how we sort of understand how powerful these bombs are.

My telling you how much uranium or plutonium is in a nuclear bomb wouldn't give you that

sense of just how powerful they are.

But again, today we have nuclear weapons in these arsenals that are dozens, if not hundreds

of times more powerful than those early bombs.

And there's a total of 12 and a half thousand of them.

And we know that if something like a nuclear war were to occur, and let's even just for

a moment take India and Pakistan, both of which have about 150 nuclear warheads and estimated

on average to be 100 kilotons, so it's about seven Hiroshima bombs equivalent.

If those two countries were to use their entire arsenals in a nuclear war, it's estimated

the 130 million people would die just from the attacks.

We also know from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that basically the day of or just in the immediate

aftermath of the bombings, a certain number of people died.

And then within months, the number of casualties basically doubled from the impacts of radiation.

So if you have this 130 million, the day off, that's like people who are vaporized or blown

apart, et cetera, and then you would have casualties from radiation as well.

And that's not where the impacts of nuclear war ends.

In fact, last year when there was, it was just three or four days, a conflict between India

and Pakistan.

And I think there was some comments on the internet, why do we need to worry about, you know,

let them do whatever they want?

Well, it turns out that if they go to a nuclear war, that's going to impact the entire planet.

How is it going to impact the entire planet?

There are two major effects.

One is nuclear winter.

That is the fact that if these bombs are used in the tax on cities and there are widespread

fires as a result of the explosions, those fires would produce so much soot that would

go into the atmosphere and then block incoming sunlight, reduce temperatures on the planet,

and reduce them to such a degree that food would begin to, food growing would begin to

fail, agriculture would begin to fail.

And within two years, it's estimated that actually more than two billion people would

die from starvation around the planet.

That's just India, Pakistan, nuclear war.

Not even including the chain of proxy alliances that these nations have.

Not just, they call it in these scenarios, limited regional nuclear war, right?

So India and Pakistan do their thing, nobody else gets involved.

And of course, we actually don't even think that's what would happen, but just to illustrate

how serious this is.

And then there's another level where the U.S. and Russia would essentially use one-third

of their current arsenals each.

And that would end up with 360 million immediate deaths followed by over five billion people

dying of starvation.

That's really the end.

And these are estimates, it could be much worse, it could be, maybe it could even be better.

But this is at the level of collapse of human civilization is something else nuclear weapons

can do that doesn't even require you to explode the bombs on cities and kill women and children

and so on.

It's called electromagnetic pulse.

It's when you explode a nuclear warhead high above the atmosphere, about a hundred miles

up into a way from surface and you explode the nuclear warhead and it basically sends out

this radiation that then interacts with particles in the atmosphere and creates something

called electromagnetic pulse which ends up shutting down electricity in entire regions.

It's estimated, and we've known this since the 50s, we've known this for a long time,

it's estimated that you need just three such weapons to shut down electricity over the

entire United States.

And that's not a blackout, that's not like, oh, we lost electricity and it's coming back

in three days or five days or seven days, it's not coming back.

That's electricity that is not coming back.

You don't even have to kill us all, we'll just kill each other, right?

Like you imagine, can you imagine this society without electricity, where's the food going

to come from?

Yeah, logistics, supply chains, global banking.

Everything, everything collapses, right, where's your money, right, if there's no electricity

you don't have anymore.

I mean, it's almost too much to even try to figure out, but that's the kind of thing

that nuclear weapons can do and why they're so dangerous and why they really represent

this as you so eloquently put it at the beginning, this existential threat that's looming over

all of humanity and that's been doing that for 80 years.

Yeah, I mean, again, I just, I'm in an exercise and kind of like prepping for speaking with

you, I put myself in the shoes of trying to like really feel what it would be like to

be in a city where a nuclear bomb went off, you know, 10 miles away.

I was, you know, 20 miles away from the blast zone and it's really horrifying.

Like I even found like a little bit of a write up that kind of can paint that picture

like really vividly and I implore the audience just to imagine whatever city you're in,

whatever place you're in.

And imagine you see this light and it's beyond, it's not the sun, it's like beyond brightness,

it's nothing you've ever comprehend it before.

If you're in the blast zone, you're immediately eviscerated, you don't even know that it happened

by the time you're dead.

And as a quote, I think maybe you mentioned last time we spoke that the living would envy

the dead.

Yes, yes.

Is sort of how people I think around Hiroshima described the fallout.

It specifically comes from Krush, Nikita Krushchev, who was a Soviet leader and who negotiated

with President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and they also negotiated the limited

test band treaty and so on.

But it's that recognition that this is just, this is not something we want to even think

about.

I actually admire you.

I'd love to hear the description that you offer to read.

I admire you for thinking in this way.

I think about nuclear weapons all the time and I really, I just kind of refuse to think

about what would happen.

They're novels, they're films, they're other things.

And for me, I somehow have this feeling that what I really want to spend my kind of

intellectual and emotional energy on is what can I do to prevent this from ever happening?

Of course, I think you're maybe more aware than the average person of just how horrific

this may be.

Yeah, no, no.

That's how I felt.

Absolutely.

Even thinking about it.

Absolutely.

I've read descriptions that if you held your hand up, you might see your bones through

your hand.

Right.

That there's literally like a radiation effect that if you're somehow outside the blast

zone, you're going to see your bones inside your own hand.

I know.

And from that moment, then all of a sudden, the heat, and you wouldn't even hear it

at first.

You just see this bright light, you would probably feel the heat and it's like you mentioned

the hotter than the sun, which I think, like I think you've burned your hand on a stove

from up in incomprehensible, like the air immediately, like, would thicken.

Yes.

But it says here, it literally would almost feel solid.

The exposed skin would respond immediately.

Yeah.

Like the air around you would ignite potentially, like literally the oxygen would have

a chemical reaction.

If you're breathing in the air, your lungs might eviscerate from just the oxygen around

you basically.

But what would even happen with the oxygen in presence of that high heat?

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Yeah, so this is actually a really interesting question,

because back before the very first test that was conducted in July of 1945,

the scientists were actually worried that all the nitrogen in the atmosphere could ignite

and that there was one in a million chance that they would actually destroy the entire planet.

Just with one test.

Just with one test.

And they went ahead and did it anyway, so that's the...

I think the...

It's really...

So much of this is about the specific scenarios.

What's the bomb?

How many are you using?

Where is it going?

And so on and so forth?

I think it's...

The primary effect I really worry about is...

You create this fireball, right?

It might be a mile across.

And that's...

You created a miniature sun on Earth, vaporizes everything.

And then you kind of go in these concentric circles farther and farther and farther out.

It's...

Those fires, you know, how far they're going to go...

I mean, really far.

But also really depends on how this all plays out.

Where I think a lot of the times we're imagining one nuclear weapon attacking New York City.

Russia has intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry ten warheads.

Why not one in Brooklyn, one in Staten Island, you know, two in Manhattan, you know,

Queens, whatever, the Bronx?

Like you could...

And you could create these miniature suns everywhere.

Now imagine how those miniature suns are going to actually combine, right?

What's going to happen in between, even if they're sort of separated.

Right.

So there's a lot of...

That fire...

I was talking about nuclear winter earlier.

There are things that would be radioactive isotopes, you know,

really contaminating the environment for hundreds of...

And even thousands of years.

But then you also have this destruction of the ozone layer,

a kind of nitric oxide type compounds that are produced that destroy the ozone layer.

And then that ends up in like the...

The scenario of the US, Russia, nuclear war.

70% of the ozone layer is destroyed, right?

So I think last time you asked me about people building bunkers in New Zealand.

I mean, good luck.

Even if New Zealand is sort of still hospitable to food growing,

and maybe the radioactive isotopes haven't contaminated everything,

and you come out of your bunker,

and the ozone layer is 70% destroyed.

That's not just about the fact that you're going to get skin cancer,

find you, cover yourself.

It's going to destroy the plants too.

The food is not going to grow.

Also, the food also can't...

Benefits from the ozone layer.

Protecting us from UV radiation.

So it's just such unimaginable destruction in so many different ways,

which is what makes these weapons so different,

really than anything else we have.

You know, my kind of general approach to these things is to talk about peace,

to talk about diplomacy, to talk about,

and all of it is horrible.

Don't get me wrong.

The people dying and being injured daily by the thousands in Ukraine,

what we all have seen happening in Gaza,

there are other wars,

whether you're talking about Sudan, exactly.

But, and all of it,

really just in so many ways, so devastating,

that we as humans could come so far in so many ways,

that we can, you know, write beautiful literature

and compose, you know, beautiful symphonies,

and have the ability to have this conversation,

and then people can listen to it from any part of the world.

I mean, so many amazing people about us as humans,

and the wars currently going on just in my, you know, for me,

just really break my heart.

But the nuclear war threat is something like,

it's on a different scale.

Even compared to the immense suffering that's still taking place

in so many parts of the world,

it's just, I cannot imagine, I recently gave a,

it's like an interview, but almost like a lecture mixture

with another scientist named Stephen Starr,

and Stephen, at the end of our presentation,

said something like,

don't national or political goals would be worth destroying,

you know, all life on earth.

Like, like, couldn't we just agree with that one statement?

Wouldn't it be so simple to agree with that one statement?

And then once you take that statement and say,

yeah, you're right, there's nothing that could justify

destroying life on earth, then we have to kind of,

you know, dial back and figure out what do we need to do

to make sure this never happens.

And, you know, to meet the answer is clear,

we have to eliminate these weapons

because as long as they exist,

they will represent this enormous,

enormous existential threat.

And of course, if we go from having 12 and a half thousand

to having a thousand, that would be much better, right?

It would clearly be better.

So how about we just agree we need to keep reducing them

and then, you know, we can also talk about what it would mean

to eliminate them.

Right. Yeah, I mean, we've done it before, right?

I mean, we at what you said in the 60s, there were...

It 1986 was the height,

the maximum number, it reached 70,000 nuclear warheads.

So we've, you know, we've basically eliminated

more than 80% of that arsenal,

we're just really now,

but what's so dangerous about where we are now

is just how bad the relations are between different nuclear powers

between, you know, countries in general, the sidelineing

and I refer to it as immaculation of the United Nations

isn't helping.

We need far more cooperation

and far more just respect for international law

because if we disregard having agreements,

having a UN charter, having state sovereignty,

having, you know, once all of that goes away,

we're back in the, you know, middle ages, right?

For anything goes.

But now we're not just in the middle ages with

you know, it was from the United Nations.

Exactly.

Exactly. We're now in the middle ages with nuclear weapons

and really the consequences could be not just

it's even hard to find the right word, you know,

catastrophic, devastating.

It's annihilation.

We just don't even have the right language to think about

what that would actually ultimately mean.

I think, again, I don't want to harp so much on like

the visceral picture of what it would be like to witness.

But Chris, would you mind just pulling up a picture

of one of the nuclear bomb tests or just a video perhaps?

Because I just think like maybe for someone that's their

first exposure to what a nuclear weapon is.

Again, it's one of these things like when people talk

about like billions of dollars, like it's almost difficult

to fathom billions like, oh, like a millionaire

and like a billionaire like they're close.

It's so different.

It's so different.

And I think people think like, oh, I've seen, you know,

war footage on, you know, the internet of, you know,

Ukraine or, you know, in Palestine, whatever,

this type of nuclear attack is fundamentally different,

categories of difference.

Absolutely.

And I think we talked about this last time.

I described the energy yield difference between something

like a chemical explosive attack like the Oklahoma City bomb

that there was the equivalent of two and a half tons

of TNT.

And then you go to the Hiroshima bomb,

which was 15 kilotons of TNT.

So that's 6,000 times more powerful than the attack

on Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people,

destroyed the federal building, destroyed buildings,

destroyed the damaged buildings in the 16 block radius.

So a huge amount at the time, I think it was something

like $600 million worth of damage.

That's 1995.

That's more than 30 years ago.

And then you go from, then you go to Hiroshima,

6,000 times more energy.

And then you go to something like the Brava bomb.

Maybe if you just look up the Brava test,

the Brava bomb was the US, the largest hydrogen bomb

to US ever tested in the Marshall Islands.

It was 15 megatons,

so 1,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

So that's 6 million times more energy

than the Oklahoma City bombing.

These are compounding scales that the human brain

has a difficult time with these compounding numbers.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

And it's, you know, that mushroom cloud was 60 miles wide

it was 25 miles high.

I mean, it's an absolute monstrosity.

Imagine that kind of an area just covered by the mushroom cloud.

Maybe this is, yeah.

So this is from Vegas, PBS, just showing the size of this.

And this is 1954.

1954, March 1 of 1954,

bikini atoll,

if vaporized an entire island in the atoll.

I mean, the, like it's, it's, it's feel sci-fi.

It, it, it's, it's almost.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And not to mention the light and the heat

and then the shockwave, this massive wall of pressure.

Exactly.

I keep talking about the energy

and it's also what happens to that energy.

And so some of that energy goes into the exactly 50%

goes into this shockwave,

the blast,

35% of the energy goes into heat.

And then the rest goes into radiation,

either the initial radiation,

which is both neutrons and gamma rays,

or radiation fallout,

sort of the energy that ends up being produced

from the radioactive isotopes

that are produced from the explosion itself.

So it's just a,

it's an enormous amount of energy

and then everything that happens

with that energy is just absolutely unimaginably dangerous.

And then we have these long-term effects

of, as we keep talking about ozone layer destruction

or nuclear winter,

or something like, again,

if you're, if you're really in it, right,

to do, to have a nuclear war,

maybe you're attacking all these cities and so on,

maybe you're also doing the explosion,

you know, 100 miles above the surface

and actually destroying the electrical grid

in the country.

One of the interesting things is that our,

the US government has protected the nuclear command

and control centers from an attack by an EMP,

by this electromagnetic pulse,

but not the rest of our electricity grid, right?

So, and that's also one of the things

where it's like the good news is we could protect

the, the electrical grid.

The bad news is we haven't done it and, you know,

with Congress and funding and this and that.

I mean, it seems like a, like a real no-brainer.

Clearly they're concerned because they did protect

the nuclear command and control from,

from such a possibility.

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I mean, we're trying to visualize that society post,

you know, some type of nuclear war.

And again, there is no society.

Like the world is just fundamentally different.

We've reverted to a quasi like, you know, like village state,

where like there's probably small commons of people

trying to scrape together food and water.

Much of the water is contaminated.

There's radiation effects that are causing sickness and illness

across anyone that's unlucky enough to survive.

And people of, I've even just read online,

people have kind of pointed out that, oh,

like this nuclear winter idea is a theory.

This is theoretical.

We don't know if this would happen.

It might not.

And to me, I'm like, that doesn't really change anything for me.

You're absolutely right.

Let's say, okay, nuclear winter is completely bunk

and, you know, we have a hundred nuclear warheads

go off around the world.

Still we're talking about, you know.

Probably more likely thousands of nuclear warheads go off

in the world, yeah.

We're talking about hundreds of millions of people

dying from the blast, from the outside impact zones,

from the radiation, from the, you know,

water supply being poisoned.

I mean, like to me, that doesn't change it at all, really.

Like, because again, the question ultimately to me

is, should, you know, 10 people, maybe we say 50 people,

if we count like they're courtiers and they're, you know,

people on their staff, a hundred maybe,

should they be in charge of, and have the capability

to kill hundreds of millions of people with a buck?

You need to get you into the nuclear disarmament movement

to make all of these points.

Just a couple of thoughts.

One is that currently there's a UN mandated study

of effects of nuclear war.

A group of scientists, I'm actually not.

I'm sort of adjacent to this effort,

because I'm on a scientific advisory group

to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

This is a separate group that was just established

in the last few months.

And the last time the UN had such a study

of what would the effects of nuclear war be on the planet,

be on humanity, was like the late 1980s.

Everybody in some sense, I wouldn't say everybody,

but most people fell asleep, including organizations

and so on after the end of the Cold War, right?

So now we've, at least some people have woken up

to the reality of this, of this.

And so there is such an effort to understand

the consequences of nuclear war in today's world,

because of course, compared to the 1980s,

obviously the weapons are different and all of that.

But it's more so that we do live on a different planet,

the way in which we, the connections

between different societies, the globalization,

the way in which we, you know,

you walk into your grocery store here in Brooklyn,

and then you buy, you know, beef from New Zealand

or something, I don't know if you buy beef.

But whatever, right?

So what would that look like, right?

What would it look like?

And that's definitely now being considered

in a very serious way.

On the nuclear war is just a theory.

First they have to say one really significant thing,

which is when people dismiss the word theory.

Now in every language, maybe,

you and I would have a conversation,

well, I have a theory that if I do this, you know,

then this will happen.

That is not the meaning of the word in science.

A scientific theory is something that we have been really,

you know, thinking about considering looking at

for a long period of time, typically.

But it is something that describes a wide range

of phenomena and for which there is experimental evidence

to support it.

So I would even say at this point,

whether I would call, so for example,

quantum mechanics is a theory.

Gravity.

Exactly.

Einstein's formulation of gravity is called

general relativity.

That's another theory.

Quantum mechanics is why my phone works

in your phone works, in your iPad,

and all kinds of things, right?

So you can call it just a theory,

but it basically is responsible for so much

of our technological development.

So same thing with people dismissing evolution

by natural selection.

It's just a theory.

If there had been a biologist since 1850,

and since 1859, when Darwin published his theory

of evolution by natural selection,

if there had been a biologist who was able to disprove

what Darwin first proposed,

they'd be like the most famous scientist in the world, right?

Because they would have supplanted something

that was so fundamental to everything we understand in biology.

So the idea that something's just a theory,

kind of just in general, needs to go.

On nuclear winter,

what I will say is that in 1980,

scientists had figured out what happened to the dinosaurs

or to the large dinosaurs, non-bred dinosaurs,

66 million years ago.

How come they all disappeared?

And there had been efforts to try and understand this,

basically a series of discoveries,

desperate discoveries all led to this.

Initially hypothesis, I would now call it a theory

that an asteroid hit the earth near what is today,

Yucatan Peninsula,

changed initially, it's all very hot,

but then you get this impact,

you know, the fires in the sud,

and you're blocking coming sunlight,

and so the planet becomes inhospitable

to life the large dinosaurs just have no food,

they die out.

Turns out that was a good thing for us

because the small mammals that could burrow underground,

that could hibernate,

that could survive a very little food,

they ended up, and at some point,

there were other conditions on the planet,

vastly improved, the planet was back to,

it's kind of normal, you know, climate cycle,

and those mammals, over millions and millions of years,

evolved the last common ancestors we have,

with chimps and bonobos,

lived about seven million years ago,

and since then we've split from them,

and went on our own way,

and our own path to evolution.

Okay, so 1966 million years ago,

asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs,

the scientists discovered different pieces of evidence

that pointed to this,

and then thought something like,

the iridium layer, the iridium came,

it's a very heavy element that would only be present

in the core of the earth,

it doesn't exist on the surface,

and so why did you have this layer?

It's just the right time,

and not just in one place,

deposited globally,

so iridium,

and then there were glass ferules that they found,

and then they found a crater

in the Yucatan, near the Yucatan Peninsula,

you know, 200 kilometers across,

I think, crater,

just all fits, everything fits,

for this is why the dinosaurs disappeared,

and some of the scientists involved

in this work began to wonder,

whether there was something that could happen today,

and now these kinds of very large asteroid impacts

are thought to occur once every 100 million years,

so chances that we have one, you know.

Another 30 million years.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chances are very, very, very small.

I can live with that. Right?

We can live with that.

Another existential threat would be a super volcano.

We also don't think that that's going to happen

in our lifetimes,

or in the coming hundreds, or even thousands of years.

But we spoke about 1816,

that year without summer.

Yes, yes, and that's Mount Tambora,

that's a relatively small volcanic eruption,

that did change the climatic conditions for several years,

but in 1816, a year without a summer,

it snowed in New York City, in July,

and this actually impacted people really starved

around the planet because the food growth

was very much reduced.

So in thinking through these other threats, natural threats,

scientists basically realized that a nuclear war,

and at the time this was 1980,

probably had 50 or 60,000 nuclear warheads at that time,

the peak ended up in 1986, as we said,

oh, at 70,000.

And so they just realized,

hey, if we had a nuclear war in which you used

a lot of these nuclear warheads,

and it's very important for people to recognize

that when we talk about something like the nuclear testing,

so in the Marshall Islands,

they would do these tests, you know,

vaporize an island, right?

But then there was not, you know,

it's just like ocean around,

so they weren't creating massive fires, right?

They were choosing these sites

of where to do the tests very deliberately,

not to create massive fires.

If you're doing this in the context of a war,

and you're actually attacking, right,

you're attacking military installations,

you're attacking cities,

there are lots of things that were burned

in those cities, including human beings.

And so that's the amount of soot that is produced,

and that's what they realized in the early 1980s,

wrote a paper, a group of geologists got together,

and then they got actually Carl Sagan

to be interested in this,

and Carl Sagan was on that original paper

in Science Magazine

of proposing nuclear winter

as something that could occur

as a result of nuclear war.

Sagan went on until his death,

he died sometime in the late 1990s,

really was a kind of spokesperson for this idea,

and very much a proponent of science

or as a means of progress,

and very much a spokesman for peace

and for disarmament and against nuclear weapons.

But from the very beginning,

they were being attacked.

A lot of this was attacked at the time,

Soviet Union, of course, was a communist regime.

This was disregarded, this communist propaganda,

you'll still see some of that,

like when I talk about it,

and people write comments to, you know,

interviews or podcasts or whatever,

you know, this is communist propaganda,

and the government really has been trying very, very hard

to set this research aside

and to pretend like this is not real.

The truth is that the more research we've done,

the more we think that this is real.

There has been a tremendous amount of progress

in kind of climate modeling

because the goal was to understand global warming,

and so that those climate models have improved

over the decades,

this is now four plus decades

since the initial discoveries.

And on top of it,

the scientists have been able,

for example, to compare within their models

to compare things like wildfires in Canada and so on,

and to say this is what we observe

and does it fit with our models.

Now, of course, you know, to your original point,

maybe it's just, maybe nuclear winters

were just all wrong, right?

And life will continue to flourish on the planet,

really, after hundreds of millions of people die,

and potentially we have no electricity.

Like, if that doesn't bother you enough,

and you feel that discrediting nuclear winters

is like the way to, you know,

to keep justifying nuclear weapons,

then yeah, go ahead.

That's how I feel.

Okay, maybe, you know,

five billion people don't die,

and maybe it's only a couple hundred million.

I'm like, still, I just don't know

a small select group of people

that don't care about the individual interests

of humans on Earth should be in charge of that type of power.

And really, Mark, it's a little worse than that,

because what you're saying is, you know,

the nine heads of state

of the countries they have nuclear weapons and so on.

Just one of them starts to chain.

Our understanding is that one nuclear weapon

will begin the chain reaction,

of course, what actually happens in a nuclear weapon

and lead to a full-blown nuclear war.

Right.

And so it's not even that nine of them

get to decide the future

of not just eight billion currently alive,

but future generations as well.

It's one person.

One of them makes a deliberate decision

to go within a attack.

And when you have conflicts and wars

between nuclear powers

or nuclear powers are indirectly involved,

of course, this is a possibility.

This deliberate attack is a possibility.

And again, some people will dismiss.

Now, one's crazy enough, well, if you trust all of them,

you know, could like to all of us.

But that's not even all.

It could end up happening

because of a mistake.

It could end up happening

because you think you're under attack

and you do decide to attack.

Or it could be an accident.

We've had so many close calls.

And I just, in many ways,

some real, you know, experts on understanding risk

and understanding what's happened

and how close we've gone.

Many of them quite simply say,

we've just been lucky.

It's not even, you know,

that we've been smart

or that nuclear deterrence works.

We've really been lucky.

And the more time the past is,

the more we learn about these incidents

in which, you know, something really, really could have gone wrong

in the past.

Yeah, I mean,

if during this conversation,

we both had guns pointed at each other.

You know, I don't think you would pull it.

You don't think I would pull it.

But it still would make me very uncomfortable

to have a loaded gun pointing at me.

And maybe you knew that if you pulled it,

I would also pull it

and we would both go.

So you won't do it.

But still,

I mean...

What if neither of us had a gun pointed at each other?

I know.

I know.

Daniel Ellsberg.

So this is, you probably know the name.

Dan was the person

who released the Pentagon papers in 1970,

which led to,

basically led eventually to the end of the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon papers really revealed

that the U.S. government was aware

that it was not winning in Vietnam

and that it was open.

It was lying to the American people

about how that war was going

and what the prospects for winning that war were.

Dan Ellsberg ended up after that.

He ended up basically standing trial

and then it ended up being a mistrial

because the prosecution had...

This was during Nixon had...

I believe they broke into his doctor's office,

his psychiatrist's office,

and as a result,

the judge dismissed all charges.

And he ended up spending...

He passed away in 2023, I want to say.

He ended up spending...

The rest of his life really talking, protesting

and talking about nuclear weapons and so on.

And he said that

all these governments that have nuclear weapons

actually use nuclear weapons every single day.

And he said,

they used them like a robber uses a gun

when they pointed to your head exactly to your point.

The robber doesn't have to pull a trigger

to be using a gun

and telling you,

give me the money,

whether you're a store clerk or whatever.

They just have to point it at your head

and that's what we have been doing

in some sense the US has been doing that for 80 years

and the other countries that acquired nuclear weapons

afterwards have been doing it for less time

but nevertheless,

they've been doing it.

And the question is,

what kind of a planet can we really have

if our...

Even if we for a moment assumed

this notion of nuclear deterrence works, right?

I'm pointing a gun at you,

you're pointing one at me,

you know,

that if I, you know,

if you shoot,

I'll shoot,

so we just both stay restrained.

Even if that works,

what kind of a relationship do we have as human beings, right?

If that's the basis

for the relationship between different countries,

I think we're really in trouble, right?

One, because you could fail

and if it fails,

it's catastrophic.

And two, because it can't,

it quite simply cannot be

the kind of cooperation

that we need to address climate change,

that we need to address pandemics,

that we need to address AI.

I know you want to talk about AI.

I mean, we have some real challenges on this planet.

It's a beautiful planet.

It's got...

And we as humanity have done so much

and have so much potential to do more,

but we also do have challenges.

And imagine the you and your neighbor, right?

We're constantly pointing out gunnets each other

and yet at the same time needed to fix something,

I don't know, in the hallway or whatever,

in the front yard backyard.

It's just like,

how are you going to do that?

If your entire relationship is based on,

I'm going to annihilate you or...

And it's not even a gunnets each other's head.

It's like a bomb in each other's,

you know, homes, right?

Like I'm going to destroy your entire home.

And I have this button I can use to destroy your home.

How much can you get done

if that's the basis of your relationship?

I think that's the other piece.

And then the third piece is how much money we spend

on these weapons, right?

Yeah, maintaining and developing.

And now modernizing.

And now there are new intercontinental ballistic missiles

and new submarines and submarine launch missiles

and new types of bombs and warheads.

Could you pit production?

I mean, it's just unimaginable.

Could you steel man the argument for nuclear deterrence

or mutually assured destruction as people put it?

Because I think, you know,

there are probably many people justifiably saying,

like there's been two nuclear bombs that have gone off,

you know, against a nation with civilians.

And in 80 years, that's basically all there's been

and you know, that's pretty good.

So maybe it is working.

And maybe it does actually make the planet safer.

Could you steel man what that argument is?

So that's an argument.

That's basically the basis for all of this.

The justification for the possession of nuclear weapons.

And it really, what it does is it ignores two kind of fundamental truths.

One fundamental truth is that nuclear deterrence could fail.

And if it fails, it is so catastrophic.

Are you really sure that this is worth it, right?

That what's your plan B?

How are you going to actually deal with it failing?

The other piece that it ignores is what I alluded to earlier.

All of these incidents,

whether it was really stupid accidents like US and the Soviet submarine,

both carrying nuclear warheads, you know, colliding,

planes carrying nuclear warheads colliding,

planes dropping nuclear warheads in South Carolina and North Carolina.

One time I was talking about this and somebody wrote,

she's wrong.

Within dropping nuclear warhead in North Carolina,

we dropped it in South Carolina.

Turns out we dropped it in both Carolinas.

Poor Carolinas.

Exactly.

That seems personal at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

I might have been a scientist with like an ex-wife for somebody.

Exactly.

I mean the number of its dozens of incidents.

And we're just talking about the US,

like the declassified materials from the United States.

In 1983, two really major incidents.

One is called Able Archer.

It was a NATO exercise where NATO had decided they wanted to kind of up the notch

in terms of how realistic it would be.

So for the first time they involved, I think heads of state.

And there was some other kind of improvements to how the exercise plays out.

Meanwhile, the Soviets are thinking it's a,

they're preparing for nuclear war.

They're literally loading nuclear warheads onto their bombers

and ready to send them out.

And luckily somehow, you know, the back channels worked.

And we didn't, they didn't go into nuclear war.

That same year there was a detection by the Soviets again of,

basically there was an alignment between satellites and clouds

that in the Russian detection system appeared like five incoming missiles heading for Russia.

And this one captain, Stanislav Petrov.

Stanislav Petrov is there.

Yeah, yeah.

Stanislav Petrov is there.

He ends up seeing this.

And instead of passing it to his superiors, he decides to just keep watching it.

He served reasons that, you know, if the US were attacking the Soviet Union,

probably wouldn't start with five missiles.

It would probably start with a whole lot more.

And he just basically doesn't end up doing anything

and sure enough, they realized that this was a false alarm.

Later on, those detection systems were adjusted for this alignment of clouds

and satellites and so on.

But, you know, a real moment where a different person,

we keep saying it's lucky.

Maybe it's just that he was really smart and just did the right thing.

Maybe a different person had been there and said we're under attack.

And they then attacked the United States.

The United States sees that it's being attacked.

They retaliate.

And retaliates.

And we're all gone.

I was actually alive in 1983.

I know you were not.

But, you know, it's not like ancient, ancient history.

And we don't even know about things that have happened in the last X number of years

because those are not declassified.

Some of these things we only know because of the declassifications that have taken place since then.

And then, of course, it was on the screen as well, the Cuba missile crisis.

It's the really famous one.

There was a kind of combination of diplomacy, diplomatic efforts happening between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

But also behind the scenes that nuclear warheads were already in Cuba.

And there was a Soviet submarine that was, you know, deep underwater and was actually experiencing a kind of,

it's not an actual attack, but they call them depth charges where it's sort of like,

like you think you're under attack, but you're not really under attack.

And in that submarine was carrying nuclear warheads.

There were three officers on board.

Two of them wanted to launch the warhead because they thought nuclear warhead already started.

And one of them, another Russian name, Vasily Archipov, said, no, let's not launch.

And that was in the midst of Kennedy and Khrushchev, you know, trying to negotiate how to get out of this crisis.

Yeah, it's just, again, I'm finally now at this point in my life, maybe having children has helped.

I'm just realizing just like the threat is not like a regular bomb, it's not like a gun.

It's, it's, imagine, okay, no more nuclear weapons, but we put a massive explosive device in the center of the earth.

And it's a, it literally, if you push a button, the earth will crack apart and everything will eviscerate.

And we'll all float into space and gravity will cease to exist.

And every person dies.

And you give 10 countries, Russia, India, Pakistan, France, America, China.

You give all them the button.

Is that a world we want to live in?

Like, is that really the situation?

And then I also consider like, okay, let's say you have four teenage boys and they're all in your house and they're all fighting all the time.

And you say, okay, here's my solution.

All of you are going to have an explosive bomb put into your backpacks.

And you all can control each other's bomb.

And if you guys fight each other, then this person can just explode you at any point.

As a parent, would you ever want your children to have this type of technology to kill each other if they have a disagreement?

Like, would you really think like, oh, that'll keep my family safer if they all have a bomb in their backpack?

Because like you mentioned, you could accidentally push the button.

You could be looking for your pencil and accidentally hit the detonator and kill your brother.

And I don't know, maybe it's because of, you know, I grew up with a Catholic worldview.

I'm like, is this what God wants for humanity?

Like, I know there's many people out there listening that might be secular and I respect that.

But imagine there is a God.

Is this what God would want for humanity?

Like, if you don't want this for your children, is this what God wants for his creation?

To me, it's like, I just don't understand the argument of like, yeah, if everyone has it, we're safer.

To me, it just breeds, you know, discordination and a lack of, you know, compliance and, you know, real good faith cooperation.

And furthermore, it also just opens up potential, you know, honest mistakes that lead to the destruction of humanity.

Yeah.

So either situation isn't great and there is a third option.

Which again, I get myself wrapped up in, you know, the real politic of humanity.

And I'm like, yeah, human beings fight and, you know, violence has existed for as long as humans have existed.

And we are going to continue to battle each other and there's going to continue to be conflicts.

So it just sort of is what it is.

And it's a little reluctant and it's a little sort of like, you know, aloof, like, yeah, you know, it exists.

But I do try to imagine a world where we say this cannot exist.

We have to all of us and we come up with some type of global treaty that somehow reinforce with some type of institution or some type of, you know, united force.

Which again, I understand these things result in bureaucracy and, you know, unfair advantages, et cetera.

But what if that world is real? Like what if that world could actually exist?

And to me, it's just a decision that humans can make.

Yeah.

And it feels maybe a little crazy for people to think like, no, humans have always fought.

We've always fought each other. There's always going to be violence.

But to me, I'm like this type of violence, this type of technology is just too egregious for any person to have.

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Now, let's get back to the show.

Hi, Mark, I really couldn't agree more.

I mean, absolutely dead on.

Just a couple of comments.

One is to actually pieces of good news.

One piece of good news is that it really is a political decision.

So, I also actually am concerned about global warming, climate change.

It's really what's happening is the globe is warming because we're emitting greenhouse gases.

Also doing nuclear bomb testing also.

Well, no.

You don't think that contributes? I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it was a while ago, the warming is currently.

We've actually understood for a very long time that greenhouse gases make our planet livable.

If it weren't for CO2, our planet would be much, much colder.

It would actually be minus 15 degrees Celsius.

It's probably, I don't know, minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

So today, I feel like.

Right.

But on average, across the globe, that would be like a frozen earth.

So greenhouse gases are great.

The problem is that in the last 150 years, and in particular in the last several decades,

we have been increasing those greenhouse gases very rapidly.

And that is resulting in increased temperatures on the globe,

which are then having these other side effects of, you know, sea level rise, you know, fires, all kinds of impacts,

and really impacting life on the planet, impacting us humans.

We primarily live near coastlines and so on, but impacting other life on the planet as well.

So the global warming problem is real.

The solution to global warming is non trivial.

There are several routes we could go and many of them are, you know, promising and so on.

But politically, some of them are really difficult, even if we agree, you know, to have, for example, solar energy,

the kind of technical things of how you distribute that energy, how you store it, battery storage, all of that.

Some of that is non trivial.

The thing about nuclear weapons and that being a political decision is that once the political decision is made to eliminate them,

it's eliminating them isn't actually that difficult.

So that's the really good news because we already said if there were 70,000 of them in 1986,

and today there are 12,500, that means we were able to eliminate them.

Some of that was actually used for to fuel, you know, nuclear power plants.

And some of it is just the dismantlement and then you still have the waste problem and so on.

But much better to have a waste problem from, you know, nuclear weapon, you know, material than to have them blowing up.

So the one piece of good news is it is a political problem and humans can solve political problems.

And it's something we created and something we're able to dismantle.

The other piece of good news is that we do have a treaty actually.

It's called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

This is something that diplomats have been working on for many years.

So that said that treaty currently has 99 states,

UN member states that are either partied to the treaty, that means they've gone through the kind of process of ratifying the treaty,

that means their national legislation typically did something, or they have signed the treaty.

So more than half of the UN member states are the nine, the possess nuclear weapons part of the treaty now, they're not.

And the big question is how to get them to that table.

So the, you know, from my perspective, the US really has an absolutely fundamental role to play in all of this.

We were the first to develop nuclear weapons with the only country to ever use them on cities full of women and children.

And we've wrote the playbook for the nuclear testing era.

We were in the Marshall Islands six months after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

asking the people of Bikini Island to move so that, you know, we could test nuclear weapons in their islands.

I mean, just really, really devastating history.

But that's our legacy. That's what we the United States have done.

And then everybody else in some sense, you could say follow suit, except for the, the use of nuclear weapons in time of war.

And so my view is that the United States really has a role to play in leading the world.

Now, how do you lead the world?

You, I love your example of, you know, what parents would do with rowdy teenagers and so on.

To me, leading the world is always and must always be about setting an example, right?

If you're a parent who's on their phone all the time and you tell that same teenager not to be on their phone all the time, it's not going to happen, right?

Like, how do you as a country lead on, you know, having a world that is free of, free of the nuclear threat, which I would argue is most acute for the United States?

I imagine the world free of nuclear weapons in which the United States is actually much safer.

Because we've got the oceans, we've got the geographies on our side, we've got the conventional militaries critical as I may be of, you know, the spending and everything associated with that, this really could be an incredibly safe country.

And in fact, with nuclear weapons, we're incredibly vulnerable and we're vulnerable to a very small and relatively poor country called North Korea because they now have about 50 warheads and they have intercontinental ballistic missiles that are estimated to be able to reach any part of the United States.

So it's, forget all the morality and ethics and responsibility, forget all of that for a moment and just say that actually we'd be better off in the world free of nuclear weapons, so that's what we're going to do pursue.

And then you have to put yourself into what does that leadership look like? How do you lead by example? How do you show respect for other states, for other countries? How do you show respect for international law?

Well, I don't think we're doing a very good job, especially at this time, but we really in some sense haven't done a good job on that in a long time.

The U.S. really has this now, you know, 80-year history since the end of the Cold War of playing this role of, you know, world policemen and being involved in all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of wars.

I mean, there are estimates out there that of its entire history, you know, 250 years, the U.S. has not been involved in wars for less than 20 years of that, right?

That's not a good, you know, kind of backdrop, but we could change in part of the way where changes have happened in the past is by one having a general public that's aware

and two having a general public that gets really engaged on these things. When it comes specifically to nuclear weapons, there really were two periods of progress is how I would put it.

One was the 1960s, which gave us the partial test band treaty. That's what basically halted all the atmospheric tests.

So all of this, you know, fallout that went all around the planet, right, was halted.

It was primarily U.S. and Soviet Union tests that were the largest, the UK also stopped testing in the atmosphere as a result of this treaty.

This was in 1963, and there was a tremendous amount of public engagement on this.

At the time from the Nevada test site, there was fallout that had reached basically all corners, essentially going from Nevada, going east.

So just because of how the winds are in the United States, very little of it went west of the Nevada test site, most of it east of the Nevada test site.

And there was this effort to actually document speaking of your young child to document strontium 90 in baby teeth.

And the started out at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, it was actually a group of mothers who became very concerned that their babies were drinking milk, which contained strontium 90s, strontium 90s, a radioactive isotope.

It's similar to calcium, so it ends up in the milk. And then it gets incorporated into baby teeth. And they were doing these analysis and finding strontium 90 mothers parents were sending when, you know, the tooth fairy visited the child.

They would send these in little packets, they would send the baby teeth labeled with the date of birth. And they actually found that kind of correlation between when a child was born with respect to the atmospheric testing that was taking place and how much strontium 90 they were finding in their teeth, just unimaginable.

But in any case, that ends up being a kind of real public engagement effort that also convinces Kennedy to pursue the partial test band treaty. And then that takes place in 1963.

And then by 1968, we also had the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Then the 70s were, you know, very turbulent Vietnam or kinds of other things happening. And then by, you know, in 1980, we're on a Reagan comes back.

It wins the election. And he's, you know, going full on, you know, cold warrior, nuclear weapons and so on. And in 1983, Reagan watches the film the day after.

You should watch it sometimes. I actually watched it not that long ago. I didn't think it was very good. But apparently in 1983, this was this really made a strong impact on people, a hundred million people watched it. There was a TV movie that a hundred people, a million people watched, including Reagan made a big impact on him. And he decided he wanted to do something about nuclear weapons.

Prior to that, a million people walked in Central Park in June of 1982 against a nuclear arms race. So you have this, and then by 86, you know, Reagan and Gorbachev are in Reykjavik and they're actually discussing eliminating nuclear arsenals, which sadly didn't happen because they ended up disagreeing over the

missile defense system that Reagan had hoped to build called Star Wars. Nowadays actually Trump wants to build a golden dome. It's just as doomed as Star Wars was back in the 80s.

And just not a good use of money. And it's really only going to actually fuel a nuclear arms race rather than than constrain it.

But in any case, back to my original point, we need people to understand what's at stake. And we need them to engage. And we need to make, we also need to make progress on these more fundamental issues of war and peace.

Because as long as, you know, these countries are in such either open or indirect conflicts, they're not necessarily going to be sitting down discussing let's eliminate all nuclear weapons.

But that is quite simply what has to happen so that, you know, my children who are older, but your son so that they can have a future.

We need them to have a future. And I also, you know, you don't have to have children to think that this is really important. I mean, the ultimate survival of humanity has somehow got to be something that people actually not just become aware of, but actually are ready to do something about.

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I mean in the current state of the world, geopolitically speaking, you had a recent conflict with Indian Pakistan that we mentioned, both nuclear powers.

And that could have become a calamity.

And thank goodness it didn't.

Maybe partially perhaps to Trump's credit but also a lot of global cooperation that stopped.

But now we have a war with Iran that seems to be growing.

And between the America, Israeli, Iran kind of triad, all of these countries seem to have some version of nuclear power.

I mean, obviously we don't have full transparency on what that looks like.

But that conflict in particular is that of supreme concern for you right now.

That conflict is very, very concerning.

So of course, last year we had the 12-day war between Israel and Iran with involvement by the United States.

Of course, the United States has nuclear weapons, we keep saying for 80 years.

Israel also has a nuclear arsenal of about 90 nuclear warheads.

It is thought that they had their first operational nuclear weapon by 1967.

And Iran does not have nuclear weapons.

Iran has had nuclear power for decades.

At one point, they probably were pursuing nuclear weapons development.

And then in the early 2000s seemed to have stopped.

When JCPOA was, this is the Iran agreement on their nuclear program with the United States European Union.

And so on the Trump walked away from.

When that agreement was in force, Iran was enriching their uranium only up to three and a half percent.

That was the limit.

And that put their, that essentially put their ability to build a nuclear weapon probably to, you know, 10 to 15 years away.

Trump comes into power, tears the JCPOA and prior to this conflict, Iran was enriching uranium up to 60 percent.

Now, you don't need 60 percent for nuclear power, but it's also probably not.

You could make a nuclear weapon with 60 percent.

It wouldn't be a very good one.

Typically, you'd go to something like 90.

So 60 percent, enriching to 60 percent on their part was a little provocative.

At the same time, it is sort of ironic, right, that the United States, the country that first developed nuclear weapons, used them and so on, right.

It's telling Iran you can't have a nuclear weapon.

It is also ironic, especially ironic, for Israel to tell Iran you can't have a nuclear weapon because they have a non-declared arsenal.

They're not a party to what's called the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, NPT.

In fact, I'm sure some people will say, well, you know, of course the United States can tell Iran they can't have a nuclear weapon because both are party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

And that some of that is, I would say that that's, I would even concede that point, yes.

The United States is a party to the NPT as a nuclear weapon state.

Iran is a party to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state, so in some sense they both agree to that arrangement.

At the same time, the United States actually isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing under that treaty, which is the eventual disarmament.

That treaty has been enforced for more than 55 years, and the US as well as the other four states recognize this nuclear weapon states haven't been doing.

They're haven't been fulfilling their end of the bargain, which is not just nuclear, but eventually totally incomplete disarmament.

That's an article in the treaty called Article 6 on disarmament.

And so the irony here is specifically these two countries telling Iran, you know, you can't have a nuclear weapon.

Another irony in that particular how that crisis played out with the use of force, with bombings and so on, is that you probably could have achieved more by renegotiating another deal with Iran.

Rather than attacking Iran, and I think it really fundamentally speaks to this problem of the, in some sense, how the general conversation has changed, right?

The way from talking about disarmament is something that all countries need to do versus talking about non-proliferation.

Well, we can't allow, you know, North Korea to have nuclear weapons, what they do now, or we can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

And as if it's nuclear weapons are only bad if they're in, and this is frequently kind of used, you know, bad hands, right?

Like we can't let nuclear weapons fall into the wrong hands.

There is a quote by a UN Secretary General Former, UN Secretary General Banky Moon, who said something like there are no right hands for the wrong weapons.

And that's really what I subscribe to, this notion that we need disarmament.

And at some level, I think there's a nuclear war, and civilization is destroyed, and, you know, small groups of people survive and live under who knows what kind of circumstances.

Would it really matter who started it? Would it really matter why they started it?

It's different than like the gun argument, because people will say like, oh, a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.

And whether you subscribe to that philosophy or not, I can understand the point.

Like if I'm on the train with my wife and some crazy guys attacking us pointing at gun at us, and someone shoots that guy, I'm not going to be that mad about it.

You know, like, of course, it's a tragedy, but at the same time, my life is in danger, and now it's not.

So it's okay, but a good guy with a nuke doesn't stop a bad guy with a nuke, because the nuclear bombs still go off, and then it still results in, you know, some type of global claim.

We were talking earlier just about what that world would look like, and there's a really, I think, very deep quote by Einstein, who I think this was from 1946.

He said something like, I know not with what weapons world war three will be fought, right?

Like who knows what we're going to, you know, discover, but I know the world war four will be fought with sticks and stones.

So just this idea that we're just immediately going to go back to who knows what, you know, phase of human existence, but human civilization, what we've built.

And it's, it's incredible how actually how short human civilization is in the span of existence of our species on the planet estimated it about 250,000 years, right, for homo sapiens, and then 10,000 years being generous of agriculture, maybe 30,000 years of like cave paintings on 10,000 years of agriculture.

And just several thousand years of, you know, organized societies and, you know, what we would really refer to as civilization.

And here we are, you know, 80 years into the nuclear age.

We're going to destroy all of that and the 250,000 years of our species is in the context of probably about, you know, close to four billion years of existence of life on the planet.

Again, like these are incomprehensible numbers. You and I can't really imagine what it means that life has existed on the planet for four billion years.

Yeah, sometimes it's a fun experiment that I like to think about because I love like ancient civilizations and, you know, like ancient technology, like, oh, how did they build the pyramid stuff like that? I find it very fun.

But I like to imagine like, what if human beings existed two billion years ago? And what if we developed similar type of societies and we developed nuclear weapons and we destroyed it, and we destroyed it all, it's possible.

And that the entirety of that existence of, you know, humanity's first stint just got washed away by the sands of time and ice ages and meteors and we sort of restarted.

And now it's just kind of ironic, like I imagine from the perspective of an alien that's watching Earth and has the totality of human existence, they're like, oh, they're on the nuclear part again.

Like they failed this four times before they built great societies and then they destroyed it all with these nuclear weapons and they had to restart.

And then they restart again, again, whether or not it's true, probably not, but it's just a fun experiment to kind of think like from an outside perspective, they might be looking at us going, what are you guys doing?

I'm guessing that we would have evidence, some kind of evidence of that in the geologic record, but it is really interesting to think about it.

And you know, astrobiologists think a lot about, you know, our, so we live in the universe, there has a hundred billion galaxies and our galaxy has about a hundred billion stars in it, meaning, and it's a fairly typical galaxy.

So a hundred billion galaxies each of which, let's say on average, might have a hundred billion stars in it. That's one followed by 22 zeros of the number of stars.

When I was first in college and even in graduate school, we sort of didn't know whether the solar system was special in terms of having planets.

And now we've discovered on the order of thousands of exoplanets, it seems that nearly every star has planetary companions.

Exactly how many does matter, but even if you call it on average, one to ten, right, it's again, even just one per star means one followed by 22 zeros, planets in the universe.

So surely there's life somewhere else. The question is, how far are they from us in order for us to actually meet at this day and age?

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There's a galaxy that is two and a half million light years away from us. It's called the Andromeda galaxy.

If we had telescopes that were powerful enough that we could zoom on to Andromeda, zoom on to some planet, some star in the galaxy and some planet orbiting that star.

And we see whoever is there or whatever is happening there.

We would see that planet as it was two and a half million years ago, because the light that our telescope is receiving from there has been traveling to us for two and a half million years.

And same for them. If they look onto the planet, they see some ancestors of humans from two and a half million years ago walking in Africa, like literally walking upright in Africa.

Homorectus was about two and a half million years ago. And they would have no idea that you and I are having this conversation, right? Just impossible. That's just playing simple physics.

Maybe they're YouTube. I don't know. I don't know if it gets there that fast.

All of it, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So when we're separated by such vast distances in space, we're also separated in time.

And as your biologist talk a lot about, right, so like, could we meet some other, right, civilization or have evidence or, and, and they always included in their kind of considerations is the idea that these very advanced civilizations ultimately always self destruct.

And so that's a little bit of a problem. It's a little bit of a problem. This is going to be outside of your scope because you are an esteemed academic at a prestigious university.

But are you familiar with the sort of UFO discourse around nuclear weapon testing?

I know that ask me something that I should have been looking at. I know we're getting into it.

No, no, you probably shouldn't be because you're doing legitimate, like, you know, trying to save the world work.

So I don't want you to be going off into alien territory. But it's a, it's an interesting kind of thing because I speak with a lot of people that have either, you know, they claim to experience UFOs or they've witnessed them or they do, you know, research on classified government documents, things like that.

And it's, I find it fascinating. But many of them will talk about the amount of sightings of these types of craft around nuclear testing.

Now, some people say like, oh, that's probably, you know, other military craft because these are around sensitive military sites.

Maybe it's espionage from foreign countries that are spying on our military, you know, nuclear testing.

But there is a theory within the UFO community that these are some type of entities from a distant galaxy that using some type of quantum entanglement are able to move through space and time faster than the, you know, universal speed limit, et cetera.

And they are witnessing humanity creating these weapons to destroy themselves. And it's interesting.

They're going to save us.

Well, they're going to maybe just watch. And I've heard, I've heard many theories from different people and now we're in sci-fi land.

And I think part of this has even been picked up in like Star Trek. But like, if there are other, you know, life forms out there and maybe they're similar to us in some way, they might be, again, this is their theory, might be looking at Earth and saying,

are we able to cooperate with them when they have weapons like this?

And are we able to interface and communicate with them because what if they tried to attack us with these weapons that would be, you know, dangerous to us on a different star system or in a different galaxy, et cetera.

And it's just interesting that there's, it seems like some type of citing inference or correlation with nuclear testing and a lot of the modern UFO discourse exists around these, you know, the age of nuclearization.

I find it fascinating. I know this is going to be an operating for you.

I just don't know enough to serve, you know, really offer a kind of pushback on this, my senses, no way, you know.

And so, so that's just, you know, kind of the opening statement there.

I was under the impression that I saw some headlines, but again, I didn't really look into this that actually the government was trying to mislead people into thinking that there were UFOs to kind of steer them away from actually figuring out what government was doing.

Whether it's nuclear testing or military.

Project Stargate, I think, was like a siop done by the government.

Oh, look at this.

So, you know, and you have to kind of wonder, I think just more generally about the way in which our society, especially in more recent years, has been so divided on so many issues,

while the issues of the economy are really, you know, so difficult for so many people.

I think the, you know, the stock market may be going up, but that's certainly not helping most most Americans.

And I think these war and peace issues are really, really serious and it's quite simply not something that we seem to be maybe, you know, there was a lot of public discourse around Gaza.

Certainly that one, you know, has, you know, attracted a lot of attention for, you know, for good reason.

But at the same time, just generally interrogating what our government is doing in terms of not just nuclear weapons, which I see as a kind of pinnacle of this militarization.

But just in general, there's a relatively new book by Ben Freeman and William Hartung called the trillion dollar war machine.

And it details that, you know, and this is our, we both pay taxes, I'm sure.

This is, you know, our taxpayers money at trillion dollars going into what's called defense spending, but it's really more spending.

And the book is was, I mean, at some level, I kind of knew all of this, but just to see it documented in such detail about kind of the way in which all of the different players are all on the same page.

Whether it be, you know, Congress, whether it arms manufacturers, think tanks, universities, Hollywood, Hollywood, you name it like everyone's in the same, you know, the famous military industrial complex, like it's so much bigger than just military and industry, like everyone's in on it.

And then there's like so much about kind of the way in which the money is wasted and projects are constantly delayed and then they still don't deliver what they're supposed to deliver and they even put our troops in harm's way, like all of it.

And again, it's a trillion dollars and we don't have discussion, right? Like we, we fight about so many things that are kind of, you know, and I don't mean to imply that they're all unimportant, but we fight a lot about sort of cultural issues.

And that seems to take up all the oxygen and then it comes to something really fundamental about like how a huge percentage, 60% of our discretionary spending from our taxes, how that gets used.

And on nothing less than life and death plus the, you know, possibility of ultimate destruction of the planet, right? And we just don't have that as like this constant debate, constant discussion, which I think it really somehow needs to become, I know it's not fun.

So it's more fun to be like, oh, you know, Trump did this or that and he's great or he's not great, but, but we somehow need to get back to where our awareness is, I mean, ultimately and fundamentally, I really think that American people have really good people.

It's just been my own experience, I've been living in this country now for over 30 years, I came here when I was 17 as a foreign exchange student, you know, I wanted to come, it was a dream for me to study at the US universities.

It was, but it went beyond that, it was also a dream to come to what I saw growing up as the country of freedom and respect for the individual and democracy, right?

The first world's democracy and here we are like, you know, 30 years later, I made it all worse.

It's all my fault. It's all my fault. Here we are, you know, and where is the state of that democracy? How are decisions being made? How are we being represented both in Congress and in the executive branch?

I will just completely set aside any political opinion of what Trump does or specifically what he does, a lot of what he has done is by executive order that's not quite how democracy is supposed to work.

And even when Congress does get, does pass legislation and so on, a lot of times it's not the legislation that the American people are interested in.

There's overwhelming support in this country, for example, for universal healthcare. Do we have legislation on this? I don't think so, you know, is President Trump doing an executive order to put this forward? I don't think so.

So I think it's a little bit, in some sense, I talk about the nuclear issue, partly because not many people are talking about it or not talking about it enough.

But I also see it as a kind of pinnacle in so many ways and if we can really find a way to solve that issue, then so many other things could be within reach.

And if we can kind of revive that notion of engagement in the political process, not just by voting once every year or two years or four years, right, and not just by arguing on social media.

Can we somehow find a way to get behind an issue and not even see it as political or partisan?

My big dream on nuclear disarmament is that it starts to be seen as the ultimate pro-life issue, because what else could be more pro-life than not wanting the life and the planet to be destroyed in a matter of minutes? We didn't even talk about this this time.

In the matter of minutes, how could we be in that situation and who really wants to sit with me and tell me that a world without nuclear weapons wouldn't be a better world?

I'd be super interested in having that discussion with someone who really disagrees, who thinks that what I'm saying just doesn't make any sense and we must have nuclear weapons in perpetuity, well then we're going to blow ourselves up eventually.

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That would be a good discussion. I would listen. I think a bunch of points that you mentioned I think ring true. One, nuclearization is extremely profitable and I think keeping the world on the edge of their seats that at any moment we could all be eviscerated I think does put a ton of money into this sort of vague military industrial complex we've talked about.

I think a lot of people do profit from this heightened sense of anxiety and constantly being at each other. I think it is a profitable industry and that a world of more harmony and peace is probably less profitable.

I think that our current profit motives probably lead us to these positions in a lot of places. To the political point, I do see it as a nonpartisan issue.

It's not like, oh, I don't want this president or this president. I don't want any president. I don't want any any head of state anywhere to be able to eviscerate humanity.

I think to your point, like the executive order thing, I'm less concerned with what Trump is going to do tomorrow, yada yada, and I think again it's frivolous in the grand scheme of humanities demise.

But I do think the executive order position does create a really scary paradigm where maybe it's not Trump that will do it because I mean we'll look at Obama that did executive orders and Trump did more.

And then what if there's someone three presidents from now that truly is a tyrant, truly is some type of demagogue that wants to utilize the precedent that's been made in the past to then do something catastrophic.

And I think that is to me like the biggest looming threat is kind of the precedent that these kind of orders make.

And yeah, at times I feel hopeless because I'm like, what can I do? Like what can I really do? Right? Like I'm just I'm a comedian. I have no, I have no sway, no influence. But I guess I'm curious what you think to me, my, the thing that I lean on that makes me feel better to this hope conversation that we had is, you know, I hope for a better world.

I hope that humanity is intelligent enough that it's conscious enough to want to preserve itself. And I hope that the people in charge don't want to rule over ashes and that they want to have thriving societies and that they love humanity as much as I do and that they would want it to persist.

And it was part of me that also hopes that there is a God that is in some way divinely guiding these things. And again, that is just a hope that I have.

And in terms of what I can do, like, you know, I can spread awareness and discuss it with people and have it like in my mind when I'm considering elections and things like that.

And I know this is maybe trite. But to me, the thing that gives me solace is just tending to my garden.

This is kind of a stoic idea. But like Mother Teresa says, like if you want to change the world, love your family.

And if every person on earth just loved their family, I do think that the ripple of that. Like think of a, you know, Putin or, you know, Kim Jong Un or Trump.

If they love their family so much, then maybe they would think twice about using these types of weapons.

And maybe they would really consider disarmament because if you love your family and you love your grandkids, you don't want them to live in a world where this is a threat after you're gone.

So I don't know. What do you think about the hope?

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, the hope. So I want to address the hope issue. I just want to make a point about something you said earlier.

I totally agree with everything you said. On the profit motive, I have to think that those people also have children and grandchildren.

And if not children and grandchildren, you know, that they also think that humanity, that it's not just about whatever profit they're making at this very moment.

But it really should be about the future and ensuring a future for humanity. I think in many cases, I think people have, it's the, it's the buying of the nuclear deterrence argument.

I think that's been most detrimental to disarmament, the notion that nuclear weapons keep us safe, that disregards, you know, the what if it fails, right?

What if nuclear deterrence fails? And that disregards these examples of actually we really got lucky and so on.

So I think it's convincing people like that. I think they sleep at night because they think that actually what I'm doing is a good thing because it keeps the United States safe rather than recognizing that this is as you described so beautifully, this threat, the looms over all of us.

I talk a lot about, you know, what because people ask me what they can do. And I think, you know, in your case, you're doing more than plenty, certainly by by raising this to your viewers and listeners and having them be be aware of really where we are and just why this is such an important issue.

So I thank you for that. I think in general for people, it's knowledge. I really do think is power. It's all about learn, learn, learn because when you learn and the more you learn and I can tell you have been interested in this question for about 15 years for some of that time, not as intensely as as I am now.

The last since August of 2022 when I became president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation that just really gave me a new kind of sense and level of responsibility and also opportunities to talk to people and to be in places like the UN and so on.

That has really raised the stakes for this for me, but I can't tell you over this entire time, like I still learn new things about nuclear weapons every single day, like quite literally whether it's the history, whether it's the science, whether it's someone mentioning some policy that I hadn't read about or you know details of a treaty or whatever it might be.

So it's just I mean, I think that it's one of the most exciting things about being a human being is disability to learn and the world is such an interesting place and there's so many things to learn and I don't care if you like learning about history or music or whatever, like just be passionate and learn.

So when it comes to nuclear weapons, people just need to know and learn more so learn, learn, learn.

There are lots of resources out there. My own organization, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we recently released a learning hub that has a lot of resources but there are other organizations and and you know places to go and read and books to read and so on.

Tomb's Day Machine by Dan Ellsberg, Andy Jacobson's nuclear war scenario, people haven't read it.

There are even recent films, well there's the day after which they can watch and you do what you love.

So 1983, there was recently on Netflix a House of Dynamite which kind of has a very similar storyline to Andy's book but nevertheless it's it's absolutely worth people's time.

It's on Netflix, they can watch it, it really kind of puts into perspective this idea that this could happen in a matter of minutes and it kind of plays that you know it's a 19 minute you know time frame plays that from different perspectives and what happens to the people in different places and situations and so on.

So it's learning another thing you know we got to get that democracy back so how do we get democracy back we let our elected officials know that this is an issue important to us people can write to their representatives people can talk to them about it people can write to president Trump.

So I want to praise him for his past statements on the necessity of denuclearization just say president Trump I'm so happy to hear these words from a US president we haven't heard these words.

I am happy to hear this.

Exactly absolutely and and and and praise him you may not agree with him on everything or you may not agree with him on many things or maybe you like everything he does.

I don't care tell him the denuclearization is a great idea how about we wrap up some of these wars first and then we work on how the U.S. and Russia the first step has to be the U.S. and Russia coming down from their 5,000 plus nuclear warheads when everybody else has a couple hundred for example they're not going to come down until U.S. and Russia makes some progress.

So you know letting people in charge know that this once you understand that that this is important to you I think is really one of the key issues another issue is the people you know they're often local initiatives they're cities in this country that saw that you know have back back in the 80s in 1982 if you look at photos.

From the Central Park rally again a million people in Central Park can't you know hard to even imagine you know with these banners carrying banners Vermont towns for a nuclear free you know world like there would just there was engagement in many many many levels local kind of you know town city you know state government efforts.

As well as organizations working on these issues religious you know groups and movements and there's there's just a lot that we could do in some sense organizing in this day and age would be even easier than it was in you know early 1980s

and but what we really need for that is for people's awareness to go way up we really need people to understand what's a stake this is the future of you know all future human generations this is we're not just talking about our children and grandchildren we're talking about no one after that and we need to we need to make sure that that humanity can

I'll last a nuclear age and that we can in some sense put the genie back in the bottle.

Well Ivana thank you so much I know that I told you that this would be a shorter episode but I think I lied we had a wonderful conversation I really appreciate you being here and just yeah using this platform to to share your message truly I'm inspired by your love for humanity and I wish more people had that perspective I think I think humanity is worth fighting for.

Absolutely absolutely thank you for giving me the opportunity and it's really such a pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you so much and if there's anyone watching at home if there's anything that I missed or if there's if you have a legitimate kind of push back to this idea of disarmament I would love to know what you think drop a comment I you know I'll read most of them be civil be nice to each other right you know we're all human beings and yeah maybe if you know if someone has a thoughtful response

you know we can go through it at a different time and read what I would love that that would be actually my favorite I mean this is what I you know

when I'm not advocating for nuclear disarmament I teach college students so I love the back and forth and so I'd be totally down for that thank you.

As I think Aquinas maybe he says that the truth doesn't fear interrogation so if you have a good argument I would love to know what it is just again be civil be thoughtful

and you know through a source in there if someone said it better than you you can just link to that I'll check it out

but thank you guys so much for tuning in thank you Ivana for being here and let's do it again soon.

Thank you for having me absolutely.