Within Reason - #38 Carl Robichaud - Will There Be A Nuclear War?

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Carl Robichaud co-leads Longview Philanthropy’s programme on nuclear weapons and existential risk. For over a decade, Carl led grant-making in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. Carl previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Carl Robeshoe is the co-leader of Longview Philanthropies Program on Nuclear Weapons and Existential Risk. For over a decade, he led grant making in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. He previously worked with the Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his research spanned arms control, international security policy and non-proliferation. We speak about the likelihood of nuclear conflict in the modern age, especially in light of the war between Russia and Ukraine. We also talk about the few times that humanity has come dangerously close to nuclear catastrophe, why that

happened, and what measures are currently in place to prevent the future onset of nuclear war. And this episode of Within Reason is brought to you by barturman.com forward slash Alex. Bart Ehrman is one of the world's most famous New Testament scholars. I recently had him on my podcast and it was one of my favorite episodes to date. Dr. Erman offers a wide variety of courses from an agnostic perspective in the New Testament with courses including did the resurrection of Jesus really happen? Did Jesus think he was God? And unknown Gospels, which is a scholarly look at the Gospels.

Who wrote them? How can we know? When were they written? Are they accurate? So if you're interested in learning about New Testament scholarship from an agnostic perspective, perspective from one of the world's leading experts and going to barterman.com forward slash Alex or let them know that I've sent you and help out the channel if you do decide to purchase any of their courses. With that said, I hope you enjoy the following conversation with Carl Robeshoe. Carl Robeshow, thanks for being here. Yeah, my pleasure. With the current state of the world, what do you think is the prospect of nuclear war breaking out? I think it's impossible

to know what the prospect is, but it's not zero, and it's higher than it's been in many years. Right now, we have a conventional war that's occurring between Ukraine, armed by NATO, and Russia. And Putin has already made several references to the use of nuclear weapons and certain lines that if they were crossed, Russia would use nuclear weapons. So he is already invoking a nuclear threat.

And so we are fighting a conventional war in the shadow of nuclear weapons. And the problem, of course, is that even if Putin never planned to use nuclear weapons, he might still invoke that threat because nuclear deterrence is about manipulating risk. And so there's a real incentive to try to raise the prospects of nuclear war in order to scare Ukraine and scare NATO from getting more involved. in the war. And so there's a strategic element to this as well. But once you put a threat out there, there's always a risk that you might be forced to carry through with that threat. So that's one of the things I'm concerned about. You really have one decision maker in Russia. We know that Putin has been prone to miscalculation and mistakes in the past. And some people have questioned

the stability of his personality, et cetera. I don't necessarily want to go there. But I don't, but nuclear weapons inherently rely upon human decision-making, and from a technical perspective, they also have to work every time. Nuclear systems can never fail, or you could have accidents or inadvertent use that could lead to really bad consequences. So I think it's a really scary moment. What are the actual threats that have been made? How explicit have they been?

And how likely do you think it is that they are more something like a scare tactic for the purposes of deterrence rather than a genuine threat that might be made good on? So Putin has invoked nuclear weapons on several occasions, including immediately at the start of the war and then about six months into the war and has said, you know, remember we have nuclear weapons and we will not hesitate to use them to protect our nation. I don't have the exact words he used off the top of my head. But he also indicated that the alert level of Russian nuclear forces were being raised. And the U.S. intelligence community actually made a statement that they saw no evidence that the alert level actually was raised. So that's an

example of signaling, I think. Putin also said, essentially, don't test me on this. I'm not bluffing. And of course, that's also what you would say if you are bluffing. So I think he is manipulating risk and he's trying to keep NATO out. But it's not clear exactly what those red lines are. When he talks about the Russian territory and the integrity of Russia, does he mean the parts of Ukraine that Russia is occupying that have had these plebiscites in order to join Russia. What about Crimea? Crimea is different for Russia because they have a very important naval base there that they feel they can't afford to lose. So from a Russian perspective, and Putin has said this on several occasions, this war is existential.

They see this as essential to the survival of the Russian state. And that raises the stakes significantly. And he may be willing to consider steps that he wouldn't consider if this were just a special military operation that he feels he could afford to perhaps lose. What are some of the specific operations that we would be looking out for that are the kind of things you think Putin might respond to in nuclear fashion? So I think there are a few scenarios in which Russia might use nuclear weapons. One would be to target specific military installations. another might be some kind of demonstration effect and that maybe doesn't kill anyone, but just crosses the nuclear threshold

in order to remind everyone that this is possible. And there's a third possibility, and this is one that a Russian-speaking colleague who follows very closely the Russian press, he believes is most likely, would be that in the case that Ukraine is using NATO territory essentially as an airstrip for its aircraft, the new F-16s that are coming, for example.

Russia might actually strike into NATO territory. So those are a couple of the scenarios. I think we are ways from that. Right now, the conflict is being fought conventionally, and the odds of it escalating to a nuclear war, I think are very small. but they exist. And especially if Russia starts doing very poorly in the war, there may be an incentive to use nuclear weapons to halt the conflict, to freeze things in place, to save

face, and perhaps to save Putin's position as leader of Russia. So what happens here if nuclear weapons are used? Is it, as is commonly assumed, that the moment one is fired, we're immediately starting a chain reaction towards something like the end of the world? Or is there a situation in which nuclear weapons are used, but the outcome is more contained? I think it depends on the scenario of use, and it depends on what the response by the U.S. and NATO is after these weapons are used. It's pretty hard to speculate on. There are nuclear weapons that are what they call battlefield nuclear weapons, small nuclear weapons that would not have the types of massive humanitarian consequences we saw

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if one of those weapons is used, it's very concerning because there has now been a threshold that's been crossed. And I think that if a small nuclear weapon were used in certain circumstances, a lot of people would look at that and say, oh, well, that wasn't so bad. What is everyone so worried about? And it could lead not only to more nuclear use in the future, but perhaps more nuclear proliferation. So I think it could set off this ripple effect. What we have is a 78-year history of nuclear non-use, a tradition or a taboo against nuclear use. And that's extremely valuable to everyone alive on this planet. So I think there's a real cost to crossing that threshold, even if the direct number of lives of lost is not large.

yeah talking about it as a taboo i think is particularly interested interesting the idea that you can use nuclear weapons that aren't as devastating as the ones that everybody has in their head when you think of nuclear weapons but after that point it becomes a difference of degree rather than kind and you're sort of opening a door here to pandora's box what does a worst what does a worst case scenario look like when it comes to nuclear war are we talking about something like an existential threat to humanity? Would it possibly wipe out the entire human race? Do you think that it would be really bad but not quite as bad? What would it look like? It would be disastrous, massive use of nuclear weapons, but how bad it would be really depends on

a whole set of variables that are difficult to determine. And we know during the Cold War, we had 60,000 nuclear weapons, mostly held by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, aimed at each other. It was this incredible philosophy of overkill. And if deterrence ever failed in that scenario, you're talking tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people killed,

as well as perhaps climatic consequences. Today, we have many fewer nuclear weapons, but still a lot. We have something around 12,000 nuclear weapons. weapons, 10,000 or so in the hands of U.S. and Russia, most of those many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So you ask about a worst-case scenario. I don't think that's likely. But if there ever were massive use of nuclear weapons one side against the other, we could be talking about tens of millions dead. Louisa Rodriguez with rethink

priorities, did an assessment at which she looked at a variety of different scenarios and talked to experts and forecasters and tried to get some parameters around that. And her number was somewhere between 30 and 70 million dead immediately after a nuclear exchange. But that also doesn't necessarily account for the second and third order consequences. You think the entire devastation of the medical system and the health care system, the infrastructure, the electrical grid, the massive amounts of radiation released. And it also doesn't account for what might be nuclear winter effects. Are you familiar with these? To some extent,

but probably to about the same extent as our average listeners, that perhaps you can give us some more information about what a nuclear winter looks like. Yeah. So the theory is that the burning of cities would release so much foot into the atmosphere. And that so would go so high into the stratosphere that it would be long-lived. And for many months and years, you would have a decrease in solar radiation. And the current climate models that have been developed to look at climate change have essentially confirmed that this is possible. But the question is, how much soot would need to be lofted, how high, for how long,

and these are things that are very difficult to determine. But in some scenarios, you could imagine massive famine as a result of disruption of agriculture patterns, ocean currents, et cetera. And that's, you know, if you think about worst case scenarios, those are the ones that really threaten civilization. Yeah, the scary thing about nuclear weapons for most people is the, as you say, the sort of second and third order effects. It's not just the blast. I see, if I look on some kind of video on YouTube about worst case nuclear outcomes, it's a common theme to see people commenting, well, if I'm ever, if I ever experience a nuclear blast, I want to be as close to it as possible so that I'm immediately incinerated rather than having to deal with these other consequences.

I mean, you've talked about nuclear winter and the effect on agriculture in the ecosystem, But what about the other second order effects of a nuclear blast? If you're far enough away to not be just incinerated immediately, what kind of experience do you have in store? I think it really depends, but depending on the winds of the radiation, people would be exposed to tremendous health effects, and including promptly dying as well as slow death from cancer. from cancer. And if you think about the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the initial deaths

were only part of the total cost of the use of those weapons, and you still have some of the lingering health effects from those bombings. It's really a terrible way to die, and these weapons are inherently inhumane when used against targets like cities. And massive numbers of women, children, and innocent people would perish. There's a photographer who took the only known photos of Hiroshima after the bomb went off. And as far as I can remember, he took something like six photos of the devastation around him until he just couldn't take anymore because the devastation was so bad. And I'd recommend that if anybody is interested, given that this is the only time that

a nuclear weapon has ever been used on human beings, this is all we have as a glimpse into the effects of a nuclear bomb. So you can look those up. But like I say, they're so bad that the photographer could only take about six of them before he gave up. Yeah, and you see this in the movie Oppenheimer as well, not to get ahead of ourselves, but there's a scene in which you see Robert Oppenheimer looking away from the devastation. And I think we all have an inclination to look away. There was a great book that came out a couple years ago by Leslie Bloom called Fallout, the Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world.

And it describes the work of this reporter, John Hersey, who essentially dodged the local censors in Tokyo. and went out and tried to tell the human story of what actually happened in Hiroshima. And he followed the stories of these six survivors and told them in great detail. And when it was published, it was published in an entire magazine of the New Yorker was devoted to this one article. And it revealed for the first time not just the scale of the blast, but also the effects of radiation, of radiation sickness. And I think that transformed the conversation that we're having about nuclear weapons

and has played a part in this taboo that we mentioned earlier. Because nuclear weapons are different. As far as I know, when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the general reaction in the United States was a positive one. people were celebrating and this was sort of seen as a step towards the end of the war i guess it's only after people realize the true cost of that that the doubt begins to to set in you said this is something that uh had to escape the tokyo censors the this so all the information coming in and out of japan was very closely monitored um so general uh general mccarthy was there

And he basically ran Japan as an administrator, and the story that they wanted to tell immediately after the end of the war was one of American ingenuity and a bomb that was so large that it forced Japan to surrender. So everything was focused on the size of the blast, and there was no discussion of the people who died as a result of that blast. And Hiroshima, the story that John Hersey published, personalized and brought home what it would have been like to live through this experience. And there are still survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima. You have Setsuko Thurlow who's still speaking about her experience as a young person during that bombing and telling that story, which I think is a painful act for her. but it's so important for us to hear that these are not just military weapons, especially in the case of Hiroshima. These were used, the primary victims were women and children,

and we still have to reckon with that. And reckon with it we do. There's still an ongoing debate to this day regarding the use of those two bombs and whether it was beneficial that they were dropped. The debate seems to be that, well, this brought about a swift end to the war, prevented the need for a full-scale invasion of Japan may have saved millions of lives. We think probably, I want to say, around 200,000 people were probably killed by the two bombs put together. I think that the argument is often made that, were they not dropped, more people would have died in the resulting conflict. I wonder what you can tell us about that.

Be careful. There's a lot of propaganda that emerged after the war in order to justify the bombing, and a lot of it, frankly, is BS. And the idea that there was this careful deliberation about whether or not to use the bomb. No, the bombs were going to be used. The U.S. had invested $2 billion in creating these weapons, and they were going to be used. And I think the only question is how they were going to be used? Were they going to be used on population centers? Were they going to be used as a demonstration effect? And that was debated. And you see some of that in the film Oppenheimer. And I think that if you look at the historical record, historians still debate this, but the Soviet Union was about to enter the war. And once the Soviet Union entered, Japan was done.

they were already prepared to surrender if certain conditions were permitted, but the U.S. was requiring unconditional surrender. In the end, their surrender was not entirely unconditional. So what did the bombs actually achieve? It's not clear that they did much of anything, except perhaps accelerate the end of the war by a few weeks or a month. Now, a lot of people think, you know, the bomb against Hiroshima was necessary to demonstrate the force of this new weapon. Primarily, the U.S. wanted to demonstrate that to the Soviet Union in order to shape the post-Cold War, sorry, the post-World War II balance of power because the U.S. was already gearing up for the Cold War and to try to intimidate the Soviet Union and in order to draw those demarcation lines

so that there didn't need to be a massive mobilization to counter Soviet influence in Western Europe. So perhaps you can make the case that Hiroshima was necessary. I think it's very hard to justify Nagasaki. At that point, I think it was a matter of time before Japan surrendered. And there were another 80,000,

mostly civilians who were killed in that bombing. So in the sort of the propagandic take, that is the take that tries to paint these bombings in the most favorable light possible, what's the reason for two bombings rather than just one? I think they would argue that Japan wasn't about to surrender and that they needed to use a second bomb to ensure the surrender. I think if they had waited a bit, Japan would have surrendered. And to demonstrate that they are willing to keep doing this until a surrender is procured. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons they used two bombs is because they had two bombs.

and they had spent an enormous amount of effort to get them and they were going to use them. And you have to remember, this is, we didn't just arrive at the moment of nuclear use. This was a buildup that started in 1939 with Hitler's aggression in Europe and this total war environment that involved people doing completely awful things to one another.

The atrocities that Hitler committed against the people he conquered, his genocide of the Jews, as well as the allies conducting firebomings that were killing tens of thousands of people a day in Germany and later in Japan. And so we went down this slippery slope to madness and continued piling up atrocity upon atrocity. So by the time the nuclear weapons were ready for use, they didn't seem so exceptional anymore. And I think what we need to do is recapture the ways in which these weapons are exceptional and exceptionally awful. And it's taken us 80 years to do that, to think about what it means to willingly target

civilian populations with a weapon of this magnitude. Yeah, and it's not just the magnitude, but also the effects of a nuclear blast is so in human that I think there's often a presumed utilitarianism when we discuss whether the dropping of a bomb like this is justified and the idea has to be something like well look it kills this many people but it saves this many people but in other contexts I think people would be would be hesitant to offer the same justification you know people are often against the use of torture even if it's going to procure important information about terrorist activity or something and you could make a similar argument you could say look I can

I can imagine a situation in which a government official had been uncovered as torturing a suspected terrorist. And the way that they tortured them was by inflicting exactly the kind of suffering that they would experience had they been the victim of a nuclear blast. We're talking about sort of giving them cancer that can kill them slowly or quickly. We're talking about burning their skin, blinding their eyes. If a human being were doing this. to another human being directly, even if the justification were to prevent a terrorist attack or to protect national security, people wouldn't be happy about that. And that utilitarian calculus of, well, look, how many people you saved wouldn't run.

But in the case of the dropping of nuclear weapons, I think it's much more common to see that kind of justification. I think that's right. And right now, if you live in a democracy that has nuclear weapons, Plans are being made in your name by your government to use these weapons in ways that would have tremendous humanitarian consequences and would cause the type of suffering that you're talking about. And we've accepted this because we have this system of nuclear deterrence that seems so inherent to the modern world. We've grown up with it. It's just embedded in our way of thinking about how we secure ourselves.

But when you stop and think about it, we're talking about committing mass murder on this massive scale. And I think we should reject that. And most countries of the world have rejected it. Once you reject that and you say, we ought not to do this, we should not rely upon committing mass murder to ensure our security. What do you do then? And that's the puzzle, because we're locked in a trap. Because our adversaries and competitors have these weapons, and each side feels they need them for their security. How do you escape that trap in which both sides are making themselves less safe by holding on to these weapons?

Yeah, and that's the goal in question, isn't it? Because nobody likes the prospect of nukes being used. Nobody's particularly trigger-happy about them. Nobody enjoys the fact that there are thousands of them pointing at their lands and their people. The problem is that, like, how can we possibly go about bringing about an end to this nuclear age? Actually, before we discussed that, I wanted to ask you whether there was ever a world in which nooks didn't get made. I mean, during the Second World War, this nuclear technology is discovered, and people start to think, well, you could make. a bomb out of this. And the fear is a sort of a preemptive fear that your enemies are going to get

there before you do. As with most military technologies, if there's a war, the game is let's get there first. Now, could it have been possible, especially given the antagonism of a situation like World War II, could it have been possible for some kind of cooperation to exist on the grounds of saying, look, these kinds of weapons are unlike anything humanity has ever seen before, these can't be made? Or was it just inevitable that as long as this technology exists, somebody's going to make that bomb? And if somebody else is going to have that bomb, then I want one as well. Well, it's interesting because the origins of nuclear weapons were not in the Manhattan Project. They were in the nuclear weapons project of Nazi Germany.

And it was that nuclear weapons program, which inspired Einstein and Zillard to write a letter to the president to initiate the Manhattan Project. Without a German bomb program, I don't think there is a U.S. bomb program. And you could imagine these weapons entering the world at a much later date. And so you go down that historical set of circumstances. Who knows what happens? But I'll give you another counterfactual is what if Nazi Germany didn't go down the wrong path with the development of their nuclear weapons. They were pursuing a bad technological path.

But if they had devoted appropriate resources and had chosen a slightly different path, maybe Nazi Germany gets the bomb first. And maybe they get it before the war is over. And so in that scenario, nuclear weapons enter the world as the weapon of Nazi Germany rather than as the weapon of these victorious democratic powers and as part of this arsenal of democracy. I think the weapon would be seen very different today and sort of the mask would be stripped off of it. nuclear physics exists in the world and things that are in the world will be discovered. So eventually someone would have figured out

how to use nuclear weapons. But the particular circumstances around how they entered the world determined a lot of what happened next. And I don't think it's inevitable that they entered the world during World War II, right? It's almost a historical coincidence that the splitting of the neutron happened in 1939, right as the, you know. So we have a challenge. If we are going to survive as humanity, how do we manage this extraordinarily powerful technology that we've unlocked?

because it's going to be with us whether or not we have the weapons actively loaded onto missiles or whether it's just there in the background the possibility of a nuclear weapon is out there and will be for as long as there are people so we've got to figure out how to manage it and how to reconcile our differences yeah and it will be good to talk about what measures are currently in place to control the development of nuclear weapons and also prevent them ever being fired. But to give an idea of just how dangerous the situation is, I think it would be worth talking about some of the nuclear close calls that have happened throughout history because we sometimes talk about the odds of nuclear war breaking out.

But we have some examples where it nearly did. And some of them are so ridiculous, so ludicrous, that. It should motivate anybody to take this, perhaps even more seriously than they already are. You can find a list of nuclear close calls just on Wikipedia if you Google search. Here's an example of some of them. In 1960, in October, radar equipment mistakenly interpreted moonrise over Norway as a large-scale Soviet missile launch. Upon receiving report of the supposed attack, the North American Aerospace Defense Command

went on high alert. doubts were raised when it was realized that Khrushchev was actually in New York at the time, the then leader of the Soviet Union, and it would be very strange if he'd launched an attack against himself. But we've got sort of high alert, nukes have been fired because radar has seen moonrise over Norway. In 1961, US Strategic Air Command simultaneously lost contact with NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. and also multiple ballistic missile early warning systems sites. These were supposed to be independent lines of communication, and so an attack was suspected when all of them went down at once.

And Air Command prepared the entire force for launch. It was later found that the failure of a single relay station in Colorado was the cause of the problem. Another example is the 27th of October 1962 during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I'm wondering if you would be a better person to explain this one than me. I mean, I think this has to go down

as the most dangerous day in human history and so much happened on October 27th. If I could, I was reading this passage in the book the other day, one minute to midnight, which is a phenomenal account of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let me just tell you some of the things

that happened on October 27th. Okay, one day, Black Sunday. It starts with Fidel Castro, urging Khrushchev to use nuclear weapons against the United States, and it ends with the denouement in which the Kennedy brothers negotiate an end to this crisis by trading off the missiles in Cuba for an end to the crisis, right? But in between, here's what happens. You won't believe it. So first, Soviet nuclear warheads are transported closer to Cuba and missile sites. Two, a U-2 spy plane is shot down over eastern Cuba, and this is something that crossed a red line that Kennedy had set.

In addition, another U-2 spy plane strayed over the Soviet Union. You have a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine, which is forced to surface by U.S. Navy depth charges. And then you have the Cubans start firing on low-firm. flying U.S. reconnaissance aircrafts, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff finalized their plans for an all-out invasion of Cuba, and the Soviets bring tactical nuclear weapons to within 15 miles of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. So all those events happened on October 27th, and any one of those incidents could have led to nuclear use. So the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's one crisis, it's one confrontation. But as you can see, there are all these different

slippery paths on which we could have gone to war. It's kind of remarkable. Yeah, it's amazing to think how close we came. And like you say, there are so many individual things that happened that day. Of course, the broad story is that the Soviet Union have placed nuclear weapons in Cuba, which at the time, nuclear weapons, we didn't really have the technology to fly them halfway across the globe. And so, you know, you wouldn't be able to reach important sites in the United States. But by stationing these missiles in Cuba, now I think every part of the United States was vulnerable to attack. Certainly the east coast for the first time. Yeah, all of the east coast of the US was now within range. Yeah, I think it couldn't quite reach

Washington state, but definitely all of the East Coast. And this is the first time this has happened. And so obviously this causes a big fear. And President John F. Kennedy sets up an embargo, stopping the transportation of nuclear weapons to Cuba, which the Soviets essentially interpret as an act of war. And we're at this, this incredible impasse. And it leads to this unbelievably dramatic episode, how many times do you think we have to run the Cuban missile crisis for one of them to result in bombs going off? Yeah. So you're saying essentially what is the likelihood of nuclear war given the Cuban missile? Like, what was what were the odds? Yeah. I mean, I think Kennedy said it was roughly one in three. I think based on

What we know today, it was probably higher than that. But it's impossible to know. After the crisis, it was a sobering experience and led to a new period of cooperation in trying to reduce the risk that something like that would happen again. But even as those steps started to come into play, there was this incredible buildup in the terms of the terms of the number of weapons and the number of delivery systems that could build these weapons. So if people were sobered up by this, it didn't result directly in a reduction of risk over the medium term. And again, by the 1980s, we have 60,000 nuclear weapons, and you have an elevated risk again

because the Soviet Union really believes that the Reagan administration is willing to use nuclear weapons and perhaps preparing to do so. So there's this risk hanging over us from the Cuban Missile Crisis until today, really. Now, on the 27th of October, 1962, during this height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a Soviet patrol submarine that almost launched a nuclear-armed torpedo. In fact, the commander of that submarine had ordered a nuclear strike against the Americans, but it didn't happen. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, so these were diesel-powered submarines that had nuclear weapons on them, each was equipped with a nuclear war, had a special weapon that they would use under certain circumstances, and they were being forced to surface by U.S. naval ships, which were dropping depth charges. You have to imagine these guys are in an extremely hot metal box under the sea, and it just imagine a barrel, just being hammered like a drum over and over again. They're under enormous stress, and they don't know whether the war has started or not. And so they have to make a deliberation. Do we use the weapon in this circumstance?

And the captain and the Soviet commissar, who reports to the Communist Party, they both agree to use it. But they are overruled by their outranking counterpart, the Commandad, who just happens to be on that ship that day. So as the story is told, this guy, Vasily Archipov says, let's wait. And they don't use the weapon. And we survive the Cuban Missile Crisis without nuclear use. And that's the story that comes to us. But we should be skeptical of it, obviously, because there's maybe some selective remembering and people painting

themselves in a different light. But I think there's probably a lot of truth to how close we were on that day. Yeah, I mean, the story goes that there are essentially three people involved here, three people with the power and command to launch nuclear weapons. Two of them say, yeah, let's do it. Let's fire against the Americans. And this one guy, Vasili Akhupov, says, no. And that singular human individual decision prevents nuclear warfare. It's hard to identify many moments in history where a single individual may have turned the course of history, especially, you know, if you're not talking about presidents or premieres. I can think of one more. Yeah.

Where an individual might have been responsible for saving the world. And surprise, surprise, it's yet another example of a nuclear close call. But this one, we have to fast forward to the 26th of September. 1983, where satellite early warning systems near Moscow reported that five missiles had been launched by the United States, and engineer Stanislo Petrov refuses to report this. And this man is often accredited as well with having essentially saved the world, because had he reported the fact, I mean, this, as I say, a satellite early warning system is telling him, five missiles have been launched. The US has actually launched these missiles towards you. And his

job is to send this information up the chain of command so a response can be made. And the common wisdom is that had he done this, a counterattack would almost certainly have ensued. But he looked at it and thinks, well, his training, Petrov's training, says that if the US were going to launch nuclear war, it would be a large attack. They wouldn't just fire five missiles. They'd fire a lot more. So he thinks, I'm not entirely sure about this, and he's essentially paralyzed. He reports later, you can hear his reports, and he says he just felt paralyzed. He didn't know what to do, but he decided, I just don't buy it. And he took a bit of a gamble on not reporting this.

And as it so happens, it's later determined that the reason this alarm went off is because sunlight had hit some high altitude clouds, which essentially confused the satellites. They interpreted them as incoming missiles. So a bit of sunlight bouncing off a cloud causes the singular individual having to make this heroic decision to go against his job description and not send this information up the chain of command just out of suspicion that something had gone wrong. Another example of perhaps a single individual saving the entire world from nuclear catastrophe. Yeah, that's an incredible story. And I am of the view that we should not be putting people in this position. of having to make a decision

that could be tens of millions or even all of civilization, right? That is too much. We're not meant to make decisions under time duress with such consequences. Our brains are not wired to perform well in that way. And it's just a terrible system

that we've built. And we need to, if we're going to rely on nuclear deterrence, we ought to back away and give ourselves as much decision-making time as possible to ensure that the information we're getting is reliable and that we've exhausted all other alternatives before using nuclear weapons.

But as the system is designed, it's all built on speed in being able to respond before the missiles arrive. And that's extraordinarily risky. And that's the world we live in today. Right? This is not some story from 1962 or 1983. We're still designing systems where the president may need to make a choice in under 15 minutes as to the fate of the nation based on imperfect information, based on sensor data that could be wrong, based on human intelligence that could be wrong.

And we ought to move away from that system. It doesn't benefit anyone. It wasn't there one case in which a training program was accidentally loaded onto the wrong system. And so the president was given a seven-minute warning or a seven-minute window in which to make a decision about whether to fire some nuclear weapons. But there was no decision to be made at all. And this was because somebody put the wrong software on the computer. So by all of the indications, there was the Soviet attack that was expected was incoming, but it was just a simulation. And fortunately, they figured it out in time.

There is a very dramatic contemporary reenactment of this on the television show Madam Secretary, which was really well done that describes a similar scenario. But it's certainly plausible. Now, these are the ones that we know about. Because in the United States, we have freedom of information act requests, we have good historical archives, we have good presidential archives, we keep all this information. There may well have been other nuclear scares on the Soviet side or maybe in India, Pakistan, other countries that we just don't know about. Yeah, that's terrifying. You're playing with fire. To let that sink in, that everything we've just spoken about, the fact that you've got sort of like sunlight or moon,

bouncing off a cloud and confusing a satellite and suddenly everyone's on high alert for a nuclear strike. All of the examples that we've just talked about, those are just the ones that we know about. Who knows how close we've come and how many times? And there's no way to really practice nuclear deterrence safely because you have the potential for human error and you have the potential for technical error. But even beyond that, as I said at the start, nuclear deterrence is about the manipulation of risk. And so if it's safe, if it's clear that you won't use these weapons, they will not have their intended effect of scaring your adversary.

So there's always a desire in order to gain leverage in a nuclear crisis to step up a little closer to that edge and to say, hey, we may not have full control here. And rehearsing for nuclear war and getting closer to. that edge. If you run that enough times into the future, eventually you're going to fail. Now, as promised, having spoken about some of the close calls, and I think it is important to be aware of the true danger of the situation we find ourselves in. I did also want to talk about some of the preventative measures that are currently in place to help. help stop that kind of outcome from from materializing so if we look at the landscape of

of nuclear weapons and international relations what's what's the situation as it currently stands in terms of the attempts that almost every country in the world shares to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons well there's two questions there's what can you do to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and i think we've done a really good job on that question for the most part, the past 80 years, despite many projections that there would be 20 or 30 countries that had nuclear weapons.

There are only nine countries today that have them, and there are fewer nuclear weapons than there were 20 or 30 years ago. But to this other question, how do you reduce the likelihood that those weapons are used? I feel like we're headed in a very dangerous direction right now

because of the escalating stakes and confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, as well. In the background, you have U.S. and China. And our mechanisms for controlling and managing those risks have fallen apart. The direct bilateral conversations on arms control and risk reduction are basically non-existent these days. And this is one of our key tools throughout the Cold War to avoid escalation into nuclear use. And we've got a rebuild the capacity to do that. It's really hard to do that right now while there is a hot war going

on in Ukraine. But we need to find a way to manage these weapons, which pose a threat to both sides. These are a shared threat. And when you have a shared threat like that, you need to find a way to reduce that risk, even if it means working with your adversaries, especially if it means working with your adversaries. Right. Do you think there is any realistic prospect of a post-nuclear world, and I should clarify one that doesn't involve them all being fired first? It doesn't involve all the nuclear weapons being fired. Yeah. Is there a world in which nuclear weapons disappear? So, as I said, the knowledge of how to build these weapons is with us, But we can make choices, and we have made choices, about how we want to prepare to use them and to deploy them, whether we want to live in a world with a lot of nuclear weapons or fewer nuclear weapons.

Now, there's competitive pressures here, right? So it can't be one side saying we don't want nuclear weapons. It's got to be a shared movement towards a world free of nuclear weapons. Right now, we're moving in the wrong direction. We're building up more nuclear arms and more ways of delivering them. And I think the risks are going up. I'm hoping it doesn't require another crisis like 1962 or the use of nuclear weapons to persuade us that we can't continue on this path.

I'm hoping that we will find ways to manage our shared interests and to say, hey, nuclear weapons exist, but we need to work collectively to reduce the chance that they are used. Most countries in the world reject nuclear weapons and say these are not legitimate weapons. don't need to rely on these for our security. Most countries have signed on to never acquire nuclear weapons, both through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and later through the Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. But there's still nine countries that have them and that rely on them quite heavily. And there's got to be a shared project among those countries. Could it happen? Well, it's not going to happen in the current climate. But I am hoping that this human

project is not short-lived, and that we have many decades and centuries together on this Earth. And if we do, we're going to have to figure out how to manage nuclear weapons. And I don't think that it's inevitable that they will spread and be used. I think that you can find solutions to manage dangerous technologies. We've had biological weapons and other terrible things with us that we don't see used. So I think that they will remain with us. The potential to build nuclear weapons will always remain with us.

Yes. I think we may be able to disassemble the actual nuclear devices, but always in the background will be the shadow, the potential that some country could reconstitute them. So in that world, what mechanisms do you need in place to make sure that that doesn't happen? I think you need much more robust systems. of conflict resolution. And this was the, you know, Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics,

believed in international control of nuclear weapons. And Oppenheimer came along to this view as well, that we need some kind of central governing mechanism or some kind of, either a world government or at least a nuclear system that is deeply international and intrusive and powerful to be able to manage this technology. during the Cold War, that wasn't going to happen. Since then, we've built systems that in some ways approximate that vision.

So the International Atomic Energy Agency does a really good job of managing safeguards and ensuring that countries are not pursuing nuclear weapons. But the IAEA doesn't deal with nuclear weapons programs of states that already have nuclear arms. That would require a whole other set of institutions. solutions. Well, while I have you, I did want to ask you about the big movie that's on everybody's lips. Do you think that Ryan Gosling made a good Ken? I haven't seen that one yet. I missed my Barbenheimer opportunity. Never mind. I'll admit, I haven't seen Barbie either. Although I did I did go and watch Oppenheimer in IMAX.

I'd never seen an IMAX number four. Specifically because I knew that we were going to be having this conversation, so I would be remiss to not to not mention it. Yeah. What did you do? Well, I thought it was a wonderful, a wonderful film. Actually, before we get into this section, I want to, just before we move on, I want to issue a,

warning to listeners that we're about to talk about the Oppenheimer movie. I don't think we're going to sort of reveal any major spoilers. But if you haven't seen it yet and you're anything like me and you don't want to see or hear anything about a movie before you've seen it, then now's your time to tune out. And thanks for listening and revisit this once you've gone to see it. But if you're still here after me saying that, then it's on you. To be honest with you, I thought the film was was uh i mean it was obviously quite long and uh i think it probably could have ended a little bit earlier than it did i don't know if it needed absolutely everything that that came after it but to be honest i i don't know nearly as much as i'd like to about the history of the

development of nuclear weapons and so i wanted to ask you whether you thought it was whether you thought it was accurate whether you thought it was a a good depiction of the manhattan project I found the film very moving and I thought it was masterfully done and it takes its source material really seriously. So it's based on this book, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It's a 780 page book.

I listened to it on audiobook recently. It takes 27 hours to listen to it. Wow. And that is condensed down into this three-hour biopic. So it's a biopic. It's not a documentary. It uses a lot of artistic tricks,

but it is remarkably faithful to the story that Khy Bird and Marty Sherwin tell in their book. And I just thought it was very, very moving, and it covers these historical events. A lot of the dialogue is taken directly from transcripts or from journals and records. collections. So there's this underlying faithfulness to the material. It whips you through in a really fast fashion. So you're seeing the discoveries that come in Oppenheimer's early career

with the history of physics and then takes you through to the development of the bomb itself and then the aftermath. And this comes down to the question we've been discussing is how do you manage this technology that you've unleashed upon the world, which seems like it will inevitably spread. And that's the central dilemma in the third part of the film is, do we develop the super bomb, this thermonuclear bomb that is 10 or 100 times more powerful than the weapons that are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And what does that mean for humanity?

Something that jumped out at me in the film was that when the calculations are being made about whether a nuclear bomb is possible, how it might come about, there's this slight fear. And there's a moment in the film when somebody pulls out a bit of paper and says, everybody looks at this. And everybody is sort of horrified. And Oppenheimer takes it to Albert Einstein for a second opinion. And the thought is written down in this paper in mathematics that I would never even hope to be able to understand that if this nuclear bomb is set off, even just the test that was being planned, there's a small possibility that it could literally ignite the atmosphere and the chain reaction at the basis of this nuclear weapon never ends and just destroys the entire atmosphere and thereby all life on Earth. That stunned me. I hadn't heard of that as a consideration before. And even at the time of launching the nuclear tests, there was still a non-zero possibility that that could happen. And they were aware that that could happen. I mean, is that. Oppenheimer says, it's near zero. What more do you want from theory alone? And that's true. This is, this part of the story is true. They discovered that this is possible. Well, I'd quite like zero, actually. And this is true. Yeah, so they, they, Edward Teller was the man who conducted the initial calculations that determined that this might be possible.

In the, in the movie, Oppenheimer takes it to Einstein, and he needs to take it to Einstein as part of a framing mechanism for the film because he meets Einstein later. In real life, he takes it to James Conant, who is at Harvard University and is organizing the Manhattan Project at a certain level. and says, basically, we've discovered there's a risk. And so they rerun the calculations, tellers involved in rerunning the calculations along with others. And they determined that it is very low odds, and essentially near zero. If, I think they decided, I don't remember exactly, I think they decided that if the odds were greater than one and three million, they would discontinue the price. project. One in three million is really small odds, but at the same time it's not zero. Yeah, when we're talking about the literal destruction of the world, the odds could do with

being a little bit smaller. And in that situation, would that necessitate the sharing of this information with the enemy as a way of saying, I don't know if you realize this, but we could be at risk of blowing up the atmosphere here? Do you think that were the odds higher? Were it discovered that there was something like a sort of, you know, one in 500,000 chance that this was going to happen. And so the Americans decide this needs to stop. Do you think that they can go to Nazi Germany or go to the Soviet Union and say, listen, we can't be doing this? Or do you think that the process continues? I think this is a question that's at the heart of the film and heart of the current dilemma, because even if the specific instance of actually igniting the

atmosphere was not true, right? Essentially, we've set in motion this process through the detonation of the first Trinity test that has led us on this path, and each step along the way seems almost inevitable and irrevocable to build a doomsday machine. The weapons pointed at each other in the U.S., in Russia, and in China. We have gone forward with this doomsday machine, and it's just sitting there in the background.

As we hum along with our ordinary lives and we go to work, in the background, there are people in silos who are rehearsing to turn that key. And the result of a failure at any point along the line may not result in the end of humanity, but will be a really dark path for humanity to go down. And so I don't know what would have happened

if we had brought that information to the Germans and to the Soviets. Would anyone have stopped? Or would you have had one country that says, oh, we don't think the odds are that high, we're willing to live with a one and three million less risk. You know, the stakes are so high, we're willing to live with a one in a thousand risk

that this blows up the world. Yeah. That's kind of the world we live in now. And I think that's not to spoil anything in the film, but that's the metaphor that Oppenheimer places before us. So some people are also upset about what's not in the film in Oppenheimer. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about that. Yeah. So the film, I think, is very faithful to the book and to the story, but there are emissions, and one of them relates to the fate of the downwinders. These are the people in communities near that initial Trinity test, mostly rural and indigenous people. There were about 500,000 people living within 150 miles of that test, and they weren't notified in advance of the test or after.

And it was a report in the New York Times that described the spread of radiation. And some of those people continue to suffer from the consequences of that first use of nuclear weapons. And the first victims of nuclear use in some ways were Americans in these regions. And I'm going to give Christopher Nolan a pass for not telling that part of the story because it wasn't heavily featured in the book. And it was different from the story that he was. seeking to tell, but I think it's something we need to all be aware of. The film also doesn't show the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are a couple scenes where you get these visions of what it might be for nuclear war to come to America. And there's one scene in which you see

Oppenheimer presented with historical footage, but we don't actually see it ourselves. Now, some people are upset with that. But I think that's a deliberate decision by Christopher Nolan, because if you look in that scene, Oppenheimer's looking away. And the story is written from his perspective in many ways. And his inability to fully grapple with what it is that he has helped unleash upon the world is central to the film's themes. But it is a little disconcerting that a movie about the first use of nuclear weapons doesn't feature any Japanese people or any really the stories of the victims of those first two nuclear bombs. Yeah, well, like you say, this is told from the perspective of Oppenheimer and we do see

some of the effects of nuclear war. And it's, I mean, you just described it as, as Oppenheimer sort of foreseeing what nuclear war in America might look like. some of the people in front of him begin to have the effects of nuclear radiation. I mean, I sort of interpreted that as him just seeing the effects generally. I didn't think of that as, oh, this is him thinking, what if it comes to America? But he's beginning to realize that everybody who was living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, this is what's happening to them, as if those thoughts are creeping into his head as he sat there trying to celebrate with people, this historic event, he begins to sort of reflect

upon what's actually happened here. And it's subtle because it's the kind of thing that as he begins to think about it, he wants to shut it out. And so that's the experience that the viewer has. Yeah, I'm interested. I wasn't familiar with this community of people living near the test site. What kind of problems did they face after the test of the nuclear weapon? Well, the effects of radiation can lead to all different health consequences and especially cancers of different sorts. And there's a really good, as I mentioned, the New York Times piece describes it more fully. But a lot of the people in Nevada and around other U.S. nuclear test sites have been compensated for their radiation exposure. But the people of New Mexico were excluded from that act.

And now there's efforts in Congress to include the people of New Mexico in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. And I think that would be a good historical corrective. Yeah, well, it's nice to end a podcast like this looking forward rather than spending the whole time looking back. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you think about where we were in 1945, this was a terrifying moment. And there was a sense very much that these weapons could spread everywhere and be used again and again.

and over the past 80 years, it's evidence that that's not inevitable. We don't have another use of nuclear weapons. They've only spread to nine countries. We developed an insane number of them, but by the 1980s, we started reducing that number, and we have one-sixth as many nuclear weapons as we had. And it shows that if you have good leadership, if you have arms control and negotiation and communication, and you have engagement of civil society, you have improvements of norms, you can reduce these risks and you can make progress away from the brink.

I think that someone in Oppenheimer's shoes, seeing where we are now, would be surprised and impressed by how we've managed this threat and avoided use of nuclear weapons again and again. But the story is not over. In some ways, we may be at the start of the nuclear source. story. We're entering a new nuclear age in which the risks are once again on the rise. We see what's happening in Russia. We see China building up its arsenal. And so we need leadership and civil society engagement to manage that. So that's what I'm focused on at Longview Philanthropy. And I'm really glad we had this conversation and hope we can talk again soon. Carl Ravisho, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you.

You know, you know, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.