Making Sense with Sam Harris - #330 — The Doomsday Machine

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Carl Robichaud about the ongoing threat of nuclear war. They discuss the film "Oppenheimer," the ethics of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the history and future of nuclear proliferation, the logic of deterrence, cyber vulnerabilities, the history of de-escalation, the war in Ukraine, war games, the nuclear taboo, growing tensions between the U.S. and China, artificial intelligence, getting to nuclear zero, the role for private citizens in mitigating nuclear risk, the Longview Nuclear Risk Policy Fund (https://www.longview.org/fund/nuclear-weapons-policy-fund/), and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, today's episode is a PSA, so no paywall. As always, if you want to support the podcast, you can subscribe at samharris.org. Today I'm speaking with Karl Robichaux. Karl co-leads Longview Philanthropy's program on nuclear weapons policy, and he co-manages their nuclear weapons policy fund. This is a fund to which the Waking Up Foundation will soon be giving a fair amount of money. If you'd like to support it along with us,

you can find the relevant link in the show notes in your podcast player. For more than a decade, Karl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He also previously worked with the Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where he focused on arms control, international security policy, and non-proliferation. And the topic of this conversation is the ongoing threat of nuclear war. We discuss the new film Oppenheimer, which I must say really is a masterpiece. If you haven't seen it in a theater and it's still playing in a theater near you, I highly recommend that you see it.

This really is a film that benefits from the big screen. We discuss the ethics of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some of the false lessons we learned there, the history and the future of nuclear proliferation, the logic of deterrence, our vulnerabilities to cyber attack, the history of de-escalation, the war in Ukraine, war games, the taboo around using nuclear weapons, growing tensions between the U.S. and China, artificial intelligence, getting to nuclear zero, the role of private citizens in mitigating nuclear risk, and finally Longview Philanthropy's Nuclear Risk Policy Fund, which again I encourage everyone to support. Unfortunately, this remains one of the biggest problems of our time, one which we do not talk about or think about nearly enough.

So I hope you find this conversation useful. I now bring you Karl Robichaux. I am here with Karl Robichaux. Karl, thanks for joining me. Yeah, my pleasure. I'm a big fan of the work you're doing. Nice. Well, I'm a big fan of the work you're doing, although I've only just encountered it. But you are an expert on, it seems, much that ails us with respect to nuclear weapons and proliferation and failures of containment and all of that. and proliferation and failures of containment and all of that. So we're having this conversation 24 hours after I watched Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater, which I highly recommend to people.

I recommend people go to the movie theater to see this movie. Have you seen it? Yeah, I did. I've seen it twice now, and I'm going to go back a third time. It's really, it's some kind of masterpiece. Perhaps you can alert me to anything that gets wrong with respect to the history, but not noticing any errors, it's quite amazing. I mean, it's just everything from the performances to the writing to the sound design, it's just really worth it.

Again, in a theater, it's really required to appreciate it. I found it very moving. There's a high fidelity to the source material. And it's based on this book, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin. And if you've read that book, you'll see that many of the quotes in the scenes are lifted directly from the book and from the historical record. So it takes its source material very seriously, which I appreciate. And I think it also is just an incredibly relevant film today, because just as in the

period covered in the film is in 1945 and 1955, we are now facing this new nuclear arms race. And it's the central question, can we head off a new competition that threatens to make us worse off? So I think it's a phenomenal film. But because of the way the story is told, it leaves out some important details. And one of those is the effect on the downwinders, as they're called. These are the people who lived in the proximity of the Trinity test. And the New York Times ran an article the other day and talks about how there were 500,000 people who lived within 150 miles of that Trinity test site. And none of them were informed before the test or after the test, and a lot of them continue to suffer from health consequences

related to that initial test. And there's another whole part of the story that's excluded, which is Los Alamos was only part of the Manhattan Project. In fact, 90% of the budget for the Manhattan Project was spent on producing the fissile material, the enriched uranium and the plutonium. And Leslie Groves oversaw this project. It was an enormous engineering feat. And that work was done primarily in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, and has had various health and environmental effects that have lasted for generations. We're still paying some of the cleanup costs there. So there are victims of this nuclear age that are not depicted in this film, both the victims of the nuclear production in the United States and the victims of nuclear use in Japan, which are never really depicted in the film. And I think part of that

is that this is told from Oppenheimer's perspective. And you see him looking away, you see him averting his gaze from this part of the history. And I think that's really clever, the way the film portrays Oppenheimer being unwilling or unable to look at the destruction that his work has created. And the film itself is looking away from these second and third order effects. And I think it just reflects a collective failure of imagination that we have around nuclear weapons. And these weapons still have a legacy that we live with today. Yeah. I mean, it could be that I'm so aware of the second order effects that I felt that the film sort of properly invoked them by ignoring them. But yeah, I mean,

as you say, this is very much from Oppenheimer's eye view of the situation and what he averts his eyes from and the stuff that sort of invades his consciousness as he's trying to give a speech. And I thought it was just very effective at portraying the cognitive dissonance and the conflict. It's pretty brilliant, especially the sound design that happens there. Oh my God, that sound in the auditorium scene is just shaking. And the test itself and the way you realize that the flash comes before the sound and then it just washes over you. I mean, I think it does a brilliant job telling the story that it tells. And I think it's also our job to tell the parts of the story that are

not in the film and as a compliment to the film. Yeah. So perhaps you can summarize your background in this area. How have you come to these topics? So I first discovered nuclear weapons in a course in college, and it was with Jonathan Schell, who is someone who you've spoken about before. Wow. Where were you in school? I was at Wesleyan University, and I had never thought especially about nuclear weapons, but I was interested in writing University, and I had never thought especially about nuclear weapons, but I was interested in writing. And someone told me, you got to take a class with Jonathan Schell. He was a writer at the New Yorker and an editor there. And they said, he's one of the best people

if you want to learn to write well. So I signed up for his class, which happened to be on thinking the unthinkable. So I showed up in the class. I was the 13th person in a 12-person class. And I went to him afterwards because the lecture was amazing. And I said, I really want to be in this course. And he let me in. And that changed the course of my life because I was sort of pulled the curtain back on this hidden world of nuclear weapons that shape so much of what we take for granted in the modern world. And he agreed to advise me on my senior thesis, which I wrote about nuclear weapons. And I've done other things since and worked on other aspects of international security policy, but I always keep coming back to this question.

Yeah. Well, he was an amazing writer. What year was that that you studied with him? It was 1998. Well, the fate of the earth was really instrumental in my becoming aware of this issue. And it's so well written. Actually, I did a book report on it, I think when I was 13. Wow. So I came to this pretty early. I don't know how the book got into my hands.

But yeah, and so really for my entire life, longer, I mean, for nearly 75 years, we've lived under the shadow of nuclear risk. The Soviets got the bomb in 1949, which was earlier than we were expecting. Yeah. 1949, which was earlier than we were expecting. And as everyone knows, we're the only country to have used it in 1945 on August 6th on Hiroshima and August 9th on Nagasaki. Do you have a sense of the ethics or your beliefs about the ethics there in our first and only use of these weapons. They're treated somewhat in the film. And I could be wrong about this. This is a piece of history I thought they were getting wrong, but I could be wrong about it. I had thought...

Yeah, I think the film embraces an older version of the history, and there's a more recent historiography that has access to all of the declassified documents and shows that in many ways, we were sold a false narrative when it comes to the necessity of the use of these weapons. And the Truman administration after the war was really keen to shape the perception of these weapons. And they framed it up as if there had been this debate where Truman considered all the options carefully and with a heavy heart, decided that nuclear weapons would save American lives, would save Japanese lives, and went ahead. And in many ways, that's a piece of post-war propaganda, because the debate at that time was not over whether to use the bomb

or to invade. They were planning to use the bomb and to invade, and they didn't know what the future would be. And so they actually sent both weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, out to the local commanders in the Pacific. This is a time where communications took longer as well. And there were preparations to use both of them when the weather conditions permitted. And especially with the use of the bomb on Nagasaki, there was not a well-considered strategic decision to use that. The bomb was used just three days after the initial bombing of Hiroshima. Yeah, that's always seemed inexplic is to indicate, in this case falsely, that we've got a whole arsenal of these weapons to spare.

Yeah. But at the time the weapon was dropped, the Japanese were still making sense of what had happened with the first weapon and were still processing that. And as we know now, the Soviet Union was preparing to enter the war. Truman knew this at the time, and he knew when the Soviet Union entered, it would be the end for Japan. And he wrote that in his memoirs and his communications. But there was a real interest in demonstrating the power of the bomb to the Soviet Union and in shaping the post-war balance. The US had demanded unconditional surrender from Japan. So the use of the bomb in some ways was to ensure an unconditional surrender without the invasion of the home islands. And nobody knows exactly

what would have happened if those weapons were not used. But the consequences were just devastating. Why do you think we didn't drop the first bomb off the coast in the ocean as just a demonstration of its power as opposed to dropping it on civilians? So this was briefly considered. And one of the considerations was that a demonstration in a harbor or off the coast may not show the full magnitude of the weapon and would not impress upon the Japanese and the Soviets the effect of this weapon. There was also a concern, what if it didn't go off? And then now you have a device that is in the water and could be retrievable by the enemy. There was some talk of inviting the Japanese to see a demonstration at the Trinity test site. But again, there was

concern, what if the demonstration doesn't go as expected and we'd be tipping our hand as to this device that we have? So ultimately, they decided to drop it with very little notification. And they considered maybe saying, evacuate the city, we'll drop it. But then they were concerned that the Japanese would shoot down the plane. So this debate is treated very quickly in the Oppenheimer film, but it's not exactly how it played out. And again, I could be mistaken about this, but I had thought that the rationale that, and maybe you just indicated, I'm not mistaken about this, I thought that the rationale that dropping a bomb, at least on Hiroshima, was justified because it saved something like a million lives of infantry that didn't have to invade, that that was a very post hoc epiphany

that was not thought at the time, right? Yeah. So they had estimates of what it would take for the invasion. And nobody knew, of course, but I think the median estimates were something like 100,000 US troops dead in the invasion of the islands, which obviously would have been awful. And any president has to think first and foremost of the lives of those US service members. But it wasn't the number that was cited in the post-war propaganda. And I just want to acknowledge that we're having this conversation around the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it's striking to me that there are people who are alive today who live through that. And the other day, I listened to an interview with Setsuko Thurlow, and she's a survivor

of Hiroshima. And it's this incredibly courageous act that she continues to bear witness in a recognition of this suffering that can last generations. And I just want to acknowledge that we should be listening to those voices as well. Yeah, I would just add, anyone who feels that they haven't fully imbibed the details of what happened at Hiroshima, John Hersey's small book that based on his New Yorker articles is well worth reading. That's an incredible book.

And the story behind it's pretty remarkable because you have Hersey, who is this, really, he's a recognized war reporter. He's in Tokyo. And at this time, Tokyo is under the occupation, the US occupation, and General MacArthur is the administrator. And Hersey actually slips out. He pretends to have a stomach bug. administrator. And Hersey actually slips out. He pretends to have a stomach bug. And he goes and records the story of these six survivors of the Hiroshima bomb. And he tells a different story than the official one. The official story is focused very much on the size of the explosion. And that's where the emphasis is. And he tells the human story of these survivors and also, for the first time, reveals that there was this radiation sickness that affected people really terribly. And I think this changes the way that the weapon is viewed. It ends up being a

30,000-word piece that's released in The New Yorker. It actually is like a full issue of The New Yorker, this one story. And when it hits the newsstands, it's all anyone's talking about. And I think that's an example of a reporter, someone in civil society, not in government, who had a really powerful effect on the nuclear age, because our relationship to the bomb changed once we understood its full consequences. And I also want to say that the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's not taken in isolation. And it's sort of this culmination of a series of atrocities. And it's something of a coincidence that the ability to create nuclear weapons emerged during World War II. It didn't need to be that way. There's this world of physics and sort of the breakthroughs in atomic physics in the 1920s and 30s is just an incredibly exciting period of discovery.

incredibly exciting period of discovery. And by coincidence, they realized the potential for building a bomb at the exact time that Europe is descending into war. And not just any war, but this war in which atrocities are being committed on all sides, the genocide of the Jews and later the firebombing of the German cities and the Japanese cities. And so this new weapon enters the world at a time when all of the constraints on humanitarian behavior have already been washed away. And I think we can sit in, you know, we need to put that into context when we think about the decision to use the weapon. It didn't seem like using a weapon of this sort against civilians was anything different than what had already been going on for months within the war. You'd have firebombings of Tokyo where they would try to create these conflagrations

that would kill 10,000 people in a night. And you had similar atrocities by the Japanese in China. And it's just a... If you think about even the origins of nuclear weapons, right? The nuclear weapons were not born from the Manhattan Project. They started in Nazi Germany. There was a nuclear weapons program, and the US only decided to pursue nuclear weapons because of a fear that Nazi Germany might get there first. And so these weapons enter the world in the hands of this victorious democratic nation and part of the arsenal of democracy. But if Nazi Germany had taken a different path with their technology,

these nuclear weapons could very much have entered the world in the hands of Nazi Germany. And in some ways, that would have sort of revealed the mask of what they're capable of doing. Yeah, that's a very important piece of context because it makes all of the ethical risks we ran and ignored seem totally understandable given the context. I mean, you've just pointed out two very important pieces of context. One is we were already committing similar genocides of civilians by firebombing cities and killing tens of thousands of people a day. And not really, I mean, in the aftermath, we second-guessed that a little bit, but it just seemed like we were, obviously in the wrong and evil and aspiring to create catastrophic harm globally that we sort of had to throw out the rulebook and our scruples

with it. And I think right after the war, there was an attempt to pull back and to return to a different approach. And that's part of the debate that plays out is, should we go on and develop this thermonuclear weapon that's even larger and capable of a thousand times more destructive power, like a true city-busting weapon? true city-busting weapon. And that's the debate. And the US, of course, does proceed with this weapon in part out of fear that if they don't, the Soviet Union will. Oppenheimer is opposed to the use of nuclear weapons in that way, and that's why he is politically sidelined by his adversaries. But even in the movie, you can see the emergence of these two new technologies that are really going to shape the nuclear age. And one is the H-bomb, the thermonuclear weapon,

but the other is the intercontinental missile. And in some of those visions, you can see the terror that a weapon of that sort would inspire because they move 20 times the speed of sound, there's no defense against them. And these are the weapons that really compress the decision-making time and put us right on the brink. And so it's the marriage of miniaturized hydrogen bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles that represent a step change in the level of danger to humanity. So now I realize I derailed you in giving us your bona fides on this topic. I last left you with Jonathan Schell learning to write. So then what happened to you?

Well, I went and worked at a couple different think tanks and I got a fellowship first to study internationally. I got this Watson fellowship where I could travel and study internationally and then came back and did some work at the Stimson Center and the Council on Foreign Relations and went back to graduate school because that's one of the things that Jonathan told me is, you know, if you want to have credibility on this issue, you got to know the details. And I got a master's degree at Princeton University and then went on to work at the Century Foundation where I was involved in editing some volumes. The big debate at that time was over counterterrorism in Afghanistan, as well as Iran and Iran's nuclear program. So I helped edit some volumes and prepare some events on those. What is the Century Foundation? What do they do?

Yeah. So they started as the 20th Century Fund and they published books and supported scholarship, and some really important books came out through their publishing house. And then at the end of the 20th century, they decided that they wanted to continue. They were meant to sunset, but they decided that they had important work to continue, and so they became the Century Foundation. They're based in New York. They're a tiny think tank, and I think they continue to do good work. And you also worked at the Carnegie Corporation, which I also realized I am confused about. I have heard their name, I think, in sponsorship of PBS or NPR a bunch, but what do they do? So they were established by Andrew Carnegie to continue his philanthropic legacy. So he was making money faster than he could responsibly

give it away. So he decided to found a bunch of institutions. He was incredibly prolific. He founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Ethics and a foundation on teaching. But the main continuation of his philanthropic vision was to be housed at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. And it's a grant-making foundation that's made a couple billion dollars of grants over the years and has an endowment that they continue to allocate for education, for peace, and for citizenship, which were Andrew Carnegie's main passions in life. Okay, so let's talk about nuclear risk and just how it has waxed and waned over the years. Most people still put the absolute peak of risk at the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Isn't that the case? Yeah, and I think that's right.

And actually, we recently learned that it was quite a bit riskier than we even thought. Yeah. that it was quite a bit riskier than we even thought. Perhaps you want to review some of that history because it really was what we were unaware of. I'm thinking, of course, of the tactical nukes that the Soviets already had in place that we were apparently unaware of. It's very easy to see how things could have spiraled out of control had we invaded as I think was recommended

by the National Security Council, and it was really just JFK who decided, no, we're not going to do that. What do we know about what was happening there? Well, so this is an interesting story because for many years, we took away the wrong lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe. So you have this crisis that stretched over 13 days, and it was this high stakes brinksmanship, and there were a lot of opportunities for both human and technical error. But the crux of it comes down to the 27th of October in 1962, which is known as Black Saturday. And in my view, this is the closest the world has ever come

to nuclear catastrophe. It's also my wife's birthday, so I made the mistake once of pointing that out. Don't do that anymore. But I also think of it as the day that we survived nuclear catastrophe, so we could celebrate that every year. On that day, you have this incredible series of events. I mean, the day starts with Castro writing to Khrushchev and encouraging him to use nuclear weapons against the United States. And it ends with the Kennedy brothers negotiating for the removal of the missiles in Cuba in return, secretly, for the removal of similar missiles that were in Turkey, right? But in between,

you have three or four different events, each of which could have led to a nuclear exchange. So you have the shooting down of a U-2 surveillance plane in Cuba. You have another U-2 surveillance plane that wanders into Soviet airspace and triggers a response there. You have local anti-aircraft batteries in Cuba that are firing on US planes. And this would have, if they had shot one of those down, this is a red line that Kennedy had drawn. And it was actually the local commanders who were doing this, unbeknownst to Khrushchev and to Castro. You also have the US drawing up its final war plans for an invasion of Cuba, which was going to happen on Monday. So you're here on Saturday, they're preparing for an invasion on Monday.

The Soviet forces are preparing to use these tactical nuclear weapons if they have to, as you've described, there were secretly these tactical nuclear weapons that were on the ground in the hands of the local commanders. And then amidst all of this, you have this incident with with a nuclear-armed submarine, a Soviet submarine that is accompanying the ships. And the US Navy is dropping depth charges to force this submarine to surface. And the guys on the submarine, it's like 130 degrees down there. They don't know if the war started or not. These depth charges are going off. It's like being in down there. They don't know if the war started or not. These depth charges are going off. It's like being in a tin can that's being pounded on, right?

And the captain of that ship actually authorized the use of their special weapon, which was a nuclear torpedo against the US forces. And we're fortunate that they also had the commodore of the fleet who outranked the captain, and he basically said, let's wait, let's see what happens. This is Vasily Arkhipov? Arkhipov, exactly. Yeah. So there were three officers that would have needed to authorize the use of this weapon. Two of them authorized it, the third did not.

This story comes to us through the memoirs of these people and through some archival material. And it's always hard to make sense of these close call stories and how close we really came. But I think this is just, you know, if you add up those three or four different things that were all happening on that day and any of them go wrong and you get nuclear war. And as you said, Kennedy was the one person in that room who was willing to accept Khrushchev's offer. I think Adlai Stevenson was also favorably inclined towards it, but all of the other advisors, both civilian and military, were basically saying,

don't take this deal. You don't want to betray Turkey and sell them out by trading off these missiles. We're ready to go in on Monday with our invasion. We have more nuclear forces. We're in a better position. And so they were ready to go. And the story that for many years people took from the Cuban missile crisis is that you need to demonstrate resolve at all costs. So Kennedy looked Khrushchev in the eye, Khrushchev blinked, the US won. That's the story that people knew because the deal to remove the missiles from Turkey was secret and was only revealed 30 years later, right? And only six people knew about that deal. So what actually saved us in that crisis was not fierce brinksmanship, but the fact that both men, both Kennedy and Khrushchev,

acknowledged their vulnerability and their fear. And they could see that this was a shared problem that could take down both their nations. And so both men blinked. And that's why we avoided nuclear use. Well, I want to return to that logic of brinksmanship and just the game theory there, because obviously it's relevant to our current moment as we watch the war in Ukraine unfold, and the concern about first use of nuclear weapons has suddenly become more relevant to everyone. But before we get there, it's worth focusing on this feature of the problem, which is, I mean, it's not talked about enough, which is that there's so many moments where we have come close to nuclear catastrophe. And the reason why we haven't

has come down to a decision of a single person. You know, in the case of JFK, it's understandable, he's the President of the United States. He's the person who should be deciding this. I mean, you know, as crazy as that sounds, I'm not sure we've even thought through the logic and psychology and practicality of having even a president make this decision. But there are multiple cases where you have a low-level commander on the Soviet side who's deciding whether or not to start a nuclear war on the basis of some information. whether or not to start a nuclear war on the basis of some information. The other case was in 1983, where you had a, I think it was a lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who got some faulty radar data. He wasn't in a position to decide whether or not to respond with nuclear weapons, but he was in a position to pass this data up the chain, and it seems very

likely that a retaliatory response would have been forthcoming. But if memory serves, he saw that it looked like, based on the radar, that the U.S. had launched something like five ICBMs as a first strike, and he reasoned that there's no way they would just launch five missiles. If it's going to be a first strike, they would launch hundreds. So this is probably bad data. But the idea that we have a system where it is falling to some low-level person to decide whether we are on a greased slide into nuclear Armageddon, It's a crazy situation. Yeah. Nobody should ever be put in that position. And the fact that we relied on Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov to make that call, we need to move away from a system where that's

even possible. And people are not equipped to make these kinds of decisions under duress. It's just not something that we're wired for. And even as you say, with political leaders like Kennedy and Khrushchev, yeah, Kennedy was elected and delegated with this level of responsibility. But even then, the pressure to put on a single individual, I think we should reject that and we should move away from systems in which one person is forced to make a decision about the fate of the nation in 15 minutes or less in some cases. We still have these very tight timelines for decision-making, even today. very tight timelines for decision-making, even today. Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about AI.

There are reasons to be very concerned about taking this out of human hands, but that suggests that the whole thing is totally untenable. And even the ethics of it, when you think about a retaliation in response to a perceived first strike. That is something I've spoke about, I believe, with William Perry when he was on the podcast. I mean, I just, I don't think, it feels like we haven't thought through the psychology of the moment. I mean, imagine you're the president of the United States and you have information that your enemy, let's say it's Russia, has just launched a full, you know, first strike seeking to destroy American society, the idea is that given that information and given, you know, the 15 or 30 minutes you have left to respond, that it's the policy of the United States, and it's actually possible that someone's going to follow this policy to just unleash our own genocidal

retaliation. You just get the missiles out of the silos before they get destroyed, so that we can kill 100 or 200 million people on the other side quite pointlessly, right? Nothing is accomplished. You know, you have not protected anyone on your side by doing this. And yet it's imagined that a U.S. president is going to feel that that is what he or she wants to do in their last minutes of life. It really is out of, you know, Dr. Strangelove that we got into this situation.

We've built this incredible doomsday machine. And each step along the way, there was a rationale for doing what we did. And it was driven by this sense of competition. But when you step back and look at the system, it's insane that we continue to live with this. I remember on one of your podcasts, you mentioned it was as if we had all wired our homes with dynamite and that that system just existed in the background. Then we just all forgot about it. And we just go about our lives forgetting that we're under the veil of this nuclear threat. And there has been this collective amnesia, I would say, about nuclear weapons. And we've just assumed that they've pretty much gone away. And if they haven't gone away, they're probably in

safe hands. And I think that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has woken some of us from that slumber and to realize that these weapons are very much still a tool of statecraft and can be used for threat making and coercion. And that nuclear weapons remain a part of the world and this collective challenge that we need to find a way to manage. So let's talk about proliferation and why it hasn't proceeded further than it has. We've got nine countries now that have nuclear weapons. If I'm not mistaken, that's the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. But many others have toyed with developing them. And South Africa even had a stockpile at one point and then dismantled it in 89. And then obviously Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan had weapons that were Soviet weapons that they gave back when the Soviet system collapsed. How do you interpret the fact that, I mean, this is not a successful story of total non-proliferation, but at one point, it was imagined that many more countries were going to go nuclear very quickly. So what happened?

Yeah. So I think, I mean, this kind of takes us back to the film as well, because when Oppenheimer leaves the stage, the sense of most technical experts and political experts and military experts is that these weapons will almost inevitably spread. The scientists understand that it's not hard science, it's an engineering problem, and that any country that can mobilize enough resources can acquire these weapons. And during the early 1960s, Kennedy famously said there are 15 to 25 countries that might acquire nuclear weapons. And it's an interesting list when you go back and look at it, right? And here we are now with

only nine countries that have nuclear weapons. And I think this is a success story. And it's a story that we should be telling more often because it shows that when there's sufficient will, you can do hard things and we can make ourselves safer. So I think there are really four reasons why you don't see the unfettered spread of nuclear weapons. Now, one of them is that the US and the Soviet Union essentially buy off some of these would-be proliferators with security guarantees and promises to protect them if they don't acquire nuclear weapons or lean on them in ways that make it unlikely that they would continue their pursuit of the bomb. Another is that this system of international law and export controls springs up, and that increases

the already high costs of pursuing nuclear weapons. There are certainly financial costs, logistical costs, and reputational costs for countries that want to acquire these. And so this system of law and export control raises those costs. You also have a couple cases of counterproliferation through military action or sanctions that knocks off countries' programs that might have become a threat. But I think an underrated part of the story is this set of norms that emerge against nuclear weapons and against nuclear proliferation. And elites in many countries come to view nuclear weapons as immoral and as unnecessary, and come to see them as liabilities rather than assets.

And I think that's an underrated part of the story. So it's really a multi-causal story, but where we are now, this is kind of the best case scenario for someone sitting in 1960 and looking at where this technology might go. And I think we can continue to build on that. Then what do you think about the logic of deterrence here? Because when you look at a country that really has become a global malefactor like North Korea, the reason why North Korea has been immune to retribution or outside meddling, apart from its quasi-alliance with China, is the fact that it now can, you know, I guess in part it could, there's a conventional answer here. It could just blanket

South Korea with artillery shells. But the fact that it's nuclear seems to be part of the picture here. And it's just a reason why it's unthinkable to respond to its provocations with force. I guess another example would be Pakistan. Now, it's like, as much as we might want to respond to something there, it might have been several moments over the last 20 years where it would have seemed warranted. It's in a different category, given the fact that it has nuclear weapons. Why do you think that, and I guess we could speculate that Ukraine, had they ever properly had their own nuclear arsenal and retained it, they would not have been invaded by Russia. much more of the world to draw the lesson that if you want to maintain your sovereignty as a nation, you want to have at least some nuclear bombs that you can threaten to use. Yeah, well, I think that North Korea and Pakistan drew that lesson, and they live in a tough

neighborhood and face some adversaries and decided that the only way they could achieve their security was to acquire nuclear weapons, and they successfully crossed that line. And they are sort of the exception that proves the rule, because a lot of other countries weren't willing to subject themselves to the types of sanctions and economic isolation in order to achieve the bomb. So both Pakistan and North Korea paid a huge cost to acquire nuclear weapons. And people look at sanctions and say, well, they didn't work here. And to some extent, that's true. But I think those sanctions also had a deterrent effect for other countries that might have wanted to go in that direction. And most countries have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have adhered to it because they realize that while they probably could get a nuclear

weapon, that would be very expensive economically, politically, et cetera, and would result in their isolation. Who else do you think is poised to go nuclear now beyond the obvious case of Iran? Yeah, I think it's a really short list. And I think that that's evidence of the success of this international system that we've built over the years. I think Iran is the only credible country that's on the verge. Now, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, this could result in a new wave of interest from countries like Saudi Arabia, for example. You could also imagine a world in which the US backs off of some of its alliance commitments

and basically signals that it's not willing to defend Japan or South Korea. And you could imagine governments in those countries proceeding with a nuclear weapons program. They both have access to the technology and the fissile material if they wanted to launch a crash program to acquire the bomb. So in some ways, these US security assurances are a key part of the non-proliferation regime. There's also Taiwan, which had a nuclear weapons program until the 1960s or in the 1960s and gave that program up under pressure from the United States. So nuclear weapons are out there. They're not that hard to build. These are 1940s technology. They entered the world at the same time as

microwave ovens and jet engines and things that we take for granted as having spread everywhere, right? So it's really this system of assurances and controls and norms that have kept these weapons from going everywhere. But we're only 80 years into the nuclear story, right? That's the crazy thing, is there's still people who are alive who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that's one human lifetime. And we don't know what's going to come next. And what is the story that we're going to be writing 80 years from now, if we can survive that long, looking back at this period, will we say this was a period of relative safety, or this was a time where we turned the corner and went down a dark path? Or is this the time when we decided once and for all that these weapons are too dangerous to live with, and we pushed them to the side and stop relying on them as heavily. I think the most likely scenario is the status quo where these things continue to hum along in the background, and we all pretend that they don't really exist, but every year we're running

some non-zero risk. You keep rolling those dice year after year, and the chance for human miscalculation, for technical accident, for deliberate use, every year you're taking a risk. Yeah, that's the most sobering part of it, the idea that we're rolling those dice year after year, and as a matter of probability, this is compounding. And it's all being maintained by an aging infrastructure, which I guess in some of the... We'll talk about the dangers of things like cyber attacks, et cetera, but maybe there are some ways in which the antiquity of this system has a silver lining because presumably it's not as, maybe it's not as hackable as it would be if it was all being run on the latest operating system. Yeah, they've upgraded it now. So we're now on digital systems with nuclear command and control.

We're now on digital systems with nuclear command and control. And I think that enhances reliability. But as you mentioned, it creates certain cyber vulnerabilities. And nobody knows what those cyber vulnerabilities are in every country. There are some people who believe they know a lot about their own country's vulnerabilities. But as you say, there are nine nuclear weapon states, and they all have different systems for managing nuclear weapons. And there's the possibility that one side will attack a nuclear arsenal in a way that leads to nuclear escalation. That's an additional terrifying variable here, which is that really we're at the mercy of the weakest link in that chain. I mean, we might completely lock down our system in the United States and feel that it's really perfect.

You know, there's just the chance that we're going to do something by accident is zero. Of course, we could never achieve that. But even if we did, the best possible case, we're at the mercy of whatever China and Russia and other possible adversaries. And North Korea. Yeah. How good are their systems? I don't want to be at the mercy of North Korea's systems. It's incredible that we're in this situation. Yeah. And then you read, I'm sure you've read Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control. Yeah, it's a masterpiece.

You read about the preparations we have made for the continuity of government, and it is a dark comedy. Yeah. And it is a dark comedy. The steps we've had to take to figure out what to do in one direction, but that we got there and we're left with the machinations that we imagine is going to safeguard our survival. It's just, it's bonkers. I think that it's worth looking at a few of the moments where we actually released tension from that ratchet, because it hasn't always been inevitably increasing. One of them is in 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev meet, and they agree that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.

And they fell short of some of the deep cuts that were discussed at the Reykjavik summit, but they left with a shared understanding. And Gorbachev went back believing that the US would not launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. They'd previously been very afraid that the US was preparing to do that. So that sense of shared understanding allowed for the intermediate range nuclear forces agreement, which limited some of the most destabilizing weapons in Europe. So that's one example. Another is in 1991, where unilaterally, President H.W. Bush just takes all of the US tactical nuclear weapons and he takes them off alert and off of the surface ships, et cetera. And this is just a recognition of a change in the security environment

after the fall of the Soviet Union. And he didn't need to negotiate an extensive treaty, but I think rather courageously just said, we can move first and had this presidential nuclear initiative that was then reciprocated by Russia. And so that's one of the cases where you have this ratchet going in the other direction. And so there are things that we have done in the past to take a little pressure out of the system. Unfortunately, where we are now is going in the wrong direction. We've gotten spoiled. The past 30 years or so has been a period of relatively low nuclear risk. And with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I feel like we've entered a new period

of escalating nuclear risk. And this is something that people have been talking about for some time, but you can see it really manifesting itself. You're fighting a conventional war in the nuclear shadow in which Vladimir Putin has made references and threats with nuclear weapons. And then he's occasionally walked them back, but some other spokespeople have gone forward and made those threats again. So we have this period of heightened risk. And in the background is a new relationship with China and their nuclear arsenal. So China for many years has had a small recessed nuclear arsenal, and they are in the process of doubling or tripling that arsenal. They could have as many as 1,500 nuclear weapons by the 2030s,

and that is going to reshape this competition because we've never had a three-way nuclear standoff in the way that we soon will. So let's take those separate cases. Let's talk about Russia and Ukraine first. The threats we've heard from Putin and other spokespeople in Russia, have those all been with respect to the use of tactical weapons in the theater of conflict in Ukraine, or have there been- Usually it's not specified. Usually they're making some reference. So, you know, for example, in February, Putin said, if Ukraine attempts to take back Crimea, European countries will be in conflict with Russia, which is a leading nuclear power superior

to many NATO countries in terms of nuclear force. In that case, it's a vague threat, but it's referencing nuclear forces that could be used. And then later, Putin mentions that they are raising the alert of their nuclear forces. It turns out that appears to have been bogus, and the US intelligence community mentions they don't see any difference in the operational patterns of Russia's forces. But it's clear that he's trying to manipulate risk and to raise the prospects that nuclear weapons would be used. And presumably, it would be a tactical or battlefield nuclear weapon rather than a strategic nuclear weapon, but we just don't know. We know that

Russian nuclear doctrine says that they would only use nuclear weapons if the existence of the state is threatened. But at various points, Putin and other officials have made statements that seem to signal a broader interpretation of that in a way that I think we need to take seriously, even if we recognize that they have some desire to manipulate that risk. So when this war started and the obvious threat of nuclear escalation was first discussed, many people immediately drew the lesson, seemingly the wrong lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is that you just can't blink, right? You can't give in to nuclear blackmail.

We don't want to set that. One, it's a terrible, because it means that anyone who has nuclear weapons can basically do whatever they want conventionally, as long as they purport to be suicidal. And I guess I'm wondering what you think about what been, we, the US, I guess, and NATO, have been impeccable in how we have not caved in to Russian demands? see there is not a rush to invoke nuclear weapons as a response. There is a seriousness and a cautiousness through which the Biden administration has approached this issue while continuing to support Ukraine's righteous defense of its territory. And I think it's a really hard line to walk because it's not clear where the lines are. What do you think we would do if Russia used tactical nukes on Ukraine? strike with conventional forces the units that launched the attack and would also strike other forces that are of great value to Russia. For example, sinking some warships in the Black Sea

or striking other targets and indicate that this represents an escalation in the war, but without expanding in a way that could lead to all-out nuclear war. I think that would be the attempt. But who knows? There are not that many stages beyond that, right? That seems completely sensible to me. But then when you imagine what happens next, there's just not that many stops on the way

to the end of everything. It's interesting. You had Fred Kaplan on the podcast. He's an amazing, he's a national treasure. That book's a great book. And he describes in it a set of war games and exercises that were conducted during the Obama administration over a fictitious scenario, a war game in the Baltics in which Russia had invaded and occupied the Baltics and had used nuclear weapons. And they played the simulation or war game out twice, once with the principals, so the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, et cetera, and once with the deputies, the deputy secretaries, et cetera. And the outcome was

different in each case. The principals responded with a nuclear weapon and the deputies did not. So a lot of it depends on who's at the table and who's advocating for what. Now, with any of these war game scenarios, they're different than what someone would be encountering when really making a decision. I think they're really useful to try to help prepare ourselves to think the unthinkable, to think about what we would do when sitting in that chair, but they can also mislead in various ways too. I think one of the interesting questions we might ask is why hasn't Russia used nuclear weapons yet, right? Because we know they see this conflict as being essential to their security. It's sometimes described as existential. They have

nuclear weapons, including relatively low-yield tactical weapons that they could use on the battlefield to try to achieve a tactical goal, but they haven't. And I think there are a few reasons. I mean, one, we don't know how this ends, and maybe they're not desperate enough, and maybe that's why they haven't used them. There's also a deterrence element from NATO and from Ukraine. But I think that there's another piece of the puzzle too, which is that even for Russia and Vladimir Putin, these weapons are seen as a line that he's reluctant to cross. And that's in part a result of this history of 78 years of non-use of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union had its major rhetorical talking point throughout the Cold War that we weren't the ones who used

nuclear weapons. It was the US that used these terrible weapons. And there's been this distinction that we've drawn over the years. It wasn't always like this, but that nuclear weapons are something different. So if Russia were to cross that line, they would be paying a price in doing that reputationally. Three quarters of the people in the world live in a country that haven't really taken sides in this conflict. And we've heard that China and India have indicated to Russia that Russia should not use nuclear weapons in this conflict. And so there are considerations that are other than military. One of my fears is that if a country does use nuclear weapons, and especially uses a small, relatively small battlefield weapon, there will not be the sorts of massive deaths and casualties that we saw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. deaths and casualties that we saw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And a lot of people are going to look around and say, that's it? What's the big deal, right? And you could imagine that leading

to a new wave of interest in nuclear weapons and a new wave of proliferation. It also could lead to a rejection of nuclear weapons and to say, we should never use these things again. And so I think whatever happens immediately in the aftermath of the next use of nuclear weapons, if there is one, could shape our relationship with these weapons for the future. And this nuclear taboo that we've had for the past 78 years is something that benefits us all and we should really work to preserve that. Yeah, well, it's somewhat analogous to the taboos around chemical weapons and biological weapons.

And I'd heard recently, I don't know if this is common knowledge and I just missed it, but I'd heard that at one point we realized we could create laser weapons that would just permanently blind soldiers on the battlefield. And we just didn't go down that path at all because it just seemed so ghastly to ever put that into use, which is interesting because on some level, it's not nearly as bad as the other things we have developed. Right. Yeah. I don't know why. it was so obviously unethical to the people who saw that this technology was in reach, but there is just something

horrible about the idea of effortlessly blinding people en masse as a way of winning a war, yet we're willing to blow them up, riddle them with shrapnel, and et cetera, and yet silently blinding everybody is just, we're not going to go there. Do you have any intuitions about why that struck us as just totally untenable, ethically? Yeah, I'm not sure. But you have, at various times, an effort to make war more humane and to limit the types of activities you would engage in. humane and to limit the types of activities you would engage in. Even in World War I,

there was an effort before the war started to limit the use of poison gas. But then once one side used poison gas, and initially it wasn't the type that killed you, it was a less deadly form of gas, all of a sudden that line was crossed and it became commonplace to do this horrible thing. And so these norms, I think, can be really valuable, but they can be fragile as well. And I don't know exactly what to make sense of it. You see an effort to ban landmines and cluster munitions and these other devices that are disproportionate in their humanitarian consequence, right? They're just really awful weapons that harm civilians. And then we have these weapons, nuclear weapons, that are inherently inhumane in just about every circumstance you can imagine them being used, right? We plan to conduct mass murder on

this scale that is hard to comprehend in the service of national security. So even as you're preventing blinding lasers and landmines, you still have plans on the book to incinerate cities or incinerate military bases that are adjacent to cities, which would have resulted in massive fallout and death. It's one of the great contradictions. And I think to go back to the film Oppenheimer, this is part of what's captured is the decision to develop the H-bomb is about what is the role of these weapons going to be in society and in warfare going forward. And there were a group of people who felt nuclear weapons were like any other weapon and that we ought to develop them and put them in the hands of the military. And Truman eventually pushed back against that and took control back and put these in the hands

of civilians. And that's where it's been in the US and in other nuclear countries as well, that these weapons are different than just military devices that can be sent out to the local commanders. But we have a really imperfect history there about how they've been used and practiced. What do you think about the growing tensions between the U.S. and China, specifically around our somewhat equivocal commitment to protecting Taiwan? Yeah, I think if there is a hot war between U.S. and China, it will be over Taiwan. I think that's the only issue that approaches the stakes. And the U.S US has become less equivocal under the Biden administration about its willingness to defend Taiwan. And...

Were those moments essentially gaffes on his part where he basically said we would defend Taiwan even though our official doctrine is, I think, what was it called? Strategic ambiguity or something like that? I don't think so. I don't think they were. I think it reflects an increased willingness to stand up to China or to try to stand up to China in this case. And I am deeply concerned about the path that we're on because it seems like we are on a collision course with China and nobody really knows what the right approach is to avoid war with China, because there are risks and costs to both approaches.

So... What's the risk of... So we're strangely, and we as I think the entire world is strangely dependent on Taiwanese manufacturing of semiconductors. But if we onshore all of that supply chain and we're no longer dependent on them, can you imagine that we would suddenly decide they're not a critical U.S. interest anymore and we don't need to have a policy that we're going to come to their rescue? Or does that then make Japan and South Korea suddenly worried that we're not the ally we claim to be and then they go nuclear? Yeah, I think that's the central debate that we're going to have in the coming years as the US becomes less dependent on Taiwan for its technology, and as China becomes more powerful relative to the US. And China has been building up its military in order to assert its dominance

in the Western Pacific. And it's not clear how long the US can preserve its advantage. And a US president is going to have to make a hard choice at some point. There's a fair amount of talk about the coming demographic collapse in China and that they're really just not going to be what we feared going forward. I don't know if you have followed the work of Peter Zion or anyone else who's been hitting this topic of late, but... Yeah, I haven't been following it that closely, but it does sound... The narrative on China has shifted a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Although, I don't know if that could lead them to do something more reckless rather

than less reckless in the meantime. They may feel like they have a closing window to resolve this problem. Right. And Xi Jinping has said that he does not want to pass the Taiwan issue on. He wants to deal with it during his tenure. I'm sure he'd like to. I don't know if he's committed to doing that. So given these background concerns that we have collectively built a doomsday device and it's on, to one degree or another, a hair trigger or many hair triggers or triggers that the integrity of which we can't assess, And now we have this growing concern about misinformation and disinformation and cyber attacks and deep fakes. And I mean, just we have this digital layer of culture that is proving to be a kind of hallucination machine. How are you thinking about the advent of these new digital problems? And if we throw generative AI

and AI control of our actual nuclear infrastructure, ultimately, how are you thinking about recent developments in tech against what we've, in light of everything we've just talked about? Well, I think it's really concerning. And there's a couple of reasons for concern, and you've mentioned one of them is just do leaders and decision makers understand the context in which they're making decisions? And there's an opportunity to create disinformation about a particular conflict or crisis, right? about a particular conflict or crisis, right? And then at a more granular level, there is a set of systems that enable nuclear use, command and control, communications, and these systems rely upon a digital infrastructure, And they need to be executed perfectly every time and with great speed. So you have a network of early warning satellites and radars, and you have communications

nodes, and you have decision makers who then receive the information from these various sensors and have to make sense of it. And I think in many countries, there's going to be a strong incentive to use AI to synthesize that data and provide decision-making support to the relevant decision- makers as quickly and accurately as possible. And to some extent, this is just software, right? This is what military planners do. They take state-of-the-art software and they integrate it into their systems. And so we will be relying increasingly on this processing of the information by something that you could consider as AI, right?

Now, there's a strong commitment by the US military and by US decision makers to never let an AI agent make a decision. There always needs to be a human in the loop and a human making the decision to use a nuclear weapon system. My concern is that all of the processing of the information and the interpretation of the information could be done by an AI system in a way that leaves humans essentially as button pushers. as button pushers. Are you really going to reject the conclusions of a system that has proved 99% reliable and that's built on state-of-the-art software and hardware? And it just really seems to be the best way to support your decisions. And that's, I think, the slippery slope we might go on. And there are some efforts in Congress to limit that. I think that, you know, as with other

command and control issues, we are only as safe and secure as the weakest link in the chain. And so we need to be getting together now with Russia, China, other countries to figure out how can we avoid this slippery slope in which we are essentially delegating nuclear decisions to an algorithm, because that's a really scary world. scary world. Yeah, it is, except if you imagine that you have AI that you are wise to trust, right? Because again, we're talking about situations where you don't have a lot of time, right? If you've got 15 minutes to make a decision and you either have an ape who doesn't have time to consult with other apes, or you have some AI system that you have put in place that you really think is analogous to a chess engine that's just better at chess than people are. systems and these human systems are prone to different modes of failure. And the problem fundamentally is making high-stakes decisions under incredible time pressure. That's the

fundamental problem, and that's what I think we need to move back from. We need to devise a system that allows us to be safe and secure without relying on a decision in minutes that could imperil the world. Because whether you're delegating that decision to machines or to people, there are these failure modes. And I don't know which is better, right? I just reject the premise that we need to accept that. Is there a path back to zero here? I mean, has anyone articulated a plausible path whereby we would just recognize that the only way to win this game is not to play it at all? I mean, it seems really implausible at this particular moment, given the height of tensions with Russia, China. We haven't even talked about India or Pakistan or Israel's reliance on nuclear weapons, North Korea. There are a lot of countries that possess these weapons and have a strong desire and incentive to keep them, right? So I think it needs to be, if we ever move in this direction, it needs to be a joint project in which collectively we recognize that these weapons pose

an unacceptable risk to humanity and to our nations, and that systematically, step by step, in a safe way, we're going to pull back from the brink. Because there are certainly risks to moving too quickly and to leaving vulnerabilities. But I think the first thing we need to do is to recognize that we've got a problem and that fundamentally, we've wired all our homes with dynamite, right? We haven't even acknowledged that, right? And once we acknowledge that there can be a better way to resolve our differences without resort to nuclear threats, then we can start moving in the right direction. The Obama administration put forward this plan, a graduated approach towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

And it was rejected by Russia, in part because they saw it as a ploy. And so the world we live in now, you can't just take nuclear weapons out of that world and expect that to be a safe world. It's naive and unrealistic. But we need to work towards greater mechanisms of collective security in which we reach the point that there's no conflict that's worth fighting that we would consider annihilating each other's cities for. Well, on that point, do you think that the current status quo of mutually assured destruction has kept us over the last 75 years from fighting the conventional version of World War III?

It's interesting that you say mutually assured destruction because this phrase is often evoked. This is not a deliberate strategy so much as a condition that people had to accept, right? And there was always a desire, especially within the US, to escape from this condition of mutual assured destruction. Because if deterrence is stable at the nuclear level, it allows for potentially conventional aggression below the nuclear level, right? This is that stability-instability paradox. And so there was always a desire to maintain some nuclear superiority. This is the world that we are confronted with, is a world of anxiety and fear. And you can have nuclear stability for a while, but then something comes along to challenge that nuclear stability. I think that if you look at the way leaders thought about nuclear weapons throughout the

Cold War, it did play a dampening effect on their goals and aspirations and their willingness to engage in war, especially between the great powers, right? But it pushed that conflict elsewhere. So instead of fighting a conventional war in Europe, there were these proxy wars that were fought in Korea and in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. And the Cold War, it was a relatively peaceful time if you lived in the United States, but it was not a peaceful time for the populations that were affected by these proxy wars. There were just some really awful, brutal conflicts that were a result of this rivalry. that were a result of this rivalry. And so I think nuclear deterrence has certainly had some benefits, but it has come at the cost of these various close calls and at the cost of pushing conflict elsewhere. Well, I know we all await the wisdom of governments in figuring out how to mitigate this threat, but what is the role or opportunities for philanthropy here?

Because I know you're currently at Longview Philanthropy and leading their program on nuclear weapons and existential risk. And Longview has been advising me and the Waking Up Foundation in how we give out money each year. Philanthropically, what can private citizens do to help? Yeah. So I think from the start of the nuclear age, scientists and activists and non-governmental experts have played a really key role in auditing government activities and putting pressure and changing the incentives for what government actors wanted to do. In general, these weapons are the domain of governments. They're in the hands of government and military leaders, and that is as it should be.

But the voices of citizens are really important too in setting the tone and the voices of experts as well. So I think you could see that in the role of academic experts and understanding nuclear deterrence and shaping the field of arms control. You can see that today in the work of many NGOs who work really hard to make information publicly accessible in the role of media organizations that report on these things. But this is a contracting field. You have the largest funder in the space, which is the MacArthur Foundation, chosen 2020 to exit the field. And so there are a lot of these non-governmental organizations that are essentially starved for cash. And- What happened there? Why did MacArthur get out of the saving the future game? They were reorganizing their portfolio and they had placed a big bet on nuclear weapons. And they did an assessment of that and determined that

while the grantees were making great contributions in informing official policy and informing the public, they didn't see a line of sight to achieving their big bet goal. And so the board ultimately decided that they didn't want to do this anymore. And I don't think that's the right choice, but at the same time, I think the MacArthur Foundation should be applauded for their many years of investment in this because there are lots of other foundations who haven't done anything in this space. And when I look at that, I just think about how large and consequential an issue this is and how important it is to have non-governmental voices. And the amount of money that is going into the sector is tiny in comparison.

What is it? Can you estimate what the funding is? Yeah, so the Peace and Security Funders Group seeks to estimate the total non-governmental spending in this space. And I think that we don't have the numbers for this year, but it'll be somewhere around $30 million. Oh my God, that really is paltry given what we're talking about. Yeah. Wow. Is that all the organizations that are in the space? I mean, something like the Plowshares Fund, and I mean, you're including all of those? We're including the grants that Plowshares makes, yeah, in that total. Man, okay. Well, this is an appeal to audience members. This is a game that we obviously need to win, and it's astonishing to me that we're talking about this level of funding for a problem of this sort. When you look at what gets funded and at what scale, there are startups that no one's ever heard of and will never hear of that have raised 10 times that amount of money.

And then they evaporate. It'sate. This is all upside down. So I am going to be giving money to this. I've already given money to Plowshares and others, but this is going to be a top priority going forward, and I would just welcome that all of you get involved to the degree that you can. I know, Carl, Longview is opening a nuclear weapons policy fund, right? Can you say something about that? So we see this as a really neglected problem that just affects all of us alive today. And we need non-governmental voices, the voices of scholars and scientists and activists in order to help shape these policies. And I think from the start of the nuclear age, these voices have been essential. So we're putting together this fund to try to raise money. None of it goes to long view philanthropy. 100% goes directly to the beneficiaries.

And so what types of groups are we likely to fund? Well, for example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is working on this issue of inadvertent nuclear escalation and looking at the ways that technological entanglement of conventional and nuclear systems could lead to the inadvertent use of nuclear weapons. You have a group called the Council on Strategic Risks, which is looking at some of the most dangerous nuclear systems that are in development. For example, the sea-launched cruise missile, which the US administration did a review of, decided it didn't need, but Congress then put the money back in for it. And this weapon is escalatory because it has target and payload ambiguity.

So when it's launched, you don't know exactly where it's going, and you don't know whether it carries a nuclear or a conventional warhead. going, and you don't know whether it carries a nuclear or a conventional warhead. So these are the types of interventions that we think are really important at the moment. We need, broadly, a civil society effort to elevate this issue and return it to a position of concern within society. And I think there are just so many ways to contribute to nuclear risk reduction. And one of them is financially, if you're in a position to do that. But I think this is an issue for everyone. And I think that we should all add nuclear weapons to our portfolio of concern. And I know that's a

big ask because there are just so many things to worry about these days, but we're not going to get better policies unless people remember the threat that these weapons pose. And support political space for the US, if you're in the US, to negotiate with Russia and China to reduce these shared risks. And if you're not in a position to give financially, you still have a political voice and you can talk about these issues with your friends and amplify helpful messages on social media. And if you are in a position to give financial support, there are so many good, dedicated people who have spent their lives preparing to try to contribute. And they're struggling right now because the space has contracted. And a little bit of money goes a really long way here. And our job at Longview Philanthropy is to try to find the best, highest impact projects,

and then to put that money to use. So we have a great team and we can go out and investigate and find groups that we think are doing work that is the most effective. And then we can network them together and help them be more effective than they would be operating in isolation. So by all means, if you already know of a group working on nuclear weapons risk reduction, you can always support them directly. But if you're not sure what to do, we want to make it really easy for people to make a difference here. Well, that's great. And we will put a link to the foundation page when this podcast goes out. It will be on my blog and in the show notes and in the associated email. Lastly, Carl, imagine we have some in our audience who are just going to college now, or they're midstream in their undergraduate years,

and they are suddenly struck by the opportunity to live a truly meaningful life by trying to grapple with this particular problem. I imagine there are many paths through a university and perhaps through a graduate program that could equip somebody to meaningfully put their shoulder to the wheel here, but what strike you as a couple that seem especially promising? Well, I have incredible respect for the government officials who grapple with these problems, and they're not easy, and they're operating under a lot of constraints. So we need really good people in government working on these

issues. So I think a career in government is excellent, an excellent path, both in the short term you can contribute, but longer term you're developing skills, connections, and perspectives that will be helpful. There are a lot of graduate programs that prepare you both in terms of science and policy to have a high-impact career in this space. But beyond that, I think we need people with a variety of skills. So if you are an artist or a graphic designer, you can contribute in that way.

If you do social media, we need people who can tell great human stories about the way nuclear weapons have affected us and the risks we continue to run. us and the risks we continue to run. And I think there's a really important role for civil society and for citizens and for outside experts to provide support for government efforts, but also to critique them and audit them and to hold people to account. Because there are large bureaucracies that are at work, that are chugging away, producing these outcomes that are inimical to our collective security. And so you need people who are willing to call that out. One example is this guy, Bruce Blair, who passed away a few years ago, but is just a hero to me.

He's this veteran nuclear launch officer, and he became a deep expert in nuclear command and control and a really dedicated truth teller to expose the dangers that are inherent in this whole enterprise. And someone like that, he knew the generals and the admirals, and he knew people in the Russian enterprise as well, and he spoke with great clarity and conviction. But he was able to provide a counterpoint to some of the official narratives in a way that I think is really healthy. And you also have people who work in and out of government and develop the expertise and the connections they need outside of government and then bring that in. So a good example of this is Rose Gottmiller, who worked in government early develop the expertise and the connections they need outside of government, and then bring that

in. So a good example of this is Rose Gottmiller, who worked in government early in her career. And then she went to work at the Carnegie Moscow Center. And the expertise that she built up was really helpful when she was appointed as the chief negotiator for the New START Treaty. And she describes in her book how that was a really important part of getting that treaty done, and then the role of civil society in getting that treaty passed through Congress, because you need a two-thirds majority for treaty ratification. So providing political space for cooperation is essential, because it's really hard these days to talk about cooperating with Russia and China. And I get it, right? These are countries that are,

in some cases, they're doing really awful things, but we have a shared threat that we need to manage. And I think that's one of the roles of civil society is opening doors for work in that area. Yeah, on that point, that brings us full circle to what Christopher Nolan has just accomplished with his film. I mean, it's just, you know, it's a work of art, but perhaps more than anything in recent memory, it's made this problem unignorable for so many millions of people. So it's props to him. Yeah, I mean, there's so many important themes, yeah, in terms of the way it deals with the role of scientists

and society. And we just see echoes of this today in the way scientific expertise is sidelined in the public sphere, from vaccines to climate change to AI. And it's capturing this Prometheus moment. And nuclear weapons were really the first time we confronted the fact that our power has outstripped our wisdom. And we unleashed these elemental forces, the very forces that power the sun. We bring them down to earth, right? And we had to grapple with that then. But in some ways, we're doing it again with biotechnology and with artificial intelligence. And so the story is about nuclear weapons, but this idea of creating something that you're not sure you can control, it has real resonance in this moment. And there's this scene in the movie, without spoiling it, where Oppenheimer is

talking to Einstein. And I think the scene is fabricated, but it is based on the sentiment that he might have had at the time. As they're embarking on the Manhattan Project, they are wondering whether the first Trinity test could result in the ignition of the atmosphere and lead to a chain reaction which destroys all of humanity. And they run the calculations and they run them again, and they realize that this possibility is vanishingly small. It's essentially zero. So Oppenheimer's talking to Einstein and he says, when I came to you with these calculations, we thought we might

start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world." He turns to Anton and he says, I believe we did. And the question is, what did we set in motion with that first Trinity test? Did we start this arms race inexorably, which would lead us to where we are today with 12,000 weapons, many of them on high alert, in this system in which we are all vulnerable forever. I don't think we did. If you look at the past 80 years, we've come right up to the brink. But then each time we've gained a little bit of wisdom and we've built these systems of governance. And you look at the nuclear nonproliferation regime to prevent the spread and these various arms control treaties that have helped manage competition and hotlines that allowed for communications between adversaries.

All of these are imperfect ways of managing this technology and we need to do better. imperfect ways of managing this technology, and we need to do better. But I think Oppenheimer, looking at where we are today, if he could see where we're at, he'd be terrified by the number of weapons we've built, but I think he'd be also impressed at the international systems we've built to regulate these weapons. And the International Atomic Energy Agency in some ways reflects his vision of international control over the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. So it's really a mixed story. Yeah. Well, Carl, thank you for your time and thank you for the work you're doing. I will continue to follow it with interest. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate all you're doing.