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Carl Robichaud on Preventing Nuclear War
266 Plays10 months ago
Carl Robichaud joins the podcast to discuss the new nuclear arms race, how much world leaders and ideologies matter for nuclear risk, and how to reach a stable, low-risk era. You can learn more about Carl's work here: https://www.longview.org/about/carl-robichaud/
Timestamps:
00:00 A new nuclear arms race
08:07 How much do world leaders matter?
18:04 How much does ideology matter?
22:14 Do nuclear weapons cause stable peace?
31:29 North Korea
34:01 Have we overestimated nuclear risk?
43:24 Time pressure in nuclear decisions
52:00 Why so many nuclear warheads?
1:02:17 Has containment been successful?
1:11:34 Coordination mechanisms
1:16:31 Technological innovations
1:25:57 Public perception of nuclear risk
1:29:52 Easier access to nuclear weapons
1:33:31 Reaching a stable, low-risk era
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Transcript
Introduction and Nuclear Arms Race
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. My name is Gus Dogger and I'm here with Carl Robichaux. Carl is a program officer at Longview Philanthropy where he specializes in nuclear policy. Welcome Carl. Thank you. Glad to be here. Great. So I think you're the perfect person to ask about
00:00:19
Speaker
Whether there is a new nuclear conflict underway, is there a new nuclear arms race in the world? All nine countries that have nuclear weapons are modernizing and improving their nuclear arsenal in one way or another. And many of them are doing it in response to developments by other countries. So I think that there's already something of a qualitative arms race underway. And we could talk more about what we mean by that.
00:00:49
Speaker
But I think we're also
Relevance of Nuclear Weapons in Modern Conflicts
00:00:50
Speaker
on the verge of seeing a lot more nuclear weapons in the world. And that reverses a trend that we've seen for the past 30 years or so, in which we've had progressively fewer deployed nuclear weapons and a perception that nuclear weapons are something of the past and don't pertain much to current conflicts. They war in Ukraine and some of the developments in China, events in North Korea, etc.
00:01:19
Speaker
are forcing us to recognize that these weapons are with us. They're here in the background, even if they're invisible. And we are entering a new phase of nuclear competition, which may not look like the past 80 years of the nuclear age. So if this started by countries responding to each other, how did it get started in the first place? Which country began this race, so to speak?
00:01:45
Speaker
Part of it is a product of technological changes and specifically the revolution in accuracy and some of the changes in US policy to pursue more effective missile defenses. And those things were
00:02:05
Speaker
driven by an attempt to obtain advantages in conventional warfare, and in the case of missile defenses, to deter countries like North Korea and protect the United States. But they have this follow-on effect of driving perceptions in Russia and China.
00:02:25
Speaker
The biggest
US Policies and Technological Changes
00:02:26
Speaker
change right now, in my view, is China's decision that they are no longer going to rely on a small, recessed nuclear deterrent, but are going to essentially seek parity with the United States and Russia. Based on the estimates that I've seen, they are moving up to an arsenal of between 1,000 and 1,500 nuclear weapons on a diversified set of platforms, upgrading their command and control,
00:02:50
Speaker
and moving away from a position that nuclear weapons were only a weapon of last resort. So those are some really significant changes in the nuclear order. And I think China is responding in many ways to things they're seeing in the United States. We also see Russia, their invasion of Ukraine, relies on nuclear weapons in the background as a backstop to their conventional power.
00:03:17
Speaker
And then the US is responding to China and Russia, correct? Yes. But the US is also responding to developments in North Korea, for example. So the US missile defenses, I don't think, are primarily driven by concerns over Russia and China, but that's not the way Russia and China perceive that. How is the US responding to North Korea? Why is that an interesting conflict from a national security standpoint?
00:03:44
Speaker
So the US has an ally in South Korea that feels very threatened by North Korea. North Korea is in violation of multiple international agreements in seeking nuclear weapons
Historical Tensions and Geopolitical Shifts
00:03:54
Speaker
and obtaining them, testing them, and making nuclear threats. And this is one of those challenges that
00:04:00
Speaker
puts US policymakers on the back foot, all of a sudden you have a small, relatively poor and weak country that can threaten the US homeland with annihilation. And that's not a position that any US policymaker wants to be in. So there is a lot of domestic political pressure, Bjork product pressure, et cetera, to try to reduce that vulnerability.
00:04:20
Speaker
which has driven an interest in missile defenses, which have become increasingly sophisticated and an attempt to escape from vulnerability from North Korea. What about Taiwan? Is that a similar conflict?
00:04:35
Speaker
Now, Taiwan is quite different. Here you have a long-standing US-1 China policy, which is based on ambiguity, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the US would come to Taiwan's defense in an armed conflict, at least under certain circumstances.
00:04:53
Speaker
And that is fueling this competition in the Western Pacific, where China is seeking to assume what it feels is its rightful role in that region and feels really constrained by the United States, by Taiwan, by South Korea, and by Japan. So you're really on a collision course.
00:05:16
Speaker
Is there a reason these regional conflicts are popping up now? Is there some underlying explanation that unifies all of these conflicts?
00:05:25
Speaker
Well, they have been with us for a long time. So all of these conflicts have been simmering. The Korean War was
Leadership and Decision-Making in Nuclear Policies
00:05:31
Speaker
never really ended. It just kind of froze in place from the perspective of North Korea. After the Cold War, you have the fall of the Soviet Union and a decline in Russian power. And US power sort of expands. NATO power expands to fill some of that vacuum in a way that feels very threatening to Russia. So a lot of the recent tensions
00:05:55
Speaker
are about Russia feeling like it is on its back foot and that its very vital and core interests are at risk. And it has lashed out in order to preserve those interests.
00:06:07
Speaker
China for a long time has been rising as a major player on the international scene and their economy now parallels that of the United States and wants to assume its rightful place in the world order. It doesn't want to be a second class power anymore. So it's pushing up against some of these historical constraints on its freedom of action and doing so in a way that many people see as in violation of the
00:06:36
Speaker
rules-based international order. And we now see the war in Ukraine. You have Russia, which has invaded a country, which is getting support from NATO and is something of a proxy war now. And that changes the dynamic pretty significantly. And the risk of this escalating into an all-out war are very low, in my view.
00:07:03
Speaker
But that risk is there. And especially since these decisions are being made by only a handful of individuals. In the case of Russia, you have a leader who has a very small cadre of advisors.
00:07:22
Speaker
And it's not clear how much information Putin is getting that contradicts his worldview. And we know he's made miscalculations before. He sees the world through a pretty narrow lens of power. And I think there's a risk that he overplays his hand in a way that leads to some really bad outcomes.
00:07:45
Speaker
So that's one issue I'm especially concerned about at the moment. I think with North Korea, you have essentially a totalitarian leader who's calling the shots, who also has shown some erratic behavior. And all it takes is one mistake to dramatically change that landscape.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, this is actually something that worries me quite a lot. How much of the world do you think hinges on the behavior of these specific individuals and other world leaders like them? How much does it matter that it's Putin as opposed to another world leader?
00:08:23
Speaker
Well, as you know, there's a lot of debate in IR theory about how much individuals matter and in what contexts they matter. Nations have enduring interests, but that individuals really do matter at the margins in some very significant ways. When you read the history closely, for example,
00:08:40
Speaker
The Cuban Missile Crisis would have been very different if you had a leader other than Kennedy at the helm in the United States or Khrushchev in the Soviet Union. I don't think you can take leaders out of this, and especially now where you have countries that are so driven by the personalities of Putin, of Xi Jinping, of Kim Jong-un.
00:09:03
Speaker
These are countries where those individuals' particular psychological makeup has a lot of impact on how those countries pursue their national interests. What was Kennedy's impact in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
00:09:19
Speaker
Kennedy was so burned by the Bay of Pigs in which he essentially trusted the military and the CIA analysis of that situation and went ahead with a plan that was on the books from the Eisenhower administration and it turned out terribly and he was blamed for it.
00:09:39
Speaker
And he came into the Cuban Missile Crisis with a willingness to really question all of the advice that he was getting from his military advisors and from intelligence officials, because going into the crisis when those missiles were detected, there was pretty much a consensus that this was an opportunity for the United States to invade Cuba and solve that problem for once and for all.
00:10:10
Speaker
And we know now that if the US had carried out on that plan that was the consensus of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many of his advisors in the foreign policy establishment, it would have been disastrous because there were already operational tactical missiles on the ground in the hands of the local Soviet commanders. US didn't know this at the time, but those weapons would have been used against an invading force.
00:10:35
Speaker
and it would have triggered a massive nuclear exchange. We don't know how bad it would have been if they would have been able to hold. Anyway, it would have been a really bad situation. Kennedy was willing to question the necessity of an invasion and push back on that advice. One of the things you hear again and again in the transcripts of these recordings of the deliberations, he was always asking, why did Khrushchev do this? Why did the Soviets do this?
00:11:04
Speaker
And that sense of empathy and trying to figure out what are the causes behind this was really important in resolving that crisis. We're lucky that nuclear weapons were not used. There were about three or four different places where things could have gone wrong. And I think both Kennedy and Khrushchev realized at that moment that while they were sitting in the chair as the decision maker, they did not have control of all the decisions that were being made. There were decisions that were being made by
00:11:34
Speaker
relatively low-level military officials or by parties that didn't control like the leadership in Cuba that could have easily spiral out of control. I think it was a sobering experience to realize that in the fog of crisis, in the fog of war, there's a lot of things that can happen that we don't anticipate.
00:11:57
Speaker
We can all be grateful that Kennedy acted as he did, but I think it is at some level a failure of government policy that all of this responsibility rested on one person.
Debate on Nuclear Weapons: Peace or Risk?
00:12:09
Speaker
Did anything change after the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of policy? Did we make any rational improvements in how we manage risk around this technology?
00:12:19
Speaker
In some ways, yes, there was a hotline that was put in place so that the leaders could talk directly to each other in real time during a crisis, but that of course only applied to the United States and the Soviet Union. And I think it was a sobering moment and led to changes in the way that Kennedy and Khrushchev
00:12:39
Speaker
viewed nuclear crises. But of course, they were only part of the story. And Kennedy was soon assassinated. Khrushchev would later leave the scene. And behind them was this military imperative. So both sides took away very different lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the United States, the lesson that was taken away was that in order to prevail in a nuclear crisis,
00:13:09
Speaker
you cannot blink. You need to stare down the adversary and by showing resolve and by having more weapons and more capabilities, you're going to be able to get your way. That was the perception in part because nobody knew that Kennedy and Khrushchev had both blinked.
00:13:31
Speaker
They had both agreed at the final minute to strike a secret deal to remove the missiles from Turkey and return for the missiles in Cuba. And that was the key that unlocked the crisis and allowed for a de-escalation. But that information was only known by a handful of people. And as a result, the conventional wisdom was, you know, you got to stay strong in a nuclear crisis.
00:13:57
Speaker
Interestingly, on the Soviet side, the takeaway from the entire Soviet leadership was that we cannot allow ourselves to be vulnerable in this way. We need to build up our nuclear arsenal because at the time of the crisis, the US had a huge qualitative and quantitative advantage in nuclear arms. And the Soviets looked at that and said, we just got bullied here because we don't have
00:14:24
Speaker
enough to preserve our interests. And that led to a massive buildup throughout the 60s and put the world in a much more dangerous place. In the United States, we still rely on one decision maker. The commander in chief decides
00:14:39
Speaker
when and how to use nuclear weapons based on plans that are formulated by STRATCOM and the Pentagon, but ultimately that one individual is in charge. And initially that system emerged as a check on the power of local military commanders to use these weapons.
00:15:02
Speaker
So the sole authority emerged when Truman basically said, these are not normal weapons of war. I want to be the sole decider when it comes to using nuclear weapons again.
00:15:15
Speaker
But over time, that system has perpetuated itself, even as we've strengthened our command and control. We can make decisions faster with better information, but we retain what I view as a really outdated mode of decision making around nuclear weapons.
00:15:35
Speaker
And that has real implications for today because you're going to have a president in the White House, whether it's President Biden or President Trump, who is in their 80s or might be forced to make the most consequential decision ever made by someone on Earth, right? Yeah, that's pretty terrifying. Are there any prospects of getting rid of this one-person decision process for nuclear weapons?
00:16:02
Speaker
There has been some legislation proposed in Congress that would change this and would say that under certain circumstances, the president can use nuclear weapons without going to Congress. But in order to use nuclear weapons first,
00:16:20
Speaker
or if there's no time pressure, the president would have to first consult. There are a couple of different variants. Some people say there would be a conversation with Congress. More often, there would be a couple other decision makers, including the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to have an expanded circle of decision makers around nuclear use. This is
00:16:45
Speaker
what we have on the books at least in Russia and in some other countries where there isn't just one individual who makes that decision. Is that how it actually works in Russia? Is there a council so it's not just Putin himself who decides? Yeah, there are three individuals, including the Russian president, the minister of defense, and I'm blanking now on how the third individual is. How it would play out in practice is that
00:17:14
Speaker
you would need someone who's willing to speak their mind in opposition to what Vladimir Putin prefers.
00:17:25
Speaker
I mean, in an ideal world, the leader of any nation when undertaking a decision this big would want to consult a variety of different sources of information and really reflect on that decision. We are likely to face some nuclear decisions that come under extreme time pressure and psychological stress.
00:17:46
Speaker
And that's one thing that scares me because we know that humans don't make decisions well under stress and extreme time pressure. And when these decisions are of such high consequence, you got to get them right every time. We talked about how much individual world leaders matter in the course of history of nuclear weapons and
00:18:13
Speaker
Nuclear policy, how much do you think ideology matters? You could see the Cold War as a clash of ideologies around how economics should work. It seems to me that, for example, Russia's invasion of Ukraine seems ideologically driven. The North Korean regime seems ideologically driven.
00:18:32
Speaker
enterprise. How much does ideology matter for the way states think about nuclear weapons? Both Russia and China see themselves as pushing back against this Western order.
00:18:47
Speaker
with its embedded values, which are economic, cultural, social, and on what we call the rules-based international order, which these countries see as you follow the rules when it's in your interests. And then when anyone else breaks the rules, you use your power to overwhelm us and dictate the terms.
00:19:11
Speaker
I think that ideology remains a force. If you think about ideology broadly to include nationalism, or in the case of North Korea, the sense that they are this chosen people that have a special destiny in world affairs, I think it's hard to separate out pure national interests from an ideological
00:19:39
Speaker
interest. It's not just about national ideology. There's a lot that comes in about perceived grievances and slights and a sense that my country and I am being disrespected. I need to do this in order to gain back respect or else it's going to keep happening to me over and over again. I think that that is one of the
00:20:07
Speaker
big risk factors is that someone does something that may not be in their national interest or their personal interest because they're angry, because they're upset. Decision makers are human too. We can all think about instances in our own lives where we've done something we've regretted in the heat of the moment.
00:20:28
Speaker
And there's this illusion sometimes that states are utility optimizing entities rather than subject to the same whims that the people at their helm are. But for states, the consequences of acting out on these impulses might be considerably greater than in our personal conflicts, of course. Yeah, I mean, it can put everyone alive on this planet at risk to one degree or another.
00:20:59
Speaker
a single person's decision. That's shocking. That is something that's new to the human condition. For a few million years, there have been humans on this planet and modern humanity goes back tens of thousands of years. During that entire time, there were individuals who had incredible power, if you think about Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great.
00:21:25
Speaker
nobody could push the button and create global consequences in the course of an afternoon. That is a new development that emerged over the past 80 years. There wasn't one line that was crossed. It was a series of lines that were crossed as we'd unlocked the fission bomb and then the thermonuclear bomb and then intercontinental ballistic missiles and improved
00:21:54
Speaker
the number of weapons and the accuracy of those weapons. So each time you're crossing these thresholds, but we live now in a world in which, in a really short period of time, a very small number of individuals can create really awful outcomes. Somewhat paradoxically, maybe, we also live in a time of relative peace. So for the last 80 years, say, we've managed to avoid World War III.
00:22:25
Speaker
Do you think nuclear weapons are responsible for holding the world in a kind of peaceful stalemate? Yeah, so a lot has been written on this, and I think nobody knows for sure. And we have a puzzle in which you have this dependent variable, which is a relatively long period of peace, absent great power conflict, and then you have lots of explanations for it.
00:22:47
Speaker
argue, for example, that the ideological divisions between the US and the Soviet Union or the West and the Soviet Union allowed them to step back and feel like time was on their side and that they didn't need to move quickly. Other peoples look at the general exhaustion of the European powers and of the Soviet Union after World War II
00:23:09
Speaker
and look at the fact that Soviet leaders were not willing to embark on a new wave of wars to promote their interests because they were essentially exhausted and wanted to focus on rebuilding their country. And then other people look at international law and the spread of rules and values. Personally, I don't think that those variables explain everything. I think nuclear weapons played a role in this restraint.
00:23:34
Speaker
I think there is a lot of evidence that leaders of nuclear armed states really grappled with the fear of unleashing nuclear war and what those consequences could be. And I think that led them to exercise more caution in starting a war than they otherwise might have. I
Near-Miss Incidents and Risk Assessment
00:23:56
Speaker
think there's a better question we might ask though, which is, in expectation did the nuclear policies we pursued
00:24:03
Speaker
make us less safe or more safe? And I feel confident that the answer to this question is that the nuclear buildup actually made us less safe. Even if you do have this period of peace, it came at a cost, which is that every year we were rolling the dice with the potential for global annihilation. We were taking chances that could have led to 300 million to 500 million people
00:24:31
Speaker
dying directly from nuclear blast. And that doesn't take into account the effects of fire, of radiation, the potential for nuclear winter or nuclear autumn, right? So you have the potential for billions of people to die as a result of this nuclear standoff. And even if we were able to buy some peace,
00:25:00
Speaker
The cost of that piece is this underlying risk that you're going to lose it all. What were the odds that nuclear weapons were used during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Nobody knows for sure. I believe the odds were certainly more than 1%.
00:25:18
Speaker
I think they were probably closer to 30% or 50%, which is what President Kennedy put them at. Remember, when Kennedy made that estimate, he didn't know about some of the things that we know now.
00:25:34
Speaker
Right? We only learned later about the incident with the B-59 submarine, which almost launched a nuclear torpedo. We only learned later that there were Soviet officers with tactical nuclear weapons that were authorized to use those, and those weapons were fully operational. So there are lots of things that
00:25:55
Speaker
may have made the situation even riskier. Now, you know, you could say also Kennedy had reason to inflate that risk in order to make himself seem like a hero and justify the actions we took. So we don't know what his actual risk assessment is. And that's the problem with all of this is that it's impossible to determine what the underlying risk is
00:26:23
Speaker
One of the reasons it's impossible to determine that is that risk is dependent on the actions that individuals take. So in some cases, the higher the perceived risk, the lower the actual risk and vice versa. There's a lot of risk compensation behavior that occurs in the nuclear space. And that's one of the reasons that it doesn't lend itself to sort of a simple game theoretical analysis.
00:26:48
Speaker
If I'm hearing you right, the cost of world stability is this underlying risk, but that underlying risk is difficult to estimate correctly because people respond to the risk by decreasing the risk. That's right. In some cases, they may respond to the risk by increasing the risk. If they feel like the risk is very low, they feel like they can leverage that risk in order to achieve something that's really important to their country. And I think you see both behaviors happen throughout the course of the nuclear age.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's a dynamic system like the economy. It's not like a natural phenomenon. Exactly right. And you see that in Ukraine today, right? Where Vladimir Putin has made nuclear threats.
00:27:31
Speaker
in order to limit NATO's support of Ukraine in that war. And he's manipulating risk, right? Now, if NATO entirely discounts that nuclear threat, then maybe the nuclear risk actually goes up. On the other hand, if NATO takes that nuclear threat really seriously and acts as if Russia's about to use nuclear weapons,
00:27:58
Speaker
Russia may be able to achieve more goals and feels emboldened to make more nuclear threats. So again, it's this dynamic. It's very multi-layered. How do you even make decisions in such a system? How do you make an all things considered decision when you have all of these interacting effects? Well, I think that the way decisions are usually made by policymakers is they have these mental models.
00:28:24
Speaker
they apply that mental model to the situation that confronts them. I have no evidence that leaders are using probabilistic estimates and sophisticated models of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis in order to achieve their goals. There are people in government who do that. When designing
00:28:47
Speaker
nuclear plans, for example, there's a lot of thinking that goes into that. But in the heat of the moment, decision makers are politicians in most cases, and they use these simple models of how they understand the world to navigate this new challenge that faces them. They're not obligated in the US system, for example, to take into account models that are provided to them. They don't have to respond to any of the information that's provided to them.
00:29:12
Speaker
I think that's right and I don't think it's just in the US system. I think in basically any system there is a small cadre of decision makers and really often is dominated by one person and they will make a choice when faced with the choices presented to them. They may pick one of the items off the menu or they may opt for something that's not on the menu as Kennedy did when he imposed this quarantine around Cuba. I think there's a view
00:29:42
Speaker
in government, at least in the US, that the president should have a lot of options to choose from. Whether that's a wise thing or not, you'd have to ask someone who's really expert in decision theory, do we operate better when provided a broad menu of options or a narrow menu?
00:30:01
Speaker
And in some cases, I think a large menu can confuse us. And in some cases, having a few middle options, which are still very extreme, may make those middle options seem more palatable and sensible, if that makes sense.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, as you mentioned before, we can imagine Putin responding only to the information that's being fed to him. And maybe the people feeding him information have various incentives not to be entirely straightforward. And of course, Putin himself can punish people for providing information he doesn't like and so on. It's interesting to consider how much human psychology goes into making these decisions, whereas in a better world, I think it should be a bit more considered
00:30:49
Speaker
or reliant on systems that we have developed while we were sure we were thinking straight. Yeah. And 10 years ago, I was really concerned about that problem as it pertains to North Korea. I think today we increasingly need to be concerned about that problem as it applies to Russia and to China, which have increasingly personalistic leadership.
00:31:14
Speaker
And I know there are a lot of people in the United States, too, who are concerned about Donald Trump. President Trump, if he wins again, will be in charge of these decisions and has shown an inclination towards taking extreme rhetoric, if not extreme action. If we return to North Korea, do you think North Korea could ever be invaded or otherwise affected by the outside now that it has nuclear weapons?
00:31:40
Speaker
North Korea has long feared an invasion from the United States and South Korea, but I don't think that that fear was ever really warranted. I think it reflects some paranoia on the part of North Korea. What their nuclear arsenal has not protected them from are from sanctions.
00:31:58
Speaker
which have impoverished and isolated their country. If you go back to the end of the Korean War, North and South Korea were roughly similar in terms of their economy. If anything, the North was stronger and richer. And today, there's no question that the South has flourished, whereas the North has not.
00:32:20
Speaker
And you could just look at these nighttime satellite photos that are taken. And you could see just a couple blips of light in North Korea, but otherwise it's entirely dark. And South Korea is just shining with economic activity and prosperity. So by any objective measure, North Korea's policy of seeking nuclear weapons to advance its interests
00:32:44
Speaker
has backfired. I think that they are losing ground. Would the United States and South Korea have conducted military airstrikes absent North Korea's nuclear weapon? Possibly, and especially in response to some of North Korea's most provocative
Public Perception and Awareness of Nuclear Risks
00:33:00
Speaker
actions, like the shelling of an island that killed many South Korean service members. But I do think that
00:33:08
Speaker
South Korea would be deterred by North Korea's conventional capabilities. You know, Seoul is basically within range of North Korean conventional artillery. So I don't know how much North Korea's nuclear weapons have bought it. Far from being protected by nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons are the major reason for North Korea's suffering.
00:33:30
Speaker
In some ways, these weapons do insulate the Kim regime from the laws of gravity as it pertains to... He has this power and this security that he can brandish against these external threats and he can motivate people to unify against this external threat.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's important to remind yourself of the difference between North Korea as a country and Kim's personal interests, which are not always perfectly aligned. Do you think the annual risk of nuclear war has been overestimated in the past? So is it the case that we thought that the risk was higher than it actually was?
00:34:12
Speaker
If you have a 1% risk each year for 80 years and continue running that into the future, at some point it becomes just mathematically improbable that the world still exists. And so you might begin to doubt your numbers. What do you think of these estimates?
00:34:27
Speaker
Well, I think that the risk of nuclear war has been overestimated and underestimated, depending on who's doing the estimating, because most of these estimates come with a political agenda, right? So if you want to rid the world of nuclear weapons, you are likely to overestimate the risk that they will be used. On the other hand, if you see nuclear weapons as legitimate tools of diplomacy and military power, you might underestimate the risk that
00:34:55
Speaker
threatening to use nuclear weapons will lead to nuclear war. And I think you see both of those dynamics throughout the Cold War. The fact is that almost nobody has systematically sought to estimate the annual risk of nuclear war. And I think it's virtually impossible to do it. It's worth trying because
00:35:16
Speaker
in trying to do that, I think you can isolate some of your assumptions and some of the points of disagreement and some of these cruxes between people who have very different worldviews. But there's also this other problem, Gus, that we talked about earlier, which is that if you have a high estimate of the risk, you are likely to take actions that then reduce that risk.
00:35:42
Speaker
A good example is the risk of nuclear terrorism. If you go back to the early 1990s, a lot of policymakers in the United States were talking about how there's the potential for a non-state actor to acquire and to use nuclear weapons. Of course, that hasn't happened in the intervening years, and our default would be to
00:36:06
Speaker
say, well, they way overestimated this risk. It's really hard for non-state actors to acquire these materials, and this was all a distraction.
00:36:16
Speaker
And maybe that's true, but I also think that because we had that risk in mind, there were a lot of actions taken by the United States, by Russia, by the former Soviet states that dramatically reduced the availability of fissile material, that reduced the likelihood of proliferation both to state and non-state actors, that worked to disrupt
00:36:39
Speaker
the networks of non-state actors that might be able to find a safe haven and work on these bomb projects in secret. And so I think that those interventions were worth taking because nobody really knew what the underlying risk was. And the consequences of the use of even a handful of nuclear weapons or even one nuclear weapon in a major city are large enough that the money that we spent to secure and reduce those materials made a lot of sense.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, there's the direct deaths and there might be additional deaths from radiation and from smoke and so on. But there's also just imagine the political instability caused by a nuclear weapon used in a major city. That would also be extremely costly for the world.
00:37:27
Speaker
If you think about the second and third order consequences of the 9-11 attacks to the global economy and the backlash that led to multiple wars and major instability led to infringements on civil liberties, the violation of international law and torture and surveillance,
00:37:54
Speaker
And the fact that we're still all these years later taking off our shoes every time we go through an airport security line, that's like a very small inconvenience, but compounded by millions of people every day since, it's like these costs endure. And once you put in place something, it's unlikely to be rolled back. So if a nuclear weapon is used again on US soil,
00:38:24
Speaker
I'm not confident that our democracy survives, that our constitution survives. It might, but it might not. And that's one of the reasons I think it's worth investing a lot of time, effort, expertise, and care into avoiding these weapons from ever being used again. Let's talk a bit about nuclear near misses. This is one of these subjects where you get a sense of what the risk might be, even though we're not engaged in trying to estimate a probability.
00:38:54
Speaker
There are
Limitations of International Nuclear Treaties
00:38:55
Speaker
stories of near misses where you think this could have easily gone the other way. So do you have some near miss examples that you would like to use?
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there were three or four during the Cuban Missile Crisis alone, which I think is the most dangerous moment in human history, is especially risky because the tensions were so elevated. I think it's unlikely that we will end up in a nuclear war that comes out of nowhere, that Cuban Missile Crisis built on a series of other escalations.
00:39:28
Speaker
Also, you have a case in which the decisions were happening very quickly and then they were in no individual's hands. I'll give you one example of this. I mentioned this B59 submarines, Soviets. They were originally designed for the Arctic.
00:39:44
Speaker
so they were never meant to operate in warm waters. They get their orders to go down to the Caribbean to support the operations around Cuba. And it's not even clear what these submarines are there to do, but they are armed with these nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
00:40:06
Speaker
And as they approach, they are discovered, and the US Navy starts dropping depth charges to force them to surface.
00:40:17
Speaker
Now they're signaling, like, we found you, come up. But the submarine officers, the worst thing you can do if you're in the Soviet Navy is to surface and give up your ship. It's humiliating and you're likely to suffer a lot of consequences. Everything you're trained is to avoid that.
00:40:38
Speaker
being blasted. Imagine being in a tin drum with someone hammering on the outside of that drum, and it's 130 degrees Fahrenheit because these ships were meant to operate in the Arctic, and now they're in the Caribbean. The stress that these guys under is extraordinary. The captain of the ship
00:41:02
Speaker
says, I'm not going to go down like this. I think the war might have already begun. They've been out of touch with Moscow. And he authorizes the use of their special weapon, this nuclear torpedo against the US Navy ships there. And there's a commissar on board as well who has to sign off on the order. He signs off. And it just so happens that the commandant of the fleet, Vasily Arkapov, was assigned to this specific boat.
00:41:29
Speaker
He looks at the situation a little differently and he says, let's wait to get more information. I'm not about to start World War III without knowing that the war is underway and he halts the order. Now, if he hadn't been on that boat or if he had taken a decision, that nuclear torpedo would have been used, the first use since 1945 and could have easily spiraled out of control into
00:41:58
Speaker
all-out nuclear war, because the US nuclear war plans at that time were a single integrated operating plan, which basically called for the release of everything we had against not just the Soviet Union, but their Eastern Europe allies and communist China.
00:42:19
Speaker
would have been the worst day in human history, and it may have been avoided by virtue of this one individual saying, let's not do this. Within that crisis, you have a number of decisions made by both Kennedy and Khrushchev to pull back from escalation. And you had a lot of decision makers. Strangely enough, you had a lot of people
00:42:43
Speaker
who had the opportunity to use nuclear weapons during that crisis or to trigger a crisis that would lead to the use of nuclear weapons. So this illusion of control is one of the things we need to get away from. I think in the intervening years, we probably have gotten better at this in terms of
00:43:07
Speaker
the training that is provided to military officers as well as enhancing communications, command and control. We should be really cautious about assuming that the system will work as it's designed to work every time into the future.
00:43:24
Speaker
And it's worth thinking about why such power was assigned to one person, whether that's Kennedy or an officer in the first place. And I think that has to do with time pressure. The incentive is to have a quick response if the enemy is firing nuclear weapons at you. But as you mentioned before, humans just aren't good under the time pressure in making extremely consequential decisions. Have we done anything about
00:43:53
Speaker
about the time pressure or has this problem just become more intense? The problem has continued and
00:44:01
Speaker
We have developed the means to avoid this problem, but we haven't really implemented them. That is to say that within the United States, we have a very robust early warning and command and control infrastructure, which in principle give the president a lot of time to wait and to decide and to see whether a nuclear weapon has actually detonated or not before using.
00:44:30
Speaker
before authorizing a response. In the case of the US, we have these ballistic missile submarines, each of which has a massive amount of firepower on them. One of those boats is essentially enough to deter any threat the US might face, and the president could choose to take as much time as they wanted to before authorizing that response.
00:44:54
Speaker
in the case of the United States, the thing that is driving time pressure, well, there are really two. One is this fear that the intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are land-based missiles, are vulnerable to being taken out. So that is one of the drivers of time pressure. You might only have 15 minutes to make a choice to either use those weapons or to lose them.
00:45:22
Speaker
And secondarily, this fear that the president and the vice president and other leaders could be killed in a nuclear attack, and that would delay the US response. So those are the two things that are driving the need to move very quickly.
00:45:44
Speaker
And I think we should reject that and move away from that and move towards a policy in which we're only going to respond once we're 100% sure that we are under nuclear attack. That would make the world a lot safer. But there are various bureaucratic and political obstacles to making that happen. Now, that's the US system.
00:46:08
Speaker
This is the country that has spent the most on its nuclear command and control and on really highly professional training for its military officers. There are nine nuclear countries. Nobody knows exactly what the security of the launch procedures are in each of those countries.
00:46:28
Speaker
or the vulnerability to interdiction, to cyber attack, to kinetic attack, to the cutting of communications channels, to electronic warfare. Nobody knows how vulnerable all of these decision-making chains are.
00:46:45
Speaker
My hunch is that the window for making a decision in North Korea or Russia or China or Pakistan is in fact quite a bit shorter. And each of these countries has a different infrastructure, right? So in some cases, the weapons might be demaided, in which case there might be a longer window for
00:47:08
Speaker
actually using the weapons, but the decision to use the weapons might have to be taken very quickly, especially if there's a fear that the national leader themselves is at risk of being killed. As bad as it is in the United States, I'm concerned that it's even worse in some of these other countries, and that this chain that supports all of us, it's only as strong as the weakest link,
00:47:35
Speaker
Because if a leader in North Korea is acting upon erroneous information and using nuclear weapons, that imperils all of us. The US has the technical ability to detect whether an apparent nuclear strike is genuine before they launch a counterattack.
00:47:57
Speaker
But it's not politically feasible to implement that system in the US today. It hasn't been so far, right? Tell me if this is insane, but is there any possibility of the US exporting that technical system to other countries? It seems like a genuine good for all nuclear states to have this system, but I don't think it could be trusted by other states yet.
00:48:20
Speaker
You imagine Russia's response if we offered to share our wisdom with them on this. What kind of loopholes or trojans would be built into that system, right? Unless perhaps we could somehow prove to them, and here I'm thinking mathematically or in programming language, that the system is safe in a way that they could use it. It seems like a fantastic opportunity to have the system that helps decrease accidental nuclear launch.
00:48:46
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. Of course, that system to prevent accidental launches is also the same system that enables you to launch nuclear weapons under a variety of circumstances, including not just in response. So China is upgrading its nuclear command and control in part because they're concerned that in a crisis, the US would try to preempt its nuclear arsenal.
00:49:15
Speaker
try to take out its satellites and its radars and cut its communications nodes and try to strike the missiles while they're on the ground, leaving China vulnerable to US coercion. That's the fear in Beijing. So that's one of the reasons they're investing so much in their nuclear arsenal.
00:49:38
Speaker
They don't want to be bullied, and they want to be able to threaten and intimidate the United States. As we discussed before, then you have this unfortunate scenario of the US responding to China's actions, which causes China to respond to the US's actions, and so on. How do you get off this treadmill? I think you need a country to say, we have nuclear sufficiency.
00:50:03
Speaker
We have enough weapons across enough platforms to feel that we are safe and secure regardless of what our adversaries are doing. I think
Disarmament Dynamics Post-Cold War
00:50:15
Speaker
right now, from a technical and a strategic standpoint, the US has that. But politically, it's risky to sit there while China is tripling the size of its arsenal.
00:50:30
Speaker
and to say, we're not going to do anything. Similarly with Russia, right? So the United States have equivalent numbers of deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Russia also has some of these tactical nuclear warheads which aren't counted under those agreements. They're generally very short range and have very limited utility, but people in the US are concerned about that and rightfully so, right?
00:50:58
Speaker
This agreement that we have, this New START Treaty, it puts a ceiling on the number of deployed warheads you can have. But incidentally, it has also set a floor on the number of weapons because nobody wants to go below
00:51:20
Speaker
the number they're permitted under the treaty. And so that's one of the unintended consequences of this agreement. It would be politically costly to negotiate this agreement and then say, actually, we only need a thousand nuclear weapons to keep ourselves safe, which is actually what the Pentagon did a review, Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Obama,
00:51:44
Speaker
administration, and they determined that all of US goals under a variety of possible futures could be met with a thousand nuclear warheads. But that number was politically unpalatable because the US didn't want to have fewer warheads than Russia.
00:51:59
Speaker
A lot of the strategic objectives could be met by a thousand nuclear weapons, but they had to have more than their main adversary. Why did the US ever end Russia too? Why did they ever have thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads? What happened?
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting story and it really goes back to the beginning of the nuclear age. So from 1949, which is when the Strategic Air Command creates its first nuclear war plan, to 1955, that's a six-year period, you have a 14-fold increase in the number of nuclear targets.
00:52:37
Speaker
more and more weapons are coming with greater and greater yield. By 1960, the US arsenal has the equivalent explosive capacity of 1.4 million Hiroshima's. So we're talking about 18,000 total weapons, over 3,000 strategic weapons on a variety of different platforms,
00:53:01
Speaker
The Soviet Union has also dramatically increased its capabilities, though they don't have as many weapons or as many deliverable weapons as are feared in the US. So this is another example of the kind of threat inflation that fuels this bureaucratic process.
00:53:16
Speaker
And by the 1960s, the Soviets have a similar number of weapons, a similar amount of firepower, and we are in a place that leaves both sides much worse off in a situation that nobody would have hoped for, that nobody would have chosen if they could have signaled restraint from the start and believe that the other side would have restrained themselves.
00:53:40
Speaker
Is the US government or the Soviet government acting as a monolith here? You mentioned different military departments. Is there a sense in which each department is interested in having their own stockpile of nuclear weapons to increase their relative power within their respective militaries? Yeah, so in the US, which is the case that I know best, there's definitely this inter-service rivalry.
00:54:06
Speaker
where nuclear weapons start off loaded onto bombs in the domain of the Air Force. And the Air Force starts getting a lot of money and a lot of attention and increasing its status within the armed forces. So both the Army and the Navy want part of this nuclear mission. I mean, I think they genuinely believe they were advancing US national security and they wanted to find ways to do that. But there was also an interest to remain relevant in a new world.
00:54:32
Speaker
That's how you have nuclear missiles that are operated by both the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Along comes the Navy, and they have a new design for a submarine-launched ballistic missile called the Polaris.
00:54:51
Speaker
this creates a real crisis for the Air Force. And this weapon is really good and it's relatively invulnerable. Unlike our bomber bases and our ICBMs, which should be taken out, the Navy now has this missile coming online. There's a RAND study about how the Air Force should respond to this. And the title of the study is very telling. It's called the Polaris Problem.
00:55:17
Speaker
Not like the Soviet problem, but they see the Polaris as being a fundamental challenge to their role in the world. And so they come up with new concepts that involve more precise delivery of nuclear weapons, which is something that they're more accurate missiles and that their bombers can do, which the Polaris at that point is not a very accurate missile.
00:55:44
Speaker
You have this inter-service rivalry within the United States that's fueling more targets, more weapons, more modes of delivering them. You have the same thing on the Soviet side. I'm less familiar with that, but they spent so much of their national treasure on trying to catch up. If the situation wasn't as serious as it is, it would almost be funny that you have
00:56:09
Speaker
you know, military personnel acting as boys in a schoolyard, seeing who can have the shiniest toy. It almost sounds like that. That's why I think the greatest nuclear film ever made is Doctor Strangelove. And it's based on the same material that was used in the movie Failsafe. But whereas Failsafe plays it straight, Doctor Strangelove is this dark comedy, and it reveals the way in which these trends are just so...
00:56:38
Speaker
farcical, right? And yet, their stakes are so high. You mentioned a couple of times that the world only has nine countries with nuclear weapons. And I say only because you could have imagined a world in which say 200 countries had nuclear weapons and in which they had perhaps much larger stockpiles. Why were nuclear weapons contained to only nine countries?
00:57:04
Speaker
That is a great question and it's something I've given some thought to because it's kind of counterintuitive, right? So you have this technology that emerges in the 1940s at the same time as jet engines and microwave ovens. It's hard science.
00:57:21
Speaker
It's hard engineering, but it's not that hard. And we've seen that it's not that hard because there are countries like Pakistan and North Korea that are relatively poor and don't have state of the art technology in other areas that are able to master the use of nuclear weapons. I think it's a puzzle that has a few different answers. First, you have this system of military alliances.
00:57:45
Speaker
which reduces the necessity for many countries of pursuing these weapons. So many of the countries in Western Europe who had the technical capability to pursue nuclear weapons decide not to because they can rely instead on protection from NATO, this nuclear alliance. And in parallel, the Soviet Union leans on its Eastern Bloc allies and says, hey, you don't need to get these weapons, knock it off.
00:58:14
Speaker
So that's one big factor. So a second factor is direct military action or sanctions that try to limit countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. These can work against relatively weak states, but they're not likely to be successful against strong states or states that are protected by alliances. A third piece of the puzzle
00:58:38
Speaker
is this international treaty regime that emerges. And it doesn't really come up until the 1960s, and it starts off very weak. But by 1968, you have this nuclear nonproliferation treaty that
00:58:54
Speaker
essentially is a bargain between the countries that have nuclear weapons to say that they won't spread this technology and that they'll work towards a cessation of the arms race and that they'll share the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy in return for those countries that don't have nuclear weapons to credibly and verifiably not pursue nuclear weapons. It starts off very, very weak with
00:59:18
Speaker
poor adherence, but just a few years later, a lot of countries have signed on, and a lot of countries end their nuclear weapons program at this point. It's not well appreciated, but there were dozens of countries that at least pursued nuclear weapons to some extent, and some of those programs were very serious. You start to see in the 60s and 70s, those programs start to taper away because for most countries,
00:59:43
Speaker
It's expensive and risky to try to acquire nuclear weapons. And if you can get your security in another way, you should do that. It would be preferable. But how can you be sure that your neighbor won't acquire nuclear weapons and threaten you? Well, that's one of the great things about this Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is it allows you to sign up and indicate that you're not going to pursue nuclear weapons, but it also has this verification mechanism through the International Atomic Energy Agency.
01:00:12
Speaker
which can come and take measurements and make assessments to show that a country's program is peaceful in nature. Those are three key factors. But I think there's a fourth, too, that is probably underappreciated, which is that along with this formal legal regime comes a change in norms and a change in views. And when the nuclear age started, nobody really knew what to make of these weapons.
01:00:42
Speaker
Were these just another military tool like any other, or were these something fundamentally different?
01:00:50
Speaker
And over the next couple of decades, there's a big debate about that. But in most countries, nuclear weapons come to be seen as something different and a particularly horrible weapon that has disproportionate effects on civilians and on innocents, which is hard to contain. And so countries
01:01:12
Speaker
feel there's a normative element to signing onto the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and holding to that agreement. They want to be the good guys. They don't want to be pursuing these weapons, which are truly horrible. And so there's a story they start to tell themselves. And that story
01:01:28
Speaker
I think explains some of the stickiness and the success of this Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. At least for democracies, when countries sign on to this treaty, they generally adhere to it. And there's been very little cheating on this treaty by democracies because they have rule of law, they have domestic law, and it becomes embedded in their identity.
01:01:49
Speaker
And you see that today with this effort in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to ban nuclear weapons. And the vast majority of countries in the world are saying, we believe that these weapons have no place in the world. We won't pursue them. We want you to give them up. And there's a strong normative element to that that I think if you just look at the realpolitik and just look at the international law, you're missing part of the story.
01:02:17
Speaker
If you were in 1945 and you were looking over the future, how successful would you say that containment of nuclear weapons became in our world compared to how it could have went?
01:02:30
Speaker
I would be horrified at what happened in the 1960s and the fact that today we still have thousands of nuclear weapons, many of them on high alert, and that we're preparing to use those weapons. We're rehearsing using them, and if something goes wrong, those consequences will be
01:02:51
Speaker
worse than what happened in World War II, and that'll be just day one, right? That's horrifying. Some of the observers in 1945 feared that future and tried to stop that future. I talked about Robert Oppenheimer, but it applies to many of the scientists and even military leaders who were confronted with this new weapon. That's the future they wanted to avoid. Unfortunately, I think
01:03:17
Speaker
we still have that reality with us. Now, on the other hand, I would be pleasantly surprised that these weapons had not been used again after 1945. That's kind of surprising. We've had these weapons, we've spent a lot of money on them, we've threatened to use them under many circumstances, and yet there has not been another detonation in war since 1945.
01:03:41
Speaker
That's a pretty good track record. I think, in part, that track record of success has led to some complacency among people to think that because these weapons haven't been used, that they can never be used, and that there's something intrinsic about these weapons and about nuclear deterrence that makes it more or less foolproof. I don't think that's the case. I would be surprised in 1945 that these weapons had only spread to nine countries.
01:04:09
Speaker
I'd also be surprised about what those nine countries are. What are those nine countries actually? So you have the US, Russia, China, UK, and France, as well as India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea,
01:04:25
Speaker
And then you have what many argue is a nuclear weapons program in Iran that is cloaked in a civilian nuclear power program. But those are the nine countries that have them so far. And there aren't a lot of countries on the horizon that seem poised to get nuclear weapons, with the possible exception of Iran. Some of those are definitely surprising from the perspective of 1945.
01:04:51
Speaker
So the main
Role of Technology in Nuclear Risk Management
01:04:52
Speaker
impediment right now to more countries getting nuclear weapons, it's not the international legal regime. It's not the sanctions regime. The main reason more countries don't have nuclear weapons is because they've chosen not to get nuclear weapons.
01:05:09
Speaker
And politically, in most of these countries, it would be very difficult to reverse their stance on nuclear weapons and to decide they wanted to build a nuclear arsenal. They say difficult is certainly not impossible. And especially if we have nuclear use, if we have nuclear war, there's going to be a reevaluation in a number of countries that have been
01:05:35
Speaker
anti-nuclear as to whether or not they need to acquire these weapons to ensure their security. I also think that if the US were to step back from some of its formal and informal treaty commitments, you'd see an interest at least in exploring nuclear weapons by some of these countries.
01:05:54
Speaker
So we've talked about how containment has been relatively successful. What about de-escalation? How did the world manage to go from, I don't know, you can give me the exact number of warheads at the top of the Cold War, to a highly reduced number today. How did disarmament happen?
01:06:12
Speaker
In the 1980s, there were about 60,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and today we have between 10 and 12,000 nuclear weapons, depending on how you measure them. It's an interesting story about how we cut four-fifths of our arsenals, and most people didn't really notice. A lot of it was at the end of the Cold War,
01:06:36
Speaker
The United States decided to remove from service a lot of its tactical nuclear weapons. It was a decision by George H.W. Bush to remove nuclear weapons from the surface ships and the tactical nuclear weapons, and it was reciprocated by Russia and Boris Yeltsin.
01:06:53
Speaker
And so you had a really rapid decrease in the number of weapons. And subsequently, they negotiated some arms control treaties which limited the number of deployed weapons. And a lot of weapons were then marked surplus or slated for dismantlement. And since 90% of the nuclear weapons were in the hands of the United States and Russia, it was relatively straightforward to cut that number really significantly.
01:07:19
Speaker
These countries were also in the midst of modernizing and they had more accurate missiles and better conventional weapons, which allowed them to rely less on large nuclear warheads to deter the other side.
01:07:35
Speaker
There's also a hope in the post-Cold War period that US and Russia could, well, maybe if not being friends, at least they could work together on a variety of global issues. And to some extent, they did. But in recent years, things have gotten really, really bad. So I think we could start to see that number ticking up again. During this period, starting in the 1990s, even as you have the global stockpile of nuclear weapons decreasing,
01:08:04
Speaker
you have an increase in the arsenals among some smaller states. So particularly India and Pakistan start to build up their nuclear arsenals. North Korea builds up its nuclear arsenal. China is an interesting story because for a long time they've had a very small recessed nuclear deterrent. So they have a no first use nuclear policy which says they won't use nuclear weapons unless nuclear weapons are used against them.
01:08:33
Speaker
They traditionally have not had their warheads mated to their missiles, so it's something of a recessed deterrent, and they've relied on a relatively small number. Their view is that no country would be willing to suffer even a handful of nuclear attacks, and that they don't need to have a large, diverse nuclear arsenal of the type that the Soviet Union and the United States developed during the Cold War.
01:09:00
Speaker
And I believe that that view is starting to change in China. I think it's already changed. They basically want an arsenal that is on par with what the US and Russia have today. And they're spending a lot of money and a lot of effort to get there over the next decade. What explains this? Why did they change their strategy?
01:09:20
Speaker
I think a major factor there is they started to question whether their nuclear arsenal was sufficient. And they started to question that because they saw the rapid improvement in US capabilities, especially in US conventional capabilities, to be able to strike
01:09:41
Speaker
targets from long distances with high precision and concern over US missile defenses. In 2002, George Bush pulls the United States out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and embarks on a reinvigorated missile defense strategy.
01:10:02
Speaker
The argument for doing this is to protect the United States from small countries like North Korea or potentially Iran or Iraq. But from China's perspective, their view is that the US is seeking nuclear primacy and seeking to be able to coerce and bully them during a crisis.
01:10:23
Speaker
And even though the missile defenses are not a lot of interceptors and they're not very good, Chinese military planners start to worry about what will come next. The US is spending a lot of money on this. Why would they be spending so much money?
01:10:38
Speaker
unless they had designs at ultimately negating our arsenal. And so China starts to invest in their capabilities. I think another factor is just that they had more money available. They have a larger economy. They're upgrading all aspects of their military. And so it was peculiar that they had exempted
01:11:00
Speaker
nuclear weapons from that modernization program. So they decide we're not going to exempt it anymore because we're spending a lot of money on our nuclear weapons, and we're going to start developing the type of fissile material that allows us to have a lot more weapons.
01:11:15
Speaker
The picture that you're painting for us here is, as I see it, of two successes, containment of nuclear weapons and disarmament from the height of the Cold War to now, and then a beginning failure of international cooperation and diplomacy and the treaties we rely on and so on. An overarching question here is, which coordination mechanisms can countries use to successfully decrease nuclear risk?
01:11:42
Speaker
Well, there are a few different coordination mechanisms. One of them is formal treaties in which you agree not to exceed a certain number of warheads and you provide some verification mechanisms in place to ensure that both sides are agreeing or all sides are agreeing.
01:11:59
Speaker
Right now, I don't see any prospect for continuing this treaty-based approach in the short term. The apprehension and mistrust between the United States, Russia, and China is too high. Instead, you're left to rely on a less formal mechanism, which is essentially signaling. How can we signal our intentions without verifiable treaties in place?
01:12:28
Speaker
I think the US would be wise to adopt approach to say that we are going to hedge against bad possible future scenarios without catalyzing them by taking actions that will lead to a response. So again, I think it comes back to understanding how many nuclear weapons are enough.
01:12:50
Speaker
and not building more. I think that the current number of nuclear weapons in the US is 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons across a variety of platforms. I'm hard pressed to think of scenarios in which that is not enough. And so you need to resist the political pressures to say, hey, because the other guy is building more weapons, we need to build them too.
01:13:15
Speaker
That requires a certain amount of courage and in some cases it might be a loser on the domestic political stage. So it's important that we create space for politicians to adopt a policy of nuclear sufficiency instead of seeking some form of nuclear primacy which
01:13:34
Speaker
While it's tempting to do that, while it's tempting to have an advantage and to seem stronger, history suggests that that advantage will be short-lived because an adversary that has enough money will find ways to respond, to build more weapons, to build countermeasures, and then both sides will end up worse off than they are before. You're thinking on treaties and their perhaps bleak prospects. Is that feeling shared by your colleagues in the field?
01:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think those who are honest with themselves would give you one example of obstacles to future treaties. Even if you were to have one negotiated, you would need two-thirds of the Senate to ratify
01:14:20
Speaker
that treaty. You can't get two-thirds of the Senate to agree that it's Monday. There's just so much distrust in the US political system. I could be wrong. Maybe under a Republican president who negotiates a treaty and then sells it to the Republican party as an important contribution, you might be able to have that. Treaties in general have a lot of benefits, and one of those is they offer you predictability.
01:14:45
Speaker
So the Pentagon can plan ahead based on a particular set of requirements because we know that at least until 2026, Russia will be capped at 1550 strategic deployed warheads. After 2026, all bets are off and that unpredictability can cause a lot of problems for everyone involved.
01:15:11
Speaker
Can we actually rely on Russia staying under a certain number of nuclear weapons until the treaties run out? It seems like a strange situation if it's common knowledge that they will break the number defined in the treaty after 2026. Why aren't they just doing it now? So last year, Russia announced that it was suspending its participation in the New START Treaty. There's nothing in the treaty that permits the suspension of this sort.
01:15:37
Speaker
They have said that it's because of US actions in Ukraine. And so there is no longer the types of on-site inspections and information exchanges that could guarantee more or less that they're at a certain level. Is there likely to be
Future Nuclear Nations and Proliferation Risks
01:16:01
Speaker
a meaningful increase beyond that number? Well, we know that Russia could upload
01:16:07
Speaker
some missiles to their existing system. So they could cheat on this agreement, but it's unlikely to be militarily or strategically significant. So most people I've talked to believe that Russia will remain in compliance more or less with the treaty until it expires. It's going to happen soon and there are no real benefits to exceeding the limits before then.
01:16:32
Speaker
Could technology come to the rescue here? Is there any interesting technology on the horizon that would make it easier for us to cooperate as a world in reducing nuclear risk?
01:16:44
Speaker
Well, I think technology has played a key role in improving transparency and verification. And you think about the tools that the International Atomic Energy Agency has now at its disposal and the tools that it could have as at its disposal, given the prevalence of ubiquitous sensing in other fields. You could play a thought experiment and imagine that nuclear weapons only arrived on the scene in 2023 rather than in 1945.
01:17:14
Speaker
it would be possible to have the type of intrusive verification regime that was envisioned in the Baruch plan and maybe have that actually succeed given the technologies we have available to us now. But obviously at the time they had a lot less insight into what was going on into other countries. So verification technology will be really important in managing nuclear risks going forward as it pertains both to non-proliferation
01:17:42
Speaker
and to arms control and disarmament treaties if we're ever able to negotiate another treaty, we will need to have significant innovation in terms of what we can measure and how. At a recent conference, I spoke with Rose Gottmiller and
01:17:58
Speaker
She's the former negotiator of the New START Treaty, and she describes how once you get to a certain point, you need to start moving from counting delivery systems, which is what the current treaties do, to actually counting warheads. And that's a much harder problem. And it's a problem to which we can develop technological solutions.
01:18:20
Speaker
but there hasn't been enough attention to that particular problem. You need to be able to verify that something is a warhead without revealing any sensitive design information or complicating military operations too much. That's a thorny technical challenge, but there's lots of really great tools in the world of cryptography and observation that might be able to help with this.
01:18:47
Speaker
You're thinking zero knowledge proof specifically, which is an interesting and recently invented field, or at least a recently invented subfield of photography. There are many, many applications, not only in nuclear, but in many aspects of human cooperation.
01:19:04
Speaker
So there's another way in which technology is going to affect nuclear operations in the coming years, and that is as war moves faster and is increasingly fought at machine speed, we will be integrating artificial intelligence into our nuclear command and control processes as a way to support decision makers. And there are some countries that will find this controversial, but ultimately
01:19:32
Speaker
A lot of AI is essentially software and it helps people operate complicated systems in a timely way. So we are likely to see AI integrated in a variety of nuclear support missions. It might make the world safer until it doesn't. That's one of the problems is turning over some of these decisions essentially to an algorithm. And you can imagine if war moves so quickly
01:19:59
Speaker
that humans are not able to process the information independently. They'll be relying on the inputs from digital systems to guide them. And that's kind of a scary world. Actually, Future of Life Institute, you did a video on this, right? We did, yeah. We picture a scenario where AI enables the US and China to act much faster, but they also lose control of the process in a way that turns out to be destructive to the world.
01:20:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I found that scenario pretty scary and I think folks should go out and watch that video. It's really well done. There are other scenarios too you could imagine. You could imagine some countries using an AI to allow them to essentially develop a dead hand system that guarantees retaliation in a crisis.
01:20:49
Speaker
And this, of course, echoes the doomsday machine from Dr. Strangelove, right? There may be some incentives for countries to do that, and that's really scary. So we need to stay on top of this, and the time to start working on this and to start to limit the use of these systems in nuclear operations is now, because once the system is developed and deployed, it's really hard to take it offline.
01:21:14
Speaker
I'm concerned about this trend. I don't think it changes the laws of nature with regard to nuclear weapons, but it's something we need to stay on top of. Do you think we can retain the human in the loop as a legal mechanism or will that eventually become a formality?
01:21:30
Speaker
I mean, there are efforts now in the US Congress to mandate that and to ensure it. I don't know what it means to have a human in the loop. A human can be required to make a decision, but what if they're making that decision based on information that's mediated through a variety of digital systems? It's a hard challenge. And for me, at the heart, it's not a technological problem.
01:21:57
Speaker
It is a problem that is driven by the need for speed in nuclear operations. So we have this vision of
01:22:09
Speaker
responding in a really prompt way to a nuclear crisis. And that's going to compress the decision time, whether it's a human making the decision or an algorithm. And fundamentally that's the problem. We need to move away from procedures that require us to launch the missiles within 15 minutes.
01:22:38
Speaker
and allow for sanity to prevail. That makes a lot of sense to me. What about the interaction of nuclear warfare with other types of warfare? For example, today's nuclear facilities in different countries, how vulnerable are these facilities to cyber warfare or to conventional warfare? This is an underappreciated transformation in nuclear strategy.
01:23:08
Speaker
over the past 30 years or so. During the Cold War, there was an assumption, and I think it was largely correct, that nuclear weapons could only be targeted by other nuclear weapons. So this would allow you to develop systems in which both sides are reducing their nuclear warheads, and when they reduce their number of warheads deployed,
01:23:31
Speaker
They also were reducing the number of targets that the other side has to target, and so you can have this beneficial reduction. As conventional missiles became more and more accurate, all of a sudden you had the potential for conventional weapons to destroy
01:23:49
Speaker
nuclear platforms to be able to hit missiles. You've always had the case with submarines, for example, where an attack submarine could destroy a ballistic missile submarine and take out with it lots and lots of nuclear warheads. But now ground-based missiles also started to become vulnerable.
01:24:13
Speaker
or potentially vulnerable, and people debate the extent to which this is true. But that's something of a change, how we think about nuclear weapons. And cyber creates another avenue for disruption.
01:24:29
Speaker
So within the parlance of missile defense, there are approaches called left of launch, which involve trying to take out the adversary's missiles before they could ever be launched.
01:24:44
Speaker
either through cyber means or other means. Countries are really concerned about this and have sought to strengthen the reliability of their nuclear command and control, but it's really a cat and mouse game and nobody knows how safe all of these arsenals are. Fortunately, we haven't had a nuclear crisis in which that's been tested. But as a response to this kind of vulnerability,
01:25:12
Speaker
countries are taking, and we can imagine them taking more steps in the future, to insulate themselves against being preempted. And so in the case of China, they're investing very heavily in getting a more diversified nuclear arsenal.
01:25:28
Speaker
and trying to find ways to hide missiles and build them at missile sites deep in the interior of China where they can't be easily reached. And North Korea has dramatically upgraded its nuclear infrastructure, same with India and Pakistan, et cetera. So I think that this fear of vulnerability is driving this new wave of nuclear improvements, which I've called a nuclear arms race. And I think it could well accelerate.
01:25:57
Speaker
How do you think about the public perception of nuclear risk? Is the public potentially bored of nuclear risk? It's been hanging over our heads for something like 80 years. And naively, you might think, nothing has happened. And so this threat is maybe not as potent as it seemed. Do you think the public is bored about hearing about nuclear risk? I think that some people have kind of checked out. This is a risk that's in the background.
01:26:25
Speaker
I can't do anything about it, so why should I worry about it?" and have moved on to other issues, many of which have a much stronger emotive element to them, which they feel a little bit more personal agency, or threats that seem novel and kind of spicy compared to this. You know, nuclear weapons, isn't that my parents' problem? Isn't that my grandparents' problem?
01:26:49
Speaker
I also get it like we all have so many things to worry about. Do we really need another thing to worry about? I think it's important that we consider these risks that we're taking and the risks that are being taken in our name.
01:27:07
Speaker
in order to provide security because absent some level of public oversight, we're likely to have this out of control threat inflation and policies that are really driven by military bureaucracies rather than by the public interest.
01:27:25
Speaker
And certainly those military bureaucracies have a lot of insights into the problem. And there are a lot of good people working on these problems in government. But there's also a need for a public voice on this issue. As you say, I think a lot of people have kind of checked out.
01:27:41
Speaker
I'm hoping that this recent crisis in Ukraine will remind people that nuclear weapons are here and that we need to work, every generation needs to work as part of its project to ensure that these weapons don't extinguish us because
01:28:02
Speaker
Nuclear weapons
Achieving Global Nuclear Stability
01:28:03
Speaker
have only been with us for 80 years, and the knowledge of how to create nuclear detonations is likely to remain with humanity as long as we're here. We're going to have to learn to manage it, or we're going to go off the rails at some point. Yeah, this could quickly go from boring to deeply horrific, apocalyptic even.
01:28:27
Speaker
I mean, boring is good. I want a world in which my children never have to think about nuclear weapons, in which they say that was my father's problem, right? That's the world I want to work towards. Yeah, that would be beautiful. Do you think it's likely that we will see a 10th nuclear nation or nuclear country? I mean, at some point in human history, I would think so. Within this century, let's say.
01:28:51
Speaker
I think the country that's knocking on the door right now is Iran. We had a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. It was a good deal that limited their activities with a lot of verification into what they were doing. It was incomplete and it wasn't perfect and no deal will be perfect, but that deal is long gone.
01:29:15
Speaker
There's so much distrust between both sides, between all sides. It's going to be really hard to manage this. And I think Iran every month slips a little closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon. And now you've seen Saudi Arabia, which has come to the US and said, we want to start having access to nuclear enrichment so that if Iran ever gets a nuclear weapon, we will have an option. You could imagine a
01:29:45
Speaker
new cascade of proliferation. I don't know how likely it is. It really depends on what happens next. Are nuclear weapons becoming easier to develop such that perhaps a terrorist group at some point could develop them on their own? Nuclear weapons have become both easier and harder to develop. They've become harder to develop because we have much better controls on
01:30:08
Speaker
weapons usable fissile material and much better controls on the nuclear fuel cycle through the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is a more robust system of international surveillance and awareness of anything that's going on anywhere in the planet.
01:30:26
Speaker
We all leave digital signatures, but there are also satellites overhead. So I think it's harder to operate in secrecy than it ever was before. But as I said from the start, this is an 80-year-old technology. It requires solving some difficult engineering problems, but it's not unobtainable. And I think as technology advances,
01:30:52
Speaker
Each year, it empowers us to do more with less, right? So you think about just software allows us to produce and edit documents better and faster than we were ever able to do before. And manufacturing has gotten much easier to move from a concept to a finished product. Transformers are the next phase in this, right? And so we have
01:31:18
Speaker
powerful artificial intelligence systems, which allow any individual in the world to harness a lot of knowledge and reasoning that's available. For example, a non-state actor operating today to build nuclear weapons still needs to master all of the various disciplines and processes that would give them a nuclear bomb. But
01:31:44
Speaker
their cognitive capabilities and their knowledge is now enhanced by access to these really powerful tools. So I think it is getting easier to build nuclear weapons. The fundamental bottleneck is acquiring the weapons usable fissile material, which is either enriched uranium or plutonium. It's hard to get, but especially if we have a world with more nuclear power,
01:32:13
Speaker
which is a world that I'm optimistic to see. I would like to see us getting more electricity from nuclear energy relative to where we are today. But if that is not managed carefully, if there are a lot more nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities, if there's a lot more nuclear power plants everywhere in the world, it will allow for greater access. I think right now,
01:32:37
Speaker
If you were to tell me tomorrow that a non-state actor had gotten access to a nuclear weapon, I would say, well, who gave it to them? That's the easiest pathway right now. In 20 years, we might be in a world in which it's easier to manufacture anything. The barriers to a nuclear weapon might be very small.
01:33:00
Speaker
And I think Nick Bostrom has this thought experiment in which he imagines a vulnerable world in which you could take some sand and put it in the microwave and have a nuclear detonation. We're not there, and I don't think we'll ever get there. I think it's probably easier to destroy the world using other technologies, unfortunately. But I do think that the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons probably do decrease
01:33:24
Speaker
a little bit every year and that's why it's important to be vigilant and to have these mechanisms of control also improve every year. How do you imagine us reaching a truly stable state in the future where we have reduced nuclear risks such that it's not something we have to worry about?
01:33:42
Speaker
I think fundamentally stability in the nuclear space requires finding conflict resolution means between countries that have nuclear weapons or might want nuclear weapons, right? It's less about the technology itself and it's more about the way we resolve our differences. As long as there have been humans on the planet, there has been competitions between groups of humans.
01:34:08
Speaker
and sometimes they could be quite brutal. But we live in a world now where the means of destruction at our disposal are so much greater than they've ever been, that we need to figure out how to resolve our differences and fast. Because nuclear weapons, along with biotechnology and AI, pose a shared problem
01:34:37
Speaker
that confronts everyone on this planet. And we need to think of them not just as tools and assets and something we can use to gain an advantage, but as something that we need to manage collectively as a shared problem. In the 1980s, you see a change that happens. And Reagan and Gorbachev come together and actually start discussing nuclear weapons as this shared problem. It's a paradigm shift.
01:35:07
Speaker
It comes in 1983 after one of the worst scares of the Cold War, in which the US learns that the Soviet Union believed that the US was preparing for pre-emptive nuclear war.
01:35:23
Speaker
against the Soviet Union. There was this Abel Archer exercise in November 1983. It was a regularly scheduled NATO military exercise, but it also had a nuclear component in which the leaders of NATO were preparing a decision around nuclear weapons. So this was, from the US perspective, an ordinary exercise.
01:35:48
Speaker
But tensions were really high with the Soviet Union at this moment. You had the Reagan arms buildup. You had the Strategic Defense Initiative. There had been recently the shoot down of a Korean civilian jet. A lot of civilians died, including a US representative. So there's this high tension
01:36:13
Speaker
And at that time, NATO has this military exercise that involves preparing and executing a nuclear war. And the Soviet Union takes this very seriously. We know now from their archival material that they had this Project Ryan, which was monitoring things like the number of cars and Pentagon parking lots and the amount of blood and
01:36:36
Speaker
hospitals, like blood banks across the US, as indicators that the US might be prepared to go to war. Around this time too, you have the Stanislav Petrov incident in which the light glinting off clouds is confused for five incoming nuclear missiles.
01:36:59
Speaker
And Petrov, who is a lieutenant colonel, he's the launch officer who's on duty that day, sees this, and his job is to report that to his superiors. And presumably there would have been an initiation of a launch sequence that would follow. And he decides he's not going to report that. He thinks, this pattern doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the US launch an attack with only five warheads? And he knows that there's some technical limitations to the system. So he sits on the information.
01:37:28
Speaker
and it's later revealed to be a false alarm. This is just one of the incidents and moments of anxiety during this period, right? And later on, Ronald Reagan learns how scared the Soviet Union was that the US would use nuclear weapons. And he says, that's crazy. Why would they think we would do that?
01:37:54
Speaker
And so he feels like it's incumbent upon himself. And he communicates this to Gorbachev, who's come in with a platform of Glasnost and Perestroika. And the two men really see eye to eye on this issue. And they're not able to achieve the ambitious goals they set for themselves, but they are at least able to come away from that meeting feeling that neither side is about to initiate a nuclear war. And that becomes this foundation for further risk reduction.
01:38:25
Speaker
That is the kind of collaboration we must get to again in order to have a better chance of surviving.
01:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, they started telling a different story about what these weapons are and really looked at them as this shared problem. And we need to return to that framework. It's really hard to do right now, you know, while Russia is occupying Ukraine and with all of the belligerent rhetoric on both sides between the US and China and between India and Pakistan. But we need to recapture that spirit. Makes sense to me. Carl, thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure.
01:39:01
Speaker
Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.