The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Iran, Nukes and the Illusion of Safety | Nuclear Weapons Expert Scott Sagan

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Scott Sagan. Scott Sagan is a Stanford professor, Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a leading scholar of nuclear security and international relations. An expert on nuclear weapons safety, organizational failure and proliferation, he previously served at Harvard and in the Pentagon supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Author of The Limits of Safety and multiple award-winning works, his research explores how human error, complex systems, and institutional breakdowns can lead to nuclear accidents and global security risks.

Hey, hey, this is live from the table, the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcast. Dan Aderman here with Noam Gorman in studio. Perry Alaschenbrand, I guess it's not coming. She's here. She's joining us via Zoom. I don't see her. But then any...

Okay, Perry else with us via Zoom. Also via Zoom, we're privileged to have Scott Seagan, a Stanford professor, co-director and senior fellow with the Center for International Security and Cooperation, a leading scholar of nuclear security and international relations. I hear nuclear security, I'm thinking this is going to be a discussion about Iran, and it's high time we dug into that topic. By the way, I have to leave because I have a set around the corner at the village underground, so I won't be here the whole time, just FYI. And take it away, Noam. Welcome, Professor Sagan.

So I've been wanting to speak to you desperately now. I told Perry, I'll call him again, email him again, because you have spoken. And by the way, the way I found you was, I asked ChachyPT, who is the number one expert in the world on the issue of accidents, of accidental launches and explosions from nuclear weapons? And I think Chachy P.T said, Scott Sagan is to this subject as Bob Marley is to reggae. Like you're like the ultimate. That's the very first time I've ever been compared to Bob Marley. So, you don't already made my day. On your next book, I'd like to have a blurb that says that.

So anyway, because I have been making this analogy now for, I don't know, a couple years. Maybe it's a tortured analogy. But if it's tortured, I think it's more like waterboarding than hot oil down the gullet torture. Because I think it's close to something you'll agree with. And my analogy has been as follows. that just like we're so worried about biological warfare, but that very likely it was the lab leak, which was the cause of the deadliest event in modern history.

We are so fixated on the use of nuclear weapons that we have taken our eye off the ball on what I think is the much more profoundly dangerous and likely event is of some sort of horrible, accident and a chain reaction which follows from that. And I think that is along the lines of where you're coming from, but I'll let you just respond to that and tell us, you know, give us an overview of your position on all that. Well, I would say that you're right in that most people focus on the questions about the deliberate use of nuclear weapons. And there

are huge debates about how deterrence works, how strong is it, etc. What I've argued for a long time, and I think the evidence is strong, is that there are risks of accidents and false warnings, but the risk of an accident and a false warning triggering nuclear use and a crisis in which people are contemplating the deliberate use are related. That is, they shouldn't be thought of as entirely separate. When you have a crisis in which somebody is thinking that an adversary might use nuclear weapons, that's exactly when a false warning is really, really dangerous. So the best example recently is what happened in January 2017. You remember this incident during the Trump Kim Jong-un hostile rhetoric about

about, you know, my button's bigger than your button. And if you don't stop testing, we're going to have fire and fury. That's why I learned the word, that's when I learned the word dotard. Kim Jong-unquote Trump of do-tard, which I'd never heard before. Go ahead. Right in the middle of that, there was this instance in Hawaii that you may recall where a emergency system operator put something on saying that there's a missile coming into Hawaii. this is not a test. This is not a test. And in Hawaii, some people reacted correctly,

which is you hunker down, you go into your basement if you have one, go in the middle of the house, if not. Some people reacted poorly, which meant going outside and seeing what was going on, which is where you'd get exposed to radiation if there was a weapon that landed anywhere nearby. But in Washington or in Omaha, where the strategic command is, or in, in, in Colorado where the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Warning System operators are, no one panicked. And the reason was threefold. One was that we have redundant sensors that said, oh, there's nothing coming. We have professional operators who said, oh, oh, by the way, this was a test.

We made a mistake. And the guy made a mistake. And we reported it internally within about 20 minutes. And lastly, no one really expected that Kim Jong-un was about. to launch a war by attacking Hawaii, by attacking Pearl Harbor. Now, a man, one second, that incident occurred in North Korea. All three of those mitigating factors wouldn't exist. They don't have redundant sensors.

They've just got a couple primitive radars. They don't have professional operators because in North Korea, you don't get fired if you make a mistake. You get killed. Right. So they're not going to say, oh, sir, I'm sorry. Mr. President, we made a mistake. They're going to run. They're going to leave. And lastly, they did think that the United States might attack. Why? Because President Trump was saying,

if you don't stop testing, we're going to have fire and fury, and you'll see an attack like nothing you've ever seen. So I think the risk of an accident or a false warning or something going tragically wrong and the risk of a deliberate war are related. They positively reinforce each other. All right. So let me read into the record here, and I agree with you 100%. And then I want to talk about... I have a quick question on that. I'm sorry, Dan?

I have a quick question, just whenever you can get it in. I want to then talk about how all these risks are extremely amplified when it comes to despotic nations, dictatorships, and particularly Iran, which is what's on everybody's mind here. But just I ask chat GPT to generate a list of accidents or near accidents. Goldsboro, a B-52 broke apart over North Carolina, and one hydrogen bomb came alarmingly close to detonating. I think three out of the five dip switches. B-59 submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis came close to firing a nuclear torpedo.

Petro false alarm, Soviet warning systems reported an incoming U.S. strike. The guy just chose not to disregard it. The Volkfield Bear incident, a bear trigger to security scare that it sent nuclear-armed interceptors towards takeoff during the Cuban Missile Crisis. there's a Norwegian rocket. I discovered that one in the archives. No one had known about it. That's your thing.

Okay. I mean, I'm just skipping through the computer chip false alarm in 1980, caused U.S. systems to display a massive Soviet attack that did not exist. Norad exercise tape 19709, Damascus Titan, 1980, Alaska U.2, overflight, 19602. It goes on and on. It won't take the time. And, of course, we've had Nixon, I think, put the world on DefCon 3.

Kanye West went DeathCon 3 on the Jews. I don't know if that, if that are. applies here, but all these things are scary. So anyway, so there's all these, um, close calls. And right, every one of these things in your, uh, scenario that you just, uh, painted, you wonder, well, how would Hawaii have reacted if these were, these came from somebody they were suspicious of. So can I just play you? And then, and then after this, I think you're going to do almost all the talking. I want to play you just because, um, as I said to Dan, I, how did I put it in, I always feel that my, I always have to remind people that my accomplishments speak for themselves.

So I always want to play you three minutes of a video that I made in 2020, where I talked about how I was feeling about all this stuff. And the reason I want to do is I don't want people to think that this is something that I've just come about because of October 7th or Iran or whatever it is. Because you can just play that video, Stephen. This was a video between a woman, me and me, know, a doctor, I think Alina Chen was her name. She's a very high-end molecular biologist at MIT, and she was one of the important people talking about lab leak and things like that. So go ahead,

play that, Stephen. And then I have two more questions to come to my. One is kind of political. So did you see the miniseries Chernobyl? I think was on HBO. Yeah, I watched that. Yeah. And so there were a lot of parallels to that. One of them, just to as an aside, was that early on, they said, well, it's only 30 Rangan of radioactivity, just like a chest x-ray. And it turned out, well, that was the limit of the Geiger counters. That reminded me very early of when they were saying there's only 50 cases of COVID in New York, but that was just, we only had 50 tests, right? So clearly it was much, much higher.

So, but another lesson kind of Chernobyl is just how incompetent dictatorships are. And just how perverse the incentives are within a dictatorship. So you would imagine in a Western lab, if something is unsafe, a Western scientist would hopefully immediately blow the whistle, go to the supervisor, call the papers, whatever it is. Whereas I fear that a scientist working in China would just keep their head down and be very afraid. I'm not going to be the one to blow the whistle on this. I could get killed or something like that. Is that, am I right about that? And do you think that that would mean that Chinese labs in general just are more dangerous and we can't trust them?

Well, I think that some cultures definitely favor more cover up and less transparent because there are life and death situations. So if you tell the government something that you don't like, your whole family could get disappeared. So for example, in the U.S., there is a mandatory reporting of exposures, accidental exposures or losses of select agents. So these select agents are the most terrifying toxins and pathogens around. And we know from records that in 2019 there were on average more than four accidental exposures or losses of select agents per week, more than four per week on average in the US in 2019. So that's only the worst of the worst pathogens. Before this pandemic, if you look at SARS-CoV2, no one would have said it was a select agent.

they would have said it was just a regular virus. In fact, in fact, the scientists in Wuhan were experimenting with similar viruses at a very low biose safety level of BSL2. This is a level where even if you get sick, you don't have to tell anybody. It's probably more difficult in places where there's less of a culture of transparency. Yeah, I have a fundamental deep mistrust about any dictatorship. This is definitely not about Chinese people because the example I gave was Russians of any dictatorship like he was.

Iran handling nuclear material or whatever it is, I just don't believe they will have any protocols. I picture like the circuit breakers in the Iranian nuclear lab, you know, with duct tape on them. So they're blowing all this. Like I just, I think we in the West don't fully understand how different these authoritarian dictatorships are and how that translates into real risk of them handling technologies that can end the world or ruin it. So that's what I said. And then today I read in your book that when we discovered the Iraqi nuclear program, you're right, the inspectors found out one other thing about the Iraqi bomb. It is highly unstable.

The design calls for cramming so much weapons-grade uranium into the core. They say that the bomb would inevitably be on the verge of going off even while sitting on the workbench. It could go off if a rifle bullet hit it, one inspector said, I wouldn't want to be around it if it simply fell off the edge of a desk. And this reminded immediately of my duct tape thing. So go ahead, comment on all that. Dan has a question. I thought it was great, actually.

Your comment about, you know, if you make a mistake, you might get killed, therefore you're not going to report it. It was exactly the point that I made unscripted here. So I think that's very good. I think the one difference I would have with you here is that I don't think it's just a matter of low-level officials or operators. You also have in a personalist autocratic system, you have individuals who, at the highest levels,

make decisions on a whim, and they don't have checks and balances on them. And that's one thing that's very worsen about some governments getting the bomb. People in my field in political science often talk about rational actors and formal choice, formal models that have rational actors. I don't think deterrence requires a completely rational actor, but it does require checks and balances for when normal human beings make really bad choices. What we should worry about with personalist autocrats is that they surround themselves with yes men,

who are rarely willing to challenge them. And that's true whether you're in technically a democracy in which you have a personalist authoritarian personality. you need to have checks and balances on that individual. And it's especially true if you actually have a dictatorship, which does not have even the formal qualities of checks and balances. So I think it's really important to have a professional military who can say, no, this is not going to work, or this would be illegal, or you need to have other people in the command and control system

who could say, wow, this looks like a false warning to us. This doesn't seem to be really something that should react. to. So we should all worry about that kind of problem. And the concept of illegal doesn't even exist in many nations. Go ahead, Dan. Oh, yeah. So my question is about the false warnings. If we have reason

to believe, but we're not sure that a nuke is coming our way, is it better to just wait it out? What advantage is there to firing off our nukes immediately rather than waiting to see if one actually hits? I assume our nukes are somewhere

that are protected. Yeah, so have you seen House of Dynamite, which is about this kind of scenario? There isn't House of Dynamite a launch from somewhere in the Pacific. We don't know whether, they can't tell whether it is from a submarine off of North Korea or off of China. But there's a single missile coming in. and the first thing you would try to do is to launch American anti-ballistic missiles, that is interceptors that we have a couple in California, but many of them, 44, 3 of them, are located in

Alaska. And you try to shoot that down. And if there's one, you've got a decent chance of it, especially if you fire repeatedly, one, two, three, four, if necessary. so that even if you have only a moderately high probability of hitting it with one, if you fire them and they are independently targeted, that hopefully you can get that missile down. So you'd be shooting that.

If it kept going, which is what happens in this movie, the premise of the movie is that we'd want to launch to try to destroy an adversary's nuclear capabilities. I thought that was a very unrealistic scenario. We would want to wait to see whether this was a false warning. We wanted to wait to see maybe it was a missile test that had a radio on it, not a weapon on it. Maybe it was a rogue commander. But in one scenario that you're most worried about that this is the start of a major war,

if we launched against an adversary, they're going to be prepared and they're going to launch on warning. So to me, the scenario of a single missile launching, creating this massive exchange, which could destroy most of civilization, I think it's less likely than some kind of false warning, an accident that someone thinks is deliberate, and then we make bad decisions. Let's apply this all to Iran. Sure. And let's just, I'll tell you my assumptions, and you know, you tell me if you think they're, They're not fair.

One is that I imagine Iran, we have to assume, I would say, that Iran will be a somewhat paranoid state. It believes certain things about the evil of the Israelis, the evil of the Americans. We could presume that if Iran goes nuclear, other Gulf states will then go nuclear, so it has very quick warning times to sworn enemies. So am I right that everything. that you're worried about here vis-a-vis, for instance, Russia and America. And I'd also add to that, that Russia and America have much more sophisticated anti-missile

technology than Iran might have. So maybe we'd give it a shot before they go. All this is, you know, 100x, 1,000 X when it comes to Iran, correct? Correct. And, yeah, so I think we should be deeply worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons. I have no qualms about efforts to try to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. I think it's very important that the world unites in preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for the reasons that you and I have been talking about so far.

Where I think the biggest mistake was made was that in my judgment, the JCPOA, the Joint Competensive Plan of Action, negotiated by the Obama administration, with Russia, China, the UK, France, the European Union, and Iran had a diplomatic solution, which is that Iran would agree to have very low-enriched uranium, not anywhere near weapons grade, and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, would inspect that diplomatic solution was working. And I think the origins of this tragedy of this war today is that Donald Trump decided to get rid of the JCPOA. The argument against it was that it had a sunset clause, that at some point, depending on which one of the individual parts of the treaty, at one point or another, those would come to an end. The argument in favor of that is that if that happened and Iran started to build nuclear weapons, then we'd bomb them.

But instead, what Trump did was got rid of the treaty, he withdrew from the treaty, put sanctions back on, and Iran then started increasing the amount of enriched uranium. So today, they have an estimated eight to ten bombs worth of nuclear materials. It's not enriched all the way up to the highest level that you'd want for a nuclear weapon, but it's at 60%, which is damn close. And it's not right now fabricated into the form that you'd want for a weapon, but we don't know where all their fabrication facilities are, so we don't know whether they'd be able to do that. Right.

So President Trump said he obliterated the program. He may have buried it or may have gotten it to be moved around. but there's still that much material, as far as we know, in Iran somewhere. And you're right. They've got every incentive now to try to weaponize it. Yeah, so let me say as far as it, Jason, people are curious what I think about it. At the time, although I'm probably just inherently more skeptical of the Iranians, maybe not than you are.

I remember thinking at the time, look, from what Obama is telling me, they're so close. The breakout period is so short that we have no choice. And so I supported the agreement. And we had a significant carrot at the time in terms of billions of dollars, which we brought to bear. But I also thought that obviously this issue was going to come around again when this sunset finally happened, because I just feel in the end they would want eventually to get the bomb. and they, you know, so they decided at that point. But, you know, and I'll, I will stipulate that Trump was wrong for pulling out of the JCPOA.

But, and I think you'll agree with this too, that ship is all sailed. And, you know, the question is, especially after Israel, first they, you know, the small bombing of Iran and then that 12-day war, At that point, I think it's clear that Iranian psychology had to have changed to say, if we ever get up off this mat, we are going to go nuclear because this would not have happened to us. We would not find ourselves in this situation if we had gone nuclear like so-and-so was urging. So I'm operating from the assumption that no matter what mistakes were made in the past, as the new CEO, as it were, I can't undo those mistakes. what do I do now, I think it's clear we have to stop them or they will get the bomb. There's no negotiation now that is going to stop it. I don't think. I don't know if you have any feeling about that. Yeah, I do.

I mean, we're blaming Donald Trump for getting out of the JCPOA, and I think he does deserve some blame for that. But you also should blame the Iranians. who in November 24 launched a large-scale missile and drone attack against Israel. After Israel killed one of their generals in Syria and they decimated, the Israelis decimated Hezbollah, the Iranians started a war. Right. What a stupid thing to do. And in the end, the Israeli initial attack took out a lot of their air defense, not so much of their missiles because it didn't go in far enough.

but that meant in June 2025, the Israelis were very successful and had relatively high numbers of interceptors of the missiles that they were being launched, attacked a lot of the rocket launchers, got a large percentage of them, and further destroyed much of the Iranian infrastructure leading in the United States under President Trump to say, okay, now that you've done so much, we'll go in and try to mop up. the final things with these deep buried underground facilities. But it did not obliterate it. The U.S. intelligence has been very clear that it has damaged it significantly, but there's still material there. And the question is, are we going to go in on the ground, which I think is a distinct possibility with a special forces operation? Or are we going to try, as the Israelis put it, to mow the lawn,

to wait every now and then to see if they start excavating at Natanz or at Isfayan and then bomb it again. And I think those are the two most likely solutions. Neither of them are attractive. The one of a negotiation might possibly work, but I think it's very unlikely. And that would be what I call the Hirohito solution. If as in 1945, President Trump likes to say, say that he wants to have unconditional surrender like Harry Truman, right? But in 1945, we should remember

that we did not have complete unconditional surrender. We made a deal with Hirahito that we won't put you on war crimes trials and we'll have an emperor in a sort of symbolic role in the future. Maybe that could happen someday in Iran. I think it's highly unlikely, but I also think that the other two options of bombing every now and then or sending special forces in, both of those are very unattractive and very dangerous. Right. You know, it's funny because before the interview, I said, I'm not going to, well, I'm dying to know what he feels politically.

I'm not going to ask him about that because I know that once somebody hears or gets a whiff that your political view of this is different than theirs, they're going to start to dismiss what you're saying. And I wanted you so much for your expertise on this, on the science of this, as it were. But I've consulted to Republican and Democratic presidents. I've consulted with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I've done consulting work with the U.S. laboratories. So I consider myself a independent analyst trying to do the best job that I can,

presenting the facts and trying to understand what's going on. Absolutely. Okay. Tell us a little bit about what you would expect would be. the command and control situation of the Iranian nuclear bombs, should they have them? I don't think we know very much about it. It would presumably be under the Revolutionary Guard Corps, but whether they'd have two men in the loop or have it be done in an emergency way

with less checks and balances we simply don't know. I did want to say that I know that part of what you do is comedy. The only slightly humorous thing I've written in this area was a title of an article called The Problem of Redundancy Problem, which is about how adding safety and security units to a complex system makes it more complex and therefore can actually create the kinds of problems that you want to try to avoid. And there are lots of examples in that article,

the problem of redundancy problem. The editors kept saying, well, that's redundant. You can't have that in the title. Yeah, that's the point. Noam didn't get it the first time. I got, I got it. No, it took me to say,

I miss heard the word at the second that I realized, oh, he's at redundancy. I'm a little deaf, too. But that's a very good title. Go ahead. And so I think this is a problem with all command and control systems. You recognize, boy, this stuff is really dangerous. Yeah.

And so you want to try to put together a set of multiple safety systems that if they are truly independent of one another, can provide a reliable system out of unreliable parts, to use a phrase that my colleague, John Bender, invented, a reliable system out of unreliable parts. But that only works if you understand the complexity well enough that you don't create common mode errors. So, for example, one of the closest calls to a nuclear power accident in the United States

was in Monroe, Michigan. I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, so I remember this event even, in which in the 1960s in which a nuclear power plant in Monroe, they had a special concern about if there was a meltdown happening, they wanted to make sure that they had synchronium strips at the bottom of the reactor that could stop material from going further away from the reactor core. but they didn't put the Zincorium strips into the blueprints of the reactor. It was a last minute addition to add more safety and of course it broke off,

plugged the coolant pipe and almost caused the accident that it was meant to solve. So I think with nuclear weapons, there's this problem of redundancy problem. You recognize that

it's a complex system, there are hundreds of people involved in any military operation dealing with nuclear weapons. You want to have lots of safety devices. You also want to make sure it can go off if you want it to go off. And the risk that it will go off when you don't want it to go off remains high. Yeah, I mean, it scares the hell out of me. Again, it goes back to my duct tape thing because I just know, you know, I'm always, it's like

always awkward when you bring your personal life experience to bear. on a monumental problem you know nothing about. But we all do experience people. And I just know how the people take shortcuts. And that'll be all right. And they make things easier for the next day. And they put the password. They write it down and they tape it to the computer, you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. I interviewed an officer in charge of a nuclear weapons on a B-52. and they had the codes for the launch authentication, had to be kept in a safe. For extra security, they changed the dial switch code for the safe every month. Okay.

No one would remember that, just like you can't remember your own passwords, right? So where was the new code put? It was put on the calendar above the safe. So anybody walking in would have said, oh, what's this password written on it? So I think you're on to something. Human beings are imperfect.

And we try to create a perfect system out of imperfect parts, but it's very hard to do that effectively. And then you imagine every country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon. Yeah. And this seems to me, I mean, I have three kids. This isn't, it's such an intolerably dangerous world, almost certain, I think, to have an accident that although I don't pretend to be an expert on whether this war in Iran is the smartest thing they could do. When I hear people complaining about gas prices going up, I say to myself, we need to get Scott Sagan on the show because I don't think people understand what this is all about, what the risk is. When I hear people, this guy, John Hopman, say, well, the academics tell us that mutually assured destruction means that no one will use a nuclear bomb.

I'm like, dude, you know, you need to get your head out of a book and you just like channel real life a little bit. You need to get his head into different books. Or different, but Scott Sagan. Ken Waltz, a great political scientist and I have three editions of a debate book where he takes that position, that maybe the spread of nuclear weapons to other people is a good thing because they can all replicate the Cold War situation where the Russians and the Americans didn't use nuclear weapons against each other. And my view in return is, no, that's absolutely wrong, because we were a lot closer to nuclear war than we thought.

The analogy I've used is that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is like walking across thin ice. The fact that you've done it a couple times doesn't mean you should try to do it as a regular practice. And you've got to figure out how to either make the ice thicker or walk someplace else. And I'd prefer to be able to walk someplace else. You think we'd be better off if nobody had nukes or you think that, us having nukes, at least, is a good thing. I think that the world would be better off if everybody didn't have nuclear weapons, if you could have really strong inspections and have an ability to use conventional forces

to whack anybody who cheated. I don't think we're anywhere close to getting that. We had a slight possibility in 45 to 47 before the Soviets got nuclear weapons. So I think from a legal perspective, we should work towards that goal and try to have arms control agreements and have negotiations, even with our adversaries. That's where you need negotiations to talk to the Chinese and the Russians. But we shouldn't be optimistic that we can get there. That should be our goal, but it should be an aspiration, not something that we should do in any way

in a unilateral manner. This is also scary. without overlaying on an issue which, as a Westerner, I have a lot of trouble having a firm opinion on it, which is, you know, does this ideology that leans so heavily on martyrdom? And we have some empirical evidence. They will send their own children to sweep minefields in Iran, things like this. So clearly there's something different about the way they value life and see the afterlife. Of course, the whole theory of mutual sure destruction implies that we all agree that destruction is the worst possible thing that can happen.

I have found it impossible to understand or to feel confident. I understand how that really applies to, you know, the jihadists. But I have heard some people from that culture say, no, no, they really mean it, you know. And then, of course, October 7th, we learned something. because so much of Israel's position vis-à-vis Hamas was based on the notion of deterrence. They would never do that because they know what we would do to them. Well, it turns out they would do it. And it turns out actually when you kill all the leadership and you say,

who wants to sit in the chair next, probably to certain death, people line up to do it. So all these are very, you know, so all of which is to say this guy waltz, and I saw part of your debate with him on YouTube, I don't understand how he can be so sure. And if you're not sure, you have to err on the side of caution. You're dealing with all the marbles here. This is it, right?

You can't take these chances. And how can he be sure? Yeah, so the question is, how do you deal with it? You can either deal with it militarily, which we're trying to do now. And I hope it works, but I'm not optimistic. or you try to deal with it diplomatically. And the diplomatic solution was better. It was not perfect, but it was better.

I think the military solution now is going to be exceedingly hard. I know President Trump, in his gut, does not want to send ground troops or special forces in. But I think that it is very seductive to think, oh, yeah, the 82nd Airborne can go in and solve this problem. If it does, it's going to be a bloodbath. We might be able to get the materials, but it's going to be really, really nasty and worse than what we have now. So hopefully we avoid that.

But I think that there are some people in Washington who think that's still the best solution. And the president seems to have a hard time making up his mind. One day he wants this goal. The other day he has the next goal. He is erratic. I would say. Circling back to what Nome said, has a diplomatic solution, has that ship sailed and we're left with no choice but a military solution at this point?

Again, the only option I could see that could work would be to tell the Ayatollah, like Hirohito, that you're going to be in a Islamic symbolic leader role. and I want you to get all the Revolutionary Guard Corps to agree to this, and we will let this happen if you get rid of the nuclear materials. Whether that would work or not, I don't know. Just as in 1945, one of the great tragedies of August 1945 was that it took that deal to get Japan to surrender in the end. We didn't try ahead of time.

And an atom bomb. And two atom bombs. So you can't really divorce that diplomacy from the use of military force or the credible threat of it. I don't think that's right. We actually thought about that. Indeed, Secretary Stimson, the Secretary of War, back when the Department was called the Department of War, he made two requests of Harry Truman at Potsdam. He said, Mr. President, we know the bomb works. We've had a successful test.

We're going ready. We'll be ready to drop it in a... another week or two. I have two requests of you. One is take Kyoto off the target list. I think it's really important. He tried to say because it's beautiful and I've seen it and it shouldn't be destroyed. But what was really powerful for Truman was he said, if we want to have the leadership in Japan and get the Japanese people to accept surrender, we can't destroy their most beautiful civilized city. It is beautiful, by the way.

I've been there. It is absolutely beautiful. But go ahead. Absolutely. Second, I want you to take Hirohito off the war criminals list. So instead of saying unconditional surrender, you should say that you should make a statement about this, they're saying that the future of the role of the emperor will be determined by the Japanese people,

not by the surrender document. Truman refused to do that. It was only after the second bomb was dropped that Truman asked James Burns, the Secretary of State, to draft a special letter to Hirohito, basically saying that. That letter was sent, and that's what caused Hirohito to switch sides and join the peace party. Are you saying, and I'd never heard this before, that there was a third option, not drop the bomb, not amassed this mass invasion, but actually maybe Hirohito. might have surrendered or if we had simply been smarter about our diplomacy in 1945?

Yes, I do believe that. And there are even some hints in Stimson's biography in which he suggests that he thought that was a possibility as well, but he was overruled. What a tragedy if it's true. We don't know. It's a counterfactual. The argument against it would be that's just going to make them think we're not going to invade. We're scared of invading.

They would think that we only have conventional bombs. They don't know about the nuclear bomb, et cetera. But that was the position of the Secretary of War, and it was rejected by Harry Truman until both bombs were dropped, and then he tried it. It's such a – I mean, the game theory of that part of that time in history is so complex because also we're worried about the not. Nazis getting an atom bomb. And my goodness. And we're worried about the Soviet Union starting a war against Japan, which they did at that period of time as well. Right.

So we wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union didn't keep pushing into and take more territory than they currently had. All right. Before I let you go, whatever else you want to add into this stool of things that the, that every day Americans who are trying to judge. After all, democracy is based on the notion that we can decide for ourselves about these things. The voters have a say that depends on the most informed public that we can have, which is why I wanted you on this show so badly. I don't understand why you're not on every major TV show, news show, debate show right now. This point of view is part of this mix and needs to be heard. Anyway, what else should people be thinking about on this issue?

Well, I think as you think about who you're going to support in November, regardless of whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, you should take into account what is the person's position on these kinds of questions. Do they support trying to have negotiations with the Russians. The Russians this past year said that they would extend the current start treaty restricting how many weapons the United States and the Russians can have. It wasn't the Russians who rejected that treaty. It was President Trump.

He said, oh, I can get a better one. And so he said that he's not going to abide by it. So hopefully we can get back and have a negotiation. Second would be testing. I believe we don't need to have nuclear weapons testing in the United States. We've tested lots of weapons and we've invested literally billions of dollars in non-testing simulations so that the lab directors of Los Alamos, Livermore Labs, and the Sandia National Lab, all testify to Congress that we don't need testing. President Trump and some in the Defense Department have said, oh, we need to test.

because we think the Russians might be doing some subcritical test or above critical tests, and we need to do exactly what they're doing. I think that's really not appropriate and indeed is counterproductive, because if we start testing nuclear weapons, the Chinese are going to start testing nuclear weapons, the Indians are going to start testing nuclear weapons, and we're giving an excuse for the Iranians if they can get that material from underground to start testing nuclear weapons.

So I hope that the public wakes up and says, we need to deal with these nuclear problems in a full court press, which means diplomacy, military force if absolutely necessary. But be smart about it. My former colleague, the late General John Charlie Koshvili, used to say when he led men into combat, men and women in combat, he would say, as a young officer, are you scared? And they said, no, sir, we're not scared. We're not scared.

They said, you know what? What you're doing is really dangerous. You should be a little bit scared. Don't be scared enough to get paralyzed, but be scared enough not to do something dumb. And I think what we're doing as a nation in terms of threatening to start testing again, to not abide by arms control agreements, I think we're doing some stuff that's dumb because we're not scared enough. by the way if Iran were to get a bomb

and then the Saudis and you know one of the Emirates Egyptians and the Turks the Egyptians and Turks and then some exchange happened triggered by an accident what

what would be the consequences how much fallout would spread around the globe around the Middle East I'm sure there's estimates of it all depends on two factors. One is the number of weapons used and whether they're done

on the ground, which creates more radioactive material or they're done up above, which produces less. And secondly, the environmental effects will depend on whether weapons are used in an environment that is

filled with wood, basically. It's done in cities. It creates soot that goes up into the air. And that creates much greater fallout and much greater global warming. If it's done at a military target away from cities where there's not a lot of burning, it would do less. There's a very good National Academy of Sciences study of this that shows two things. One, it shows these factors really matter. So the details matter a lot in this. And second, it says we need to invest more money in understanding this scientifically. And thus far,

has not followed the advice of the National Academy of Sciences to do more work in this area. All right, sir. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on this show. Again, I'm hoping... Noam? Can I ask a question? Yes, please. That's our engineer. He's, you know, he knows a lot about technical stuff. Go ahead, Steve. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm just thinking on like the terms of sort of strategic game theory and in some civilization-based video game simulators and stuff. And how far away do you think before nations like at the lower tier of development of these weapons are from just glomming up with each other and absorbing each other's technology

via violent means or not rather than just developing themselves in their own silos? I think that you're suggesting a alliance partnership that has occasionally existed. You may remember AQ Khan, the Pakistani scientist, who made deals with both Libya, to try to give enriched uranium technology to Libya and then cut a deal with North Korea. North Korea originally was trying to get the bomb through building reactors and getting the plutonium, but instead, through the assistance of AQ Khan, the Pakistani scientists, started enriching uranium, which is how they got the bombs that they've now exploded underground and that they're deploying on their warheads. So I think that's a serious problem.

I don't see Iran doing it with anybody else right now, but when Noam was talking about a future in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and Turkey all are trying to get a bomb. Yeah, I think that you would see lots of cooperation, and that would be dangerous. I mean, I am, and this is another thing I see in my everyday life. It's like when you feel that someone you detest has gotten you into a situation because of his dumb mistakes, it clouds your judgment, and it becomes very hard to focus. Yes, yes, yes, but you have to play the cards that you're holding now.

You can't undo the past. And I, you know, so my feeling is I think they have to do what they have to do, even if it means going in there. That's what I feel. That is not a pro-Trump position. As I said, I'm very, very amenable to all the critiques. And certainly some of them, I think, are 100% true. You know, it just reminded me to something that I read Kissinger at the time when Obama was negotiating the JCPOA. he worried that the Iranians knew that Obama was more worried about a military, a military

confrontation than the Iranians were. So he felt we could have gotten a better deal if Obama had been a more credible negotiator. But in the end, whatever, I think he probably still supported the deal. But we just can't have this scenario where the whole world, the least sophisticated, most emotional, for lack of a better word, without safeguard. you know, aggressively focused on their enemies right now, paranoid, maybe with some sort of religious martyrdom overlay, we can't have a world where all these people I've just listed have nuclear bombs.

I mean, we just, how could we have that? I think you agree. So the least destructive thing, the least... If we have that, we're not going to have much of a world, because we're going to get a nuclear war out of that condition. And if ground troops are the least destructive way to do it, then it's got to be ground troops. I hope it's not.

I hope it's not. And a major grudge against the Jews. Well, as I was saying in 1945, I think one of the great tragedies is that we didn't try diplomacy as seriously first. It might not have worked in 45, and it might not work today, but I still think that trying to cut some kind of deal with the current Iranian regime and not think that you can use bombing to create regime change,

I think would be smart. Absolutely. We'll let you stay in power with some kind of symbolic role for the Ayatollah under a more democratic Iran in the future. As long as you get rid of this material, that may not work, but it's definitely worth trying. Worth a shot. Okay. Scott Sagan. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

Great conversation. You have a book, The Limits of Safety, which is one of your older books, but I think it's very apropos to read now, if anybody wants to follow up on this. I'm going to do my best to speak to a few much more successful podcasters that I know and encourage them that they ought to be,

they should watch this interview and hopefully get your word out even more because this needs to be heard. Thank you very much, sir. If you get to New York, please come to the Comedy Cellar so we can speak frankly. I would like to do that. Take it easy.

I'll be there in the fall, so we'll try to make that happen. Thank you.