Camp Gagnon - Nuclear War Expert: LIFE 1 Week After The Bomb | Ivana Hughes

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/Nuclear Expert Ivana Hughes is the Associate Director of the K1 Project and Center for Nuclear Studies. She visited the tent to discuss how Russia, the US, and China are 72 minutes from the end of the world and how nuclear war is the end of the world as we know it. Hope you enjoy and welcome to camp 🏕️Edited and produced by Christos PapastefanouS/O to our sponsors Morgan & Morgan, Bespoke, Marek Health & Bluechew...

We are one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation. You really believe it's that. I really believe that it could happen. Ivanaugh Hughes, Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecture of Chemistry. $2 trillion to modernize weapons that we plan to never use. And if we did use them, it'd be the end of the world as we know it. If there was some type of nuclear event, how devastating would it be for the way that Americans know life to me? It's as devastating as you can possibly imagine.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the equivalent of like a musket gun compared to, you know, a tank that we have today. Yes, those were essentially toys. An attack of that sort would be like having wildfire and an earthquake and a radiation accident followed by the concept called nuclear winter. The soot in the atmosphere would block incoming sunlight and the temperatures would drop dramatically. And I don't know why I got teary about that. When we talk about nuclear war today, it is the end of the world. I guess the first question, and maybe the most important question of all,

how close are we to nuclear war? It could happen today. That's pretty close. It could happen today. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen next week. It could happen in a month. It could happen in a year.

You really believe it's that image. I really believe that it could happen. Now, what is the, you know, can we quantify the probability of it happening? And there are people who do this and try to do this. Of course, we haven't had use of a nuclear weapon in the way that we think of using nuclear weapons like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for nearly 80 years. So these, you know, quantifications are perhaps difficult, but there's no doubt that we are looking at something that is simply, the probability of it happening is definitely not zero. And so you can ask what is, you know, what's the reasonable estimate of that probability?

And so scientists do something they call order of magnitude estimates, right? So is something, am I talking about 1% or 10% or 0.1%? There's someone whom I know and respect greatly. His name is Marty Hellman. He's a professor emeritus, actually, at Stanford University of Electrical Engineering. He was involved in the kind of research that cryptography research. So someone who's very quantitative person, it has been. interested and really concerned about sort of global security issues and nuclear weapons.

And so he goes through a very careful calculation of an estimate of what the probability is that we would be in a nuclear war in any given year. So, and he comes to a number, and this was, this is his number from before the Ukraine war, that the probability is 1% per year. Now, 1% per year may not seem like a lot. No, we're likely to be okay for another year, right? But when you look at these what we call cumulative probabilities, right? If it's 1% per year, year on, you know, year in and out, 1% this year, 1% next year, 1% the year after.

And if you think of, let's say, a child born today, and you think that their life expectancy is, let's say, 80 years, there's more than a 50% probability that they will die or survive nuclear war. And that's really, really scary. And I should just add that Marty estimates the 1% per year. And I can, if you're interested, I can talk a little more about why that number is opposed to, of the other possible numbers. But Mardi says that that has certainly gone up since the Ukraine war started in 2022. And in fact, we had,

there was a New York Times investigation just in the last few months talking about the way in which the White House thought that the probability on nuclear weapon use in, I believe, fall of 20, was 50% or more, which is really, really, really scary. Wow. Okay.

I want to unpack that a little bit, but first I kind of want to set what the stakes are. In my mind, as someone who's never seen war, I've lived in a fairly peaceful time in human history. Yes. The concept of a nuclear war is so foreign to me. It's so beyond what I can really comprehend. And I think that there's even a little part of me that says, even if something like this were to happen, you know, like if something like we saw in Hiroshima or Nagasaki happened again, heaven forbid, it never affected me. My, you know, I had grandparents that were alive during that time.

They didn't even notice, you know, things like Chernobyl and Fukushima happen. It doesn't affect me at all. If there was some type of nuclear event or some type of nuclear war that were to happen, how devastating would it be for my personal lifestyle and for the way that Americans know life to be? It's as devastating as you can possibly imagine. It's truly the end of the world as we know it. It's the end of human civilization undoubtedly. So let me unpack what I mean by that. Hey, what's up, guys?

Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations, and it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much.

Let's get back to it. In 1945, when we used two bombs, first we tested a weapon in July in New Mexico. The bomb was called Trinity. And then after that, just three weeks later, we used one weapon in Hiroshima in an attack on Hiroshima, one weapon in an attack on Nagasaki three days later. Those weapons were the equivalent of 15 and 20 kilotons. Now, what does that mean? What it means is that when we have a nuclear weapon, we talk about its explosive yield in terms of how much TNT or chemical explosive you would need to have to actually generate the same explosive yield as the nuclear weapon has.

So 15 kiloton bomb used in the attack on Hiroshima would mean that you would need 15,000 tons of TNT to get that explosive yield. Right. I don't know if you remember you're younger than me, But I was actually, it was my very first year in this country. It was the spring of 1995. Sorry, the spring, yes, the spring of 1995. And it was Oklahoma City bombing.

Do you remember that? It was a government building that was destroyed. No, a whole government building. And it was 169 people died, something on that order. The building was enormous. And it was the person, his name was Timothy McVey, had filled a rider truck, basically like a small van, with chemical explosives. And that was two and a half tons of TNT. That was actually chemical explosives.

Of course, it wasn't a nuclear weapon. And it destroyed this building, killed, you know, 170 people, including children in the daycare center, destroyed buildings in a 16. block radius. So there was a lot of damage. I forget the exact numbers of the millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in sort of economic damage. There was two and a half tons of a chemical explosive. And when you go to Hiroshima, you're looking at 15 kilotons, so 6,000 times more energy yield from a single bomb. That's what's so crazy about nuclear weapons. But you're right, Hiroshima, you know, wasn't the end of the world, obviously. In 1945, we had those three weapons and we tested one and used two of them. That's sort of the terminology we use, but,

you know, testing and using. But of course, even when you're testing, you're using. So anyway, but that was it. There was not going to be a response. It wasn't like Japan or Germany or or anybody else had nuclear weapons. What we now have is around the world, about 12,500 nuclear warheads. And these are not actually the warheads that are equivalent to the bombs used in 1945. These are much more powerful.

So what we're looking at is destruction of if you just take, you know, attacks on, let's say it's a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, in which both of them use all of their currently deployed. These are on hair trigger alert. You like press a button and they just go. So the U.S. has about 1770 of those and Russia has just about the same number, just actually slightly smaller number. How many? 1700 nuclear warheads. 1,700.

Right, 1,700. Nukes. Nukes. Ready to go. And with targets and everything. And these are all of them are bigger than... And all, it's so, so yes, let's call it all of them are bigger and some are much, much bigger. So for example, China has, so let me back up.

The U.S. at one point, developed. developed hydrogen bombs, which work on a different process than the bombs that were developed in 1945, which we call them atomic bombs, and they work on the process of fission. Hydrogen bombs work based on the process of fusion. And that process turns out to allow you to make even more powerful bombs. And so when the U.S. first developed hydrogen bombs, one of the bombs that we tested in 1954, this was done actually in the Marshall Islands, was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. So now we're talking about Oklahoma City bombing.

Then you go up 6,000 times for Hiroshima. And now you go up another thousand. So you're at six million Oklahoma City. bomb equivalence, right? So just unimaginable. That test, it's called the Bravo test. It was done in Bikini atoll. That mushroom clouds, of course, there's the iconic mushroom cloud of a nuclear

weapon explosion, that mushroom cloud was 25 miles high, 60 miles wide. Can you imagine something in the sky, 25 miles high? Wow. I mean, how tall is like a skyscraper? Like half a mile? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what do we have?

So we have the 1776 feet, right? Yeah. Is, yeah, so less than half a mile. 25 miles high. 25 miles high. Wow. Mushroom cloud. And so we have many, many more weapons.

And many of them are incredibly powerful. Russia currently, so that bomb, Brava bomb was 50. 15 megatons. The Soviets tested something that was 50 megatons, so more than 3,000 times equivalents of the Hiroshima bomb. So completely, I mean, just insane, right? And then in current arsenals, my understanding is that it's actually China, which has a far smaller arsenal than the U.S. and Russia do, but it has some very powerful weapons. It has weapons. There are five megatoms. So that's 333 Hiroshima bombs in one weapon. In one weapon. And so what we are talking about, so let me just go back to the scenario of U.S. and Russia.

And let's say it's no one else. U.S. and Russia use about one third of their current arsenal. and you have 360 million deaths that are instantaneous, basically, that are from the impact of the bomb, that are from, you know, fires and blast, and, you know, within a certain radius of these explosions, everything would actually be vaporized. It's not even like there would be anything, you know, left. And then you have...

And that's 360 million. And those are the lucky ones. And those are the lucky ones, right? And then you have hundreds of millions of people dying from radiation impact, from, you know, collapse of civilization. I mean, one of the first things that would happen is we wouldn't actually have any electricity. And, you know, it's not going to be easy to find food. 360 million would die from the initial. die from just the explosion of the United States?

450? 330. So the entire population of the United States, hypothetically, in terms of total number? Not necessarily. So the war scenario I'm describing with 360, it's a lot of people. It would also, Russia would not just attack the United States.

It would also, Russian missiles are pointed at European capitals as well. So that includes people in the U.S., people in Europe and people in Russia. But just in terms of total scope, it would be the population of the United States. Yes, slightly bigger. Yeah. Okay, so just could you go back and even just unpack that story a little more? So like what would have to happen for these missiles to go off? Would Putin have to be at, would there have to be an American attack on Russia?

Would Putin have to consult with people within his cabinet? Would he be able just to push the button? Is this a situation where there's like two keys and two people have to do it? What are the details of that scenario unfolding? Tell me the whole hypothetical. Yeah. So here in the United States, the president has sole authority. This is the whole thing about, they call it the football, right?

But the briefcase that goes around wherever the president is and the president has access to the launch codes for nuclear weapons. And in Russia, it turns out Putin is also able to launch nuclear weapons. He doesn't require anyone to approve that decision. And that's true here in the United States too. Now, when you say launch codes, we always hear this in movies. Yes. What does that mean? That just means like you literally, you're basically choosing, I think, in the United States,

It's like there's like a black book. They literally call it a black book, which has code, which has different scenarios. So and then launch codes, you sort of punch in the AIA that correspond to a particular scenario. So say you want all of your, you know, deployed nuclear weapons to go to Russia or you want 82 to go to North Korea or whatever. whatever you might be choosing as your option for nuclear war. Wow. And these nuclear war plans have been in the making since we acquired nuclear weapons. And someone named Dan Ellsberg, I can talk a little bit about him in a moment.

But Dan Ellsberg was ended up being a peace activist. in a disarmament activist, he was the person who released the Pentagon papers in 1970, which led to the end of the Vietnam War. But Dan was also involved in the 60s in nuclear war planning. So he had access to highly classified information. That's why he had access to Pentagon papers to actually be able to release them. but he called the policies of the nuclear weapon states, but the United States in particular,

he called these policies dizzingly insane and immoral. Because for decades, they have meant that we were ready to kill hundreds of millions of people, civilians, clearly innocent civilians. And in fact, at the time in 1960, the war planning for what was then called general war was such that if the U.S. thought it was being attacked by Russia or was actually being attacked by Russia or decided to attack Russia, it wouldn't, or Soviet Union, it wouldn't have just attacked the Soviet Union, it would have attacked both the Soviet Union and China. My understanding is that's no longer the case.

But at the time, it was like, well, if we're going to go into this general war, we're going to attack both countries. And in fact, some of the plans at that time included that you would use one nuclear warhead on every single town in the Soviet Union. They had more than 25,000 people. Every single town. That was a part of the actual plan. That was part of the actual plan. I know. I mean, that is unthinkably destructive.

More than 25,000? I know. Yeah. As long as the town had more than 25,000 people, it was a target. Wow. I mean, you could understand Moscow, right? Like, this is like a major capital and there's government and there's military and they probably have nuclear warheads there. Like you can understand that from a military strategy perspective.

25,000. Like, I'm trying to think of cities in America with 25,000. This is small. Yeah, everything, everything. For Moscow, the plan was to use 40 megatons of energy yield, so obviously multiple bombs. 40 megatons, the Brava bomb that I described, was 15 megatons. So three times as much, more than three times as much, or about a little less than, sorry, a little less than three times, the energy yield of the Bravo bomb just for Moscow.

And who developed this policy? The United States government. I mean, this has been... It's like Secretary of Defense? Is this like even deeper? Is this people that are not on the record? Like, yeah, some of this... That's just freezing.

Yeah, some of this, I mean, the current... So I'm talking about the war plans that have been declassified or, you know, released in some way. We don't know what. our current foreplanning looks like, right? Now, could you say that that's preemptive to say, hey, Russia, if you even think about pointing a missile at us, we will destroy. They point missiles at us.

I don't like that. Okay. Well, if you dare to even touch the button of that missile, we will destroy every single city in your entire country. Does that, is that the thinking here? Yes. You just described the logic of nuclear deterrence. and that has been the prevailing logic for decades.

And the logic is that, oh, they won't dare attack us because if they do, we will destroy them as well. The problem with that logic is that no one has the answer to what happens if that logic fails. What is plan B if, you know, thinking that, oh, no, Putin would never send his nuclear weapons our way because we can send our nuclear weapons his way. If that, if that, and it's not just that kind of like I know you're attacking me and I'm responding.

It's that we could literally, this could start with an accident. It could start with a misunderstanding. It could start with someone just simply. having some bad information on a computer screen. And the problem is, and this, there's a famous quote from just recently, 2022 of the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez, who says, we are one accident,

one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation. And that is true. And what we also know is that throughout the decades that we've had these weapons, and especially during the Cold War, there have been numerous accidents. Literally, nuclear warheads being dropped off of planes, you know, by accident. Nuclear submarines, a U.S. and a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear weapons crashing into one another. there are 50 nuclear warheads at the bottom of the ocean today, today, and we can't even recover

them, right? But it's almost the fact that we're still here and that these weapons haven't destroyed our planet is pretty much a miracle. And the question is, how long can that miracle last? How long can we survive under the present circumstances? And, you know, one of the things that I try to do is say, you know, we've got to shorten the amount of time for these weapons on the planet as fast as we can. We've got to eliminate them. There is no, there can be no justification for starting a nuclear war and destroying the planet.

So let me go back. You asked me, what would that look like, right? So 360 million people die from the attacks. But what would provoke that? Like, I'm curious if you have a likely scenario or something that seems like somewhat reasonable. So right now, there's a book that's out called Nuclear War, A Scenario, is by any writer, investigative journalist, Annie Jacobson. It's an excellent book. one of the things that's most striking about that book

is that it goes through a nuclear war scenario that basically lasts 72 minutes, 72 minutes from the U.S. noticing something on a radar screen thinking that there's an intercontinental ballistic missile, possibly carrying a nuclear warhead, possibly coming our way, and 72 minutes. till the end of the world, as we know it.

Her scenario involves North Korea, a rogue state, just attacking the United States out of the blue. But again, I think in the, I'm, not that I'm not concerned about North Korea, I'm concerned about every single weapon, including our own, right? I'm concerned, it's not like, oh, well, if we start the nuclear war, it's okay. It's like not going to be okay, no matter how it starts. With the U.S. and Russia currently with Ukraine and what's happening with Ukraine and the fact that this really is, you know, in some sense, however you want to describe it, a war in which obviously Russia is a nuclear weapon state is participating in this war.

Then there's NATO on the other side with the United States backing Ukraine. So it's, you know, and you can imagine scenarios in the fog of war of one or the other side thinking that it's being attacked with a nuclear weapon. And it's not even just thinking Russian leadership has repeatedly alluded to the possible use of a nuclear weapon. And what we do know is that if one is used, it's not like we think like, oh, okay, they'll use one, they will be like Hiroshima and then they'll all be over. It's that because we have so many and because the nuclear war planning is such on all sides, it wouldn't just end with one. It would lead to this full blown out nuclear war. And then you have all these deaths from the explosions. You then end up having this collapse of civilization.

At the same time, radiation, so this is also what's so different about nuclear weapons. Now you can have radiation killing people, even the ones who survived. And then on top of it all, there's probably the scariest thing about nuclear weapons. There's a concept called nuclear winter. And what nuclear winter is, is the idea that because these nuclear explosions would essentially lead to widespread fires everywhere throughout the continents, those fires would release soot into the atmosphere. The soot in the atmosphere would block incoming sunlight and the temperatures would drop dramatically. Initially, incredibly dramatic, you know, 2740 degrees Fahrenheit.

So really, really just like unimaginable. So right now on the planet we have what's our average 15 degrees Celsius is the average global temperature. Okay. And so you would, with nuclear winter, you basically go down to say zero degrees Celsius. is so freezing temperature as a 32 Fahrenheit as your global average. That's the average. That's the average. So that means in a place that's cold, it would be far lower.

Exactly. And why is that a problem? Well, of course, it's a problem because we'd be very cold, but it's even more of a problem because we survive with agriculture and food supplies that rely on specific climates, and we simply cannot survive. We will not have enough food. And so the scenario that I alluded to

with the U.S. and Russia using about one-third of their current arsenals is estimated through the impact of nuclear winter and through the impact of basically food, you know, shortages. and starvation to lead to over 5 billion deaths. Over 5 billion deaths. And that would be from famine.

And that would be from famine. And that would be all around the world, pretty much. I mean, there are parts in the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand and Australia. There would be a little bit, you know, in a little bit of better shape because they'd still be able to grow some food there. but it's just a, I mean, it's an absolute disaster. It's truly, truly the end of the world as we know it. So Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible, absolutely horrible.

But you're right, it wasn't the end of the world. When we talk about nuclear war today, it is the end of the world. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the equivalent of like a musket gun compared to, you know, a tank that we have. today. Yes. Yes, exactly. Wow. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024.

And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Yes, that's right. The world is a crazy place. And one person's negligence can result in another's settlement. And that's why I got to talk to you about Morgan and Morgan. Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and over 1,000 lawyers. Yes, these are the big boys.

You know them, you see them, you see their billboards all over the world. If you ever drove down I-90 from Florida to New York, I'm telling you, you've seen the billboards. All right, if you've ever watched a UFC fight, you've seen them right on the banner. I'm telling you, these are the biggest guys in the game, all right? With over $20 billion recovered for over 500,000 clients, Morgan & Morgan has a proven track record of fighting to get you full and fair compensation. The annoying thing with most attorneys is that in order to submit a claim, you've got to call them up, you've got to talk to their people, you got to go back and forth. on the emails. You got to hope that they see it. They might charge you just even look at their claim. Here's the cool thing with Morgan and Morgan. With eight clicks or less, you can submit a claim,

and one of their licensed attorneys will take a look at it and get back to you. It's that easy. It's like ordering something off Amazon. It's just a couple clicks. You can submit your claim very easily and cheap. Yeah, how about zero dollars? That's how much it costs to submit a claim with Morgan and Morgan. Extremely easy. No fee required. So if you are ever injured, you can go check out Morgan and Morgan. Their fee is free, unless they win. That's right, unless they win for you. Unless they fight and get you compensation, you're not paying a single dollar. That's a pretty good deal. So for more information, go to for the people.com slash gagnon. That's correct. F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon.

Or dial pound-law. That's pound-529 from your cell phone. That's for the people, F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon or dial pound law, pound-529 from your cell phone. This is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back. to the show after the short disclaimer. This idea of like a nuclear winter would be, I guess we've seen versions of this with like volcanic eruption. Is that true? I think Crackatoa?

Yes. Resulted in like a delayed summer. Yes. So 1716, if I'm remembering correctly the year. No, 1816. And they called it a year without a summer. It snowed in New York in July. And, you know, but that lasted two or three years.

years, and that was not anywhere. That was like a couple of degrees, you know, globally. And this would be a completely different scale. Not to mention that, you know, if we just had a really large volcanic eruption, it wouldn't mean that all of our electricity is out, that all of our, you know, like our systems would just be very called. Right, the infrastructure still exists. Right. The infrastructure would exist.

And that's one of the things. So in these nuclear war scenarios, you don't just have the cities that get attacked and destroyed and evaporated and so on. You also have something called the electromagnetic pulse. So it's using a weapon over the entire United States and basically not as an explosive, you know, not to attack a city, but to shut down all of the electricity over the entire country. That's possible? That would absolutely happen. And it would probably be one of the first things that would happen is that you shut down

the electricity, you know, and then all these cities would get attacked. Wow. And so what, so if you have 1,700 warheads, right, heading towards the United States, It's and we, so with Hiroshima and Nagasaki was literally like they put these weapons on a plane and they flew them over to Japan and they dropped them over a city, right? In nowadays, we have these intercontinental ballistic missiles which can carry multiple warheads, right? So the warheads can be much more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb. But at the same time, you can send, you could potentially send one towards New York, a intercontinental ballistic missile, and it could maybe land in, you know, six to ten different locations in New York City.

So that all of it, it's not like we sort of imagine, okay, you know, it hits Times Square, right? And then like you can draw these concentric circle. Yeah, exactly. 20 miles or something. Exactly, exactly. But you could literally create. And basically what would end up happening is you just have fires for hundreds of miles. Like in a huge, you know, area would just be, it would be like the worst wildfires ever.

In fact, an attack of that sort would be like having a wildfire and an earthquake and a radiation accident, you know. Followed by a winter. Followed by volcanic eruption winter all at the same time. So even using Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a metric is kind of futile. It's like it's like comparing, you know, a child's almost like comparing a child's toy gun with. Wow. Yeah. Like it's those were essentially toys compared to what we have today in terms of the single bombs.

and then all of this other technology and the numbers, you know, that would just make the scale of this unimaginable. Wow. I think about it so much and I still feel like I don't really understand what that would be like. I don't know if human brains can really even, like it's almost like trying to understand like wealth. Like you've seen like a million dollars versus a billion dollars like comparatively. You think it's similar but it's so, so separate. And I when I was actually I think I was 17 I went to Hiroshima with my family

We went we went and visited it was a very powerful and moving experience and I remember being there and Seeing the destruction is like we went to the museum and it shows like what it does to the people and You're lucky if you're near the blast zone if you're near the actual impact point Yeah Because then you're just decimated immediately you don't even know what happened you see a flash of light and you're gone It's the people that were on the periphery that had you know like they were were still alive, but their skin was evaporated. And then even farther out, people with radiation damage.

And I remember seeing it thinking, like, wow, if this hit New York City, this would be terrible. Yeah. But we're talking about something that's orders of magnitude beyond. Or there's some magnitude. Absolutely. And there's a famous quote by the Soviet leader in the 60s, Nikita Khrushchev, who said in nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead. because it really would be sort of like that instantaneous, you know, evaporated,

like you wouldn't even know what happened to you, right? Versus the survivors who, it's truly unimaginable what would happen to them. Do we know where the Russian, like, warheads are pointed in America? Do we have any idea of, like, what places they would try to hit? We can guess pretty well. I mean, New York City is not going to be spared. No. Do you think they would try to hit population centers or would they try to hit like military centers or both?

Yeah, I mean the argument is that they're supposed to be hitting military centers. But we do know from the declassified war planning in past decades that it was civilian centers. Yeah. If America's planning cities in Russia, you know, 25,000 or above, why would Russia not be comparing the same thing? Exactly. So hypothetically, tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, there could be some type of miscalculation or misinformation coming into Russia that says, oh, America just launched missiles.

They respond, but America maybe didn't. Or maybe we did. But in this hypothetical, let's say we didn't. They get bad information or their radars are wrong or their data's wrong. They then decide to shoot at us. Yep. electricity would go out across pockets of America

or the entire country. Across the entire country, yeah. And then from that point, within 30 minutes, nuclear warheads would then be exploding across America. Hypothetically, if they went off in New York City, 8 billion people in Manhattan, would probably all be wiped out immediately. All of New York, the greater area of New York,

would basically just be in fire. I imagine Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., any other major hub, all decimated immediately. If you're someone that maybe lives in a rural area, you might be spared, potentially. But then they would have the fallout from no electricity, infrastructure gone, pure anarchy. And radiation fallout, which would, if you're so going back, I mentioned the Marshall Islands. this is where the United States tested. Where is the Marshall Islands? The Marshall Islands are in, right smack in the middle of the Pacific.

They're basically just, oh, you have a map? I have a map up here. Yeah, they're just north of the equator. Okay. And just west of the international deadline. Okay. I often tell people that if you draw a line from like the northernmost point of Australia to Hawaii, right smack in the middle of that line,

be the Marshall Islands. Okay. It's a collection of 29 coral atolls that span an area of about, you know, a thousand miles wide. So I want to say almost a million square miles. What is an atoll? An atoll is not the same as an island. And what it is is it's actually a coral buildup. on top of a remnant of an old volcano.

So volcanoes that are now underwater that basically have the rim and then coral building up and sticking out of the ocean. So it's uninhabitable. No one lives there. So no, people live. The Marshall Islands in particular

were inhabited estimates range from 3 to 4,000 years ago. And people have been living there for hundreds, thousands of years. And they have a sort of colonial history. I mean, the last, the Japanese occupied the Marshall Islands during World War II. And then there were battles that were fought, not just in the Marshall Islands, but elsewhere in the Pacific as well, between primarily the United States and Japan. So the Marshall Islands is where the U.S., they were under the protection of the United States, according to a U.N. kind of established, I think it was a treaty, something, a treaty for the Pacific states. And the U.S. was supposed to provide their protection. And what happened instead is that

Within basically six months of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. was in the Marshall Islands asking the islanders to leave some of their islands in order to begin testing nuclear weapons there. Oh, wow. So that was in February of 1946. there was a very famous meeting on Bikini Island, which is in Bikini atoll, where a U.S. commander, his name was Ben Wyatt, went in and met with the islanders on a Sunday after church and asked them to leave their islands in order to help the United States basically to end. all for the good of mankind and to end all wars. And it was a fairly small indigenous population, obviously,

and they had a king for bikini. His name was King Judah. And he answered, we will leave believing that everything is in the hands of God. And so they left in by March of 46 and by July 1, the U.S. was testing weapons in bikini at all. Wow. And the really sad thing, it's a very long history, you know, decades of things that happened. but today people still don't live in Bikini Island. Wow.

People still don't live. That's almost 80 years since the first tests. And they're still testing there? There's no testing. No. The testing in the Marshall Islands lasted from 46 to 58. That was 12 years. Over that time, since we talked about the energy yields of nuclear weapons,

over that time, the U.S. basically tested the equivalent of 7,000 Hiroshima bombs, which over the course of 12 years is like testing 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every single day for 12 years. Wow. So really, really crazy. And then, so the radiation, the reason I started talking about this, the radiation, there's still, radiation in Bikini Island. In fact, this was work that I've been involved in with colleagues and students at Columbia University. There's still radiation that in, you know, our assessment is that a multi-generational community should not live there full time. Today,

again, now, you know, almost 80 years later. And when the U.S. was testing, there was a one particular test, the Bravo test, the one that I mentioned, thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. But it wasn't just that that was a really powerful test. It was also that the winds, the day of the test were such that the fallout went to other inhabited islands. And in particular, and went to many of them, many people have been harmed. But I'll talk for a second about one, which is Rongalap, which is the closest and was directly on the line of the fallout, a hundred miles away. And people there experienced radiation sickness, acute radiation sickness. The test was done early in the morning by middle of the day.

The fallout had arrived on Rangalap. By evening's time, basically everybody on the Island was very, very, very sick. Do you know what kind of illness? Yeah, they were, it's, we call it acute radiation sickness. They were vomiting. They were nauseous. They had all kinds of pains. Their skin was peeling.

Their hair was falling out. It's basically if you, there is a level of radiation, right, that you can get exposed to and just die, right? And then they were in this kind of. range where you survive, but you've now been impact, you not only experienced acute radiation sickness, you're also now much more likely to get cancer at a later point in life. And they had kind of a large, this population on Rangelop had this very large increase in cancers. But my point is that you could be in a rural area, right, but on the path of the fall. But, on the path of the

fallout and you could get very, very sick. And, you know, the situation, it isn't like it's just going to be okay as long as you're not in New York or you're not in D.C., right? It's going to be pretty much bad everywhere. So, okay, so everyone that I know in New York is dead, everyone in L.A. is dead. Everyone in D.C. is dead. But if I know a couple people that are rural farmers living, you know, maybe in Iowa or Vermont or, yeah. They might have more time than me, but ultimately it's almost certain that they'll be on a crosswind of the fallout.

Yes. So, I mean, it would have to depend. One of the things about fallout, it depends on obviously the winds of that. Basically, if you get this mushroom cloud, right? About half of the radiation gets deposited locally, right? and then the other kind of goes up into the higher levels of the atmosphere, and it may even spread out globally. So that's the other thing.

Like you could have radiation effects really anywhere. So what would happen with people in, you know, kind of more remote, what would be much worse for them would probably be the nuclear winter. It would be that within, you know, days, weeks, the temperatures would be dropping so much now. They might have some food store, you know, but all of that is not going to last. And the ability to start producing food again is going to be very, very limited. And so the idea with nuclear winter numbers, the number I cited of over 5 billion people dying, that number is always given as within two years of nuclear war, right?

So it's not that you die immediately, but on a time scale where, you know, and initially, I mean, like, it's not going to be even a, you know, no more choosing what we eat, right? It would literally be just trying to survive. And then there's another impact that I think is often, non-mentioned, and that is that this kind of war would produce so much nitrogen oxide, which would actually begin to destroy the ozone layer. And so there are estimates that the ozone layer could be up to 75% destroyed,

which would mean that even if we do get some sunlight coming through all that soot, it would be incredibly dangerous. it would be the UV radiation would be yet another. So you kind of get hit by radiation, you know, both from the ground and from the sun. Wow. Could crops, let's say you had a little pocket in a rural area that was getting sunlight, but the ozone was destroyed? Would the crops be able to grow from that radiation? I think the crops would be okay.

Okay. the crops could grow. Part of the problem with the growing of food would also be that the radiation, if there is, even if it's kind of background radiation, at that point you would end up getting radiation into the food. So there are specific radioactive isotopes like cesium. It's called cesium 137 and then strontium 90. those two isotopes are particularly important and difficult to deal with because they are

cesium is chemically like potassium. And you know that when you eat a banana, you intake potassium. And your body needs potassium, for example, your brain uses potassium for your neurons to communicate. And strontium 90 is like calcium. and you also know that when you eat dairy, you get your calcium or broccoli, and that it's in your bones. So when there is cesium 137 or strontium 90 or both in the soil,

the plants also like potassium and calcium, and the plants also take these things up. And so then you're eating radioactive food, which then goes into your body, which then gets incorporated in your cells and tissues, and then attacks them from within. And that's incredibly dangerous. And that's one of the ways that the people in the Marshall Islands who were impacted by nuclear testing was one of the major ways where there is radiation in the food impacting them.

So then even beyond globally, let's say back to our hypothetical, Russia's sending missiles. Again, we can assume that Russia would not only send them to United States, but also to countries in Western Europe and American allies. Is that reasonable? Yes. London. London, Berlin, Paris. Yeah. So in Europe, United Kingdom and France have their own nuclear weapons.

So just for a second, just to back up, the U.S. and Russia each have about qualified. a half thousand nuclear warheads. The UK and France have on the order of two to, let's say, 300 nuclear warheads. In Europe, there are also five countries that have U.S. nuclear weapons. So technically they don't have their own nuclear weapons, but we've supplied them. our nuclear weapons. That's Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey. But those are under the control of the United States. So the U.S. president has to press a button for those to be used.

Got it. And there's actually now, I just read literally this morning that Sweden wants to have nuclear weapons, as does Poland. So potentially seven countries in Europe would have nuclear weapons. And it's kind of crazy. Kind of? I mean, it's really crazy. But it's kind of crazy to think that by having them, you're somehow safer. Yeah, it's interesting.

Like the entire logic of deterrence, we can talk about them more on the global scale. But even these countries, it's like you don't, these weapons aren't going to make you. safer, they're just going to make you a target, right? Because if Russia knows you have nuclear weapons, you know, they're going to attack you before they attack someone else who doesn't. Right. It's just, and for a country like Belgium, Belgium is this tiny little country. Like, you can get 10 nuclear warheads and destroy all of Belgium, like nothing left.

Like the entire country becomes Hiroshima after, you know, August. Russia hasn't even chipped into their stockpile to destroy all the bell. Exactly. So why would a country like Sweden geopolitically want this? Like if you had to steal men like the Swedish government's position, like what would be the thinking? Sweden, I think, is a real disappointment because about 20 years ago they were at the forefront of nuclear disarmament efforts. There was a time when there was a group of countries at the start of the century. that was really pushing forward on.

We've got to do more on nuclear disarmament. And Sweden was one of them. South Africa was another one. This was Nelson Mandela. That's actually a beautiful case. South Africa had nuclear weapons and then gave them up. How do you give up a nuclear weapon? You just dismantled them.

So we've given up plenty of our own weapons. So at the height of the Cold War, not the height of the Cold War, But at the height of the nuclear weapons possession in 1986, there was a combined 70,000 nuclear warheads in 70,000. And today it's 12.5,000. So we've gone rid of many of them. It's just that we have to get rid of the last 12.5,000. That's it. Do you believe we've really gotten rid of them?

Oh, yeah. Why? We dismantled them. Oh, yeah. But for what reason? Like if I, like on a smaller scale, let's say I had an armory, right? And I loved guns and I had many guns. Let's say I had a thousand guns.

And I said, you know what? This is too many guns. It's too much of a threat. I'm only going to have, you know, 200 guns. That's a huge decrease. But why, if I'm choosing to not use them, why would I disarm these other weapons? Like, why would I not just say, hey, we just won't use them? Well.

Maybe I'm too skeptical. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm like, I don't believe that we would intentionally weaken ourselves. So I think there are two different things I think you're getting at. And let me answer one, which is the bigger kind of overarching thing, which is that I really do believe that we have to get to a point where there's zero nuclear weapons in the world. And I can talk a little more about how we get there and what that means. And really, I mean, I hope that what I've said so far begins to convince people that actually that's the reasonable position. Everything else is crazy. And so people often ask me, but if you get to zero and then wouldn't someone then want to make one and cheat and, you know, and that may even trouble you, right, from the get-go.

But right now we have 12 and a half thousand. Right? If we were to get to zero and then someone cheats and makes three, I'm still going to feel a lot better than I do with the 12 and a half to us. That's reasonable. Right. And so what we have to, but the other thing I want you to recognize is that unlike your armory example, nuclear weapons are not a garage project.

There is, it's a lot of, I mean, just the amount, the sheer amount of money they went into the Manhattan Project. And then all of these nuclear weapons programs, so by the way, nine countries in the world right now have them is so huge that you sort of can't really hide. Right. And nowadays with all the technology and satellites, we will see if someone is making nuclear weapons. Now, you would also hope to come to an international agreement. We're kind of like with nuclear power. There are inspections and, you know,

there is a verification system in place to ensure the people are no longer making nuclear weapons. We've banned other weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons are banned, biological weapons are banned. Chemical weapons, there's something called the Chemical Weapons Convention that came into effect. It was put together in the early 1990s and came into effect in 1997. The United States just last year destroyed its last pile, stockpile of chemical weapons. So some 26 years later, right, after the – sometimes the terminology is treaty, sometimes it's a convention, it doesn't matter.

But after this international agreement to ban nuclear weapons came into effect, took a long time to get rid of them. So I'm not thinking we get rid of our nuclear weapons tomorrow. But we have dismantled them. We have, you can, it's not, it's kind of two things. Like there's a huge difference. There's a huge difference between having something on hair trigger alert, deployed, ready to go at any moment. China actually doesn't do that.

China has two things. One is they have something called the no first use policy. so does India, which means that they will not use a nuclear weapon first. So they will only use a nuclear weapon in retaliation for being attacked with nuclear weapons. Whether or not there are a lot of people who feel very strongly that we need an international no first use treaty and so on. I'm okay with that. It's not like it would be a bad thing.

on the other hand, as long as we have the weapons, you could still, you know, you could still use them and maybe even reverse your policy. Like, if it's just a matter of a policy, I'm a little less comfortable with that. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you are a man who needs a personal shopper. Now, here's how you're going to do it. You're going to go check out my good friends over at Bespoke Post. They scour the Internet every single corner in recess of the Internet to find the coolest

items that you want, that you didn't even know that you needed. I'm telling you, this stuff is amazing. I went on bespoke post. I submitted kind of just like a very, like regular onboarding quiz. It was like 10 questions or less. It was super easy. And it just asked kind of the things that I like to do. I like to hike.

I like to go camping. I like to have a couple drinks with the boys. You know what I mean? Just kind of what my lifestyle is. And then within a couple days, they sent me this box. This is an amazing leather wallet. This is like a beautiful wallet that I would actually use. This is a, the name is super.

Swedish for first, which makes a lot of sense because this is a perfect starter wallet. If you're someone that's looking to get into the nice crafted leather wallet game, throw your Velcro nonsense away, okay? And with the bespoke post, you're going to be getting something delivered directly to your door that's going to be a great first step into the leather wallet game. But that's not it. I also got this sick multi-tool right here. It's a bottle opener, which is probably what I'll be using it for the most.

But then it can do everything. You can do a bunch of stuff. It can pry stuff. You can cut stuff, cut open packages. I even use this just like in my sock. It's just like walking around the city. You'd never realize how many times you got to open a package. You need a screw driver to screw something in.

You need a bottle opener. It's a multi-tool that can do a ton of stuff. It's made out of stainless steel. It's super nice. It's not going to rust. It's airport safe. Bespoke post is not going to get you caught in a jam. And here's what's amazing about it.

You only pay for what you keep. So before they even send it to you, they show you everything that's going to be coming in. And they say, hey, Mark, we looked at your whole profile. We looked at who you are. We think we know you. And this is what we think you're going to love. Fortunately for me, I loved everything. So I was like, yeah, send me all that.

That looks awesome. I'm going to be using all of this stuff. But if you're not like me and you're like, actually, I don't really drink that much anymore, I'm not going to take the bottle open. They go, hey, that's fine. We'll keep it and we're not going to charge you. So if you were interested in joining one of the coolest membership clubs on the internet,

having the greatest items across the web delivered directly to your door for an extremely affordable price, I want you to check out bespokepost.com. That is B-E-O-K-E-P-O-S-T-O-S-C-G-G-N-O-N, that's C-A-M-G-G-N-N, but you already know that. bespokepost.com slash campgagnon. And if you use the promo code Camp Gagnon, you are going to receive 15% off your first monthly shipment. Just click the link in the description.

That is bespokepost.com slash campgagnon. Stop wasting time. You need to get on this right away and get all of your goodies send directly to your door immediately. Now let's get back to the show. So we're talking about two different things. One is whether things are on hair trigger alert.

And so deployed, like you can just send them out. versus that you actually keep the nuclear warheads separate from the delivery vehicles. Those are the missiles. And that actually does bear some resemblance to your armory example. It's when people say that you should keep your bullets separate from your gun. The nuclear warheads are like the bullets and the missiles are. like the gun. And so if you keep them separate, so that's what China actually does.

So they, one, have a no first use policy. And two, they have, they keep their vehicles and warheads separate. So it just means that you're not going to make this, you know, split second decision to destroy the world, right? Which is, seems like a reasonable, yeah, a reasonable thing. to do. And so, you know, for, for, for, so we have gone rid of a whole bunch, right, tens of thousands, 50 something thousand, call it 58,000 nuclear warheads. In the years pretty much since 1986, those numbers have gone down. Now what we're seeing is that for the last 10 years,

the numbers were basically flat, and now they're increasing. And in fact, since I just said China was this, you know, good guy with the no first use policy and keeping their bullets and their guns separated, they are the ones who are actually increasing. Interesting. Is it expensive to store and keep them? It's very expensive. It's just maintaining nuclear weapons. It's incredibly expensive.

So I can see that from the U.S. perspective. I guess that's two things you brought up that make a lot of. sense. One, there's a precedent where we've, you know, disassembled and destroyed our chemical weapons because we say, hey, we had these at one point and used them, I guess, used the chemical weapons? We use chemical weapons. We certainly use them in Southeast Asia. And now we've destroyed that. So there's a precedent for, I guess you could say, like, weakening our military power. And then secondly, the financial incentive to say, you know, taking care of all these nuclear warheads and preserving them, make sure that there's not some type of nuclear meltdown,

costs a lot of money. And we don't need all of these. We only need a certain amount in order to protect ourselves, I'm sure, is the thinking. So let's scale back. Yeah. Which is good. Unfortunately, right, which, right. So that was the prevailing thinking from 1986.

I should just say one thing about 86. So in 86, Gorbachev and Reagan got together and basically stated, that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. So that was their big line, and that led to bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Soviet Union and later Russia and these huge reductions, because always, it was always U.S. and Soviet Union that had the vast majority of the world's nuclear arsenal. But what led to that moment in 86 was really an awakening of the general public here in the United States.

In Soviet Union, people were living under very different conditions that may still be true at some level to today. But here we at least, right, I'm able to say these things on your podcast, right? and I will safely take the subway home, right? Like, no one's going to shoot me because I'm saying these things. Well, at least we hope. But in the early 1980s, there was an awakening of the general public. There was a rally in Central Park in June of 1982 where a million people marched against the arms race. Right.

Now we like watch the steering protests and it's, you know, a few. 200 students or whatever. A million people in Central Park. I'd never heard that. From all June 12th, 1982, from all around the country, from all around the world. And one of the most heartwarming things for me was just seeing the way in which people came together clearly from such different backgrounds. It was people of different races.

It was people of different genders. It was the full age range, you know, from parents with young children to the elderly. It was the religious and the non-religious. It was the hippies and the, you know, non-hypies. I mean, it was people realizing that their lives were at stake and just sort of, you know, doing this very simple kind of, you know, civic thing you can do, which is protest the arms. race. In 1983, there was, and one of the things about the rally, Reagan didn't quite care. You know, he should have, but he didn't. And he was sort of, he was very big into nuclear weapons. He

was totally going to continue expanding the arsenal. He was planning to put them in outer space. This was called the Star Wars program. It was completely nuts. But Mikhail Gorbachev was a young Soviet leader who was paying attention and watching what the American public was saying about nuclear weapons. So there's also that recognition that when we do things in our country because we can, you know, other people may notice and maybe it's not even our own leaders, maybe someone else is paying attention. But then in 1983, there was a television film.

called The Day After, it was on ABC. I actually just watched it recently. And it was a film literally about exactly what we've been talking about. Like, what would actually happen if the U.S. were attacked? And the film even closes with like, you know, if this really happened, it would be much worse than it's shown in the movie. But it was scary enough. And at the time, 100 million Americans watched this film on television. Oh, wow.

A hundred million? 100 million. It was huge. It was basically, I mean, more than half of the population, and basically, if you exclude the children, probably vast majority of adults saw it. And Reagan saw it. And his advisors didn't want him to see the film. he watched it anyway. I think he was a kind of television guy.

He watched it anyway and then really began to change his mind. So by 86, he was in Reykjavik with Gorbachev saying nuclear war cannot be fought. Cannot be won and must never be fought. And that kind of gave, you know, started this period of both nuclear weapons reductions as well as, of course,

the end of the Cold War. Now, what happened was in the 1990s is we missed the opportunity at the end of the Cold War to get rid of. In fact, Gorbachev and Reagan were close to getting to an agreement to eliminate all the nuclear weapons. But then I think Gorbachev wanted the U.S. to give up on its the kind of defensive program of trying to intercept incoming missiles and Reagan didn't want to give that up and that's where it stalled and they kept them and they kept going down over the years but they didn't go to zero and that was a moment

where they could have gone to zero. And it was because he wanted to get rid of anti-defense. Yeah, he wanted, yeah, he wanted to see. He sort of wanted to say, like, you know, if we're going to, you know, get rid of them, let's get rid of them. Like, you shouldn't be, you know, at the same time that you're saying we're getting rid of them, you shouldn't be planning for defense. The funny thing about defense is decades after we started these programs, you know, for defense, it's a total and utter failure. Wow. And in fact, the U.S. has something like, has spent a tremendous amount of money, I think, like $350 billion or something on that order.

And has 44 interceptor missiles, which even if they were 100% perfect at intercepting incoming missiles, Russia has 1,700 deployed. So 44, fine. Right. You know, well, and they're not even, they're not even, they're like covering it like 50% if even in terms of their ability to actually intercept something. But we just have 44. It's not like we have, you know, 1700 to intercept it. And only half of them would work perhaps or be effective. Yeah.

So the, I think the current success rate is around half, but that's a success rate. when they actually, like when it's a planned, you know, like, we're going to shoot from here and like you're going to try to intercept. And actually sort of devastatingly, some of this goes on in the Marshall Islands today. Still. Yeah. So there's a U.S. military base in the Marshall Islands called Quadulane Base. And that's where they, so we shoot them from California, intercontinental ballistic

missiles without the warheads, thank goodness. And they go fly over the Pacific Ocean and then from the Marshall Islands, they try to intercept them. Wow. So anyway, kind of a... I mean, terrifying. Yeah. Well, terrifying, yes.

Yes, for sure. I mean, for sure. So then back to the hypothetical. Yes. Russia shoots much of Europe is destroyed, much of America is destroyed, anyone in a rural area is getting fallout, nuclear winter happens. Who survives? So things are a little better in the Southern Hemisphere, right?

Well, first of all, because there are actually no nuclear weapons in the Southern Hemisphere. Is not not counting submarines? Well, yeah, you're right. So we don't, yes. So the submarines can be anywhere in the world at any given time. We don't think they're going to shoot at, you know, when the Cyrus. or Johannesburg or whatever, Melbourne. I think that's the thing about nuclear weapons

is you are, if you have them, you're definitely going to be a target in nuclear war. If you don't have them, you might be lucky to not be a target. Now, you know, you're not a target, but there's nuclear winter and you're starving to death. Like it's not going to be a huge constellation. Also this collapse of civilization.

I mean, we were connected in 1960, but now the world, the global economy, the, you know, everything is so interconnected that, you know, nuclear war and collapse of the northern hemisphere is bound to completely, you know, impact the southern hemisphere incredibly, in incredibly devastating ways.

Yeah, shipping imports. Shipping imports food. Anything to rely on. Yeah. And our big food centers, like that was one of the issues with the Ukraine war. Ukraine is a big, you know, grain exporter. United States grows a lot of grains too in places like Iowa.

These places are just going to be, will basically just be winter all year long for a decade or more. They're not going to be producing those grains that need to make it to Africa, for example. Do you know what happens to the Internet? I think it's all gone. I think it's all gone. Wow. I don't know enough about how the Internet works or how.

like the hubs of internet work. Yeah. So if you are someone maybe in, you know, Argentina. Yeah, would you have the internet? Maybe for a limited period of time, my guess is all of that would disappear very quickly. There's a famous quote by Albert Einstein who said, I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stuff.

stones. And the idea is that we would basically go back to the Stone Age, the survivors, right? Would go back to the Stone Age. And the other idea is that the history of everything we've created would simply be gone, right? This isn't like it would be such a massive disruption of civilization that we would immediately, within our enter into a world of total lawlessness, right? So all the rules of society would just collapse. So if you were one of the three billion people who are left, wherever you may be, infrastructure is gone,

society's broken down, even if you're in Argentina and you're only experiencing some of the fallout from nuclear winter, things like that, you're basically now in small tribal units. Yes. The government's in anarchy, and you're now kind of collectivized in like small little pods, I imagine. Yes. Wow.

And now what happens five or ten years after that? Let's say this nuclear winter then subsides. Yeah, the nuclear winter would subside whether it's five, ten, fifteen years, depends on the exact amount of fallout, the exact. So the temperatures would return to normal. And the question is if in those ten years, you've... basically returned to the Stone Age. It's going to be really hard to come out of the Stone Age. It took humans about 12,000 years, right, to get to where we are today from the Stone Age. It took us time to maybe we would know how to do agriculture, right? Like, the big thing 10,000 years ago

was that we went from, you know, being hunter-gatherers everywhere on the planet to actually agrarian communities and growing food, which then left you if you have to spend your day looking for food and finding food, right? You don't have a lot of time to think about things, right? So that was a major step in the development of civilization because you freed people to be able to have stored food that's going to be on the table. build society, yeah, and have time to actually think about what it would look like to live

in a community that's organized in what we call civilization. But that's really pretty much, you know, just having defined jobs, right? Having roles, defined roles in the society. That's really what civilization boils down to. Now, in this, this is like a worst case scenario hypothetical, which we've done on purpose. But I'm curious, again, I know you've kind of talked about this idea of mutually sure destruction, nuclear deterrence.

It still seems like in this scenario, the mutual deterrence would still be there. Like, you know, if, you know, Russian, you know, government sends missiles over, Russia is also decimated. America would counterstrike and all of Russia would be decimated in the same way that America would be decimated. what would cause them to be okay with their self-destruction? I guess if they saw these things happening, would they not wait to see, is it real or are the attacks legitimate? Like, why are we so confident that they could go hair trigger

and just destroy all of civilization? So the question is, do you trust a single leader to not on a given day be completely suicidal? I'm not saying that about any of the current leaders, but could that happen? Could we get to the kind of leader like Napoleon, you know, after me the floods, right? Like who just decides that, you know, this is. And again, that's just one of the ways. A leader deciding to start nuclear war is just one of the ways that this could start.

The problem for me with the logic of deterrence is that there is, I said this earlier, there is no plan B. So there is no like, well, what if deterrence fails? What are we going to do then? And the problem is that it's the end of the world as we know it. And no one has an answer as to what you do then. And it seems to me, given, you know, we can talk about our universe, our galaxy, right? We can talk about the fact that our planet has been around for four and a half billion years.

Most of that time it's actually had life. But most of that time, it's had very simple, you know, single organisms kind of life. and for us to get to where we are in this universe filled with galaxies, filled with stars, right, and yet kind of be on this very special, beautiful planet, and to then decide that, you know, this one crazy leader in Annie Jacobson's book, it starts with the North Korean leader deciding to send a missile to the United States or send two of them. being able to destroy all of that,

it just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the quote from Dan Ellsberg. It's dizzingly insane and immoral. Yeah. And, and we can then, it's not like I'm going to feel so good if I know, oh, North Korea, you know, destroyed the United States. And by the way, North Korea has 30 to 50 nuclear warheads. Um, and they have intercontinental ballistic missiles that can make it to any corner of the United States. And so North Korea could, and I'm not saying they will, I'm just

saying could destroy the United States as we know it. And for us to just think that that's okay, it's actually not okay. So North Korea has 36 population by size, and it's in the bottom 10% of countries in terms of GDP per capita. So they're relatively small and relatively poor, and yet we are completely vulnerable to them. And only because of nuclear weapons. We actually wouldn't be vulnerable to them if there were no nuclear weapons.

We wouldn't, honestly, we wouldn't be vulnerable to anybody. We even have this kind of geography, right? Like, who's going to attack the United States? Russia is not coming here. Right? I mean, sure, we can lose wars elsewhere. We're not going to lose a war. And so what actually in my mind has to happen is the kind of awakening of the general public in the 80s today for people to realize that these weapons threaten us and our children and all the future generations.

And to say enough is enough, stop putting us at risk. We got to get rid of the weapons. And it seems like, you know, you could see America's, we could have a justifiable interest in demilitarizing. I could see that because we have so much other, so many other means of protection. Yes. But someone like North Korea, like you had just mentioned,

that has, you know, low GDP, effectively a low level of military exertion on the planet that now has immense exertion because of these nuclear weapons. It doesn't seem like they have much of an incentive to demilitarize or denuclearize. So I wouldn't say that they have, enormous exertion. They don't, you know, the idea I think for them is that because they have nuclear weapons, no one's going to attack them. So it's often, nuclear deterrence is often presented in this way of nuclear weapons keep us safe. And I actually really don't accept that premise. I think that nuclear weapons actually make you vulnerable because you could, because you have them,

you could get attacked. But moreover, I actually think what nuclear weapons do is they allow a country to behave badly. And they allow them to behave very, very badly. In the case of Russia, we see that with the invasion of Ukraine. In the case of Israel, we see that with what's happening in the Middle East, in Gaza. In the case of the United States, we see it in our behavior in terms of foreign policy over the decade. In the case of North Korea, it's not so much that they're now like doing bad things elsewhere in the world. They're clearly doing bad things to their own citizens, right? But because they have nuclear weapons, no one's going to go in and say, well, North Korea is committing these human rights violations.

And so it's not so much that it's a safety. It's that you have a blank card to be a bad member of the, of the, you know, Earth. of global community. And is that okay? That's also not okay. Right. And so this, oh, it keeps me safe. It's actually really just demonstrably not true because it's precisely because of nuclear weapons that you could get destroyed.

Interesting. Yeah. Ask a North Korean citizen like, hey, do your nuclear weapons make you feel safe? And you're like, well. And that's the other thing. For North Korea, they, their citizens are literally. starving, right? Because the country is investing into these super expensive, you know, huge cost-type programs. We do it too. I mean, the nuclear weapons development at some level bankrupted

the Soviet Union. It was kind of the, you know, the end of, it was just the whole thing was falling apart. For the United States right now, we have so many domestic needs that are consistently not being met. And yet, we don't just maintain our nuclear weapons, which we do at a high cost of billions of dollars a year. We also have a plan, and this plan was actually put in place during the Obama administration and has been going forward with the subsequent presidents. we have a plan to modernize our nuclear weapons arsenal. And that price tag initially was it about a billion, sorry, a trillion. So a thousand times like Hiroshima to Bravo comparison.

It was initially over a trillion. It's now looking like $2 trillion. $2 trillion to modernize weapons that we plan to never use. And if we did use them, it'd be the end. of the world as we know it. It is insanity. And I guess to the global community, that does indicate sort of not directly an act of aggression,

but if we're putting $2 trillion into modernizing weapons we're never going to use, I guess if I'm Russia, I'd be like, what are they doing? And that gets, you just reminded me of that, the idea of what does it mean to use a nuclear weapon? So we often classify Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we used them. Marshall Islands would tested them. It was 67 nuclear tests. In fact, all in all, it was over 2,000 nuclear tests around the world most, over 1,000 by the United States,

and then all the other countries conducted them as well. Devastating consequences in all of these places. But, and I'm going to come back to Dan Ellsberg again, Dan Ellsberg says we use nuclear weapons every single day. And what he made, And by that is he said, we use them the way a robber uses a gun when they pointed at your head. Because when they point the gun at your head, they don't have to shoot it, right, for you to get the message. And so we actually use nuclear weapons every single day. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you need to get your labs done.

Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you're 35. You feel your testosterone starting to go down a little bit. You got to get your blood work done, see what's going on inside your body. Maybe you're 25. Maybe you're 27 like me and you're like, I don't need to do this. No, no, no, no. Now is the best time to get your blood work done because now you get a baseline for the rest of your life.

Now, here's the problem with getting your blood work done. You got to go through and find a lab that accepts your insurance. It's a whole big thing. Then you have to find someone to read and interpret your blood work and then give you some type of dietary change that's going to actually improve your labs based off what they find. This is a huge stress and it's a huge problem. I was bitching about it to a friend of mine. and he was like, dude, why don't you check out Merrick Health?

It's from my boy, Derek, for more plates, more dates, and it's absolutely amazing. It saved me so much time and so much energy and money you would not believe. So with Merrick Health, it's super simple. You do one little entry-level questionnaire. It goes through your whole medical history. It goes through your kind of routine, what type of fitness you like to do, what your diet is, and then they send you a kit.

You send your blood work right back. And then within a couple days, they tell you exactly what's going on with your blood work, whether your levels are amazing, whether they're pretty good and they can be better, whether they're bad and what you can do to improve them. If you're someone like me that's interested in fitness, interested in staying healthy for a long period of time, if you like working out, there's no better solution than Merrick Health. So I want you to check them out.

They offer a turnkey optimization package designed for those driven to maximize performance and support longevity with the most elaborate testing available on the market. So I would recommend you check out Merrick Health. If you're interested, listeners of this program will be getting 10% off at checkout if they use the code Gagnon, Gaginon, G-G-N-O-N-O-N-N-O-N-A. at Merrick Health. Again, that's Merrick Health, M-A-R-E-K, Health, H-E-A-L-T-H-E-H-E-H-E-A-L-T-H-T-H-K-N-H-T-H-N-E-H-T-H-N-E-H-T-H-N-E-R-E-E-H-R-E-E-H-E-H-T-E-E-E-H-E-H-E-H-E-E-E-H-E-L-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-E-E-L-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-L-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-L-E-E My understanding is they have their own nuclear weapons program,

whether they had some health from China. Perhaps. Possibly, perhaps. But that's speculative. That's not necessarily. Yeah, not that I could be missing a point there. But they do have their own nuclear warheads that Arsenal has grown. They also conduct intercontinental.

They conduct ballistic missile tests. And what the other aid nuclear weapons countries, so I should just say what they all are, it's the United States. It was initially Soviet Union, then Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, India, Pakistan, and then North Korea. And then potentially Iran is the discussion. So Iran has, my understanding is Iran for a long time has had the ability and the kind of a month, you know, they're a month out from making a nuclear weapon if they wanted to make one. And of course, the situation in the Middle East is incredibly dangerous precisely for that reason. It's also dangerous because Israel does have a nuclear weapon.

The crazy thing is when people from the current Israeli government have said, and it's happened more than once, have said that they could use a nuclear weapon on Gaza. The insane thing, of course, is that they would get effects of radiation in Israel. It's not like, it's, you know. It's not like, right, exactly, exactly. Wow. And it makes the conflict between Israel and Iran that much more dangerous. Because as we've seen, obviously, Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel. Many of them were sort of deflected and intercepted.

I don't think Israel has retaliated directly, but I think they've said that they will retaliate. But now we have a direct conflict with two powers that could be nuclear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, no, incredibly dangerous. And again, the Ukraine war is incredibly dangerous. This is new, you know, since the end of the Cold War, there has always been a concern about India and Pakistan once both of those countries developed their nuclear weapons.

But here's the thing with India and Pakistan, goes back to nuclear winter. if India and Pakistan use their entire arsenals, they each have about 150 nuclear warheads. If they use their entire arsenals, 127 million people die from the attacks, and then over 2 billion people die globally from starvation from nuclear winter impacts. So even if it's completely confined

just to India and Pakistan, just this one part of the world. America's good, Russia's good, everyone's behaving. Yeah, everyone's behaving. And then people also think that like, if nukes start flying, you know, everyone's going to panic. But let's just assume everyone's disciplined.

Over 2 billion people. The numbers I'm giving you, the 5 billion and the 2 billion, those numbers, that study, it came out in 2022, but when they were running the simulations, It was based on the worldwide population of 7 billion, we're now at 8 billion.

So it would be even more. I just keep saying like more then. So it would be, it would definitely be more than 2 billion people. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty devastating. So even if everyone, these major powers we've been talking about the United States and Russia,

there's still potential fallout for us in America. Yes. And these are just the countries that are developing now. Yes. And with nuclear winter, another point that's, that's worth making. With nuclear winter, it wouldn't matter if we, the United States, let's say devise the way, and let's say it's both Russia and China. Right now, the geopolitical alignment or realignment is such that Russian China seem to be getting closer. And let's say that

we even figured out a way to decapitate. I don't think we can, but even if we did, decapitated their ability to retaliate and we just attack them. We'd need something like all of our deployed weapons. That would be enough to cause nuclear winter for ourselves, right? So even if we were spared of the direct attacks, it would be like we would write the end of our own story. And that's just crazy. Now, how are these nations, I guess I'm curious, like the timeline of nuclear development, right? Like we go, like you had mentioned, we've been homo sapiens for 100,000,

maybe more. Yeah, to call it between 2 and 300,000 years. It took us so, so long, up until the 40s to develop a nuclear weapon. And then from that point forward, you said at its peak, you know, 80,000. Yeah, 86, yeah, yes. What happened that created this exponential curve? And obviously, we know the Manhattan Project was able to develop them in the United States with American power. But then how was Russia so quickly able to replicate it?

And then North Korea and then all these other nations able to independently replicate it. So the way in which I listed for you, the countries that have nuclear weapons, I was basically doing it in chronological orders. So United States first in 45, Soviet Union in 49. I'm now forgetting the exact time, but very quickly the United Kingdom, I think in collaboration, getting some help from the U.S. for Russia, for Soviet Union, there was, I'm forgetting their name, but there was a couple that was involved in the Manhattan Project and then was basically spies for the Soviet Union.

They gave some of our development secrets to, and they were actually executed. They were tried and executed. By the U.S.? Wow. Yeah. So the Soviet Union in 49. Do you know more about that, like that couple? Like, were they paid or were they Russian assets that infiltrated?

I really should read this a while back in the American Prometheus, which is the book that the Oppenheimer film is based on. And I'm now literally forgetting the details of the story. But, yeah, they were literally Russian spies. Wow. Yeah, and they gave. So then Russia is able to get access. So then Soviet Union, yep, gets access.

Then after that was France and China around the same time in the 60s. Did France have help from the United States again or from Britain again? It looks like France did it by themselves. That's the, I think. And then Israel is unknown when exactly Israel has this policy of not saying whether they do or don't have nuclear weapons. They're also not a party to a treaty that's called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It's NPT. It's one of the largest international agreements on any topic, let alone on nuclear disarmament.

And Israel is not a party to it. North Korea used to be a party to it and then left in the early 2000s. And India and Pakistan also never joined. So it's just Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and then South Sudan is also not a party, but not that for whatever, for political reasons. Not that they care and want to make a nuclear weapon, but it's basically those four. And the other five countries are actually by this treaty, are recognized as nuclear weapon states. So this treaty was negotiated in 1968. it entered into force in 1970.

And as part of this treaty, there's something called Article 6 in this treaty. So as part of this treaty, these five countries, so U.S., now Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China are recognized as nuclear weapon states. But in Article 6, they're obliged to negotiate in good faith towards total and complete disarmament. And this was a kind of bargain that was made, which said that these five have nuclear weapons and they're going to get rid of them eventually. And no one else is supposed to get nuclear weapons. And the rest of the world, fine, not India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, but the rest of the world has held up their end of the bargain. The nuclear weapons states have not. The five, and they're really not negotiating in good faith.

towards a nuclear disarmament. Yeah. I guess I'm just so curious how these nations that, you know, obviously Russia being able to develop it with American secrets makes sense. But these other nations, it just costs so much money to develop a nuclear weapon and so much time for them to develop it so quickly thereafter.

I wonder if the secrets just get moved around. Yeah, so some of it, so it's very interesting because some of it, so I actually, I'm going to have to tell you a part of this, but at Columbia University, my husband and I live in an apartment that was previously occupied by a famous physicist who was even played a role in this history. But the apartment across the hall from us was occupied by someone named Robert Serber. Serber was Oppenheimer's basically right-hand person during the Manhattan Project. Serber was also the first physicist to fly to Hiroshima after the bombing to assess the damage. And Serber also wrote a book called The Los Alamos Primer, in which they basically described how they made the nuclear bomb. I know. It's kind of crazy.

But the thinking was that this was so hard, you can just tell the world, this is how we do. did it and they won't be able to do it because it was too hard. Well, you know, once you told them, it turns out some of them were interested in doing it themselves. So they basically just told everyone. They, they, not in full detail, but they, a lot of the principles of what they did in 45 are there. Since then, the hydrogen bomb, when they began developing hydrogen bombs, which was approved in the late 40s, and then the first hydrogen bomb test was in the Marshall Islands in 1952. All of that is classified information.

But one of the things that's really interesting about hydrogen bombs, so hydrogen bombs, much more powerful than the fission bombs. Its fusion is the process that hydrogen bombs use. fusion also happens in the sun. It's when hydrogen nuclei. So we have atoms, right? You know that inside an atom there's a nucleus and then there are electrons around it, basically. The simplest atom is hydrogen. It has its nucleus has just one proton and then it has one electron around it. In the sun, you can also have what are called isotopes of chemical elements. That means that the number of protons for hydrogen is the same for its different isotopes,

but they can also have something called neutrons, which have neutral charge. So there's regular hydrogen, which has just one proton, one electron. There's deuterium, which has one proton and one neutron in the nucleus, and one electron outside. And then there's tritium, which has one proton, two neutrons, and one electron. In the sun, it's basically deuterium and tritium coming together. And so the nuclei have to come together. And they form helium, which is a different chemical element.

It's the chemical element with two protons. And then that process releases energy, which is how, so in the core of the sun, the hydrogens are constantly, basically bombarding into one another, forming helium in releasing energy, and that's why we get all this energy from the sun. And so what happens with hydrogen bombs is you can now, you're harnessing that energy, but it's very, it turns out it's very, very, very hard to get the nucleus of one hydrogen to come together with the nucleus of another hydrogen.

And for a very simple reason, this nucleus is positively charged, this nucleus is positively charged. That much you probably remember from school, right? Positive and positive repel. Repel, right? So these nuclei don't want to come together. And so you have to, so to bring them together, you actually have to have very high temperature,

which is precisely what happens in the sun, the sun is very, very hot, so these hydrogens do bump into each other. So to make that process work here on the planet and to make a hydrogen bomb, you actually need to have a fission bomb. You need to have the atomic bomb. To create the heat. To create the heat to overcome the electrostatic propulsion of the two positively charged nuclei. So when you say a bomb within a bomb.

So it's a bomb within a bomb. Exactly. Wow. That's exactly what it is. So once you have a fission bomb, then you can create the fusion bomb. Then you can create the fusion bomb. Yeah. And then there's like, no.

The fission bomb, it's whether you're making the fission bomb out of uranium or plutonium, it's very hard to do. Uranium only, so when you mine uranium, most of the uranium you get, I think 99.3. 3% of the uranium you get is not the uranium you can use for a bomb. So it's only 0.7% of the uranium is the isotopes. So it's the same thing I was describing for isotopes of hydrogen. There are isotopes of uranium. And only one of those isotopes, uranium 235, is the kind of isotope that basically what happens is you have uranium 235, you bombarded with a neutron,

and then the neutron basically like attach itself to the nucleus, that nucleus becomes unstable, and then it splits and gives off energy. And in each reaction, when it splits, it also produces more neutrons. So those more neutrons go on to basically split other atoms. So it all happens very, very fast in the split second, and the amount of energy from each of the reactions kind of comes together into this explosion. Is it possible to take regular uranium

and destabilize it to create like this isotopic uranium? Right. So what you end up doing actually is precisely you take the normal uranium uranium to 38 and make it plutonium 239. And so with uranium, if you're making a uranium bomb, which was the Hiroshima bomb, was a uranium bomb.

What you basically have to do is separate the fissionable uranium, the uranium you can use for the bomb from the non-fissionable uranium. In the other case, you take the uranium and you transform it into plutonium to 39, and then you make a bomb. And that was the Nagasaki bar. And that was the Nagasaki and the first test, the Trinity test. Wow. And so years ago, when there was even more talk of,

This was even during the presidency of Ahmadinejad in Iran. There were often photographs of Ahmadinejad in these uranium facilities with centrifuges. The centrifuge was about separating the fissionable uranium from the non-fissionable uranium. And when you get to enough, it's called enrichment, when you get to enough enriched uranium, that's when you have sort of the, and everyone says that if they just do it for a month, like keep that process going, Iran could have a nuclear weapon.

I understand. Now, where do you mine uranium? It's, um, is it all over? Is it only in specific places? Um, United States has a lot of uranium, uh, yeah, uranium deposits, places like Kazakhstan have uranium deposits. So now are there war? to try to contain who can get uranium?

Not currently. Australia has it in Africa. The Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo has it. Like if you can control people's ability to access uranium, could you control their ability to create this fissionable uranium? So right now, because we have that nuclear nonproliferation treaty, trading of uranium has been pretty, you know, pretty, controlled in that countries have been using it for nuclear energy.

And whatever I think of that, we can, that's almost a whole podcast on nuclear energy. So maybe we don't want to go there. What I think, honestly, is really interesting is that there are actually all of these countries that could make nuclear weapons. And sure, you could say, well, they're in the treaty. I mean, but they could leave the treaty, right? It's that they don't want to, right? Because they actually recognize the nuclear weapons wouldn't make them safer.

In fact, would threaten that, would target them as a nation and then also recognize these devastating humanitarian consequences that have actually taken place in the past. And that can obviously be even more dramatic, even more devastating if in case of a. nuclear war. That makes sense. Okay. I want to ask you about close calls in the past because I know there are very many famous incidents. And I would also like to know what are the reasonable and realistic steps we can take to try to denuclearize and what that could look like. So in the United States alone, it depends on how you, what you sort of call an incident, but you could literally come up with dozens of examples where there was either, you know, kind of, you know, long. medium or high severity event that happened involving nuclear weapons.

So some of them are literally nuclear warhead drops into someone's backyard in South Carolina and doesn't explode, dropped from a plane. Wait, what is that? What is that story? It happened. It was just an accident, you know. When was this? It was 1960 something.

in the 60s. A lot of bad things happened in the early decades. So a plane was flying over North Carolina. There was actually some kind of an incident in North Carolina, too, but South there's one where it's literally like a warhead

lands in someone's backyard and doesn't explode in South Carolina. Now, I understand from my very limited knowledge, that these warheads, like a nuclear warhead, when it detonates,

It doesn't actually hit the ground and explode when they're being used in an actual, like, war scenario, that they explode above the epicenter. Yeah, so you can explode them at the surface level, and you can explode them above ground. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were exploded above ground. That does result, it still results in radiation, but it results in less radiation than the surface explosion. In fact, there's something called new. nuke map, it's a tool developed by Alex Wellerstein from Stevens Institute of Technology, can go on this map and you can choose a nuclear weapon and you can choose your location and see exactly what would happen, how many people would die, what's the kind of these

concentric circles of, you know, basically a fireball. Fireball is like temperature as high as the sun, so everything evaporates within the fireball, and then you go into the heavy, you know, damage area and radiation area and, you know, moderate damage and so on. So you just kind of keep going. The specific example of the warhead dropping. Oh, right, right, right. That's why I started talking about the – so it's not – so in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we basically exploded them mid-air. you know, how they would be used in a potential nuclear war. It's not clear.

You might want, if you explode them in mid-air, you get more damage but less radiation. If you explode them on the surface, you get sort of less damage, but more radiation. That makes sense. So that's some kind of a trade-off, I don't know. So had this thing fallen, this is South Carolina? Yeah, South Carolina. it landed in someone's backyard. And how big is it?

And it didn't? Yeah, so that one I don't particularly know. I mean, the ones that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this was kind of the early days, right? They were, I don't know, as big as this room sort of thing, right? But that's also incredible, right? That that single bomb could have, you know, caused so much distraction. When it came to hydrogen bombs, which were later developed, The very first design, the Ivy Mike design, which was 1952, was basically as big as a building.

It was like a seven-story building. That was a bomb, right? I know. It sounds kind of crazy. Still, it was 700 Hiroshima bomb equivalents, right? So like an enormous amount of destruction, right, from a single building. And that was going to detonate off a missile or were they going to drop it out of a plane? That one was basically basically like a surface.

Like they built it. It was like a surface. And then Bravo was, Bravo was exploded mid-air, but it then vaporized an island and created a crater in the Pacific Ocean. So when you look at a Google map of Bikini Atoll, you basically, it's these atolls, you know, we talked a little bit about them being just kind of rims of all volcanoes that corals build upon. And so what happens is you kind of have, they call them the pearls of the Pacific. You sort of have like this, you know, string of islands.

and you can very clearly see that an island is missing in that place. Wow. And you see this dark water, so it's a crater that's about 50 to 60 meters deep today. So it's just the amount of destructive power is really, and that was just a test, right? That wasn't exploded. So we got lucky in the Carolinas that that one didn't happen. We got lucky in the Carolinas. There were, you know, literally a crash.

crash of airplanes carrying nuclear weapons between U.S. and Russia. Crash of submarines. I don't even know how this was possible. I've just read, you know, cursory descriptions that I trust from reliable sources. We dropped a weapon in Spain. We dropped a weapon in Grenada. There's actually been kind of concerns about radiation in those places because of this. They didn't detonate.

Yeah, they didn't detonate. And then 50 of them in at the bottom of the ocean. Many also lost. Like someone was transporting nuclear warheads and then got from point A to point B and the nuclear warhead was missing. So just a lot of. And there was, that kind of gets to, you know, when the Soviet Union broke up, there was a lot of fear around what, would happen to the nuclear weapons in facilities. The now may not have been as secure as they would have been

during the Soviet government. But all of these are probably, and there was one, there's a film actually made about this called The Man Who Saved the World, about a Russian or Soviet captain, commander of some sort, who decided they were getting an incoming message that nuclear warheads were heading towards the Soviet Union. This was in the 1980s. And he was getting an instruction to fire and decided just some kind of intuition decided that this was not. This was not real.

This was a computer mistake. This was a computer glitch and decided not to retaliate. Had he retaliated, Soviet Union would have attacked the United States. The United States would have attacked right back. We would have been in the middle of a Cold War. And that's something we have. The U.S. has this policy.

Basically, all of our nuclear weapons policies are mirrored. by Russia today. It's called launch on warning. So you launch when you've received a warning that you're getting attacked as opposed to, you know, you've already been attacked, you're sure you've been attacked,

you launch, you know, a response. So you launch on warning. So that's one of the problems. But all of these, I think, paling comparison to what happened in October of 1962, which was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that was, John F. Kennedy was our president.

At the time, Nikita Khrushchev was, you know, the Soviet leader. And it was basically a standoff for weeks over the fact that at the time the United States had nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey. As the story goes, Khrushchev once looked over the Black Sea and said, well, if the U.S. can have nuclear weapons on the other side of the Black Sea, why couldn't we have them in a place like Cuba, you know, for parity? Nuclear warheads actually got to Cuba, unbeknown to the U.S. leaders. and as this thing, you know, began to unfold, it literally, I think we were just so close to an all-out, full-out nuclear war.

There was, in that case, there was also a Russian submarine commander. There was a Russian submarine that at one point had come up to surface and they, you know, he ended up deciding not approving his other two people in his submarine wanted to fire and he ended up deciding not to. That meant that they didn't end up firing. So it was a, it was such a close call. Like you and I wouldn't have been here. And that was a different case than the man who saved the world.

Yes. Petrov is a different case. Cuban Missile Crisis as a whole, and that involved our entire, you know, top of the government. The general public was informed. People were terrified. And this man's name was Petrov? No, Petrov was in the 80s. No, no. Cuban Missile Crisis. Oh, Archipov. Yeah. Archipov was the other. And why were they given order to fire? It was something about a submarine being underground and then the U.S. was threatening to invade Cuba. We almost went in to invade Cuba, but the, but Soviet Union already had nuclear weapons if we had gone to invade. They would have hit a city in the U.S. like Miami, and that would have set off the full, full-blown nuclear war. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because we got to talk about your amazing dick game.

Yes. you, you right now, listen to my voice, my deep soothing voice, you have an amazing dick game. Or maybe you know someone with an amazing dick game. Maybe you got a boyfriend, who knows? But if you have an amazing dick game, there's a way that you can make it better. And that's with the good people over at Blue Chew.

Blue Chew is an amazing service that basically delivers a chewable tablet that has the same active ingredients as Viagra, Seattle, all that stuff, but this is the chew. and it's at fraction of a cost and it's never been easier to get your hands on the greatest dick game of your life.

Never been easier. I'm telling you, you can go to bluchew.com and you can submit all your information to a licensed person, a legit person that will then mail you a discreet,

very unassuming, but very, very powerful package. You know what I'm talking about? The powerful package. To your home. That's how easy it is. You don't got to go talk to a doctor and be like, yeah, you know, I want...

Nope, nope, easy. You got to just go on the internet, at yo bluechoo.com, I want to get the best dick given of my life. And that's how you do it. Easy as that. And for the listeners of this show, of this program, you are going to get free first month of bluechow. You were going to be getting Bluechoo for free.

All you got to do is pay $5 ship, and that's a cup of coffee. Black to be delivering that BBC. You know what I'm saying? That's bluechoo.com, B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com. Use the promo code, Gagnon, G-G-G-N-O-N-N, and receive your first month for free. That's bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And thank you so much, Bluchu. I'm telling you, man, check out this product.

Even if you're one of these people that's like, I don't know, I don't really need it. What are you talking about? It could be better. It can always be better. Let's say you're in the 1% and you're about to be in the 0.01% with Bluatu. Let's get back to the show. And what ultimately dissolved the Cuban Missile crisis? It was in some sense a combination of luck and actually good leadership,

both on the part of JFK and Khrushchev. They both actually exercised some restraint. What was very scary was that JFK was under tremendous pressure from everybody in his cabinet, the defense, the joint chiefs of staff, all of those people who would have been involved in this kind of a decision, except for his brother Robert Kennedy.

So JFK and Robert were the ones because they wanted him to start nuclear war preemptively. They wanted to, you know, let's invade Cuba, let's just, let's just go all in. And he had enough, well, reason to decide that ending the world was not worth it. What was really interesting afterwards, so that was October 1962. and after that by he and Khrushchev began to, they began a private correspondence also. Exchange letters very, you know,

I think we can't even possibly imagine Putin and Biden writing each other touching letters. You know, Khrushchev would write like I'm on a train in Siberia and I'm looking out at the window at the beautiful, nature and the snow-covered forest and I wish you were with me to see how beautiful our planet is, right? And sorry, I don't know why I got teary about that. But that's the point, you know, there was like this humanity. And then by springtime, what they actually did is they pushed forward together.

something called the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. And that ended up actually happening in the United States. Kennedy went around the country, got the general public totally behind him. And then the Senate ratified this treaty by a vote of 80 to 19. Can you imagine us passing anything by a vote of 80 to 19? today. And that treaty basically ended the U.S. Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, all ended all of their atmospheric testing. So the U.S. had done nuclear testing in the Marshall

Islands. It continued to do nuclear testing both here at home in Nevada at the Nevada test site. It also did it together with the United Kingdom. It conducted nuclear tests in another Pacific Island state called Kiribati, and then the British also tested in Australia, as well as on our soil. And then the Soviets had nuclear testing and atmospheric testing in Kazakhstan. That was one of their largest nuclear test sites, but also in the place in the Arctic called Novaya Zemnaya, that's where they tested like that Tsar Bomb, the really, are really even bigger than Bravo.

So that treaty actually got us to a point where all those atmospheric tests stopped. And that was huge. That was a huge. And it also showed that an agreement between the Cold War powers was possible. And I think that was a really, really amazing moment. Kennedy went on to he also gave in 1963.

So this was just months before he was killed in November of 63. He went on to give a speech. I like to say it's a very famous speech, but most people haven't heard of it. So if you haven't heard of it, you should either read it or watch it. It was a commencement speech at the American University. And many people who work on peace issues think of this as the best peace speech ever given.

And it's just beautiful. It's just poetry. It's about, it's both about, you know, what we as a nation owe to ourselves and to each other, but it's also about what we owe to the world and how we can even disagree on things like, you know, communism of Soviet Union versus our own economic and political system and democracy, but still recognizing there's a sentence in there where he says something like about the Soviets, sort of we all breathe the same air and we all cherish our children's future. that was just absolutely tremendous he also at one point he says about peace he says what kind of peace

are am i talking about um and then he says the kind you know the kind of peace blah blah and then he says not merely peace for americans but peace for all men and women not merely peace for our time but peace for all time It's just, it's literally just poetry. And, you know, and that was in some sense, there was so much at that moment to kind of look forward to that one could have imagined. And then, of course, he was killed before the end of the year. A few years later, his brother was running for office and was killed. Martin Luther King was killed.

I mean, it was just the 60s were just this devastating time. And then we were sort of on this road to the arms race, you know, was fully out of control to the point where in 86 we got to be at 70,000 nuclear warheads. Do you think JFK's death? Obviously, there's many conspiracies and speculations, et cetera. Do you think it had anything to do with? with his appetite for peace and his desire to denuclearize? Sadly, I do.

And it makes me sad even to say that. But sadly, I do. And I don't know who I, I think from the books I've read, it seems clear to me that it wasn't just Lee Oswald, that this was bigger. Who was behind it? Obviously, you know, that they're different, you know, I would not call them conspiracy theories.

I would call them hypotheses. Alternate theory, perhaps. Again, I wouldn't feel qualified, but it seems to me, and just all these other people who were trying to do the same thing, right? Martin Luther King was, he gave, of course, the very famous, you know, speech, I have a dream. he also gave a year before he was killed. He gave a speech at Riverside Church right by Columbia University. He gave a speech on Vietnam,

and in which he also talked about nuclear weapons. And he was actually very good at connecting this with sort of our domestic policies. Like, look at what we're spending our money on while so many people in our country are poor and suffering. And of course he was very concerned about the suffering of black Americans or African Americans. But yeah, no, that was a, that was just reading, you know, I was born in the 70s, just reading about the 60s. This is really impacted me deeply because it was a very hard time. And I feel like in some sense, what we're

finding ourselves in right now is that kind of a, you know, crisis mode. Like we seem to be constantly in crisis mode, which is very, it's very difficult to address needs of a society if you're, you know, constantly dealing with crises. Wow. Yeah, it seems like anyone that is an agent of peace on a large scale gets taken care. Yeah. gets taken care of in some capacity. Yeah, I mean, some people say that Kennedy was sort of our last president who was on that, you know.

A path of peace, so to speak. Yeah, a path of peace and the ability to really see, you know, to see humanity as a whole as worth fighting for. And we somehow, you know, the whole issue of nuclear weapons. really has to come down to this recognition that if we are simply and only driven by our national interests, it's not going to end well. It's just not going to end well. Because at the same time that we are pursuing these national interests, the problems we really face and have to face are global and have to be solved through global cooperation, whether you're talking about climate change, whether you're talking about pandemics, whether you're talking about AI and, you know,

other threats. God forbid we have an asteroid heading towards us, which would actually, that's kind of an interesting side comment. It was scientists realizing that an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago. That's what wiped it. out the dinosaurs. And they then started thinking about, are there, is there anything besides another asteroid of that size hitting the earth? Today, they could create these conditions of, you know, we call it nuclear winter, but at the time they were just sort of thinking, you know, this kind of widespread.

Yeah, cataclysmic event. And that's when they realized the nuclear war would do that. So it was in the early 80s that the asteroid theory was kind of supported with evidence. And then they went into the studies of what would happen in case of a nuclear war. And Carl Sagan was famously part of that and really a big proponent of nuclear disarmament. Wow. So I guess this leads me to my last and maybe most important question is, what does the path to denuclearization look like?

And how is it realistic to say that we could get to zero nuclear weapons? Yeah. So I work on something called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I don't mean I, many, many people work on this, but I'm involved. It is an international treaty that was negotiated in 2017. and it currently has 70 what are called states parties. So there are about 200, close to 200 UN states, UN member states. And 70 of them are now a party to this treaty.

That means they have signed it and their legislative body has ratified the treaty. That means they are fully obliged to behave according to the treaty. And the treaty bans everything having to do with nuclear weapons, including, for example, making nuclear threats, right? So you can't have them, you can't develop them, you can use them, you can threaten them, you can't, you know, receive someone else's nuclear weapons. So anything you could imagine having to do with nuclear weapons, this treaty bans it. The treaty also has another close to 30 states they have signed it and they're working towards

the ratification. So very soon, I'm hoping in just the next few months, we'll get to a point where the treaty has 100 either states parties or signatory states. So hopefully we get there. And then we're going to basically cross. will have crossed half of all UN member states. And we have to keep going. We have to get more support.

When the treaty was negotiated, it had 122 states vote in favor of the negotiations of the treaty. And so now that process is unfolding. So my organization, Nuclear HPs Foundation, has been involved, you know, from the beginning, and now we're very much involved in both, you know, there's sort of, there's the whole aspect of it's called universalization. How do you get more states to join? But there's also something called implementation.

So how do you actually get the treaty to work, right, to do what it's meant to do? And what's interesting about the treaty is that in addition to having all these provisions about no nuclear weapons, it also has what are called humanitarian provisions. So there are articles six and seven of the treaty, which are devoted to victim assistance and environmental remediation. This goes back to the point I was making, points I was making earlier, about places like the Marshall Islands in Kazakhstan, Kiribati. There are actually others. France tested in Algeria and French Polynesia, China tested in Western China.

So there are places basically all around the world that have been impacted by nuclear weapons testing. And of course, Japan was impacted by, again, what we call nuclear weapons use. And so the treaty aims to help the victims of nuclear testing and use and to remediate environments. I also mentioned that, for example, bikini is still contaminated. And that's our own research at Columbia University. So that's what, you know, there is a treaty. We have to get more countries to join it.

And, of course, everyone always says have any of the nuclear weapon, you know, possessors to join the treaty. And the answer currently is no. And for a few years, I think, I've been saying that this treaty is our best hope for a world free of nuclear weapons. But I've now come to actually think of it slightly differently. I think it's honestly our only hope for a world free of nuclear weapons. The reason I say that is that if we are to eliminate, nuclear weapons, it's going to have to be an international agreement involving all states. And we're not, there's going to have to be something done about the countries that have

nuclear weapons today. But we're not going to come up with another international agreement. Like, this is it. This is the international agreement. Now, how do we fold in specifically the nine countries that have nuclear weapons. And also all of those nine countries, well, primarily United States and Russia, have what are called their allies, right? So certain countries like NATO, you know, is a very large military alliance. Those countries are sort of in this nuclear umbrella. And so, you know, but if we get the U.S. will get them. too. Or maybe we'll get them first and then the U.S. will be, you know, will be forced to act.

In any case, I personally see the United States as the one that has both the most responsibility as well as, honestly, the most to gain from a world free nuclear weapons. That goes back to my point earlier about like, who's going to threaten us unless we're really talking about nuclear weapons, in which case we can be destroyed, like completely destroyed. And that's just unacceptable. And at the same time, the reason I say United States has the most responsibility, it's all of these things. It's the fact that we were the first country to develop them. We were the only country, again, if we used, use the term use as in attacks on cities full of women and children. We, in the Marshall Islands, six months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we were in there planning for the nuclear testing before anyone else even had them, right? And so we, I always, I call it we wrote the playbook for the nuclear testing era. There's an enormous amount of, in my mind, of ethical and moral responsibility.

But we need, and I think this is partly why I wanted to tell you earlier about the partial test ban treaty, I think that one is the one that gives me the most hope because at that time there was also an awakening of the general public. There was something called Mothers for Peace. And those mothers, what was happening actually is they, began collecting baby teeth because babies lose teeth, right? And so they began collecting baby teeth and then doing an analysis of baby teeth and finding strontium 90 in the baby teeth.

And so these mothers were like out in the streets going like, I don't want baby, you know, strontium 90 in my baby's teeth. And they were really out. This was a time that was different, you know, for women in this country, right? Most were not, didn't have professions and jobs outside of the home, or many didn't. And they were out on the street. And it was this, you know, awakening of the general public.

There was this, you know, young president who really cared and wanted to do something about it. And I think what we need now is something similar. We need an awakened citizenry. and we need good leaders. We need good leadership. Sorry to say I'm not excited about this upcoming election, but I do want to have hope that we can get there and that this country can both recognize its historical responsibility

as well as its vulnerability and say enough is enough. Like get rid of the darn weapons, We cannot have this hanging over our nation and the world as a whole. And we need the resources to do all these things we need to be doing. And we need global cooperation to address the actual global threats that we have. So what if, which I doubt in the next four years, but maybe eight years, an American president could make the calculation and say, hey, we're putting all this money into preserving our nuclear weapons, into modernizing our nuclear weapons. that could go elsewhere to help the American public, which seems like a great option.

It also will make us less of a target. We already are not in any way, you know, threatened militristically from a neighboring nation or anything like that. We have all of our defense weapons, which we'll keep, but we will denuclearize. If they led the charge and saying, hey, let's all get together and let's denuclearize and we will be, you know, the leaders that will pave the way. Do you think that would be enough? I think it's incredibly important that that happens. And I actually really honestly believe that it could lead to a place where everybody else comes together. And maybe you have to use some carrots and maybe you have to use some sticks.

But if the United States decides to do this, I actually really do believe that other countries will follow. It's just impossible to see right now anyone else kind of taking their mantle. And we want to be the leaders, right? Like we have that sort of, you know, both desire and in practice. We, you know, constantly want to lead the world. Well, let's lead the world in getting rid of a threat that, again, I mentioned asteroids. if an asteroid headed our way today, maybe there are things we could do to divert it. There are certain scenarios where it's coming straight for us and there's nothing we can do.

That's obviously terrible, but it's very different from we created something that can destroy us. And it's the kind of destruction, right, that's like you've just decided something for all the future generations. You decided it for all these other species on the planet. And you, in some sense, so disrespected the generation upon generation upon generation of our ancestors. Human ancestors, right? Let's call it 10,000 generations of distinctly human, homo sapiens ancestors. if our species is, let's say, 200,000 years old and 20 years per generation. And then everything, right, and those distinctly human ancestors, what they had to go through for 200,000 years for all of us to be here.

And now we're just going to destroy it because we don't like this leader or we don't like that leader. And to kill civilians, right, as a reason. as a matter of policy? Like, it's just, it's really, really nuts. And I do, I mean, a world free of nuclear weapons. That's, you know, I mentioned the Nuclear HPs Foundation. We're one of the organizations working on this.

There are many others. Our mission since 1982, actually, has been, of course I wasn't there in 1982, but has been to educate and advocate for a just and people. peaceful world, one that is free of nuclear weapons. And it just, it has to happen. In my case, I'm hopeful that it can happen in my lifetime. Do you think a relatively, and I specify relatively minor tragedy could ultimately result in this denuclearization?

Like hypothetically, if India and Pakistan, like that hypothetical we talked to before, were to fire off, you know, two or three nuclear warheads at each other, and it causes some type of acute nuclear winter that affects the global population. And then, let's say, America says, all right, this is crazy. You've, you know, millions of people have died. And then, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people have died in America because of this, you know, nuclear winter. Now we're stopping it.

Is that a possible outcome? It's a very good question. Many people who've thought and worked on this have told me precisely that, oh, we won't do anything until something happens. The problem with that is that we really do think, and this comes from, they call them war games, we really do think that one or two or three doesn't end there. It ends in full-blown nuclear war, so I think it would be too late. But let's even imagine, you know, because there's been all this talk about, oh, you know, Russia will use one tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

my concern is that almost the opposite of what you're proposing, which is they use one tactical nuclear weapon. It's not so bad, right? I mean, we've been devastated by, you know, 40, close to 40,000 civilians in, or I think civilians in Gaza, right? So like, let's say it's something on the order of 100,000 people die, that was about the number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then you sort of go like, oh, see, that wasn't so bad.

We don't have to get rid of these weapons. Oh, really? So like you could almost have it go the other way, right? Where it's like, oh, it's not so bad. And then this taboo, people also have, there's this term nuclear taboo, right, where there's this taboo of using a nuclear weapon. But if we were to break the taboo, you know, two years, five years, ten years later, it's a full-blown nuclear war and we're really, and then it's all over.

So I kind of really feel like we can't wait for that. Interesting. Yeah, that's, I can see that. But, but, yeah. Because I see it as like, oh, if you use like a, you know, a surgical or a specific use of the nuclear bomb, right? Like if you were to use it in, you know, a relatively rural area where it was only military target. It's a military target and 10,000 soldiers die and no civilian casualties, which again, it's sad when soldiers die, but that's a part of war.

I can see that. Yeah. If it's too surgical, then it would just normalize the use. Yeah, yeah. And that's what they've been working on. It's part of this modernization. There have been plans to make even smaller nuclear weapons. which would be precisely because somehow, you know, that would be kind of easier to use than conventional weapons with, you know, that would mimic that same yield.

And that, I think, is incredibly dangerous because it could really lead to this exactly what you describe normalization of nuclear weapons use that could then just escalate out of our control. The other thing I want to just say is that we also have to fundamentally, and I go back to those quotes, I mention from JFK's peace speech, is the idea that we as humans, our technology will continue to evolve even if we, you know, get rid of nuclear weapons, which are very much hope we do, because the, I do think they present a unique threat. I think that we have to get to a point where wars are no longer a solution, where wars are, you know, somehow they're actually essentially outlawed by, you know, UN charter, but obviously we continue to have them. But where it is effectively enforced, peace is effectively enforced. And we find ways as nation states, as peoples, we find ways to use diplomacy for solving our conflicts as opposed to war.

It's so barbaric if you think about it. Yeah, and the cost is so high. And the cost is so high. And, you know, again, with nuclear weapons, like you can imagine rebuilding Gaza. If you were to use nuclear weapons, you can't even rebuild. build because the radiation will be such that you can't rebuild the cities and places that you've destroyed. Right. Have you seen any of these billionaires that are building bunkers in New Zealand or Australia? I've heard. I'm sure. Yeah. I've heard stories. I haven't looked into this or read

anything about this, but I've heard different like tech billionaires are buying pieces of land in rural areas and like building underground bunkers and things like that. I'm not surprised. Somehow I don't, I don't, I mean, clearly they're concerned about something and, you know, probably nuclear war. Not like maybe we'll help them. Maybe it will, you know, prolong their life. But it's not like you can live in the bunker forever. You're going to run out of food too. It's kind of like the submarine thing we were talking about earlier.

Right. Like you're going to have to come up to surface. So it's, I think those billionaires really actually should. invest some of their money and influence in helping us. I have a few projects for them, a few proposals on how we get to a point where they don't have to build that bunker. Do you think independent agents, like a billionaire in this example, let's say an Elon Musk or something, was interested in nuclear peace, could any wealthy individuals or people with influence put,

pressure onto a government or try to use their money in a way to try to denuclearize. Is that possible? I think nowadays it's two separate things. One is resources. So the nuclear disarmament movement is, you know, the nonprofit sector struggles, always, has always struggled with resources. The nuclear disarmament movement is like the struggler of the nonprofit sector of non-governmental organizations.

So certainly resources and supporting efforts towards, for example, the promotion and implementation of the treaty would help. I also really think that we just need for that general public awakening, we need more people. I'm so grateful to you for this podcast. But we need celebrities in the 80s. There were all kinds of celebrities talking about this. And really, you know, Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda and all kinds of people were, you know, concerts and the musicians. The, when there was this Central Park rally in 82, it was like there was a whole thing of artists. The ballet dancers from the New York City Ballet were out there, you know, protesting against the nuclear arms race.

We need, we are for better or for worse, a society that. cares about celebrities. So how about, you know, Beyonce and Taylor Swift and, you know, some of these people really truly should just, and I know some of them are parents. I think Beyonce is a parent. You know, they should think a little bit about what they want for, do they want their kids to live through nuclear war? It doesn't matter if they get a bunker, right? Like, that's not what you want. And so, you know, I think it would be, I think it would be amazing if more celebrities got involved just to talk about it. And then if someone with a, you know, really deep pockets wanted to help fund these efforts, you know, to me, I have the United Nations, you know,

for all that it has been doing and does, often gets a lot of criticism. right and oh it's ineffective or oh it's doing this wrong or oh it's doing that wrong when i think about where we are um of course we're not where we want to be and we're not where where we would hope to be but we're probably so much better off than we would have been without something like the united nations without something like the international agreements however good or or effective or not effective they have been without them would be in a worse place. So, you know, in some sense, it's almost not so much about, you know, where should we be. It's about that aspiration for where we should be going in the future.

And I think that, you know, to me, the United Nations is ultimately, yes, it's all these nation states and so on. but does ultimately try, you know, help us realize that we're all part of humanity, there we're all on this one planet. And now that was in Kennedy's speeches, so much of it, you know, you could imagine in kind of personal relations, right? You could imagine getting divorced, for example, right? and then living very far apart from your ex-spouse, and somehow it doesn't matter.

Well, on this planet, we don't have, we can't move away from Russia. We can't move away from China. We can't Israel and Israelis and Palestinians, you know, live in this one small patch of land. Like, we have to find ways to live together to cooperate. It doesn't mean we have to. to get along on everything, or it doesn't mean we have to, you know, we can compete in, you know, on economic matters, we can compete in sports, we can compete in singing.

There was the whole Eurovision just this last week, which I used to watch when I was growing up. So there are all kinds of ways for us to kind of satisfy those, you know, competitive. Urges. Yeah, urges. But war and killing people and threatening each other with nuclear weapons with distraction, with mass destruction, with civilian deaths, it's got to go. It has to go. In desire to learn about this topic, I had told you before, you know, my friend Jaime and I, we'd kind of sought out people to speak on this. And I'd mentioned to you that the majority, I can't say the majority, many of the people that we had seen that were speaking about this issue in an academic setting. both yourself and Annie Jacobson as well, were women.

There was a lot of women. And I'm curious in your work in the field, if you find at these conventions it's primarily women, if it's disorderly women, and what your reasoning for that would be. Yeah, it's very interesting. So in the circles where I now spend a lot of time, call it nuclear disarmament, there's sort of two parts to it. One is the actual diplomats from countries. And that I would say, and oftentimes, you know,

sometimes I may be dealing with actual UN ambassadors or ambassadors to the UN from specific countries, but oftentimes it's sort of, you know, for larger missions, it's actually people who work specifically on nuclear disarmament issues for their country. And I would say that there's some women, probably more men than women, in the diplomatic corps. But when it comes to civil, what's called, what in the United Nations lingo is called civil society. That's representatives for non-governmental organizations from academia.

It might be also affected communities. So Japan has very strong kind of civil society where, you know, in many ways, the backbone of it are the Hibakusha. Those are the survivors of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I would agree with you and say that for civil society, probably the majority is women. I think there's something really meaningful. to that. It's a fabulous, amazing woman. She must be now, I don't want to say how old she is,

but she's certainly, you know, she was actually on the stage of the Central Park rally in 1982, as, you know, must have been in her 30s by that point. Her name is Helen Caldecott. She's an Australian and doctor who spent many years here in the United States. I was involved in leading an organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility. And, you know, she makes this strong argument that women have this, you know, that women have this, you know, urge to protect their children, to love their children, to protect posterity. I'm a mother myself.

I feel in many ways that I am very much driven by that. I've said at times that what I really want to leave to my children is a world free of nuclear weapons. Like, that's what I want to leave them, you know? Forget. Maybe if I leave them some money, I'm sure they'll appreciate it. But if I can leave that to them, that would be everything, absolutely everything to me. And, you know, that's not to say that that that's somehow exclusive, you know, to women, but that there is this a kind of, you know, outrage over the state of the world that we find ourselves in

and that somehow women are responding to that differently and feel really driven. In my own career, I actually came into this topic. I didn't study, I studied science, I studied chemical engineering in college and in graduate school, and then started teaching at Columbia University and became involved in the nuclear weapons issue through teaching and kind of mentoring students and so on. And I've been at Columbia for now over 15 years. and I love what I do in terms of my teaching work. I really, I love teaching.

And I only started working with the Nuclear HPs Foundation just a couple of years ago. And I often tell people that I love what I do when I teach and I have to do what I'm doing on nuclear weapons. Like I just, it's not like you love it. talking about the end of the world, right? But I just feel like I can't stop. Like I can't drop it.

I can't stop. I feel like I have a contribution to make and I have to make it. And so there's a kind of urgency for me to this work that is unlike, you know, other things that I have done. where obviously I feel passionate about, you know, things, but this is a different kind of passion. This isn't, you know, this is sort of a passion of necessity. Yeah, I think there's few greater missions than preserving all of humanity. Yeah.

Yeah, I can understand that. Now, if there's anyone that was, like myself, that was, like, moved by the conversation or is interested in learning more or was maybe embarrassed by how little they knew, Are there any resources or books you would recommend if people want to get involved in this topic? Yeah, no. Well, first I'm going to be sort of selfish and recommend going to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's website, which is wagingpeace.org. You can find all kinds of resources there, all kinds of videos.

Articles, we actually have articles over, like, close to 3,000 articles over. the decades, written by some of the foremost thinkers. Also books by our founder who passed away last year, and there's actually on our website, there's a whole section with his books. Annie Jacobson's book, since it's now and recent and really fascinating, she basically goes through A, we talked a lot about U.S. and Russia and Indian, Pakistan, and so on, she goes through a scenario where North Korea fires actually two missiles in the United States and nuclear war ensues, and it all takes place over the course of 72 minutes. It's very fast-paced.

It's an excellent book. I mentioned Daniel Ellsberg a couple of times, actually. He wrote a book called Doomsday Machine. confessions of a nuclear war planner and that's where some of the early stuff in the conversation comes from. There's so many books, there's so many videos.

Noam Tromsky has talked about this many times and there are videos of him talking about it. Someone I'm very close to and very much admire his name is Richard Falk he's professor of international law or now emeritus

from Princeton University has written also widely about nuclear weapons and peace issues and has, he's written over 75 books, so there are so many of them, but I'll mention his memoir, which is called public

like something, citizen pilgrim and And he has these kind of sections on different issues, including covering kind of different, you know, peace issues, everything from Vietnam to Israel and but also nuclear weapons issues. So lots of things, but there's also a, in addition to our organization, there are other organizations. There's international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which was behind the effort to get the treaty under prohibition of nuclear weapons and continues to work with many organizations around the world to push the treaty forward. International physicians for prevention of nuclear war and physicians for social responsibility, a lot of – and then there are also – there are groups – of, they have emerged, especially now in the context of the treaty, not emerged, but, but have had more of a voice from affected states or regions.

So from like places like the Marshall Islands and so on. So organizations of these, what we refer to as affected communities. So we have a good partner here in the U.S. called Marshallese Educational Initiative. So lots of, you know, lots of ways to learn more. And I think that's, to me, that's really key to get into where we need to get to, which is we have to get to a point where people are actually invested in this such that our political leaders can't keep sweeping it. the rug and pretending like it doesn't. It's not happening. Yeah. Well, Ivana, thank you so much for taking the time to share this with me and answer all my dumb questions. I really appreciate it. They weren't dumb at all, Mark. This was really, what a pleasure. Thank you so much. Hopefully we'll be here in a year and we can pick up this conversation again and discuss things as they develop. I'm happy to come back anytime. Thank you so

much. Let's do this again.