Angry Planet - The Science and Terror of Nuclear Weapons

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Joe Cirincione is back on the podcast this week to walk us through the science of nuclear weapons and give us his preliminary thoughts on Oppenheimer.Cirincione is a national security analyst and author with over 40 years of experience. He’s been a congressional staffer, a program director, a philanthropist, an advisor the the State Department and three presidential campaigns. Now, he writes at a substack.He’s recently completed a six part series detaling the history of the nuclear world. Get started on it by clicking below.https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/history-of-the-nuclear-world-partAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Well, so today we are talking with Joe Serentione. And I can't help it. I do like a little bit of the Italian accent that I can't really do. In Italian, it's Chironcone. Chironcone, which is fantastic. I was just in Sicily in Chepaloo, which is the hometown of the Chirdenchone. Oh, really? Yes, yes. So I met some distant relatives, saw streets and stores named Chirdenchone.

So it was a pleasure to see this unusual name, not so unusual in that town. That is so great. That is so great. Yeah, I don't know where my family would have to go to have that experience. So today we're talking with you about, well, nooks, basically nukes. And I know that you wrote something. I want to set people, send people in the right place. You've been writing a series of substack posts, which is at joe-surinciane.

com. And they are about the history of the bomb and also history of nuclear policy. And it's terrific. It comes from your book. See, I'm going to sell your book now, too. Bombscare, the history and future of nuclear weapons. Anyway, it's a great series of posts. Is it just totally spurred by Oppenheimer? Is that what brought it out? Oh, it is. You know, I've always been fascinated by the beginning of the atomic age, by what scientists were discovering in those early years and what they were thinking and why they went to work on the bomb project, what they thought about it right after. And Oppenheimer, of course, just crystallizes

all that and takes that search and presents it as the personal story of the leading figure in those early years, Jay Robert Oppenheimer. And I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm looking forward to seeing it this weekend. But those are the themes that I then explore in this five-part series to help you understand a little more about the science behind it. What is vision? You know, how exactly does this work? What were the scientists thinking? Why did Oppenheimer oppose the hydrogen bomb? What was his objection to that? And why did he fail in his opposition? And those are all themes that I'd looked at over my career, but this gave me an opportunity to really condense them and bring them, bring them to life in a new way. Yeah, I'm, I was sort of surprised by just how

much detail you were able to put in about vision and about how you actually build one of the bombs. And if you can see behind me, I've got a small centrifuge going right now. I'm kidding. You know, just trying to. I was squinting. What? No, that.

I mean, you really just sort of explain, do you mind so that we can help. some of our more, I guess, violent listeners. How do you make a bomb? Oh, oh, well, it's actually fairly simple. And as the scientists told the politicians, there was no secret to making the atomic bomb. In 1939, scientists discovered fission. They've been experimenting with uranium,

the heaviest natural element. It doesn't get bigger than a uranium atom, 92 protons. And they discovered that if they were bombarding it with neutrons, that test tubes would heat up, and that the weight of the resulting mass was a little less than what they put in. And they discovered and realized that the neutrons were splitting the uranium atoms. And that you fire one neutron in and a particular kind of uranium atom, the isotope U235, which in nature only represents a very small part of the elements, the isotopes of uranium. Most of it is U-238, but a very small part, less than 1% is U-235.

And you hit this big heavy atom with a neutron. It does three things. One, and the least interesting thing, is that it splits, and it forms two other, you know, usually krypton and barium. But what's more interesting is that in that fission process, it splits off, two other, on average, two other neutrons, which can hit other nearby uranium 235 atoms. And if you can get those uranium 235 atoms to get close enough together, that's your chain reaction. You start with one neutron, you get two, four, eight, you see where this goes.

And the third part is the real payoff. A little bit of the mass of that atom, that 235 atom, is turned into energy. And if you plug that into Einstein's famous formula, the only formula most of us know, E equals MC squared, M mass times C, the speed of light squared, which is a huge number, you realize that a small amount of M gives you a very large amount of E energy. And that's what the scientists understood. And the whole Manhattan project was to figure out, well, how do we actually do this? How do we get U-235 concentrated from the mass of uranium ore we find, which of course you can hold uranium ore in your hand and nothing happens. It's not going efficient. That's course most of it is 238. So the whole most of the Manhattan project was about

refining the ore to throw, get rid of the U-238 atoms and concentrate it. So you get a concentration of 70% 90% U-235. That's called enrichment. This comes up a lot when we talk about Iran. That's enrichment and then then you get the bomb. That was the biggest part of the project. That was the hardest part of the project. To do that, you had to basically build an industrial facility the size of the American automobile industry just to produce this product.

That's what the Manhattan Project did, not just in Los Alamos, but over in Oak Ridge in Tennessee and then on the plutonium route, the other kind of fissile material plutonium, making that in reactors up at Hanford. That was the industrial part of the project. Then the other science was the bomb design. Okay, now you've got 235 in concentrated form. How do you make a bomb out of it without blowing yourself up? Well, the answer was to separate it into two subcritical masses. So say, you know, what's, that's the original, the original bomb was

about 60 pounds of uranium. So you separate it, let's say, into two 30 pound chunks. And you put one end at a a six-foot-long tube, and you put the other end at the other end of that six-foot-long tube, and you propel one slug into the other. It's usually in a donut shape with the donut hole pulled out, and you propel that, and you propel it fast enough so that you can bring the two things together before the fission reaction blows everything apart. It turns out to be about 1,000 feet per second. You can do that with a regular conventional charge,

and that is your basic gun assembly nuclear bomb. If a terrorist were ever to attack us with a nuclear bomb, that's probably what they would use. It's simple. You can construct it with basic engineering and metallurgy. And that is the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. That was a little boy. That's a uranium bomb. And we knew that design would work so well.

We didn't even test it. The Trinity test that you see in Oppenheimer is the plutonial. root. In the process of enriching the uranium, we created this whole other element, plutonium, which is more fissionable. You get more fission out of the plutonium atoms of the right isotope. And you create that, and that actually is so fissionable, you can't use the gun assembly device. That is, because the plutonium fission goes too fast. It starts to blow apart before you get the whole thing together. When you build a bomb that doesn't work, it's called a fizzle. That's what happens with plutonium. So you had to devise a new technique, and this is what Oppenheimer

spent most of his time on with those scientists. They developed a completely new bomb technique to take, to basically compress a sphere of plutonium into a smaller sphere. Some people talk about compressing a basketball into a baseball or a melon into a golf ball, that kind of thing. And that's actually the size that we're talking about here. And you do that by putting conventional explosions, and you see this vividly in the film, in convex lenses that all the explosive force goes inward, it has to be perfectly timed, and then you can press it all together at the same time, no leaks allowed, and then you get the Trinity test. Then you get the Nagasaki bomb.

That's Fat Boy, that big spherical, distinctive shape. That's how you build an atomic bomb. Well, thanks for that. Is that too much? No, it was great. It's fantastic. I was thinking about the sketches, because, like, Libya's was the gunshot model. And I was somewhere recently hearing somebody lecture about, or maybe I think it was

like Libya and South Africa, we're both looking at that. And seeing all the stuff that was coming out of those countries as those nuclear weapons programs were dismantled and, like, all of their sketches were destroyed. it's interesting to me that the technology has not the basic technology has not changed a whole lot right well it's sort of like

computers we're a lot better at it now they're a lot smaller we use a lot less plutonium in our devices for example the actual amount is classified but it's widely believed to be about two kilograms of plutonium almost all our you know, fission-type devices are plutonium, and they're very, very small, very

tight, very compact. And when we got so good at this, you know, we could fit an atomic bomb into an artillery shell. So we have nuclear artillery shells. And so yes, it all advanced. And, of course, the big controversy, and that's what happens to Oppenheim in the last third of this movie, is that we moved on from atomic fission devices to hydrogen fusion devices, which release energy in a completely different way,

and a much more powerful amount of energy. And these are the real super weapons, in fact, the project was called the super, that we now feel. We don't actually field atomic bombs anymore. The fission devices that we use are the trigger for the fusion reaction in the H-bombs, almost all our weapons, almost all the Russian weapons, almost all the Chinese weapons. These are all hydrogen bombs that can be two, three, ten, a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

Can you explain the difference in the science between those original bombs and the supers that we have now, these hydrogen bombs that Teller loved so much? Yeah. Right. That's a teller loved it. But almost as soon as we develop, we realize we could do fission. and as the Los Alamos project advanced, they realized that they had created a source of energy

that could do fusion. Fusion is the basic energy force of the universe. That's what happens in our sun and all stars. That what you're doing is you're using gravity in the stars pushes the lightest element known, hydrogen, just one proton, often one neutron and one electron. on, you're pushing that together so hard that you overcome the electromagnetic resistance that keeps atoms apart. The reason we have bodies and solids and we're not all gas, you know, we cannot

be pushed together. You know, where gravity overcomes that electromagnetic force and fuses the atoms together into a substance that now has two protons, that's helium. And that's what goes on in the sun and most stars. This fusion process releases much more energy than the fission process. And gives rise to all life in the universe. This is the energy source that scientists realized they could now tap because they had a source of heat and radiation that could sort of recreate the gravity experience that goes on inside stars. And so they wanted to develop that. Oppenheimer said, no, we don't need to do that. Teller insisted all along that that's all he wanted to do, that that was the bomb we should be building. He was kind of isolated in the Los Alamos Manhattan

project. But after the war, he succeeded in lobbying the government to go ahead with this super program. Oppenheimer and other leading scientists violently ejected to the hydrogen bomb. So the hydrogen bomb would be something that would have a small amount of hydrogen isotope, usually deuterium, and it would be sit next to a little atomic bomb. The atomic bomb would be the trigger. That goes off first. The heat and radiation and pressure. compresses that deuterium isotope combination together, gives you the fusion. And instead of getting, say, a Hiroshima blast of 15 kilotons, our first hydrogen bomb, the first one we tested in the Bravo test of 52, that was 15 million tons, 15 million tons of

energy. So 15 kilotons, Hiroshima, 15 million tons, 15 million tons, that's the first. hydrogen bomb, you can see a thousand times more powerful. And the scientist said this has no useful military purpose. What would you do with this weapon except kill large numbers of people? They called it a weapon of genocide. And they said, we should not build this. We should talk to the Soviets. We should explain that we could build this, but we don't want to. Let's have a mutual ban on this kind of weapon. You don't want humankind going there because if you do, there will not be security. You cannot be secure in a world with those kinds of bombs. The only way to be, and there is no

defense to those weapons, the only defense, the only security you can get is to go to a world where you make war unlikely or impossible, and all on our energy should be devoted to that task. That is what they call the General Advisory Committee, the eight scientists advising the atomic energy commission, which you see in the film headed by this guy Louis Strauss, that's what their scientific report was. Lewis Strauss and the Cold Warriors of that period so hated that message. And this included Truman that they just iced out those scientists. They pushed him to the side.

And this is why Lewis Strauss went after Oppenheimer and why he forced him to go through this humiliating, like Star Chamber process where they stripped him of his security clearances because it was association with leftists and socialist back in the 20s and 30s. And they stripped him and humiliated him in order to neuter his voice, in order to isolate the scientists so that they could go ahead with this bomb program, which we did in spades. We went nuclear nuts in the 1950s.

We went from about 200 atomic bombs in 1949 to 20,000 mostly hydrogen bombs. by the time John of Kennedy becomes president in the election in 1960. So you can see we went and we used it for all kinds of things. We did build the nuclear artillery shells and nuclear depth charges and nuclear landmines and rockets and everything you could possibly fit a nuclear warhead to. We did. And then the Soviets followed our lead. They were many times behind us in the 1950s but caught up around 1970, finally.

And that's the arms rate. that we wrestled with in those first few decades of the nuclear age. And you talk about the idea that what the United States did ahead helped prove, oh, this can be done. Oh, absolutely. You know, I mean, we were actually just, because so much of it seems like it's just conceptual, not difficult. Right.

That's exactly right. And this is what Oppenheimer and the other scientists were telling the politicians, the military. They're saying, look, there is no secret. I mean, this is really engineering. And we did it because we had the biggest industrial machine in the world in World War II. And we're the only country that was actually capable of engineering the bomb. But many other countries understood the science behind it.

And once we proved it could be done, and once we had a nuclear monopoly, something that Strauss, for example, and others were saying was going to last for decades, we thought there was, you know, we could get the Soviets to do whatever we wanted, Because in the end, they were going to have to agree because we had the bomb and they didn't. Well, Stalin understood this. And he told a scientist, you know, quote, build me the bomb. Ask for whatever you need. You will get it.

The symmetry has been broken. It must be restored. And then four years later, 1949, they blow up their first atomic bomb. And again, Oppenheimer and the scientists are saying, see, we told you so. Now let's have serious talks. And there were some efforts to have talks. It isn't like the U.S. was, you know, was, was, was, was stif arming the Soviet. Stalin was also stiff arming us.

So those mutual hostilities of the Cold War, you know, and stymied efforts to negotiations. But the U.S. really didn't believe that the Soviets could be our equal in atomic matters. And they really thought we could outgun them. And so they, they, they, when that's why Truman in, in, in 1952, when Oppenheimer comes to see him and make his case against the hydrogen bomb, asks Oppenheimer one question, can the Soviets build the H-bomb? And when Oppenheimer says yes, knowing that there's no secret to this either, Oppenheimer says, then we have to build it. And it was a political decision. You know, he didn't want to look weak. He didn't want to look like a failure, especially as elections were approaching.

and he just misses Oppenheimer in seven minutes. It's a seven minute meeting. And this you see in the film where Truman refers to Oppenheimer as a fried baby scientist because Oppenheimer anguished over his role in building the bomb to begin with. He said famously, I have blood on my hands. And then the H-bomb program goes ahead. We detonate the H-bomb in 1953, the Soviets detonate won in 1954, and the arms race is off and running.

And the scientists are left on the sidelines, you know, saying, don't do this. And they're just run right over. Really, at that point, you had a military nuclear complex that just took off and has never looked back. We have to wait to the 70s to Richard Nixon before you start getting the kinds of arms control agreements. The scientists were urging back in the 1940s. And really to Ronald Reagan in the late 19. 1980s, when you get the real kind of disarmament treaties, when we actually start cutting the arsenals,

and that's why we climb down from the 70,000 nuclear weapons, the U.S. and the Russians had in the 1980s, down to approximately 12,000, 12,500 nuclear weapons in the world today. Still way too many, but many fewer than the excesses of the Cold War era. All of this could have been avoided if we had just listened to Oppenheimer. Well, you talk in your pieces about civilian control, and this is really fascinating to me. You said that essentially Truman had a role of saying no. And by saying, no, don't drop the bomb. He can then insert himself and now you have civilian control.

I'm trying to think of the idea of not having civilian control, that the military, you know, we don't. The military doesn't ask the president, can we use a tank, right? So are we saying that they were thinking they weren't going to have to ask to use a nuke? Oh, absolutely. Los Alamos was a military project. You know, we had some pictures of Oppenheimer

in Army uniforms where he looks pretty foolish. That's perhaps why I didn't wear them very much. But, you know, and there's the early history, Leslie Groves, the brilliant general, who was the real, you know, was the organizer of the Manhattan Project. He's the guy who built the Pentagon in like a year and a half, the biggest office building in the world.

He just does it. And he does such a good job. He's given this project, which he initially didn't want, but he's the one who puts everything together. As my friend Robert Norris chronicles in his biography of Leslie Groves, he was the essential man for the Manhattan Project, the man that made the trains run,

made everything work. He thought he was in charge of all this. And like the rest of the military, he thought this was going to be a military weapon under military control. And when you get to the point of the decision to drop the bomb, there's books about that, there's movies about their articles, it really wasn't much of a decision. This thing was the wheels were in motion.

This whole thing had been planned for several years. Once the military realized we could build the weapon, they started planning on when they were going to drop it and how they were going to drop it. And it turns out this weapon originally conceived of as a deterrent to Hitler, Remember, the reason we raised to build this bomb is we thought the Nazis were going to build nuclear weapons. And we had to have a counter to them. We had to deter the Nazis from using this. We never, in the beginning, 40, 41, 42, never thought we were going to use this weapon.

It was too horrible to use. We could only deter the Nazi use of it. But by the time we actually built it, the Nazis had been defeated. It really was no need for this weapon. And in fact, some of the scientists left the Manhattan Project at that point, saying it was immoral to proceed. But for most of them, particularly Oppenheimer, it was so close. They just got caught up and they thought, well, maybe this will have a role in convincing Japan to surrender. They went ahead and built it, went ahead and tested it.

And by then, the military had already been killing civilians in vast numbers that the idea of using one bomb to kill, say, 100,000 civilians was no longer as horrific as it was in 1940 or 1941, because Curtis LeMay, ahead of the bombing campaign in Japan, had already conducted 60 firebombing raids on most Japanese cities that it killed one million Japanese. So we were already doing this. So for the military, the atomic bomb was just another bomb, a more efficient bomb that they would control and they would decide. And in fact, Truman never actually decided. to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. This is a military decision overseen by the Secretary of War,

Henry Stimson, and it's just really to pick out the targets, which one should we bomb first. So he doesn't approve Hiroshima. He just doesn't stop it. He doesn't approve Nagasaki. He just doesn't stop it. But after he learns that there was a third city that they're planned and the wheels are in motion to do it again, he stop. He intervenes. And he says, no, we're not going to do this in his memoirs and his close advisors say Truman was racked with the thought of all those kids dying, as Truman says. And he couldn't stand the thought of killing another 100,000 civilians. And he stops the project. And that begins the process of civilian control. And this goes on for several years where it becomes clear that from now on, no decision to use the weapons

or deploy these weapons can be made without the president's explicit approval. And that continues. to this day. All right, Angry Planet listeners, want to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. Let's get back to that nuclear science and terror. What? Looking back at the 1950s and 1960s, mostly the 1950s from 2023, in advances in tests of nuclear weapons, it all seems so insane. You talked about Castle Bravo, this, this 1954 test where they think it's going to be a five megatone. It ends up being a 15 megaton.

Enormous triple the amount that they thought was going to be one of the largest nuclear detonations that's ever occurred. We build, they build Davy Crockett, you know, throwing a nuclear weapon at the end of a rocket launcher. We create, like you said, those artillery cannons, those enormous guns that they were tooling around in Europe. for a while. And the British are working on the landmines, and they've got a plan where they're going to put the landmines in the, I think it's along the Rhine. So in case the Russians come through the folder gap,

they can just blow it up with these enormous atomic landmines. Like, looking, like, all of this stuff is so world-endingly crazy to us now. why, what was the headspace? Were we that afraid of the Soviet Union? Like, why did we think that all of this was a good idea? Yes, we were that afraid of the Soviet Union and that, and also convinced that nuclear power could give us American hegemony over global affairs. that after, you know, we think of the aftermath of World War II in very sort of benign terms, like the Marshall Plan, and we rebuilt the people we had just conquered. You know, we didn't enslave the Japanese or the Germans. We help them, we create democratic societies, right?

And that's all true. And that's sort of the best instincts of Americans. But we also had these other instincts. And in the movie, you could see it in Lewis Strauss and the, and the Cold War mentality that really thought that we were in an existential battle for control of the world with the Soviet Union. And Stalin was intent on conquering Europe. And if we let down our guard, that's exactly what we would do. We now know, I mean, with high certainty, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and access to all their records, that the Soviets were in a dire state.

There was no chance that they were going to be able to or even wanted to invade Western Union. Europe. They did, they had definitely active political operations and some military operations, for example, putting down revolts in Hungary and 56 and Czechoslovakia, et cetera, but not a full fast conquest. And they couldn't have done it. But we thought they could. And because we had these images of the Soviet Army of World War II size, it was greatly reduced during the Cold War, we thought that the only way we could counter that was by using nuclear weapons. So we had to use nuclear weapons for battlefield purposes to block the Soviet tank divisions that would otherwise stream through the folder gap and over on West Germany, France, etc.

You know, there's no question about it that the Soviets were, as Reagan said, you know, evil. you know, and what they were doing in their country was evil. And there was, in some sense, they were an empire that they controlled Eastern and Central Europe, but they never had those kind of global domination views that we thought they had. If anything, that was more us. I mean, that's how we used our alliance system, you know, to have, what do we have now, 750 bases around the world? We're the ones with global reach.

We're the ones with, you know, a global, military power so that when we talk about the threat from China now, what we're talking about is whether China can pierce the sort of military containment net that we've put in the Pacific to stop them from expanding. I mean, that's our threat. We're not talking about the Chinese invading Long Island. We're talking about whether they can invade the island of Taiwan, 100 miles off their coast. And you see some of that now in the way we exaggerate the Chinese threat. Well, that was, you know, in spades over the Soviets. And domestically, it played out in the Red Skares, in McCarthyism, in the kinds of things

Lewis Strauss was doing to Hoppenheimer. He said, you know, he was opposing Oppenheimer because Oppenheimer was opposing the bomb program. And he wanted to neuter him. But he didn't say that. The excuse he used was that he thought or said that Oppenheimer was actually. acting effectively as a Soviet agent, that he was transferring secrets, national security secrets to the Soviets. And this would undermine our national security. And in the early 1950s, that was an extremely effective argument. And it worked. It worked. You know, Oppenheimer ends his life in disgrace.

Not just his security clearance is stripped, but his reputation basically ruined by this red scare, as you say, Matt, by this gross exaggeration. of the threat we faced and therefore a justification for the measures we had to take internationally and domestically. It also makes sense of something else to me, everything that we've talked about so far today, which is actually only tangentially related, it would seem now the space race. I'm thinking about people being so scared and then having Sputnik, you know, actually orbiting over your head. That must have actually, I mean, that must have been a real true. trigger for people. I mean, there had to be some reason, I guess, that they put

trillions of dollars into space. But I mean, I mean, that's really what it's about, right? So they, so, you know, I was alive then. I went out of my front lawn and would watch Sputnik in its orbit. You could, you could see it. You know, if you, if you, it would have

a decent pair of binoculars. I was a kid. I wasn't not that old, but I could see it, you know, it was launched, what was it? 59, I think, 57. I can't remember. 57, I think. 57. So, um, so, um, um, so. And that was a shock to America. And I remember being shocked and my parents being shocked and talking about this.

Now, again, we grossly exaggerated what they'd be able to do and how quickly they'd be able to do it. But it did mean that if they could put a satellite into orbit, they could put a warhead into an orbit and bring it down on the United States. That was true. It's just that it took them about 10 years to get to really an effective. military capability, it took us much less. And we started racing both militarily to build missiles that could do it and the space race. So we used the domestic program, the science of launching satellites or launching people as a way of developing the technologies that we would then use for our military programs. And you know, you know, whether you watch the Apple

program for all mankind or you just... Oh, I enjoyed that. Yeah. I enjoyed that. Yeah. I didn't enjoy Yeah, yeah. So you can see that it really does capture the spirit of the times of what we thought was at stake. And it was it was sort of, you know, that was at a peaceful competition? Well, yes, but it had decidedly military overtones and implications. Peaceful, but we did talk about nuking the moon as a show of force to bring it all back together. That's right. Speaking of nuclear nuts, people forget how crazy some of the ideas were and that were advanced at very high. levels of the government. I mean, in some ways, you know, when you look back at that area, you can see the insanity of a nuclear policy much more clearly than you can right now. For example, when I tell people that the Congressional Budget Office has recently come out with their estimate of our current nuclear program, and we're going to spend about $75 billion a year for the

next 10 years on brand new nuclear weapons, a new nuclear sub with missiles in it, with new missiles, a new nuclear-armed bomber, new land-based weapons, et cetera. We're going to spend $75 billion a year. They don't really know what to make of that. Is that too much? Is that enough? Do we have to do that? But when you look back then, you can see the dynamics much more clearly, and I'm telling you, it is exactly the same dynamics now. Generals are coming up to Capitol Hill and using exactly the same logic for why we need to build these new weapons as Lewis Strauss did in the 1950s. We had race-faced an existential threat. Then it was from the Soviets.

Now it's from the Chinese. If we don't have these weapons, they will conquer us, you know. And we can do this, so we must do this. No, there's no chance of negotiating limits on these weapons. Negotiations are weakness that would, you know, that is appease. we can only get peace through strength. Same arguments. Looking back, and this is what I hope the Oppenheimer film will hope audiences see,

particularly that half of the American population that's under the age of 40, that never went through this Cold War, that never stood on their front lawn and looked up at the first satellite. That never experienced any of this. You can see it, and for at least three hours you can experience it in the movie theater, and maybe you'll see what they were trying to tell us, what the scientists were trying to warn us. As Oppenheimer said, the U.S. and the Soviets were like two scorpions in a bottle. You know, we could kill our opponent, but only at the risk of our own death.

That's what nuclear weapons represent for us today. If we use them, it's almost certainly to trigger a reaction from the other nuclear-armed opponent that would lead to the mutual destruction of both sides. I was thinking about you. No, Matthew, go ahead. I was thinking about you yesterday because it was in a pre-briefing ahead of the the NPT non-proliferation treaty discussions that are about to start going on. And to kind of get firsthand from someone that's been in the

from someone that's been in the room since 1987, that things are as bad as they have ever been in his lifetime right now during these nuclear treaty discussions, that the last few years people have essentially, like countries that have nuclear weapons have essentially stopped talking to each other about them. A lot of these treaties are in shreds. And every time they sit down at the table,

the conversation becomes about people getting mad at each other, countries getting mad at each other about things that are not nukes as an excuse to not talk about nuclear weapons. And I was wondering if you could just weigh in on like the current state

of arms control or lack thereof. Flatlined. Arms control is flatlined. You know, we're in the period where if this, if arms control was a person, we'd be going for the paddles. you know, we'd be looking for some way to resuscitate this, this dead body that was no longer beating.

The arms control mechanisms are in place, so the body is still there. So we have these meetings, you know, we have these mechanisms. I know personally, I know dozens of State Department officials who are very good at their job, who are working very hard to keep this thing alive. But I don't get too far with this. So there's a weak pulse. It is a weak pulse. And because nobody's talking to each other, there are no negotiations right now over reducing nuclear weapons.

And we haven't been at that stage since Nixon started the assault talks, strategic arms limitation talks in the early 1970s. We've been in pretty constant dialogue with our nuclear adversaries one way or another since then. We're not doing it now. So, you know, in my last article on the substack newsletter, I give a matter. a chart of the rise, this mountain of nuclear weapons we built, Peking at about 70,000 in the 80s, and coming down. And if you look at that last, you know, a few years, it's a flat line. The reductions have stopped, and we're stuck at this 12,500 figure, and it's not going down. And every one of the nine nuclear armed nations are building more weapons. You know, newer

weapons, some replacing just their current arsenals, others like India or Pakistan or China, adding to them, or North Korea even, in the tens of nuclear weapons. And I don't see anything that's going to reverse that. I mean, we're really in a crisis period, and that's why some people are ringing the alarm bells, that we're in a dire state. And as you say, the dominant political narrative is that it's the other guy's fault. We're not talking because the Russians refuse to talk to us, which by the way is true. I mean, you know,

we would talk to Putin about arms. He won't talk to us. But the Chinese, you know, there are avenues there. If there's going to be a breakthrough, that's where I think it has to come. Unless Putin is so vigorously defeated by the Ukrainians

that he is forced from power and a new regime comes in that will talk to us about weapons. You know, those are the kind of things that might be able to break through. But we are in a tough position. We're basically trying to keep the mechanisms alive in the hope that sometime in the next few years, there could be a political breakthrough that can get these talks started again. Because I'm telling you, just like Oppenheimer warned us back then and Einstein, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warned us then, if you don't do something about this, these weapons will kill us. You've got to be a real optimist to think that you can keep 12,000 nuclear weapons in fallible human hands indefinitely.

and something terrible won't happen. Something terrible will happen. Matthew, you want to call it? Yeah, no, I think that again, as we like to say here, we like to end on down notes and warnings. And I think that that's the place to end. Well, I'm sorry to be so grim, but I do think it's grim.

There's more hoping for climate change than there is for arms control at this point. It's a grim topic. And it's greatly... I appreciate the clarity, though. Really appreciate the clarity. I mean, I think you explained it to me in a way. I wasn't thinking of it. Well, thank you for having me on, and thank you for your great substack.

I just subscribed this morning. I didn't know that there was a substack that went along with the podcast. I guess I hadn't been listening closely enough. But now I'm subscribed to your substack as well. Thanks, guys, for everything you do. And thanks for that wonderful Ukraine program you did last week. I just listened to it on a bike ride. yesterday. That's a terrific service that you're doing, letting us know what's going on

on the humanitarian front lines in Ukraine. Thank you so much. That one was all Jason. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell was created by myself and Jason Fields. I like the show. If you really like us, AngryPlanetpod.com, AngryPlanet.substack.com. $9 a month. It helps us keep the show going. Get you commercial-free episodes of the show, get you bonus episodes that we put out. We really appreciate every single one of our subscribers. You guys really

help us in the dark times. We can do the show a long, long time. We really love it. We love having these conversations. More about Ukraine next week. We're looking into some of the Africa situation. I'm probably going to get Jake Hanrahan back on here to talk about some of what he's been doing.

He's got a good new show about sad oligarchs. Thank you all so much. And we will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.